Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Public participation in science and technology
T2 - Performing and Obscuring a Political-Conceptual Category Mistake
AU - Wynne, Brian
PY - 2008/12
Y1 - 2008/12
N2 - In this paper, I attempt to explain how existing work in the science and technology studies (STS) sub-field of public engagement with, or participation in, public issues involving science and technology, has performed a serious category mistake in allowing itself to be called ‘public participation in science’ research. This requires us to reflect more systematically upon how our assumed objects, here the public issues we think we are dealing with, come to be ‘objectified’ in the forms which they do. Using the three sister papers, I make some conceptual distinctions which carry important political implications and corresponding analytical implications for STS. I suggest that the typical reduction of participation questions to ones of ‘what qualification do publics have for engagement in expert practices?’ is a mistaken distraction from more important questions which not only much analytical work, but also dominant practice, continues to ignore. This reductionist tendency even in social science and STS may tend to intensify, the more the issues reach across global networks and arenas. Finally, I suggest that STS work on public participation needs to enrich itself with some relevant political theory and philosophy, which would throw due historical perspective on the deeper forces shaping scientific understandings and normative representational performances of its ‘democratic’ publics.
AB - In this paper, I attempt to explain how existing work in the science and technology studies (STS) sub-field of public engagement with, or participation in, public issues involving science and technology, has performed a serious category mistake in allowing itself to be called ‘public participation in science’ research. This requires us to reflect more systematically upon how our assumed objects, here the public issues we think we are dealing with, come to be ‘objectified’ in the forms which they do. Using the three sister papers, I make some conceptual distinctions which carry important political implications and corresponding analytical implications for STS. I suggest that the typical reduction of participation questions to ones of ‘what qualification do publics have for engagement in expert practices?’ is a mistaken distraction from more important questions which not only much analytical work, but also dominant practice, continues to ignore. This reductionist tendency even in social science and STS may tend to intensify, the more the issues reach across global networks and arenas. Finally, I suggest that STS work on public participation needs to enrich itself with some relevant political theory and philosophy, which would throw due historical perspective on the deeper forces shaping scientific understandings and normative representational performances of its ‘democratic’ publics.
KW - Engagement
KW - Participation
KW - Defining public issues
KW - Ignoring public concerns
KW - Imagining and performing publics
KW - Deleting difference
KW - Erasing independent civic capacities
U2 - 10.1007/s12280-007-9004-7
DO - 10.1007/s12280-007-9004-7
M3 - Journal article
VL - 1
SP - 99
EP - 110
JO - East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
JF - East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
SN - 1875-2152
IS - 1
ER -