Download or read book Science and Democracy written by Stephen Hilgartner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the life sciences and beyond, new developments in science and technology and the creation of new social orders go hand in hand. In short, science and society are simultaneously and reciprocally coproduced and changed. Scientific research not only produces new knowledge and technological systems but also constitutes new forms of expertise and contributes to the emergence of new modes of living and new forms of exchange. These dynamic processes are tightly connected to significant redistributions of wealth and power, and they sometimes threaten and sometimes enhance democracy. Understanding these phenomena poses important intellectual and normative challenges: neither traditional social sciences nor prevailing modes of democratic governance have fully grappled with the deep and growing significance of knowledge-making in twenty-first century politics and markets. Building on new work in science and technology studies (STS), this book advances the systematic analysis of the coproduction of knowledge and power in contemporary societies. Using case studies in the new life sciences, supplemented with cases on informatics and other topics such as climate science, this book presents a theoretical framing of coproduction processes while also providing detailed empirical analyses and nuanced comparative work. Science and Democracy: Knowledge as Wealth and Power in the Biosciences and Beyond will be interesting for students of sociology, science & technology studies, history of science, genetics, political science, and public administration.
Download or read book Science in Democracy written by Mark B. Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-08-14 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that draws on canonical and contemporary thinkers in political theory and science studies—from Machiavelli to Latour—for insights on bringing scientific expertise into representative democracy. Public controversies over issues ranging from global warming to biotechnology have politicized scientific expertise and research. Some respond with calls for restoring a golden age of value-free science. More promising efforts seek to democratize science. But what does that mean? Can it go beyond the typical focus on public participation? How does the politics of science challenge prevailing views of democracy? In Science in Democracy, Mark Brown draws on science and technology studies, democratic theory, and the history of political thought to show why an adequate response to politicized science depends on rethinking both science and democracy. Brown enlists such canonical and contemporary thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Dewey, and Latour to argue that the familiar dichotomy between politics and science reinforces a similar dichotomy between direct democracy and representative government. He then develops an alternative perspective based on the mutual shaping of participation and representation in both science and politics. Political representation requires scientific expertise, and scientific institutions may become sites of political representation. Brown illustrates his argument with examples from expert advisory committees, bioethics councils, and lay forums. Different institutional venues, he shows, mediate different elements of democratic representation. If we understand democracy as an institutionally distributed process of collective representation, Brown argues, it becomes easier to see the politicization of science not as a threat to democracy but as an opportunity for it.
Download or read book Science in Democracy written by Mark B. Brown and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that draws on canonical and contemporary thinkers in political theory and science studies--from Machiavelli to Latour--for insights on bringing scientific expertise into representative democracy.
Download or read book Science Technology and Democracy written by Daniel Lee Kleinman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Activists, scientists, and scholars in the social sciences and humanities explore in productive dialogue what it means to democratize science and technology. The contributors consider what role lay people can have in a realm traditionally restricted to experts, and examine the socio-economic and ideological barriers to creating a science oriented more toward human needs. Included are several case studies of efforts to expand the role of citizens—including discussions of AIDS treatment activism, technology consensus conferences in Europe and the United States, the regulation of nuclear materials processing and disposal, and farmer networks in sustainable agriculture—and examinations of how the Enlightenment premises of modern science constrain its field of vision. Other chapters suggest how citizens can interpret differing opinions within scientific communities on issues of clear public relevance. Contributors include Steven Epstein, Sandra Harding, Neva Hassanein, Louise Kaplan, Daniel Lee Kleinman, Daniel Sarewitz, Stephen H. Schneider, and Richard E. Sclove.
Download or read book Imagining the Future Science and American Democracy Easyread Large Edition written by Yuval Levin and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From stem cell research to global warming, human cloning, evolution, and beyond, political debates about science in recent years have fallen into the familiar categories of America's culture wars. Imagining the Future explores the meaning of science and technology in American politics today. The science debates, Yuval Levin argues, expose the deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses of both the left and the right, and present serious challenges to American democratic self-government. What do arguments about embryos, climate, or the origins of man reveal about contemporary America? Why do issues involving science seem to divide us along the same fault lines as so many other issues in our political life? Is science morally neutral, or is it an endeavor filled with moral promise - and peril? Are American conservatives really waging war on science? Is the American left justified in calling itself the party of science? Most of the science debates, Levin concludes, are not about particular theories or facts or technologies. Rather, they come down to a profound dispute between liberals and conservatives about the right way to think about the future. Science is only one subject of this broader dispute; but today's science debates can illuminate the contours of our politics and clarify the rift at the heart of our polity.
Download or read book Democracy and Technology written by Richard Sclove and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1995-07-28 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intended for anyone interested in democracy and public policy, social justice and empowerment, political economy and business or the social consequences of technology and architecture.
Download or read book Experiments in Democracy written by Benjamin J. Hurlbut and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human embryo research touches upon strongly felt moral convictions, and it raises such deep questions about the promise and perils of scientific progress that debate over its development has become a moral and political imperative. From in vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and gene editing, Americans have repeatedly struggled with how to define the moral status of the human embryo, whether to limit its experimental uses, and how to contend with sharply divided public moral perspectives on governing science. Experiments in Democracy presents a history of American debates over human embryo research from the late 1960s to the present, exploring their crucial role in shaping norms, practices, and institutions of deliberation governing the ethical challenges of modern bioscience. J. Benjamin Hurlbut details how scientists, bioethicists, policymakers, and other public figures have attempted to answer a question of great consequence: how should the public reason about aspects of science and technology that effect fundamental dimensions of human life? Through a study of one of the most significant science policy controversies in the history of the United States, Experiments in Democracy paints a portrait of the complex relationship between science and democracy, and of U.S. society's evolving approaches to evaluating and governing science's most challenging breakthroughs.
Download or read book Science Freedom Democracy written by Péter Hartl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-21 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the complex relationship between the values of liberal democracy and the values associated with scientific research. The chapters explore how these values mutually reinforce or conflict with one another, in both historical and contemporary contexts. The contributors utilize various approaches to address this timely subject, including historical studies, philosophical analysis, and sociological case studies. The chapters cover a range of topics including academic freedom and autonomy, public control of science, the relationship between scientific pluralism and deliberative democracy, lay-expert relations in a democracy, and the threat of populism and autocracy to scientific inquiry. Taken together the essays demonstrate how democratic values and the epistemic and non-epistemic values associated with science are interconnected. Science, Freedom, Democracy will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in philosophy of science, history of philosophy, sociology of science, political philosophy, and epistemology.
Download or read book Politics and Expertise written by Zeynep Pamuk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologies Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.
Download or read book Anti science and the Assault on Democracy written by Michael J. Thompson and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defending the role that science must play in democratic society--science defined not just in terms of technology but as a way of approaching problems and viewing the world. In this collection of original essays, experts in political science, the hard sciences, philosophy, history, and other disciplines examine contemporary anti-science trends, and make a strong case that respect for science is essential for a healthy democracy. The editors note that a contradiction lies at the heart of modern society. On the one hand, we inhabit a world increasingly dominated by science and technology. On the other, opposition to science is prevalent in many forms--from arguments against the teaching of evolution and the denial of climate change to the promotion of alternative medicine and outlandish claims about the effects of vaccinations. Adding to this grass-roots hostility toward science are academics espousing postmodern relativism, which equates the methods of science with regimes of "power-knowledge." While these cultural trends are sometimes marketed in the name of "democratic pluralism," the contributors contend that such views are actually destructive of a broader culture appropriate for a democratic society. This is especially true when facts are degraded as "fake news" and scientists are dismissed as elitists. Rather than enhancing the capacity for rational debate and critical discourse, the authors view such anti-science stances on either the right or the left as a return to premodern forms of subservience to authority and an unwillingness to submit beliefs to rational scrutiny. Beyond critiquing attitudes hostile to science, the essays in this collection put forward a positive vision for how we might better articulate the relation between science and democracy and the benefits that accrue from cultivating this relationship.
Download or read book Knowledge Democracy written by Roel in 't Veld and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge democracy is an emerging concept that addresses the relationships between knowledge production and dissemination, as well as the functions of the media and democratic institutions. Although democracy has been the most successful concept of governance for societies for the last two centuries, representative democracy, which became the hallmark of advanced nation-states, seems to be in decline. Media politics is an important factor in the downfall of the original meaning of representation, yet more direct forms of democracy have not yet found an institutional embedding. Further, the Internet has also drastically changed the rules of the game, and a better educated public has broad access to information, selects for itself which types to examine, and ignores media filters. Some citizens have even become "media" themselves. In a time where the political agendas are filled with combatting so-called evils, new designs for the relationships between science, politics and media are needed. This book outlines the challenges entailed in pursuing a vital knowledge democracy.
Download or read book Analyzing American Democracy written by Jon R. Bond and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing American Democracy teaches students to think analytically by presenting current political science theories and research in answering the engaging, big questions facing American politics today. It serves as both an introduction to American politics and to the discipline of political science by reflecting the theoretical developments and empirical inquiry conducted by researchers. Every chapter highlights the most current research and discusses related public policy. It demonstrates for students how to think critically and analytically, bringing theoretical insight to contemporary American politics. More than just a comprehensive overview and description of how American politics works, Jon Bond and Kevin Smith demonstrate how politics can be studied systematically. Throughout the text, they introduce students to the insights gleaned from rational choice, behavioral, and biological approaches to politics. Understanding these three social scientific models and their applications helps students get the most out of their American government course and out of this text--they learn a way of thinking that they can use to make sense of future challenges facing the American polity. A number of features help aid comprehension and critical thinking: Key Questions at the start of every chapter frame the learning objectives and concepts Politics in Practice boxes in every chapter encourage students to think critically about how practice compares with theory Tables, Figures, Charts, and Maps throughout present the empirical details of American politics, helping students gain quantitative literacy Top Ten Takeaway Points at the end of every chapter recap the most important points covered but also help students discern the general principles that make sense of the numerous factual details Key Terms are bolded in the text, defined in the margins, recapped at the end of the chapter, and compiled in a glossary, all to help insure that students can effortlessly master the vocabulary of American politics and political science in order to move on to the more important concepts.
Download or read book Politics of Nature written by Bruno Latour and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major work by one of the more innovative thinkers of our time, Politics of Nature does nothing less than establish the conceptual context for political ecology—transplanting the terms of ecology into more fertile philosophical soil than its proponents have thus far envisioned. Bruno Latour announces his project dramatically: “Political ecology has nothing whatsoever to do with nature, this jumble of Greek philosophy, French Cartesianism and American parks.” Nature, he asserts, far from being an obvious domain of reality, is a way of assembling political order without due process. Thus, his book proposes an end to the old dichotomy between nature and society—and the constitution, in its place, of a collective, a community incorporating humans and nonhumans and building on the experiences of the sciences as they are actually practiced. In a critique of the distinction between fact and value, Latour suggests a redescription of the type of political philosophy implicated in such a “commonsense” division—which here reveals itself as distinctly uncommonsensical and in fact fatal to democracy and to a healthy development of the sciences. Moving beyond the modernist institutions of “mononaturalism” and “multiculturalism,” Latour develops the idea of “multinaturalism,” a complex collectivity determined not by outside experts claiming absolute reason but by “diplomats” who are flexible and open to experimentation.
Download or read book Communicating Popular Science written by S. Perrault and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-12 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technoscientific developments often have far-reaching consequences, both negative and positive, for the public. Yet, because science has the authority to decide which judgments about scientific issues are sound, public concerns are often dismissed because they are not part of the technoscientific paradigm they question. This book addresses the role of science popularization in that paradox; it explains how science writing works and argues that it can do better at promoting public discussions about science-related issues. To support these arguments, it situates science popularization in its historical and cultural context; provides a conceptual framework for analyzing popular science texts; and examines the rhetorical effects of common strategies used in popular science writing. Twenty-six years after Dorothy Nelkin's groundbreaking book, Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology, popular science writing is still not meeting its potential as a public interest genre; Communicating Popular Science explores how it can move closer to doing so.
Download or read book Science Democracy and the American University written by Andrew Jewett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reinterpretation of the secularization of American culture, focusing on the political views of natural and social scientists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Download or read book Why Democracies Need Science written by Harry Collins and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in times of increasing public distrust of the main institutions of modern society. Experts, including scientists, are suspected of working to hidden agendas or serving vested interests. The solution is usually seen as more public scrutiny and more control by democratic institutions – experts must be subservient to social and political life. In this book, Harry Collins and Robert Evans take a radically different view. They argue that, rather than democracies needing to be protected from science, democratic societies need to learn how to value science in this new age of uncertainty. By emphasizing that science is a moral enterprise, guided by values that should matter to all, they show how science can support democracy without destroying it and propose a new institution – The Owls – that can mediate between science and society and improve technological decision-making for the benefit of all.
Download or read book Religion Science and Democracy written by Lisa L. Stenmark and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-03-08 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the increasing popularity of “religion and science” as an academic discourse, the intersection of science and religion remains a front line in an ongoing “culture war.” The reasons for this lie in an approach to discourse that closely resembles the model of discourse promoted by John Rawls, in which plural discourse —such as between religion and science— is based on a foundation of shared beliefs and established facts. This leads to a “doctrines and discoveries” approach to the relationship of religion and science, which focuses on their respective truth claims in an attempt to find areas of agreement. This framework inherently privileges scientific perspectives, which actually increases conflict between religion and science, and undermines public discourse by inserting absolutes into it. To the extent that the science and religion discourse adopts this approach, it inadvertently increases the conflict between religion and science and limits our ability to address matters of public concern. This book suggests an alternative model for discourse, a disputational friendship, based on the work of Hannah Arendt. This approach recognizes the role that authorities —and thus religion and science— play in public life, but undermines any attempt to privilege a particular authority, because it promotes the position of the storyteller, who never settles on a single story but always seeks to incorporate many particular stories into her account. A disputational friendship promotes storytelling not by seeking agreement, but by exploring areas of disagreement in order to create the space for more conversations and to generate more stories and additional interpretations. Successful discourse between religion and science is not measured by its ability to determine “truth” or “fact,” but by its ability to continually expand the discourse and promote public life and public judgment.
