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Community and Identity in Contemporary Technosciences
This open access edited book provides new thinking on scientific identity formation. It thoroughly interrogates the concepts of community and identity, including both historical and contemporaneous analyses of several scientific fields. Chapters examine whether, and how, today’s scientific identities and communities are subject to fundamental changes, reacting to tangible shifts in research funding as well as more intangible transformations in our society’s understanding and expectations of technoscience. In so doing, this book reinvigorates the concept of scientific community. Readers will discover empirical analyses of newly emerging fields such as synthetic biology, systems biology an...
Vermin, Victims and Disease
This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in British cattle. This question has plagued several professional generations of politicians, policymakers, experts and campaigners since the early 1970s. Questions of what is known, who knows, who cares, who to trust and what to do about this complex problem have been the source of scientific, policy, and increasingly vociferous public debate ever since. This book integrates contemporary history, science and technology studies, human-animal relations, and policy research to conduct a cross-cutting analysis. It explores the worldviews of those involved with animal health, disease ecology and badger protection between the 1970s and 1990s, before reintegrating them to investigate the recent public polarisation of the controversy. Finally it asks how we might move beyond the current impasse.
The Fukushima Effect
The Fukushima Effect offers a range of scholarly perspectives on the international effect of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown four years out from the disaster. Grounded in the field of science, technology and society (STS) studies, a leading cast of international scholars from the Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the United States examine the extent and scope of the Fukushima effect. The authors each focus on one country or group of countries, and pay particular attention to national histories, debates and policy responses on nuclear power development covering such topics as safety of nuclear energy, radiation risk, nuclear waste management, development of nuclear energy, anti-nuclear protest...
Synthetic Biology
This book explores the emergence of a new scientific field, synthetic biology, and the many bold promises its proponents have made to change the future of science, industry, humanity and the global environment. It explores how people, including academics, students, industrialists and governance actors, tried to change their practices to bring engineering and biology together, and to realise such promises from within their everyday lives. It focuses on an ethnographic case study of an academic project that aimed to demonstrate the field's promise for solving water industry problems, from leaky pipes to climate change. In doing so, the book weaves together stories of barriers, bacteria and bodies, examining how they were entangled as people tried to make connections between academia and industry. It also reflects on the authors' attempts to work collaboratively with natural scientists and engineers, reflecting on current debates about the role of sociology in such interdisciplinary projects. The book contributes to contemporary studies of science and technology by highlighting issues such as ontology, practices, failure and time.
The Local Configuration of New Research Fields
This new Yearbook addresses the question of how policy, place, and organization are made to matter for a new research field to emerge. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and organizational researchers on science and technology, the volume answers this question by offering in-depth case studies and comparative perspectives on multiple research fields in their nascent stage, including molecular biology and materials science, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology. The Yearbook brings to bear the lessons of constructivist ethnography and the “practice turn” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) more broadly on the qualitative, comparative, and critical inquiry of new research fields. In doing so, it offers unprecedented insights into the complex interplay of national research policies, regional clusters, particular research institutions, and novel research practices in and for any emerging field of (techno-)science. It systematically investigates national and regional differences, including the variable mobilization of such differences, and probes them for organizational topicality and policy relevance.
Understanding the environment and social policy
Bringing together leading experts, this textbook explores the key social, political, economic and moral challenges that environmental problems pose for social policy in a global context. Combining theory and practice with an interdisciplinary approach, the book reviews the current strategies and policies and provides a critique of proposed future developments in the field. Understanding the environment and social policy guides the reader through the subject in an accessible way using chapter summaries, further reading, recommended webpages, a glossary and questions for discussion. Providing a much-needed overview, the book will be invaluable reading for students, teachers, activists, practitioners and policymakers.
Reconnecting People and Water
Water management in industrialised western countries has long been seen as a technical process associated with pipes, drains and bureaucracies. This technical model of water management is now being questioned. This book examines the nature of contemporary water management and the prospects for and barriers to different forms of engagement with the public. In particular, it shows how historical and social scientific understandings develop and question current water management norms in relation to water in the landscape, water in the home and the hidden management of water beneath our streets and behind our walls. It is shown that the four-fold challenges of climate change, urbanisation, chang...
Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences
This book offers a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Rooting itself in the authors' own experiences, the book establishes a radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines. This book is open access under a CC-BY license.
Translations of Responsibility
In 2020, a group of European researchers got a European Union (EU) grant to do a project called TRANSFORM. The objective of TRANSFORM was to integrate the principle of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into the research and innovation policies of three European regions: Lombardy, Brussels, and Catalonia. This book tells the story of how TRANSFORM translated RRI into practice, all the way from philosophy of technology to EU policy jargon, to the project contract, and finally into the real-life events in these regions. Responsibility was translated in creative ways, with surprising goals and ambiguous outcomes. Armed with these stories, the book analyses the broader context of the desire for better governance of technoscience and draws two lessons: Firstly, that there is more governance than one may see at first sight, and secondly, that there is a need to rethink the borders of technoscience and the spaces in which it resides. The book proposes to think of governance in technoscience, rather than governance of technoscience.
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
