States of Knowledge

The authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectives on the nexus of science, power and culture.

Autorentext
Sheila Jasanoff

Klappentext

In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights are now ready to be synthesized and presented in forms that systematically highlight the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by leading scholars in the field meets this challenge. The book develops the theme of 'co-production', showing how scientific knowledge both embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectives on the nexus of science, power and culture.

Inhalt

1. The Idiom of Co-production 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies 14. Afterword