Maureen McNeil

Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience

In an age of transnational scientific communities, international technological networks, and rapid communication facilities, the destruction wrought by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004 is shocking and, for some, bewildering. The emphasis on the magnitude of this event as a natural disaster has facilitated a massive mobilisation of sympathy and resources on an unprecedented international scale. However, this naturalisation has obscured patterns of uneven distribution of resources in and through technoscience that have made this tsunami such a tragedy. Such naturalisation diverts attention away from such obvious questions as: why are communication systems in India so effective in servicing Western consumers through call centres but incapable of providing crucial environmental warnings to those living in that country? How did the militarisation and corporatisation of global communication networks contribute to the making of this disaster? What are the differences in technoscientific infrastructure that will shape the differential living of the consequences of the tsunami (comparing, for example, South Asian fishworkers and Western tourists flown out of the affected region)? How has the Western-based media celebration of Western technoscientific benevolence and aid obscured local knowledges, skills, and resourcefulness in the affected regions? As such questions indicate, despite all the rhetoric of recent years, this tragic event should be a stark reminder of the specificity of the forms of globalisation, its limits, and its consequences, particularly with reference to science and technology. Within science and technology studies (STS) the last decade or so has seen a modest but growing cluster of research oriented around precisely these issues. This special issue of Science as Culture is part of this movement, offering a set of contributions to the ongoing Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 2, 105–112, June 2005

Biological markers and social differentiation: Crack babies and the construction of the dangerous mother

Crack mothers-particularly African American and Latina women-have been constructed as maternal villains who actively and permanently damage their offspring. Many women have been arrested or lost parental rights to their children because of child neglect charges. Despite this panic, recent medical and legal research indicates that reports of damage to the fetus have been greatly exaggerated. This article examines the ongoing questions in medical publications about crack babies. The authors connect the search for biological markers of cocaine use during pregnancy to a new cultural conception of a bio-underclass. The conclusion considers medical developments and controversies in the broader context of class and racial divisions and reproductive politics in the United States.

Publics of Bioscience

The twenty-first century has been hailed as ‘the century of biology’ (Venter and Cohen, 2004). Whatever we might make of this appraisal, the biosciences have become matters of considerable public concern. The stage was set in the latter decades of the twentieth century. During and since these decades, the biosciences have engendered high levels of both expectation and fear, repeatedly emerging at the epicentres of prediction, speculation and controversies. For example, since the late 1970s, public attention has recurrently focused on reproductive bioscience, stimulated by the steady-stream of news stories about innovations in that field: from the birth of Louise Brown as the first ‘IVF baby’ (1978), to the cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1996), forward to recent reports that the cloning of human embryos has become technically feasible (2013). Indeed, the very term ‘New’ Reproductive Technologies has fallen into disuse after four decades of announcements and public debates engendered by innovations in reproductive bioscience. Another thread of public issues can be traced from the controversies regarding the management of recombinant DNA during the 1970s, to those focused on genetically modified (GM) food and crops in the UK and other parts of Europe in the first years of the twenty-first century, and, more recently, associated with the emergence of synthetic biology. In each of these cases, extensions in the capabilities of the biosciences to intervene in organic life at the genetic level have become matters of public concern. Epidemics and major outbreaks of disease—including HIV/AIDS, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), foot and mouth disease, and SARS—have also Science as Culture, 2013 Vol. 22, No. 4, 433–451, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2013.812383

Feminism In Science

The romances of and about the USA combine heady mixtures of myths about equality, democracy, meritocracy, progress, and af ̄ uence. Late twentieth-century feminism in the USA has had a decidedly ambiguous relationship to these romances: sometimes sceptical, sometimes trying to realize their promise. For some feminists, the struggle for gender equality is a process of reforming democracy to facilitate the meritocracy, progress, and af ̄ uence associated with the American dream. For others, feminism must be much more critical and deconstructive to highlight the false promises and destabilize the myths at the heart of this dream. Science is another site of feminist contestation which is steeped in mythologyÐ about value-neutrality, objectivity, and progress. Once again there is no uniform feminist line about the romance of science. Some feminists want scientists to clean up their actÐ to ensure that these espoused ideals are more fully realized. For some such reform could be achieved, at least in part, through natural scientists opening the doors of their professions to women. Others eschew value-neutrality and assumptions of progress, carving out a more complex vision of `successor sciences’ forged around `strong objectivity’ (Harding, 1991). Still others remain wary: their advocacy of cyborgian politics, their explorations of the `othering’ of women, or of forms of `situated’ , `defracted’ knowledge unsettle the mythology of universal science (Haraway, 1991, 1997). Against this background of feminist contested contestation, the American feminist Londa Schiebinger dares to pose the question: Has Feminism Changed Science? Her answer is given in a synthetically ambitious new book. The ® rst dimension of her ambition is to synthesize research pertaining to the gender relations of science, to `summarize and analyze these sundry scholarly approaches’ (p. 1).

Gender, Expertise and Feminism

Connie, the poor Latino heroine of Woman on the Edge of Time who has been diagnosed as insane and repeatedly institutionalized, is represented here pitted against a phalanx of experts. The image epitomizes the ‘cognitive politics’ (Keller, 1990, p. 180) around gender and expertise which emerged with the women’s liberation movement in parts of Europe, North America, and Australasia in the 1970s. Since then the terms ‘expertise’ and ‘gender’ have had notable currency in the English speaking world. The term gender refers to the social construction of the categories feminine and masculine, whereas sex refers to the biological categories female and male.1 Feminists adopted the terminology of gender, because it enabled them to contest the ‘naturalness’ of inequality between men and women, and so open the possibility of change.