Gwendolyn Blue

Food, publics, science:

This paper draws attention to food as a site around which a historically particular form of public engagement has emerged. In the past decade, some of the most lively debates and policy actions for science and publics have focused on food related issues: first with BSE and subsequently with genetically modified organisms. Even though much of the literature surrounding publics and science acknowledges that the very definition of “publics” is shifting, little attention has been paid to food as a significant arena in which publics are engaging in politically motivated challenges to techno-scientific practices, policies and institutions. Taking food seriously means contextualizing publics as well as extending discursive models of democratic engagement to embrace consumer practices.

Trans-biopolitics: Complexity in interspecies relations

This article introduces the concept of trans-biopolitics to account for complexity in the intermingling of animal and human bodies, with particular attention to diseases capable of crossing the species divide from animals to humans. While zoonotic diseases never disappeared, they had re-emerged as pressing concerns by the 21st century. The concept of trans-biopolitics takes into account the power relations inherent in human and nonhuman lives in contemporary global, industrial, and technological formations. More specifically, trans-biopolitics revolves around practices determining whose lives are possible or legitimate to prolong, whose bodies are sacrificed in order to preserve the vitality of other bodies, and whose bodies are sustained yet ultimately rendered insignificant. To illustrate, we examine connections between bovine spongiform encephalopathy and feline spongiform encephalopathy, to show how certain bodies (humans, livestock) are taken into consideration in terms of health and food regulations, whereas other bodies (pets) remain at the periphery. Acknowledging human—animal relations in contemporary technological and global contexts challenges us to rethink ways in which the politics of health continues to evolve.

Toward stronger theory in critical public health: Insights from debates surrounding posthumanism

The ‘posthumanist turn’ in critical theory comprises efforts to recognize and analyze the interdependence of human existence with non-human entities, including other animals, spaces, and technologies. Scholarship aligned to and debating posthumanism pertains to public health, but has yet to be clearly articulated for a public health audience. This commentary and an appended glossary illustrate the relevance of these ideas for enhancing critical theory in public health.

Framing Climate Change for Public Deliberation: What Role for Interpretive Social Sciences and Humanities?

Abstract Public deliberation is increasingly marshalled as a viable avenue for climate governance. Although climate change can be framed in multiple ways, it is widely assumed that the only relevant public meaning of climate change is that given by the natural sciences. Framing climate change as an inherently science-based public issue not only shields institutional power from scrutiny, but it can also foster an instrumental approach to public deliberation that can constrain imaginative engagement with present and future socio-environmental change. By fostering the normative value of pluralism as well as the substantive value of epistemic diversity, the interpretive social sciences and humanities can assist in opening up public deliberation on climate change such that alternative questions, neglected issues, marginalized perspectives and different possibilities can gain traction for policy purposes. Stakeholders of public deliberation are encouraged to reflect on the orchestration of the processes by which climate change is defined, solutions identified and political collectives convened.

Public Engagement with Climate Change as Scientific Citizenship: A Case Study of World Wide Views on Global Warming

Abstract World Wide Views (WWViews) is an innovative participatory methodology that scales up formal public engagement in response to global environmental issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. In September 2009, WWViews on Global Warming enrolled 4,400 lay participants from across 38 countries to discuss global climate policy. The most remarkable outcome was how consistently people from across different political regions and social groups called for a stringent global climate policy. Drawing on scientific citizenship as an analytic lens, this result is positioned, not as a straightforward input into global policy but as an output from a highly formalized process. What forms of citizenship are embodied, projected, and negotiated in WWViews? What are the implications of these tacit forms of citizenship for the types of epistemic agency that emerge as a result? WWViews participants were situated as consumers of scientific knowledge tasked with responding to a limited slate of policy options that they had no role in creating, vetting, or altering. WWViews also projected an image of the global citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity. Effectively tethering the epistemic capacities of its participants to dominant scientific meanings, WWViews offered limited opportunity for alternative issue-framings or perspectives to emerge. Organizers and researchers of formal public engagement should be attentive to the potential for these initiatives, once scaled up to the global, to impose scientistic issue-framings and correspondingly limited models of epistemic agency.

Animal Publics: Accounting for Heterogeneity in Political Life

To what extent do non-human animals participate in that particular political configuration known as a public? While conventional wisdom about publics is predicated on a vision of political agency that privileges discursive and deliberative processes, recent scholarship situated in the material turn in the social sciences and humanities challenges the notion that publics are purely human and constituted exclusively through language. With these theorizations as a backdrop, this paper takes into consideration the multiple species that are implicated in political life and that play a role in constituting publics. Placing material definitions of publics in line with central concerns raised by human-animal studies, it is argued that animality is significant to publics in ways that have yet to be sufficiently theorized. The intent of this research is to invite further investigation of the myriad ways in which animal bodies and lives influence public formations in a manner that accounts for and also exceeds human capacity for symbolic communication.

Public Attunement with More-than-Human Others: Witnessing the Life and Death of Bear 71

This analysis draws theoretical and political lessons from the experiences of Bear 71, a female grizzly bear who lived and died next to one of Canada’s flagship tourist destinations, Banff National Park. What makes this bear’s story remarkable are the ways in which her daily actions were rendered perceptible, visible, and public through a complex network of digital technologies that record, store, and transmit information. In witnessing the life and death of Bear 71 through an innovative interactive documentary created by the National Film Board of Canada, we observe transformations bound up with cultures lived increasingly through digital media and surveillance. Making sense of these transformations in part warrants an account of the role of digital technologies and the politics of (re)mediation in the practices and ethics of attunement to more than human worlds and lives. In such public environments, immediacy, proximity, and connection are increasingly achieved in and through technological mediation. At stake is a broader conjuncture wherein digital information systems augment the capacity for collective care and concern in public life while simultaneously facilitating the surveillance of and intervention into private lives.