Matthew Kearnes

Nanotechnology, Governance, and Public Deliberation: What Role for the Social Sciences?

In this article we argue that nanotechnology represents an extraordinary opportunity to build in a robust role for the social sciences in a technology that remains at an early, and hence undetermined, stage of development. We examine policy dynamics in both the United States and United Kingdom aimed at both opening up, and closing down, the role of the social sciences in nanotechnologies. We then set out a prospective agenda for the social sciences and its potential in the future shaping of nanotechnology research and innovation processes. The emergent, undetermined nature of nanotechnologies calls for an open, experimental, and interdisciplinary model of social science research.

Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment

Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in producing a politics for urban wilds. In order to do this we learn how to sense urban wildlife. In learning new engagements we also learn new things and in particular come to see urban wilds as matters of controversy. For this reason we have borrowed and adapted Latours language to talk of wild things. Wild things become more rather than less real as people learn to engage with them. At the same time, wild things are too disputed, sociable, and uncertain to become constant objects upon which a stable urban politics can be constructed. So a parliament of wild things might be rather different from the house of representatives that we commonly imagine. It may be closer to what Stengers (1997, Power and Invention University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) has characterised as cosmopolitics, a politics that is worked out without recourse to old binaries of nature and society. Using empirical work with urban wildlife-trust members we muddy the clean lines of representational politics, and start to grapple with issues that a reconvened wild politics might involve.

On Assemblages and Geography

In this paper we explore what assemblage thinking offers social-spatial theory by asking what questions or problems assemblage responds to or opens up. Used variously as a concept, ethos and descriptor, assemblage thinking can be placed within the context of the recent ‘relational turn’ in human geography. In this context, we argue that assemblage thinking offers four things to contemporary social-spatial theory that, when taken together, provide an alternative response to the problematic of ‘relational’ thought: an experimental realism orientated to processes of composition; a theorization of a world of relations and that which exceeds a present set of relations; a rethinking of agency in distributed terms and causality in non-linear, immanent, terms; and an orientation to the expressive capacity of assembled orders as they are stabilized and change. In conclusion, we reflect on some further questions of politics and ethics that follow from our account of the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought.

From Bio to Nano: Learning Lessons from the UK Agricultural Biotechnology Controversy

In this paper we develop an analysis of the public and political controversy which overtook genetically modified (GM) foods and crops in the UK in the 1990s and identify some key lessons for the future regulation and governance of nanotechnologies. Given the starkness of the ‘GM Controversy’, it is not surprising that there is now speculation in many quarters as to whether nanotechnologies might not be expected to experience a similarly rough passage. Here, it is suggested, is a further potentially transformative technology, now arguably at roughly the stage of development as was agricultural biotechnology in the late 1970s or early 1980s, and subject to similar levels of utopian promise, expectation and dystopian fear (Nordmann, 2004b). Some NGOs are already suggesting that the issues and problems that nanotechnology raises are of such far-reaching political and social importance that ‘governments [should] declare an immediate moratorium on commercial production of new nanomaterials and launch a transparent global process for evaluating the socioeconomic, health and environmental implications of the technology’ (ETC, 2003, p. 72). Crudely put, the agricultural GM experience represents a warning, a cautionary tale of how not to assess an emerging technology and allay public concern. For many, addressing the question ‘Is nanotechnology the next GM?’ is critical to the commercial success and public acceptability of emerging applications in the field. As such the ‘GM experience’ has been portrayed as a model ‘to be avoided’ in the future development and governance of nanotechnology. The comparison between GM and nanotechnology—and the lessons that may be drawn from the regulation of biotechnology—has been made in a number of different contexts (see, for example, Einsiedel and Goldenberg, 2004; Mayer, 2002; Brumfiel, 2003; Wolfson, 2003; Mehta, 2004). As discussed below our analysis here is Science as Culture Vol. 15, No. 4, 291–307, December 2006

Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities

Welcome to the first volume of this new, international, open-access journal. Environmental Humanities aims to support and further a wide range of conversations on environmental issues in this time of growing awareness of the ecological and social challenges facing all life on earth. The field of environmental humanities is growing rapidly, both in research and teaching. In just the past few years, a number of research centres and undergraduate and postgraduate programs have emerged at universities all around the world: in the USA, the UK, Scandinavia, Taiwan and Australia, to name just a few places. In each area, this broad domain of scholarship is being taken up and developed in a distinct way. In general, however, the environmental humanities can be understood to be a wide ranging response to the environmental challenges of our time. Drawing on humanities and social science disciplines that have brought qualitative analysis to bear on environmental issues, the environmental humanities engages with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose in a time of rapid, and escalating, change. The emergence of the environmental humanities is part of a growing willingness to engage with the environment from within the humanities and social sciences. While historically both fields have focused on ‘the human’ in a way that has often excluded or backgrounded the non-human world, since the 1960s, interest in environmental issues has gradually gained pace within disciplines, giving us, for example, strong research agendas in environmental history, environmental philosophy, environmental anthropology and sociology, political ecology, posthuman geographies and ecocriticism (among others). Indeed, in many of these fields, what have traditionally been termed ‘environmental issues’ have been shown to be inescapably entangled with human ways of being in the world, and broader questions of politics and social justice. But recent interest in the environmental humanities, as a field and a label, is a result of something more than the growth of work within a range of distinct disciplinary areas. Rather, the emergence of the environmental humanities indicates a renewed emphasis on bringing 1 Some of this diversity is showcased in the profiles of members of our editorial board, available at: http://environmentalhumanities.org/about/profiles

Why solar radiation management geoengineering and democracy won’t mix

In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging ‘social constitution’ of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: that the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institutions; that SRM will act at the planetary level and necessitate autocratic governance; that the motivations for SRM will always be plural and unstable; and that SRM will become conditioned by economic forces. Keywords: solar radiation management, geoengineering, governance, politics, democracy, social constitution of technology

Ecologies and economies of action - sustainability, calculations and other things.

In ecological, environmental, and urban-regeneration terms, the participatory turn and the turn to action have been written about at length in both academic and official literatures. From neighbourhood renewal to lay ecologies, people are being ‘given’ all kinds of agency in the making of economy and ecology. Yet relatively little has been said regarding the financial organisation of this new populism, which is often achieved through calculation and audit, and the framing of a return. In this paper we look at the uneasy coalition of civic action and its calculability. It focuses on the funding and running of a British Pakistani and Bangladeshi womens gardening initiative in inner city Birmingham, England. We fuse empirical work with gardeners and funding agencies with theoretical understandings of calculation in order to argue for a mode of organisation that not only includes a responsibility to act but also a responsibility to otherness. Rather than arguing for or against calculation, we describe a more diverse ecology of action and in so doing open arguments for reconfiguring the ways in which sustainable activities are funded.

Introduction: (Re)Imagining Nanotechnology

For its proponents nanotechnology offers so much—unlimited and clean energy, targeted pharmaceuticals, intelligent textiles and self-organizing molecular machines. Bottom-up or top-down, the promises of nanotechnology are revolutionary and other-worldly. Similarly reports in the popular press have begun to grapple with the complicated implications of a nano-enabled world and inevitable concerns about safety. In public policy, debate centres on how to regulate nano-products and nanoscience research whilst negotiating the complex practices of scientific innovation. These social, cultural, moral, political and economic visions of promise, threat and governance have shaped and are shaping— in uneven and complicated ways—the research trajectories that will determine the eventual form of nanotechnologies. This special issue critically engages with the real-time social and political constitution of nanotechnology and together the papers contribute to an emerging analysis of the ‘upstream’ shaping of nanotechnology research agendas. The special issue calls for the formation of a reflexive social science of nanotechnology in which critical social science scholarship re-imagines what is at stake—politically, culturally and socially—in the development of nanotechnology.

Five rules of thumb for post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaborations

In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of unshared goals and neighbourliness.

Materialism and the politics of assemblage

In response to the commentaries on Anderson et al. (2012), the authors’ short response raises questions about, first, the status of materialism and realism in current debates around relations and relationality and, second, the implications of understanding assemblage as a particular kind of ethos for the politics of assemblage-based thinking.