Joan Leach

Doing the Social in Social License

A social license to operate (SLO) is said to result from a complex and sometimes difficult set of negotiations between communities and organizations (NGOs, government, and industry). Each stakeholder group will hold different views about what is important, what is true, and who can or cannot be trusted. This article reviews the contributions made in this special issue on SLO. It also sketches the benefits of applying phronesis, or a practical wisdom-based theorization, of how SLOs can be co-produced.

The Rhetoric of Research Methodology

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is the dominant rhetoric in health research. So effective is this dominant rhetoric that if you work outside EBM or question its practices your position is unlikely to be taken seriously. This is doubly so if you question EBM from within a complimentary or alternative medicine framework. You are likely to be seen as a complainer; as not as rigorous as you should be; as operating from the epistemic Paleolithic. This issue of Social Epistemology explores what EBM is, what it should be, and why it has become the dominant rhetoric and everything else has become a counter-rhetorical force.

Science as an extra dividend: Frontiers of Science

Frontiers of Science, an Australian science newspaper comic strip that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald every weekday from September 1961 until 1979, retains the record of being the longest-running newspaper science comic strip in the world. It was syndicated internationally to over 200 newspapers, and was translated into 14 languages. Its educational aspirations, its ‘omnipotent’ (read white, English-speaking) perspective, and its existence at the edge of comics and on the border between science fact and science fiction offer an invaluable record of the ways that science was imagined and popularized (in Australia and in several other countries) in the second half of the 20th century. In this piece we argue that Frontiers of Science bears witness to the intimate relations between the popularization of science and the broader political and social contexts of science, and that Frontiers of Science demonstrates the specificity of Australia and its place in the world during the 1960s and 1970s.

Social epistemology: communicating neuroscience

Addiction neuroethics has emerged as a field that underscores the public orientation of addiction neuroscience. The goal of this chapter is to suggest a social epistemology of neuroscience, with special attention to the communication of addiction neuroscience. It aims to set social epistemology in a complementary relation to neuroethics, as part of this important interdisciplinary space, but one where issues of knowledge circulation and science communication are foregrounded. This focus demonstrates the difficulties of seeing science communication as an instrumental means to fulfilling a wide variety of epistemic ends. The chapter also examines the roles of communication optimism and pessimism in framing the communication work that needs to be achieved for a successful publicly oriented field of addiction neuroethics.

Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

Proposals for the twentieth century to be understood as the century of traumatic witness have dominated post-millennial criticism and analysis in multiple genres of life-writing and history.2 For the media, the claim has been made directly that ‘television sealed the twentieth century’s fate as the century of witness’ (Ellis, 2000, p. 32). It would seem, then, that trauma and its attendance in witnesses and testimonies are central to understanding the century gone and the one recently begun. The sciences sit peculiarly on the edge of this claim. On the one hand, scientific witnessing suggests a remove from the witness to trauma; ‘the objective witness is very different from the survivor … the objective witness claims disembodiment and passivity, a cold indifference to the story, offering “just the facts”’ (Peters, 2001, p. 716). On the other hand, scientists may claim objectivity and disinterestedness in the way they go about research, but they certainly are not disinterested in the results, the ‘story’, or the interpretations of their data. Further, the goals of science do not include only representation, but intervention, belying the passivity in the appeal to objective witness; the point of science is both to represent the world and do things in it (Hacking, 1983; Pickering, 1995). Finally, through tracing the history of the position of scientific witness, historians of science have drawn attention to the mediated nature of scientific observation and the moral, political, and epistemic commitments of scientific observers as they invent (in the rhetorical sense of inventio) testimony from observation.