1. Introduction 2. Enacting authoritative reports 3. Attacking advisory reports 4. The character of the academy 5. Conclusion.

This chapter contains section titled: Patterns of Inclusion, Cycles of Anticipation, The Evaluation of Relevance, The Promise of Algorithmic Objectivity, Entanglement with Practice, The Production of Calculated Publics, Conclusion, Acknowledgments, Notes

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Science on stage : expert advice as public drama

The Relevance of Algorithms

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries.” Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective “containment.” In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of “atoms for development” which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement.

background

Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea

Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity

With the publication of the House of Lords report “Science and Society” in the spring of 2000, public understanding of science in the United Kingdom is now at something of a crossroads. After well over a decade of efforts to improve what has come to be known as “scientific literacy” among the general population— led by such organizations as the Committee on Public Understanding of Science (CoPUS)—surveys suggest that little has been achieved. But how are we now to interpret this? Is it a failure by the scientific community to “get their message across?” Is the public just insufficiently interested in matters scientific? Or is it that the relationship between the public and scientists, and the dispersal and uptake of information, is more subtle than simple measurement models suppose? And how can the “new age,” as envisioned by their Lordships, be realized?

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Public understanding of science at the crossroads

Harry Collins and Rob Evans (Collins & Evans, 2002) offer a typically forthright normative vision for the 'Third Wave' of science studies, after what they call the earlier waves of post-war rationalism, then the postKuhnian 'cultural revolution' from the 1970s. They propose to redefine the accepted qualifications for expert standing in the countless areas of decision-making in which scientific knowledge has held presumptive sway as exclusive (but relentlessly disputed and increasingly eroded) public authority. Collins & Evans (2002) start from the problem of public legitimacy that has been widely recognized to beset science in recent times (House of Lords, 2000; European Union, 2000). They argue that 'the problem of legitimacy' for science has been mistakenly replaced by 'the problem of extension', in which real distinctions between experts and publics are dissolved and 'technical decision-making rights' (as they call them) are thus extended indiscriminately. Their aim of redefining competences for 'technical decision-making' in the public sphere, so as to include practical experience-based expertise alongside 'certified science', would be more inclusive compared with existing boundaries, but more exclusive compared with the apparent assumptions (of infinite 'extension') of the participation in science 'movements'. They use the case studies of Cumbrian sheep farmers (Wynne, 1992) and HIV-AIDS activists (Epstein, 1996) to illustrate this argument. Significantly, and as issues I take up later, for them the public sphere involves an accumulation of completely unrelated 'decisions' about what they define as exclusively 'propositional' decision-questions, such as whether nuclear power, anti-misting kerosene or UK beef is safe,

Science on stage : expert advice as public drama

Citations

The Relevance of Algorithms

Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea

Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity

Public understanding of science at the crossroads

Seasick on the Third Wave? Subverting the Hegemony of Propositionalism: Response to Collins & Evans (2002)

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