230171 SE Publics, Experts, and Emergent Technosciences (2014W)

The life-sciences have become the dominant form of the technosciences in the early 21st Century, after the early-mid 20th Century 'age of physics'. Whereas nuclear science was de-facto symbolic agent of the 20th Century’s dreams and nightmares, the life-sciences have taken on this mantle since the emergence of global climate science and human-induced climate disaster, and the 1990 Human Genome Programme, became dominant from the last decade of the 20th Century and into the 21st. This course, about sociology of scientific knowledge in public arenas, has to tackle unavoidable questions about what we (and I) mean by 'science' or 'technoscience', and how social, political, and cultural conditions have changed over the last half-century or more, so as to complicate the possible responses. For this course, I will use 'science' interchangeably with 'technoscience', since both involve particular forms of both knowledge, and intervention in society, and not only in nature. Over the period of interest, both publics and experts have also become subject to question, debate, and controversy, in STS and many other disciplines for reasons that reflect deeper changes in global political economy and political economy of science. ‘Red’, ‘Blue’ and ‘Green’ (respectively, Human, Animal, and Plant) Biotechnologies, and global challenges involving political economy and science over such issues as climate, food security, biodiversity-destruction, human-parts trafficking, and multiple injustices inflicted upon indigenous peoples through genomics and related technosciences, have become the main media through which the widespread post-war concern with 'social control of technology' are expressed in today’s conditions.
This course therefore covers a large range of contemporary issues and concerns involving modern technoscience, in biological, human, and environmental dimensions. However it does so with a fairly tight set of core theoretical concerns. These are consistently focused on the twin theoretical and normative issues: (i) of historical processes of co-production, or mutual construction, between emergent technoscientific orders, and public (social, or political-economic) orders; and (ii) of how 'publics' are understood, and produced, in relation to 'expertise', amongst other things, through these processes.
I hope also to be able to stimulate some mutual learning as to how we understand the proper, or best, roles of STS as an academic discipline, in the changing context of which we are part.