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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT IN NANOTECH DECISIONS
Chris Toumey
Department of Anthropology and NanoCenter
University of South Carolina
November 1, 2005
Tuesday, 12:30pm-2:00pm
Sumwalt College, Room 102
Two profound questions intersect when we consider public involvement in
nanotechnology decision-making: first, how should we encourage and control
this powerful family of new technologies that are likely to change our
lives in many ways?; and secondly, what should be the role of the lay
public in processes of science and technology policy in general? The latter
question has a long history that precedes the arrival of nanotechnology. It
is generally acknowledged that democratic societies should have democratic
mechanisms for making science policy, but it is also said that good science
policy must be grounded in good science. If so, then the problem is find
the proper overlap between good science and healthy democracy. Science
policy should be neither bad science generated by foolish citizens nor good
science forced upon a population that resents it. Even with those rough
guidelines, however, the likely consequences of nanotech are so enormous
that they intensify the importance of finding the best ways to include the
lay public in science and technology policy processes. Every citizen is a
stakeholder in nanotechnology in the sense that nanotech will radically
affect everybody's lives, and the changes that will come from nanotech will
come so quickly that we need good forms of public involvement immediately.
Yet it is far from clear how our democratic societies should honor the
status of the stakeholder. There has been much discussion of these
questions, featuring terms like "public engagement," "nanoliteracy,"
"public understanding of nanotech," and so on. In this intellectual
climate, it seems that there are lots of good intentions but little or no
agreement on the proper forms of democratic nanotechnology policy. I
suggest that one of the obstacles to common agreement is the difference
between two nationally-grounded discourses, namely, the British and the
American. For these two groups of scholars to appreciate each other's
contributions, it is necessary to see how their respective discourses on
public involvement in nanotech policy are grounded in different historical
experiences which then generate different kinds of preferences for
democratic nanotech policy. This paper explores the differences between
those discourses, not to commend one and discredit another, but to identify
the intellectual value of both.
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