Geoengineering is defined as the ‘deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming’. The technological proposals for doing this are highly speculative. Research is at an early stage, but there is a strong consensus that technologies would, if realisable, have profound and surprising ramifications. Geoengineering would seem to be an archetype of technology as social experiment, blurring lines that separate research from deployment and scientific knowledge from technological artefacts. Looking into the experimental (...) systems of geoengineering, we can see the negotiation of what is known and unknown. The paper argues that, in renegotiating such systems, we can approach a new mode of governance—collective experimentation. This has important ramifications not just for how we imagine future geoengineering technologies, but also for how we govern geoengineering experiments currently under discussion. (shrink)

Self-driving cars promise solutions to some of the hazards of human driving but there are important questions about the safety of these new technologies. This paper takes a qualitative social science approach to the question ‘how safe is safe enough?’ Drawing on 50 interviews with people developing and researching self-driving cars, I describe two dominant narratives of safety. The first, safety-in-numbers, sees safety as a self-evident property of the technology and offers metrics in an attempt to reassure the public. The (...) second approach, safety-by-design, starts with the challenge of safety assurance and sees the technology as intrinsically problematic. The first approach is concerned only with performance—what a self-driving system does. The second is also concerned with why systems do what they do and how they should be tested. Using insights from workshops with members of the public, I introduce a further concern that will define trustworthy self-driving cars: the intended and perceived purposes of a system. Engineers’ safety assurances will have their credibility tested in public. ‘How safe is safe enough?’ prompts further questions: ‘safe enough for what?’ and ‘safe enough for whom?’. (shrink)

‘‘Anecdotal evidence’’ has become a central point of contention in two recent controversies over science and technology in referring to our cases as controversies over science and technology.) in the United Kingdom and a contact point between individuals, expert institutions, and policy decisions. We argue that the term is central to the management of the boundary between experts and nonexperts, with consequences for ideas of public engagement and participation. This article reports on two separate pieces of qualitative social research into (...) recent UK public risk controversies with the aim of unfolding the processes by which anecdotal evidence comes to be defined. We do not define anecdotal evidence as an epistemic category that exists prior to the public controversies themselves; rather, we aim to show how the term is constructed and contested by expert and nonexpert actors. We find that anecdotal evidence comes to be accepted by the main actors as an epistemic category, yet that it is multidimensional, open to interpretation as subjective reports, as an indicator of expert ignorance, as a source of novel hypotheses and as a set of political claims for recognition and inclusion. We conclude that the flexibility of anecdotal evidence at the boundary between science and its publics can offer opportunities for participation and engagement, as well as exclusion and alienation. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a personal account of a journey through a world of science governance that is in flux. I reflect on three levels of experimentation: first, the intermingling of social scientists with scientists and policymakers; second, the creation of new forms of public dialogue; and third, the blurring of technical and social experiment with geoengineering as a case in point. My conclusion is that social scientists can both gain and contribute a great deal through engaging with, questioning (...) and trying to open up such experiments. (shrink)

A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.