Feeling differently together: The It Gets Better Project as an unlikely intimate public of LGBT peers

This article examines peer participation in the It Gets Better Project, a YouTube-based platform which addresses precarious LGBT youth by offering moral support. The paper asks who engages with the project, and why particularly peers participate by recording and uploading a personal video. Contrary to this prevalence of peers, the article first shows how the project's architecture actually diverts attention from peer participation to a few featured videos, thereby shifting the focus onto celebrity participation. The article then proposes the project as an “intimate public” (Berlant, 2008) of shared feelings of difference, which connects the individual and dispersed private, amateur spaces with an indefinite affective space of public intimacy, grounded materially in and mediated by the space of the internet. Building on queer critique, the article argues that the project's success amongst peers can be understood in its capacity to circulate and share emotional knowledge of feeling differently together with others, even despite its internal dominant structural and normative orientation.     

The UK Hybrid Embryo Controversy: Delegitimising Counterpublics

The UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 was revised in 2008 in response to legal challenges, societal changes and clinical advances since 1990. A provision permitting the creation of animal–human hybrid embryos was the subject of an extremely effective public relations (PR) campaign by embryo scientists and other supporters of such experimentation. In response, science correspondents of the ‘serious’ or ‘quality’ press commented favourably on these PR activities; this validation supplemented key messages in their press releases. The approval conferred on attempts to shape public opinion was explicitly contrasted with the public consultation exercise conducted by the UK Department of Health in 2005. Press coverage of the campaign demonstrated asymmetrical framings of the representativeness of public opinion and scientists' accounts of their proposed research. Scientists' views were represented as objective and therefore a legitimate basis for policymaking, in contrast with subjective views of putatively uninformed or opposed publics. Such opponents were cast as a counterpublic. The public interest was limited to evaluating the science on its own terms, thus pre-empting consideration of the possibility that public interests and scientists' interests may not coincide.     

Aesthetics and Affect: Engaging Energy Communities

ABSTRACT

Engaging publics in participatory events has become a central means to introducing lay people's voices into processes of technoscientific innovation and governance. However, little attention has been paid to the role of aesthetics, especially in terms of opening up potential ways of critically and creatively engaging with technoscientific matters of concern. The terms semblamatic and matters of potentially are proposed as addressing this dimension of aesthetics. Drawing on practice-based design research, a probe workshop with members of energy communities was implemented. Three probe exercises served to open up potential re-articulations of such core themes as energy, communities and futures. Our goals were to examine the whether such probes enabled semblamatic responses and the emergence of matters of potentiality. Findings were mixed. The continued retention of standard meanings of these core themes suggested that such events can be anaesthetic, blunting access to the semblamatic aspects of engagement. Conversely, there was some opening up in which the core themes were creatively re-articulated. The present perspective, with its three novel terms - semblamatic, matters of potentiality, and anaesthetic - might prove useful in alerting scholars to the complex role of aesthetics in the methodological and analytic practices entailed in engagement with publics.     

The Contested Publics of the UK GM Controversy: A Tale of Entanglement and Purification

Ten years ago the UK held one of the largest, most complex and politically charged exercises in the turn towards public engagement in the governance of the biosciences. Called ‘GM Nation’ this experiment arose as an attempt to mediate public concerns in the run-up to a government decision on whether to allow some varieties of GM crops to be commercially cultivated in the UK. Formed to mediate a controversy, ‘GM Nation’ itself became a focus of controversy, with claims that many of its public participants were already engaged in the GM issue and were thus not representative of a general public. In this way, the category of the public became a contested category, with at least two different versions of the public featuring in the GM controversy. Particularly important was the contrast between engaged or issue publics that emerged entangled in and increasingly familiar with the objects and issues of the controversy, and a general public, identified through its distance and disengagement from the GM issue. These different forms of public were articulated through different modes of engagement ranging from engaged publics found in hybrid forums such as local village meetings, to versions of the general public brought into being in some of the closed parts of ‘GM Nation’. Throughout all this, a wider public institutional architecture, improvised to govern the controversy, became the site of complex boundary work that attempted to separate science from politics, a feature that conditioned how these different versions of public would be articulated and received.     

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.     

GM Food Safety: Scientific and Institutional Issues

Abstract

When government and industry elites respond to or anticipate public acceptance issues having to do with industrial innovation, they construct models of the public that have variously been described as imaginaries, discourses, and frames. Because publics are sometimes mobilized in opposition to new technologies, opportunities emerge for bridging science and technology studies and social movement studies. Methodological and conceptual challenges for such syntheses are discussed. First, it is important to disaggregate categories of the public, industrial and political elites, and imaginaries (e.g. as threats, sources of innovation, or legitimate concerns). One solution is to use flexible typologies of the relations, such as industrial opposition movements, justice movements, alternative industrial movements, and regime preservation movements. Second, there is sometimes a tendency for the cultural analysis of imaginaries or discourses to utilize all-encompassing cultural logics and culturalism and to reject nomothetic inquiry, and alternatives are discussed.     

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.