Oscillating among point of views
How different cultures confront problems based on knowledge is the main question of Jasanoff in Design on Nature. In her book, she traces the history of biotechnology in Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States elaborating cases about recombinant DNA, Genetic-modified organism and embryonic research looking at different sources. The first difference between the traditional approach to the problem is her perspective: she has positioned the political discourses over historical evidence, highlighting ontological discussions embed in the biotechnological practices in the three countries.
As a consequence of her research, she maintains a broad range perspective about the constitution of policies around biotechnology, observing how the problems are framed. “Framing social problems is an intensely social activity…[Y]et as frames embed themselves in social activity and material culture, they fundamentally alter people’s perceptions of what is real in the world around them” (2005, p. 24). But at the same time that she coins the concept of civic epistemology, and encloses the policy discussion on structures and institutions more than individuals. This is a common perspective in Science and Technology Studies. Jasanoff claims “As science became more useful and commercial, older ideas about science’s necessary and well-merited autonomy lost their persuasive force, leading to new charges of cooptation and associated to demands of accountability” (2005, p.226) To her, society seems protagonist of any epistemic transformation, being formalized through this concept. Jasanoff’s concept is a synthesis of her observations on the policy arena of biotechnology, focusing on institutional constructions of expertise and public. Both establish relationships of trust, among demonstration, accountability, and visibility to construct different styles of objectivity.
Civic epistemologies as framing share perspectives with traditional theories of socio-technical change. As Sovacool and Hess (2017) show, most of these theories focus on social groups, collectives of human and non-humans as agents or communities as niches to describe the socio-technical transformations in specific situations. In some way, the central question of the field “to ask how societies produce authoritative knowledge and functioning technological artifacts.” (Jasanoff, 2005 p. 19) is framed on these societal elements, constructing explanations over the collective and undervaluing the individual transformations are interacting with higher levels of human complexity.
In this perspective, the current framings of science and technology studies look at these broad perspectives of changes. There are also, in my view, two main explanations that motivate researchers to engage with them: First, methodological considerations about an individual are more difficult to achieve, because seems requires mathematical, social diversity and time-constraint considerations which a modern build science seems to require on the validation of results. Second, analyze qualitative data of individuals is more complex to systematize, because anthropological and discursive techniques rely on postmodern traditions of in which identity, power, and inequity should be raised as part of the arguments.
Jasanoff claims ‘Citizen’s capacity to take an issue with, and hence to deconstruct, claims made by the state is strengthened through laws that require open meetings and disclosure of relevant technical information” (2005, p. 18). But, what if we look at individuals with a theoretical model and individual evidence as samples of social discourses? If questions oscillates between quantitative and qualitative methodologies? For sure, we can change the narratives with which we can understand the social construction of knowledge and practices, going from collective political, institutional or material (infra)structures. They allow researchers to generalize behaviors in geo-cultural boundaries, such as civic epistemologies made with countries, to move to multiple narrative trajectories that co-exist and co-inhabit a social process. In this sense, if we assume that interacting dynamic individual constitute the social, we could build great stories going from the bottom up, changing over time comparing these socio-technical and scientific-political processes with a different perspective. This change of point of view will probably reveal new pathways on the original questions, that is, how do different cultures confront problems based on knowledge?
