Regula Valérie Burri

Coping with uncertainty: Assessing nanotechnologies in a citizen panel in Switzerland

The policy shift towards “upstream public engagement” requires dealing with a lack of individual and stabilized scientific knowledge that accompanies any early stage of research and development. This article examines how actors cope with this epistemic uncertainty when deliberating emerging technologies. Analyzing the arguments of the participants in a Swiss citizen panel on nanotechnology, the article explores how actors form their opinions in an epistemically nonstabilized situation. The article shows how actors develop a strategy to handle this situation: analogies, such as to other risk technologies or “nature,” and personal experiences as patients and consumers are used as interpretive patterns and serve as tools to cope with the unknown. Focusing on the ways uncertainty is handled, this approach is differentiated from other models to explain public attitudes toward emerging technologies, such as the “scientific literacy model” or the “cognitive miser model.”The policy shift towards “upstream public engagement” requires dealing with a lack of individual and stabilized scientific knowledge that accompanies any early stage of research and development. This article examines how actors cope with this epistemic uncertainty when deliberating emerging technologies. Analyzing the arguments of the participants in a Swiss citizen panel on nanotechnology, the article explores how actors form their opinions in an epistemically nonstabilized situation. The article shows how actors develop a strategy to handle this situation: analogies, such as to other risk technologies or “nature,” and personal experiences as patients and consumers are used as interpretive patterns and serve as tools to cope with the unknown. Focusing on the ways uncertainty is handled, this approach is differentiated from other models to explain public attitudes toward emerging technologies, such as the “scientific literacy model” or the “cognitive miser model.”

Bilder als soziale Praxis: Grundlegungen einer Soziologie des Visuellen Images as Social Practice: Outline of a Sociology of the Visual

Zusammenfassung Bilder sind in sämtlichen Bereichen gesellschaftlichen Lebens omnipräsent; die (post-)moderne Gesellschaft ist eine Gesellschaft der „visuellen Kultur“. Die Soziologie hat es jedoch bis heute versäumt, Bilder und Visualität theoretisch zu reflektieren. Der Aufsatz unternimmt den Versuch, dieses Desiderat nicht nur zu diagnostizieren, sondern gleichzeitig die Anforderungen an eine Soziologie des Visuellen zu formulieren. Darüber hinaus wird mit den Begriffen ‚visuelle Logik‘ und ‚visuelle Rationalität’ ein konzeptuelles, praxistheoretisches Instrumentarium für eine soziologische Bildanalyse entwickelt und anhand einer ethnografischen Untersuchung medizinischer Bildpraktiken empirisch illustriert. Summary (Post-)modern societies can be understood as “visual cultures”. Despite the ubiquity of images in social life, social theorists have, to date, paid little attention to images and “the visual”. This paper aims to outline what can be understood as a sociology of the visual. It suggests two new concepts - “visual logic” and “visual rationality” - to analyze imaging practices from a sociological perspective. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the area of medical imaging, the paper shows how these concepts serve as analytical tools to explore and understand imaging practices in medicine.

Visual rationalities: Towards a sociology of images

Images are ubiquitous in (post)modern societies. Nevertheless, there is a lack of conceptual frameworks which relate sociological theory to a thinking about ‘the visual.’ Sociological theory has widely neglected to reflect on images and ‘the visual’ and to explore the role of images in constituting and reproducing ‘the social’. This article argues for a sociology of images. It aims to develop a conceptual tool to analyse images from a practice perspective. Following a theory of practice approach and referring to works in the sociology of science, it suggests the concept of ‘visual logic’ to analyse images sociologically. The article claims that social practice is intertwined with a visual logic. To investigate images from a sociological perspective, the article argues, implies to analyse the visual logic that shapes, and is constituted by, social practices. Taking medical images as an example and drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how this concept serves as an analytical tool to explore the social role of images. Physicians and medical researchers use images both because of their visual and non-visual dimensions. The article thus concludes by pointing to a multitude of visual logics – or, in their empirical form, ‘visual rationalities’ – that become evident when observing image practices ethnographically.