Suchergebnisse

Against the background of critique in public engagement scholarship on new and emerging science and innovation, this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making anticipatory knowledge. Adopting a science and technology studies perspective, a public engagement methodology is presented aimed at anticipating the kinds of possible and plausible worlds that novel science and technology bring into being. Drawing on six empirical social science research projects using focus groups, design criteria are explicated on context, framing, moderation, sampling, analysis and interpretation. A feature of the methodology lies in the assembly of emergent collectives and identities that are constituted to negotiate endogenously public meanings, concerns and priorities. I reflect on the potential of such processes to reconfigure dominant policy narratives, the role of the social scientist in mediating such processes and the politics of making anticipatory knowledge.

In this paper I engage with debates on technoscientific governance, narrative, and emergent public attitudes. Building on a piece of social research addressing public responses to the social and ethical dimensions of emerging nanotechnologies, I develop a methodology and mode of analysis designed to take into account four distinctive features of nanotechnology discourse and its constitution in the public sphere, namely: its unfamiliarity; its promissory quality; its uncanniness; and its metaphysical assumptions of progress. Through an analysis of common narratives that shape and structure lay public responses to the technology, and in response to framings of how the technology and its applications are being crafted in the public domain, I argue that nanotechnologies offer a site for an intense future politics centred on dilemmas of body invasion, unanticipated risks, nature's revenge, control, inequalities, and pace of change. I conclude with a set of reflections on the role of the critical social sciences in such a future technopolitics.

This paper develops an analysis of the factors likely to shape future public responses to the social and ethical dimensions of emerging nanotechnologies. The research was designed to offer insight into the following: what sorts of issues are likely under current circumstances to shape public attitudes towards nanotechnologies; what narrative resources do people draw upon to develop their thinking; how do public attitudes evolve through social interaction and knowledge generation; and to what extent can expressed concerns be understood as emblematic of wider societal dilemmas.

This article seeks to engage with contemporary debates on the social and ethical dimensions of genetically modified (GM) animals. Dominant policy ethical approaches and frameworks are criticized for failing radically to accommodate some of the most important dimensions of concern. Drawing on primary empirical data emphasizing existing embodied relationships to animals, the article analyses how people express ethical concern over GM animals, including their sense of the continuities and discontinuities between GM animals and those determined by conventional selective breeding practices. The findings suggest that GM animals are likely to become an issue of public controversy, especially in the animal testing domain, due to the ways in which they symbolize and give voice to underlying tensions between 'moral'and 'instrumental'approaches to animals.The article concludes that people reject GM animals as 'going against nature', and that such concerns reflect wider unease about science, about technological modernity, and about hubris.

This book examines the embodied nature of people's experience in, and of, the modern world. It is therefore part of the deep-seated t̀urn towards the body', which has been such a pronounced feature of sociology in the last two decades. The book argues that bodies in nature are subject to novel, complex and contradictory opportunities of freedom and escape, surveillance and monitoring, and guides readers through the various ways in which these bodily opportunities and constraints are temporally and spatially organized and managed

In this paper we develop new insights on science governance at a time when an emphasis on public engagement in responding to questions of trust in science is giving way to a more systemic and networked perspective. In a meta-analysis across seventeen UK public dialogue processes we identify five spheres of public concern about the governance of science and technology relating to: the purposes of science; trust; inclusion; speed and direction of innovation; and equity. Forty in-depth interviews with senior UK science-policy actors reveal highly partial institutional responses to these concerns and help explain the underlying processes that close down, and at times open up, reflection and response on public values. Finally, we consider the implications of this analysis for the future of science governance, prospects for more anticipatory, reflexive, and inclusive forms of governing, and the roles for critical social science inquiry.

In this article, we examine the intimate significance of trees and woods through research on how people engage with and perform their bodies in different kinds of wooded environments in contemporary Britain. We argue that there are significant, contested and ambivalent affordances provided by woods and forests in contemporary Britain - as providing `live' contact with nature, as a source of tranquillity, and as providing a distinct `social' space in sharp contrast to the pressures of modern living. Second, there is considerable variation in the bodily experiences that people gain from woods and forests, influenced by personal and family life-stage, socio-economic circumstance and geographical location. The values people appear to attach to woods and forests arise from the specific `affordances' that the latter could offer for bodily desires. There are, we might say, different `contested' natures of the forest.

This issue of Body & Society was assembled to extend the interest in the embodied nature of people's experiences in, and of, the physical world. It thus seeks to develop further the emergent sociology of the body that has provided extensive insight into the embodied character of human experience. Such a sociology has, though, dealt less systematically with the various social practices that are involved in being in, or passing through, nature, the countryside, the outdoors, landscape or wilderness. These practices reflect the apparently enhanced `culture of nature' in many contemporary societies. In particular, we are concerned with various embodied performances. The various articles consider: how is the body implicated in, and reproduced through, the diverse social practices happening within `nature'? Why is the body, and its physical capital, developed by practices thought to be beneficial because of the `natural' setting for such practices? In what form do these practices `in nature' come to be part of the reflexivity about the body, as the self and identity are increasingly matters of deliberation, negotiation and self-monitoring?

This paper is concerned with the relationship between sociology and nature or the environment. We briefly summarise the various ways in which historically `nature' has been conceptualised, including the connections between the `natural' and the `market'. We suggest that there are many `natures' and then proceed to develop an agenda for a sociology of such natures. This comprises four elements: a sociology of environmental knowledges; social variation in the reading of natures; a sociology of the diverse forms of environmental damage; and a more general examination of environmentalism and society. We conclude with an examination of the relations between culture and nature suggesting that changes in this relationship now demonstrates what has always been the case, namely, that nature is elaborately entangled and fundamentally bound up with the social and the cultural. As the social and the cultural are both rapidly changing provides deciphering that relationship immensely fruitful but complex areas for future sociological work.