Ulrike Felt

Unruly ethics:: on the difficulties of a bottom-up approach to ethics in the field of genomics

This paper explores the difficulties of addressing ethical questions of genome research in a public engagement setting where laypeople and scientists met for a longer period of time. While professional ethics mostly ignores public meaning, we aimed at a bottom-up approach to ethics in order to broaden the way in which ethical aspects of genomics can be addressed. However, within this interaction we identified a number of difficulties that constrained an open discussion on ethical issues. Thus, we analyze how ethical issues were approached, framed, debated, displaced or closed. We then elaborate on the possibilities and limits of dealing with ethics in such a participatory setting. We conclude by hinting at what should be taken into consideration when approaching issues of science and ethics more “upstream.”

Visions and Versions of Governing Biomedicine: Narratives on Power Structures, Decision-making and Public Participation in the Field of Biomedical Technology in the Austrian Context

In recent years, governance and public participation have developed into key notions within both policy discourse and academic analysis. While there is much discussion on developing new modes of governance and public participation, little empirical attention is paid to the publics perception of models, possibilities and limits of participation and governance. Building on focus group data collected in Austria within the framework of a European project, this paper explores lay peoples visions and versions of government, governance and participation for two biomedical technologies: post-natal genetic testing and organ transplantation. Building on this analysis, we show that people situate their assessments of public participation against the background of rather complex lay models of the governance and government of the respective technology. Because these models are very different for the two technologies, participation also had very different connotations, which were deeply intertwined with each socio-technical system. Building on these findings we argue for a more technology-sensitive approach to public participation.

Coming to Terms with Biomedical Technologies in Different Technopolitical Cultures: A Comparative Analysis of Focus Groups on Organ Transplantation and Genetic Testing in Austria, France, and the Netherlands

In this comparative analysis of twelve focus groups conducted in Austria, France, and the Netherlands, we investigate how lay people come to terms with two biomedical technologies. Using the term ‘‘technopolitical culture,’’ we aim to show that the ways in which technosciences are interwoven with a specific society frame how citizens build their individual and collective positions toward them. We investigate how the focus group participants conceptualized organ transplantation (OT) and genetic testing (GT), their perceptions of individual agency in relation to the two technologies and to more collective forms of acting and governing, and also their understanding of the two technologies’ relationship to broader societal value systems. Against the background of the sustained political effort to build common European values, we suggest that more fine-grained attention toward the culturally embedded differences in coming to terms with biomedical technologies is needed.

Technology of imagination: a card-based public engagement method for debating emerging technologies

This article introduces and reflects on a group discussion method for public engagement exercises and for qualitative research into citizens’ practices of developing and negotiating positions on emerging technologies. The method consists of card sets and a specific choreography in order to facilitate the development of citizens’ imaginations on nanotechnology and society in the Austrian context. Drawing on concepts from Science and Technology Studies, we discuss the method’s design as well as how citizens in four discussion groups appropriate the setting. The cards’ materiality, their content and the discussion choreography invites participants to move between individual and collective positioning work, to creatively engage with the elements available and imagine how an emerging technology – in our case nanotechnology – could develop in future. For the analyst, it allows reconstructing participants’ ordering, assessment and projection practices. The article concludes with reflections on the potential and limits of the method and how it could be employed as a tool for qualitative research more broadly.

Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research in Practice Between Imaginaries of Collective Experimentation and Entrenched Academic Value Orders

Over the past decades, we have witnessed calls for greater transdisciplinary engagement between scientific and societal actors to develop more robust answers to complex societal challenges. Although there seems to be agreement that these approaches might nurture innovations of a new kind, we know little regarding the research practices, their potential, and the limitations. To fill this gap, this article investigates a funding scheme in the area of transdisciplinary sustainability research. It offers a detailed analysis of the imaginaries and expectations on which the funding scheme rests and how researchers actually practice transdisciplinarity within the respective projects. Identifying three ideal typical models of science–society relations at work, attention is paid to how, where, and when societal and scientific arenas get (dis-)entangled. This article discusses (1) the tensions between classical academic values and efforts to open research to society, (2) the prevailing power structures that make societal participation challenging, (3) the importance of place and technopolitical cultures, and (4) how temporal project structures impede more radical openings to new ways of knowledge production. We finally emphasize that transdisciplinary knowledge production can only become a serious option for addressing societal challenges if broader changes are made to the knowledge regimes in place.

Within, Across and Beyond: Reconsidering the Role of Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe

Europe, more than ever, sees its ‘future ... connected to its power to innovate’. This idea finds its explicit expression in the current formulation of the Innovation Union as ‘an action-packed initiative for an innovation-friendly Europe’ (CEC, 2010), which is clearly staged as the way to ‘innovate Europe out of the crisis’ (ERAB, 2012; see other documents). It is further translated into the corresponding EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, called Horizon 2020. In order to realize this innovation-driven societal trajectory, European citizens are expected not only to accept the steady flow of innovations, but also to help stabilize this developmental logic through their continuous support. Though expressed in different ways, these ideas about innovation and the role of citizens have been characteristic for EU innovation policy for at least the past decade (e.g. Felt et al., 2007). Science as Culture, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 3, 384–396, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2014.926146

Unsustainable Growth, Hyper-Competition, and Worth in Life Science Research: Narrowing Evaluative Repertoires in Doctoral and Postdoctoral Scientists’ Work and Lives

There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and “hyper-competition.” Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior researchers are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions of these issues are much less frequently considered. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between how research is valued and how young researchers learn to live, work and produce knowledge within academia. We thus analyze how PhD students and postdocs in the Austrian life sciences ascribe worth to people, objects and practices as they talk about their own present and future lives in research. We draw on literature from the field of valuation studies and its interest in how actors refer to different forms of valuation to account for their actions. We explore how young researchers are socialized into different valuation practices in different stages of their growing into science. Introducing the concept of “regimes of valuation” we show that PhD students relate to a wider evaluative repertoire while postdocs base their decisions on one dominant regime of valuing research. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the epistemic and social development of the life sciences, and for other scientific fields.

Striking Gold in the 1990s: The Discovery of High-Temperature Superconductivity and Its Impact on the Science System

The article retraces the social and institutional circumstances that in 1986 led two researchers at the IBM laboratory near Zurich, Müller and Bednorz, to discover high-temperature superconductivity. After confirmation of the unexpected breakthrough an unprecedented mobilization of research groups all over the world took place while simul taneously high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) turned into a subject of intense media interest. The authors discuss these events under three perspectives: the closer interlinkage capacity of researchers and the relationship between the social organization of research and unforeseen cases of scientific creativity.

Timescapes of obesity: Coming to terms with a complex socio-medical phenomenon

Obesity is generally considered to be a growing global health problem that results from changes in the way we live in late modern societies. In this article, we argue that investigating the complexities of contemporary timescapes (i.e. the entanglement of physical, culturally framed and personally experienced times) is of key importance for understanding how ‘the obesity phenomenon’ is conceptualised, performed and acted upon. Analysing both focus groups and print-media articles, we identified three major groups of temporal narratives that shape our perception of obesity: trajectories, temporalities and timing. Each group of narratives follows a different logic and performs a specific kind of ordering work: ontological work that defines what obesity ‘really is’, diagnostic work that assesses the state of contemporary society and moral work that assigns responsibility to act. We show how the narratives are assembled into distinct timescapes that distribute agency in specific ways. Combining data from both focus groups and media articles allows us to analyse how these two discursive arenas are intertwined, as it makes visible how stories travel and converge, but also diverge in quite important ways. This highlights the importance of a multi-arena approach to fully understand the tensions between different framings of health-related issues. The article argues that the difficulties of controlling body weight are closely entangled with a perceived lack of control over time on both collective and individual levels. In conclusion, we suggest time-sensitive approaches for the analysis of health phenomena and the development of corresponding policy measures.

Diagnostic Narratives: Creating Visions of Austrian Society in Print Media Accounts of Obesity

This study explores how Austrian newspapers and magazines report on the obesity epidemic. We show how the media provide a space for formulating situated diagnostic narratives, that is, accounts that develop both a diagnosis of society through the lens of a health phenomenon and a definition of the phenomenon itself. Nourished by globally circulating discourses, these narratives are articulated in a national context and are enmeshed in biopolitical struggles. Linking a diagnosis of society to the biomedical sphere grants authority to diagnostic narratives and creates a space in which otherwise contestable moral calls to return to traditional orders can be articulated.