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Taxonomy, biodiversity and their publics in twenty-first-century DNA barcoding

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2010
<mark>Journal</mark>Public Understanding of Science
Issue number4
Volume19
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)497-512
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

We examine the crafting of publics in the global Barcoding of Life Initiative (BOLI)—seen as crucial for re invigorating, and democratizing, early-twentyfirst- century taxonomic sciences and hence for actually achieving biodiversity protection. Our approach to the issue of publics differs from that of conventional public understanding of or engagement with science work. Combining science and technology studies with critical political theory allows us to examine the discursive and material formation of publics occurring within the science of DNA barcoding. Co-productionist theory suggests BOLI to be actively crafting its prospective publics imaginatively, as an integral part of its selfcomposition as public science. Drawing on the work of Laclau’s On Populist Reason, we examine how such normatively weighted abstract publics are necessarily chronically incomplete, with an unavoidable tension between the universal and the particular.