This volume brings together contributions that resemble spotlights thrown on the past twenty-five years of science and technology studies. It covers a broad range: history of science; science and politics; science and contemporary democracy; science and the public; science and the constitution; science and metaphors; and science and modernity and provides a critical overview of how the field of science and technology studies has emerged and developed.
Covering a vast array of disciplines, this prescient Encyclopedia analyzes the many roles that applied ethics plays in the social sciences. Entries scrutinize the various manifestations of ethics across a range of disciplines and subdisciplines such as animal studies, criminology, and global health.
This Handbook assembles state-of-the-art insights into the co-evolutionary and precarious relations between science and public policy. Beyond this, it also offers a fresh outlook on emerging challenges for science (including technology and innovation) in changing societies, and related policy requirements, as well as the challenges for public policy in view of science-driven economic, societal, and cultural changes. In short, this book deals with science as a policy-triggered project as well as public policy as a science-driven venture.
Biology and politics have converged today across much of the industrialized world. Debates about genetically modified organisms, cloning, stem cells, animal patenting, and new reproductive technologies crowd media headlines and policy agendas. Less noticed, but no less important, are the rifts that have appeared among leading Western nations about the right way to govern innovation in genetics and biotechnology. These significant differences in law and policy, and in ethical analysis, may in a globalizing world act as obstacles to free trade, scientific inquiry, and shared understandings of human dignity. In this magisterial look at some twenty-five years of scientific and social development, Sheila Jasanoff compares the politics and policy of the life sciences in Britain, Germany, the United States, and in the European Union as a whole. She shows how public and private actors in each setting evaluated new manifestations of biotechnology and tried to reassure themselves about their safety. Three main themes emerge. First, core concepts of democratic theory, such as citizenship, deliberation, and accountability, cannot be understood satisfactorily without taking on board the politics of science and technology. Second, in all three countries, policies for the life sciences have been incorporated into "nation-building" projects that seek to reimagine what the nation stands for. Third, political culture influences democratic politics, and it works through the institutionalized ways in which citizens understand and evaluate public knowledge. These three aspects of contemporary politics, Jasanoff argues, help account not only for policy divergences but also for the perceived legitimacy of state actions.
French sociologist and philosopher, Bruno Latour, is one of the most creative thinkers of the last decades. This book is the first comprehensive and accessible English-language introduction to his multi-faceted work. It explores how Latour’s complex theorizing helps us understand science, society, nature, and politics in a world beyond modernity.
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.
This book focuses on the historical and sociological dimensions of scientists working in laboratories in India, offering insights into the historical, sociological and policy factors that shape scientific pursuits. It illuminates the challenges, accomplishments and the evolving role of science in societal development. The author initiates a broader discourse on the interplay between scientific advancements, societal contexts and policy frameworks. The book fosters a deeper understanding of science's role in shaping India’s social fabric and contributing to the global scientific dialogue. It also explores issues such as brain drain, science activism and the conflict between university- and government-run models of science. Lucid and topical, the book will be of considerable interest to both social and natural scientists, as well as the general academic community, including research students in science, technology, history, social history of science, science and technology studies and innovation policies.
The future of the EU's Foreign and Security Policy (FSP) and its interaction with the world's dominant power, the United States of America lies at the heart of this book. The eight authors, experienced in government and international organizations, tackle the development of the Union's hard and soft power. Having met as a group over the course of a year at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government during the months before and after the invasion of Iraq, they coherently address the most pressing FSP issues. These range from chapters on the why and how of EU-FSP over the classic areas diplomacy, defense and development to economic and science & technology policies. Under the auspices of Stanley Hoffmann and in close collaboration with distinguished professors from Harvard University, the authors have determined the interests of the EU as a single political body, laid out a clear vision for the year 2020, and established policy recommendations. Experienced professionals such as former German Minister of Defense, Rudolf Scharping to former UN Undersecretary Karl-Th. Paschke have added to the practical quality of the chapters with their reviews.
A forum for the emerging interdisciplinary field of public understanding of science, this journal encourages open debate of contrasting and even conflicting viewpoints on all aspects of the interrelationships between science and the public.
This volume brings together a selection of classic and contemporary articles written by anthropologists over the last sixty years. The essays reflect the move from earlier preoccupations with 'culture' and 'relationality' and cast new light on the relevance of ethnography for organisational and social theory.
