Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
even politicians to 'magnify' and 'mirror' through dialogue rather than
mere introspection. The news and current affairs media are, in the-
ory, a means to foster dialogue; however, as newspapers demonstrate,
the news media is itself typically segregated such that audiences have
their preferences satisfied by the news channels they select. What's
more, special interests like the oil industry use the media as a vehi-
cle for expressing preferences rather than debating options in a civic
(or public-minded) register.
NO ROOM FOR CITIZEN SCIENCE?
Taking the case of climate change, I've posed - and sought in brief to
answer - key questions about our relationship to science. I've focussed
on 'post-normal science' of the kind that has potentially large and wide
implications for most of us in our daily lives. Using 'Climate-gate' and
'Glacier-gate' as instructive cases, I discussed the self-governance of sci-
ence as part of a concern that it is accountable to the publics it ultimately
affects. I made passing mention of the need for civic debates about sci-
ence 'upstream' before major research programmes are embarked upon. But
I focussed mostly on how to ensure trust in science once a programme
is underway. Governance issues aside, I also explored the relationship of
citizens to scientific representations of nature 'downstream' of the latter's
creation.
In all this, it may seem to some readers that I'm far too willing to grant
scientists the right to produce knowledge without external intervention once
the citizen-informed upstream debates have occurred. This may still appear
to grant science too much power to represent the world, limiting the rest
of us to deciding how best to respond after the fact. It may seem to license
a sort of 'expertocracy' (at worst) or 'benign professionalism' (at best) that
ultimately keeps the black box of science sealed shut to outsiders. So, am I
saying that there are never situations where citizens can be 'co-producers' of
scientific knowledge? As it turns out I'm not. However, as I'll now explain, it
depends very much on context. A generalised democratisation of scientific
knowledge production is not, as many otherwise sympathetic commentators
have argued, possible or desirable. In our daily lives, most of us rarely find
ourselves in the situation of the Kissidougou residents, where the science-
policy link affected everyday life in direct and very tangible ways. But if
and when we are so affected, there
is
a case to be made for
citizen sci-
ence
. Here, the epistemic content of scientific representations is not dictated
by trained specialists alone. We involve ourselves in the research process,
rather than wait (possibly in vain) for sympathetic spokespersons to repre-
sent our interests to scientists (like James Fairhead and Melissa Leach did in
the Kissidougou case).
