Science,Scientism and Imaginaries of Publics in the UK: Passive Objects,Incipient Threats

Two-way public engagement with science is an important modern democratic practice that paradoxically coincides with the intensifications of state surveillance and policing of publics and social movements engaging with issues involving science. This raises important questions about the contemporary anatomies of publics, and what count as legitimate expressions of public concern over scientific stakes within the knowledge economy. Implicit in the tension between inclusion and surveillance are concerns over the social meaning and authority of science amongst both scientific practitioners and publics. Bringing science and technology studies (STS) and social movement studies (SMS) into dialogue offers a means to explore the neglected ontological stakes in the framing of scientific imaginaries of publics, and public imaginaries of science. Post-WWII UK science–publics relations have emerged in three significant modalities, with publics imagined: as passive non-entities, circa 1950–1990 (continuing); as incipient threats due to presumed deficits in their grasp of science 1990–2000 (continuing); and, since circa 2000, as politicised threats requiring state control. Each modality is shaped by elite denial of the normative commitments embedded within science as surrogate politics—scientism. In each mode, scientistic elite emphasis on epistemic issues forecloses engagement with broader public meanings expressing legitimate normative and ontological differences. Fusing the more epistemic focus of STS with SMS's emphasis on meaning and democratic process offers a route to deeper democratic forms of public engagement with what is called science, which would also precipitate more accountability in elite discourses around science and technology.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Deficit Model,the Diffusion Model and Publics in STS

The start of the twenty-first century witnessed the flourishing of both the biosciences (particularly genomics) and initiatives around public engagement in science, particularly in the UK and USA. STS researchers have both followed and fuelled this latter trend. Hence, it may be helpful to review the genealogy of these recent developments and of STS concern for the publics of science. This provides a way of assessing whether STS activities have been contributing to making the sciences more open and accountable to their publics. One trail returns to the institutionalisation of Public Understanding of Science (PUS) in the mid-1980s. The critique of this movement by STS scholars through reference to the deficit model (of public understanding of science) also figures here. However, less attention has been given to other modes of conceptualising science and publics, including what Cooter and Pumfrey label as the ‘diffusionist’ or ‘diffusion’ model (of scientific knowledge), which they contend entrenched traditional views of scientific knowledge and of publics as receivers of such knowledge. More recently, investigations of the making of science in diverse locations, attention to multiplicity and co-production have taken STS in new directions. Nevertheless, the legacies of both the deficit and diffusion models of science and publics continue to influence STS and its ‘regimes of truth’. Questions remain around STS researchers' persistent failure to acknowledge the diffusion model, in particular, and the consequent retrenchment of traditional views of how science works, limiting prospects for substantial public engagement and more open, democratic modes of science.     

阅读中的元理解监测与元理解调控

采用“阅读－关键词处理－元理解监测－测验1－选择文章重读－测验2”的流程, 探讨元理解监测对元理解调控与阅读理解成绩的影响。结果显示, 延迟写关键词相对于即时写和不写关键词更利于监测精 确性的提高; 延迟关键词组借助精确的监测能做出有效的元理解调控, 选出测验1中得分低的文章重读, 并在测验2中有较好表现, 而其他两组只能选出其认为难的、而非得分低的文章重读, 在测验2中表现不 佳。元理解监测的精确性影响元理解调控的有效性, 进而影响阅读理解成绩。     

印度干细胞及遗传学研究的途径

在印度,科学家和政府对印度的基因组研究了干细胞研究充满了热情。而有关的伦理准则就显得尤为重要。印度在2000年颁布的准则是针对胎儿研究结果的保密性,以研究为目的而剩余的胚胎不能用于商业用途。辅助生殖技术应确保参与者的知情同意。保密性和遗传学秘密对遗传学研究是非常重要的。专家认为在干细胞与基因组研究领域中,伦理学及政府的阻碍并不是主要的负担,而主要的问题在于科技的发展与应用中的经济问题。同时,公众的积极参与也是非常重要的。     

Publics and Populations: The Politics of Ancestry and Exchange in Genome Science

While researchers collect and assemble relevant populations for genome studies, they are also, along with project designers and managers, interested in assembling publics. The public holds significant symbolic and discursive appeal for large-scale genome science. This is particularly the case in projects that collect or study aspects of human genome variation where histories of biological racism continue to cast a shadow over the promises of genomic medicine. In one of Canada's first large-scale biobanks, French Canadians, who are understood as a genetically close or homogenous population, are contrasted with what are referred to as ‘immigrants’ and ‘Québecers from various ethnic and racial backgrounds’ in public engagement and consultation forums. These latter groups, thought to provide a form of diversity, both in their views and their biology, are harnessed in the consultation practices as well as in the branding of the biobank. Within the local area of sample collection, the already constructed and available ways to categorise groups provide a powerful frame to narrate the relationship between the public and genome science. The process of making and consulting niche publics not only naturalises particular narratives of national belonging but also enables forms of exchange and sharing in international genome science. Just as assembling populations forms a central component of genome science, displays of publicness are integral for economies of exchange in genome science.     

The Relationship Between Students’ Reading Orientations and their Strategic Activity During a Collaborative Reading Task

This study examined the connection between middle school students’ beliefs about reading and their use of comprehension strategies during a collaborative reading activity. Seventy-one fifth- and sixth-grade students were videotaped while they worked in small groups to read and discuss short texts describing the reading habits and abilities of four fictitious readers. Students’ conceptions of successful reading were determined based on their rankings of these fictitious readers, and their strategic activity was indexed by coding their use of strategies and the participation roles they assumed while working together. The analyses revealed a strong relationship between students’ conceptions of reading and their patterns of interaction during the collaborative activity. The findings enrich our understanding of this relationship and raise important questions for future investigations.     

The Potential for Expressing Post-secular Citizenship Through the Deobandi Doctrine

Islamic education has been regarded as a thorn in the side of religious minority community integration into the nation state, and consequently to the expression of citizenship. Expressions of citizenship are associated with public participation while Islamic education is more readily associated with retreat and isolation of religious communities. At the same time the pervasiveness of religion in public life has led to calls for the post-secular—that is where religious communities are present in secular society. Habermas demonstrates that a public which is literary constituted through critical rational communication is an effective means with which individuals can participate in the public sphere of modern society. Literary publics get constituted when three features are satisfied; writing, reading and discussing matters of common interest. The article considers the features of a literary public in relation to a review of some literature on the Deobandi education movement. The article argues that Islamic education at Deobandi institutions is able to constitute a literary public through the use of common texts in vernacular languages which are accessible to individuals who can then read and discuss them. The article suggests, then, that Islamic education within the Deobandi network of institutions opens up fascinating possibilities for expressing of post-secular citizenship requiring further research.     

Publics in the Making: Mediating Different Methods of Engagement and the Publics These Construct

The potential for public engagement to democratise science has come under increasing scrutiny amid concerns that conflicting motivations have led to confusion about what engagement means to those who mediate science and publics. This raises important yet relatively unexplored questions regarding how publics are constituted by different forms of engagement used by intermediary scholars and other actors. It is possible to identify at least two possible ‘rationalities of mediation’ that mobilise different versions of the public and the roles they are assumed to play, as ‘citizens’ or ‘users’, in discussions around technology. However, combinations of rationalities are found in practice and these have significant implications for the ‘new’ scientific democracy.     

The New Biology and its Impact in Biomedical Strategies Against HIV/AIDS

Abstract. The sequencing of the human genome and the initiation of the structural genomics projects have ushered in a new age of biology that involves multi‐lab, high‐cost projects with broad task‐oriented goals rather than the more conventional hypothesis‐driven approach of the past. The new biology has led to the development of new sets of tools for the scientist to use in the quest to solve mysteries of human disease, biomolecular structure‐function relationships, and other burning biological questions. Nevertheless, the impact of the new biology on the field of AIDS investigation has been minimal, predominantly because many of the tools in the HIV field of study were developed before the full advance of the new biology was felt in the biomedical community. Many of the high‐cost megaprojects that involve large technological advances and are marketed as projects of promise to the biomedical community are not likely to significantly impact the field of HIV/AIDS research and cannot serve as a substitute for direct funding to the HIV/AIDS scientists working for vaccine development, an understanding of mechanisms of disease causation, and new tools for therapeutic intervention.     

Fiat's cultural revolution: TQM as functional integration

The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders standing together to pronounce the anti-racist democratic potential of human genomics. Understanding and assessing this rise of ‘anti-racist, democratic genomics’ requires distinguishing between two problems of power and science: the first characterized by what Michel Foucault labeled states of domination; the second by what he described as relations of power. When states of domination exist, as in the case of Nazi science, liberal efforts to extend new powers of participation and autonomy to research subjects may play important roles in redressing power imbalances between researchers and their subjects. However, when distinctions between scientist and research subject blur, as in the case of much human genomics, efforts to extend liberal rights to subjects of genomic studies—or genomic liberalism—may produce novel problems, including: (1) human genome scientists' loss of capacity to describe their objects of study; (2) disruption of research subjects' abilities to define themselves; and (3) lack of accountability for the unintended effects of efforts to democratize genomics. In these ways genomic liberalism may foster, at the same that it impedes, the co-constitution of knowledge and democratic subjects. It may create new forms of racism at the very moment that it explicitly seeks anti-racist ends. Addressing the problems created by this paradoxical position will require more sustained attention to and critique of the anti-racist and democratic imaginaries that increasingly animate technoscience.     

Assessing the format of the presentation of text in developing a Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (R-SAT)

We are constructing a new computerized test of reading comprehension called the Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (R-SAT). R-SAT elicits and analyzes verbal protocols that readers generate in response to questions as they read texts. We examined whether the amount of information available to the reader when reading and answering questions influenced the extent to which R-SAT accounts for comprehension. We found that R-SAT was most predictive of comprehension when the readers did not have access to the text as they answered questions.     

The Rise of Citizen Science in Health and Biomedical Research

Citizen science models of public participation in scientific research represent a growing area of opportunity for health and biomedical research, as well as new impetus for more collaborative forms of engagement in large-scale research. However, this also surfaces a variety of ethical issues that both fall outside of and build upon the standard human subjects concerns in bioethics. This article provides background on citizen science, examples of current projects in the field, and discussion of established and emerging ethical issues for citizen science in health and biomedical research.     

Slim Futures and the Fat Pill: Civic Imaginations of Innovation and Governance in an Engagement Setting

Innovation politics is seen as an ever more central area of public policy, and as a key means for shaping societal futures. Particularly in Europe, with its history of controversial public debates about innovations, the idea that scientific progress is automatically equated with societal progress seems hard to sustain. Broader public participation within techno-scientific governance seems necessary; though who is to participate in which form often remains unclear. Increasingly, when the innovation process is discussed in both policy and academia, the question of when public engagement should take place in the innovation process is addressed using common models such as ‘upstream engagement’. However, these discussions about public engagement often assume a top-down approach, and pay little attention to citizens' perspectives. To address this gap in the literature, this article will ask the following questions: what tacit understandings of techno-scientific innovation and governance do citizens have; and how do they relate their understandings of the form, structure and dynamics of these innovation processes to their visions of governance and participation? How do specific cultural forms of conceptualising innovation open up or close down particular possibilities of governance and public participation, hence privileging the involvement of certain actors and not others? To address these questions, we analyse the discussions in a long-term public engagement setting involving both genome scientists and citizens in Austria.     

Vernacularizing Jñāndev: Hagiography and the Process of Vernacularization

The process of vernacularization involves more than literary language, but also invokes social ethics and an investment in the idioms of everyday life. Vernacularization can reach beyond texts to enact its force upon biographies as well, altering the ethics and quotidian memory of sacred figures. The paper examines how texts and biographical memory identified with the medieval Marathi “saint” (sant) Jñāndev (about thirteenth century) underwent a process of vernacularization that altered the social ethics of texts associated with Jñāndev and with the public memory of the saint himself. In particular, issues of caste and gender as subjects of the process of vernacularization are discussed, and especially in the context of producing bhakti publics—social spheres of devotion—that merge with the Vārkarī religious tradition in Maharashtra.     

From Validating to Verifying: Public Appeals in Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology provides a vivid and richly entangled contemporary example of a science being made public. A science, however, can be made public in different ways. A public could validate, legitimate, de-legimate, object to, verify, confirm or dissent from science. Practically, scientists could publicise science—in the mass media—or they could make science public. The contrast between high-profile, media scientists such as J. Craig Venter, and community-based participatory mechanisms such as OpenWetWare allows us to see how these alternatives play out in practice. While it is easy to criticise and dismiss the public-relations oriented promotion of synthetic biology by figures such as Venter, how should we evaluate the open participatory mechanisms of a social media effort such as OpenWetWare? I suggest, drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Michael Warner, that the case of synthetic biology is interesting because many synthetic biologists commit themselves to making it public, and making its public-ness part of how it is done. They place hope in publics to make the science viable. At the same time, however, the publics who are welcomed into OpenWetWare are largely confined to validating the coordination mechanisms on which the claim to public-ness rests. Whether publics can do more than validate synthetic biology, then, remains a question both for publics outside and inside this emerging scientific field. And whether the alternatives of validation or participation themselves adequately frame what is at stake in the emergence of fields such as synthetic biology remains debatable.     

Dynamic Text Comprehension

Abstract— Reading is one of the most complex and uniquely human of cognitive activities. Our understanding of the processes and factors involved in text comprehension is quite impressive, but it also is fragmented, with a proliferation of "mini-theories" for specific components that in reality are intertwined and interact with one another. Theories of dynamic text comprehension (DTC) aim to capture the integration of these components. They depict reading comprehension as an ongoing process involving fluctuations in the activation of concepts as the reader proceeds through the text, resulting in a gradually emerging interpretation of the material. Features of texts and characteristics of the reader jointly and interactively affect these fluctuations, influencing and being influenced by the reader's understanding and memory of what is read. We illustrate the DTC approach by describing one theory, called the Landscape model, and summarize how its simulations match empirical data. We conclude with some implications of the DTC framework for basic and applied reading research.     

Social Ecology: A Hermeneutical Framework for Reading Biblical Texts? A Latin American Perspective

Using the concept of “social ecology” developed by Murray Bookchin as a starting point, this article explores the reception of this idea in Latin America before elaborating some key principles derived from this concept for a hermeneutical strategy to approach biblical texts. In particular, the article argues that Bookchin's understanding of the seriousness of the ecological crisis and of its causes, his views on the issues around exploitation, hierarchy and domination, gender and age oppression, and his criticism of the prevailing economic and political dimension could provide a hermeneutical framework that is relevant for an ecologically sound and justice‐centred reading of biblical texts.     

Genomic Databases as Global Public Goods?

Recent discussions of genomics and international justice have adopted the concept of 'global public goods' to support both the view of genomics as a benefit and the sharing of genomics knowledge across nations. Such discussion relies on a particular interpretation of the global public goods argument, facilitated by the ambiguity of the concept itself. Our aim in this article is to demonstrate this by a close examination of the concept of global public goods with particular reference to its use in the context of genomic databases. We content that the argument for construing genomics as a global public good depends on seeing it as a natural good by focusing on features intrinsic to genomics knowledge. We shall argue that social and political arrangements are relevant and that recognising this opens the door to construing the use of global public goods language as a strategic one.     

Experimenting with Engagement

Social scientists can explore questions about what counts as knowledge and how researchers—including social science researchers—can produce that knowledge. An art/space installation examining issues of public participation in science demonstrates the process of co-creation of knowledge about public participation, not simply the co-creation of the meaning of the installation itself.