Designs on Nature
2 July 2004
Sheila Jasanoff, Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, USA
In the past three decades, policy issues connected with advances in the biological sciences have risen to prominence in many industrial nations. These developments offer an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the transformations of democratic politics as contemporary societies move from resource-based to knowledge-based economies. Drawing on a comparison of Germany, Britain, and the United States, I will show how three democratic political cultures have asserted and reinvented themselves in their encounters with biotechnology. Instead of fostering convergence, as determinist theories would have us expect, biotechnology has served as a site for the (re)performance of political culture. Comparative analysis permits us to observe these dynamics in detail, on issues ranging from GM foods to stem cell research. I will develop the concept of civic epistemology to account for cross-national divergences in the framing and resolution of problems of governing biotechnology. In the process, I will highlight the hidden resources of cognitive and political authorization that supplement the formal processes of deliberative democracy in its engagements with science and technology.
Biography
Sheila Jasanoff has held faculty appointments or visiting positions at several universities, including Cornell, Yale, Oxford, and Kyoto. At Cornell, she founded and chaired the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She has been a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) and Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's study center in Bellagio. Her research centers on the role of science and technology in the authority structures of modern democratic societies, with a particular focus on the use of science in legal and political decision making. She has written and lectured widely on problems of environmental regulation and risk management in the United States, Europe, and India. Her books on these topics include Controlling Chemicals (1985), The Fifth Branch (1990), and Science at the Bar (1995).