Black and White Facts of Public Health? The Role of Values in Shaping ‘Obesity’

Anna Bridel | 10 April 2020
Obesity cancer poster

A UK public health announcement poster Image Credit – Cancer Research UK

In March 2018, the charity Cancer Research UK (CRUK) launched a poster campaign in London that sought to raise awareness of epidemiological links between obesity and cancer. The posters consisted of various images accompanied by the text: “OBESITY: guess what is the biggest preventable cause of cancer after smoking”. The text was in black and white, suggesting that, while shocking, these assertions are simple, straightforward statements of scientific fact.

Yet they generated a heated debate on social media: campaigners and public figures said they would stop donating to CRUK – one of the largest charities in the UK – on account of its “fat-shaming” campaign, while Professor Linda Bauld of CRUK countered that it was, “not about fat shaming” but, “based on scientific evidence and designed to give important information to the public”. Others rallied to defend CRUK’s positive track record of fund-raising, and criticized those offended for “interpreting the facts emotionally”.

The controversy can be read as an example of how science is entangled with particular understandings of health, politics, and effective public policy in the UK. Weeks after these posters appeared in bus shelters, the British government introduced a ‘sugar tax’ on fizzy drinks, and the following year London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced a ban on the advertisement of products high in fat, salt and sugar on London public transport. Both measures have as their stated aim the need to tackle the “ticking time bomb of child obesity”, yet both have been criticized for failing to take into consideration the wider societal drivers of ‘obesity’, and so for wrongly identifying individual eating habits as both the problem and the solution.

The field of science and technology studies (STS) seeks to understand controversies such as these, by inquiring about the taken-for-granted assumptions at the heart of both scientific claims and challenges to them. Such questions can help us understand how we come to care about and define a societal problem called ‘obesity’, and the implications of doing so. For example, what does being ‘healthy’ in modern times mean, and how are ‘the healthy’ and ‘the unhealthy’ identified? What roles are ascribed to the state and the citizen through the concept of ‘obesity’ as imagined by campaigns such as CRUK’s, and with what implications for social justice? And how and why do these roles and meanings change over time, gaining purchase (or not) in the minds of British citizens?

Applying analytic concepts from STS to the CRUK controversy can reveal how these questions came to be hidden, and were then rediscovered in the row over these posters, and whose voices have become excluded in the process.

On the one hand, CRUK defended its posters through two methods. Firstly, it appealed to the idea that epidemiological science and societal conversations – or ‘facts’ and ‘emotions’ – are discrete phenomena that operate in separate domains. Such assertions are a form of boundary work (Gieryn 1983): a rhetoric in which people or institutions seek credibility and authority by explicitly demarcating their claims from the world of values, social norms and politics. This claim that scientific facts are uncontaminated by values and politics leads to the second method of defense: the deficit approach (Jasanoff and Wynne 1998) to knowledge and public policy. This refers to the conviction that controversies are created by a deficit of facts, and can therefore be solved by sending more (supposedly neutral) facts into the public domain.

On the other hand, those who challenged CRUK did so by rejecting the suggestion that the posters represented neutral scientific facts, by highlighting and questioning the norms and values embedded within them. Many contended that the posters reproduced moralizing discourses of fatness as shameful and sinful, and questioned what the term ‘obesity’ is actually standing in for, and how it suggests and apportions blame. For example, equating ‘obesity’ with smoking cigarettes – a recognized symbol for self-inflicted harm – reinforces the supposed incontrovertibility of both the boundary between right and wrong, and the agreed-upon terms on which this particular boundary is founded.

Meanwhile, emphasizing the “preventability” of the issue resonates with the political discourses of both right and left. The right, decrying a wasteful, ‘nannying’ national health service, is likely to approve the delegation of responsibility to the individual for her own health; while the left welcomes the recognition of environmental and structural forces, such as corporate greed being held responsible for junk food advertising and inadequate education and welfare. For both sides, such discourses work to construct ‘obesity’ as a byword for the moral individual and societal failings of modern British society.

In a world in which science frequently fails to have the authority post-Enlightenment thinkers desired for it, at least two lessons can be learned from the inability of CRUK’s posters to resonate with certain groups of society. Firstly, scientific institutions need to recognize that facts do not acquire authority among publics simply by virtue of being neutral representations of the world, but because of the ways in which they are not. Hence, science must ask more questions about the social and political contexts in which it becomes an authoritative representation of the world it describes, and whose voices are included and excluded in this process. To this end, many STS scholars have urged scientists to be more open and humble about the norms and values embedded in their work, so that they can be debated, and scientific knowledge can be made more meaningful to the constituencies to which it matters (Jasanoff and Simmet 2019; Wynne 2006). Secondly, democratic publics and governments must acknowledge the values embedded in science, and their capacity to shape them, rather than expecting science to simplify complex societal issues and quench controversies through the delivery of neutral facts.

Keywords: public health, obesity, STS, science

References

  1. Gieryn, Thomas. 1983. “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists.” American Sociological Review 48 (6): 781–95.
  2. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Brian Wynne. 1998. “Science and Decisionmaking.” In Human Choice and Climate Change, edited by Steve Rayner and Elizabeth L. Malone. Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Press.
  3. Jasanoff, Sheila, and Hilton R. Simmet.  2017. “No funeral bells: Public reason in a ‘post-truth’age.” Social studies of science 47 (5): 751-770.
  4. Wynne, Brian. 2006. “Public Engagement as a Means of Restoring Public Trust in Science – Hitting the Notes, but Missing the Music?” Public Health Genomics 9 (3): 211–20.

Further Readings:

Epstein, Steven. 1998. Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Reprint. Medicine and Society 7. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press.

Felt et al. (2014) ‘Timescapes of obesity: Coming to terms with a complex bio-medical phenomenon’. Health 18(6): 646-664

Jasanoff, Sheila (2017) ‘Back from the brink: Truth and Trust in the Public Sphere’ Issues in Science and Technology, 33: 4

Kirkland, Anna. 2008. “Think of the Hippopotamus: Rights Consciousness in the Fat Acceptance Movement.” Law & Society Review 42 (2): 397–432.

———. 2011. “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (2): 463–485.

Lupton, Deborah. 2013. Fat. Short Cuts. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

McPhail, Deborah. 2017. Contours of the Nation: making “Obesity” and imagining “Canada,” 1945-1970. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

 

Respond »

Symmetry All the Way Down: On Sunita Narain’s Visit to Harvard and Alternative Imaginaries of Climate and Environment

Tito Carvalho | 17 October 2018

Smog obscures view of Chrysler Building from Empire State Building, New York City 1953 (Image Credit – World-Telegram photo by Walter Albertin)

“We are sustainable because we are poor,” Sunita Narain provocatively announced in her Science and Democracy Lecture at Harvard University. But that was just the beginning of the paradox she put to us. “Less than 20% of Delhi residents drive cars and yet the city is congested and polluted.” For Narain, this raises a question for Delhi’s future, “If only a small number created the phenomenally horrendous problem of population, is there space on the road and air shed for the remaining?” She continued, “This is also the question that we should ask in climate politics, but we don’t. But we certainly need to ask this question in Delhi. You can’t ask the poor not to get rich, so you have to rethink development. The only way to really deal with the pollution issue is to reimagine mobility, so that we do not get into a car first to then get back onto a bicycle.”

On December 4, 2017, the Program on Science, Technology & Society (ST&S) at Harvard hosted Sunita Narain, writer, environmentalist, and Director General of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi, India. The thread that connected her public lecture and a number of conversations that followed was the need to “open up” our understanding of environmental and climate problems to a diversity of voices, competing identities, and value-positions.[1] Narain asked if India should—or could—follow the trajectory of the Western world in dealing with pollution, and, conversely, if there are lessons India holds for the global fight against environmental degradation and climate change. She discussed democracy and dissent; and she advocated for what she called an “environmentalism of the poor” that at once contends with questions of sustainability, affordability, and inclusiveness. In other words, Narain rearticulated who the stakeholders are in the global climate justice movement and, therefore, what kinds of problems we should talk about when we talk about the environment and climate.

By seeking out interlocutors such as Narain, the Program on ST&S at Harvard gives voice to two core principles of the field of science and technology studies—‘symmetry’ and ‘reflexivity’. First articulated in 1970s Edinburgh, these two principles began as specific methodological dictates in the “strong programme” of sociology of scientific knowledge, but they have since gained broader significance for the field. Over the past decade and a half, scholars affiliated with the Harvard ST&S Program have expanded the scope of the symmetry principle in terms of a more general theoretical framework, “co-production.” This analytic perspective entails not only mobilizing the same sorts of causes to explain true and false beliefs, as in the “strong programme,” but also studying the social and political orders within which science and technology are situated. Here, a symmetrical study of the natural and the social, of knowledge and power, calls attention to the actors, institutions, and processes that define public problems as being of a given kind or as requiring a particular disciplinary approach and specialized expertise. Who defines the nature of public concerns, and therefore what count as appropriate ways to address them, are historical and political projects that the co-productionist approach interrogates.

Yet in 2018, a temptation has arisen to discard this intellectual commitment to symmetry, thereby also sacrificing reflexivity in the process. There is talk in some academic circles of the need for an “asymmetry principle,” which I take to mean that we should refer to different types of causes to explain true and false beliefs. The symmetrical approach has been ineffectual—one hears at local and national conferences—in dealing with attacks on, and the dismantling of public knowledge regarding such urgent issues as the environment and climate. Worse, many believe there has been outright misappropriation of this core principle of our field by “merchants” who wish to spread doubt for the sake of political gain and private profit. “Asymmetry” is proposed as an antidote, to distinguish the good practices of knowledge-making from the bad practices of sowing doubt. But as revealing as it could be to study doubt-making in parallel to fact-making, such analyses can only kick in after our common problems have already been defined as being of “this” or “that” kind, say, of understanding climate change as a matter of atmospheric chemistry rather than of overconsumption or inequality. How do global public problems come to be understood in narrow, technical terms instead of as issues of global justice, as Narain proposed? Whose questions are answered and whose are not when climate change becomes only or mainly an issue of carbon emissions? An asymmetry principle that never looks beyond extant framings will not give us the answers.

Scholars in science and technology studies thus have a choice. Advocating for “asymmetry,” we may gain a more finely honed ability to distinguish good knowledge-making practices from bad (though it still leaves open the question “good” or “bad” from whose standpoint), but we fall into the trap of assuming particular, perhaps hegemonic, definitions of public concerns. Indeed such analysis may unwittingly aid in the work of turning that which is historically contingent and politically configured into seemingly inexorable formulations given by nature. Alternatively, if we extend the principle of “symmetry” to studying the social orders that support particular knowledge formations—if we mobilize our analytic resources to engage with such knowledge actors as Narain herself—we continue to focus on epistemic questions, only starting from an earlier analytical point in which alternative formulations of humanity’s problems have not been prematurely foreclosed. To remain open to these alternative imaginaries, and the social concerns that they represent, we must embrace symmetry all the way down.

Keywords: methodological symmetry; reflexivity; environmentalism; climate justice

Further Readings:

Jasanoff, Sheila. “Beyond epistemology: relativism and engagement in the politics of science.” Social studies of science 26.2 (1996): 393-418.

Agarwal, Anil, and Sunita Narain. Global warming in an unequal world: a case of environmental colonialism. Centre for Science and Environment, 1991.

[1] Following the lecture, Harvard STS Program Director Sheila Jasanoff moderated a discussion with panelists Sunil Amrith, Jody Freeman, and David Jones. The next day, Narain also participated in a public workshop with panelists Sheila Jasanoff, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Adil Najam, and Noelle Selin, and moderated by Gregg Macey, and had a private conversation with the fellows of the Harvard STS Program.

Respond »

Why We Should Care About the Fate of Climate Science

jmarquardt | 2 October 2018

Authors: Jens Marquardt and Kamilla Karhunmaa

“We all worry about the fate of EPA. We worry about the fate of science as we know it because we are under direct attack in terms of making sure that we can’t look at science effectively or independently and that will essentially stop us from being able to move forward. And I think in many ways much of us worry about democracy itself. Are we going to get through this in a way that continues to allow the United States and our core values to be what holds us and binds us together?”

(Gina McCarthy, Professor of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and former Administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency)

Coupling the fate of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the fate of science and democracy, Gina McCarthy is acknowledging something that is not always apparent to the scientists, practitioners, and policy-makers working on climate science: concerns about science and its standing in our societies are also concerns about democracy. This fundamental insight is missing in many criticisms of the current U.S. administration, which lament the “first anti-science president” (Tollefson, Morello and Reardon, 2016) and seem to worry more about the fate of science than that of democracy. A workshop hosted by Harvard’s Program on Science, Technology & Society took this disconnect as an opportunity, reflecting on two questions at the intersection of climate science and democracy: (1) What is the basis for claims about climate change and (2) what made this basis stable in the first place? We can begin to answer these by examining how particular values and methods come together in the making of global climate science.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example, provides a strongly institutionalized basis for universal claims and authoritative knowledge about climate change. The IPCC presents climate change as a global phenomenon that is detached from local meanings and value. Impersonal observations, complex climate models, and economic predictions take precedence over embedded experiences (Jasanoff, 2010). The idea of global temperature rise is popularized through iconic figures such as 2°C or 350ppm, but the impacts of climate change will not be exhibited or felt in the uniform manner that these recognizable figures might imply. In this way, the IPCC provides a stabilized basis for claims, producing universalized knowledge, while marginalizing alternative ways of understanding climate change (Turnhout, Dewulf and Hulme, 2016). Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain, hardly an advocate for fossil fuel industries, points out that this form of climate science disrespects local voices and alternative forms of knowledge production.

Such criticisms are not readily taken up by the IPCC, which has a history of detaching itself from politics and normative debates; its mandate is to produce policy-relevant knowledge without being policy-prescriptive. In the workshop, Rob Stavins described the IPCC as a primarily political body where scientific findings are bound to political agendas and worldviews. However, Narain’s observation suggests that the IPCC is also political in a more fundamental sense. Like any knowledge institution it produces credible claims only via a selective process, where choices are constantly being made about what issues to study, how to study these issues, and what not to study. The values and voices that are included (or excluded) in this process are, in a non-partisan sense, a matter of political choice and representation.

This brings us back to the core workshop questions about the basis for credible climate knowledge. International institutions, such as the IPCC, and scientific practices, such as global climate models, constitute the underlying infrastructure for a universalized and apolitical understanding of climate change (Miller and Edwards, 2001). Science does not simply speak for itself, but it rests on infrastructures, people, and practices that make specific types of knowledge visible and relevant, while it marginalizes others. Instead of perceiving knowledge as natural facts and ideas largely taken for granted, we should view knowledge more as a complex infrastructure that depends on a “widely shared sociotechnical system” (Edwards, 2010). In our workshop, Peter Huybers, in a striking convergence with STS scholarship, concludes that science is only effective in so much as it exists within an infrastructure of credibility. In the case of the IPCC, judgments continue to be made on what topics to study and how to do so, but the values behind these judgments are cloaked under the IPCC’s ideal of a neutral scientific body. Recognizing this feature of scientific knowledge is crucial for understanding and responding to threats to science in democratic societies.

Debating climate science in a time of political disruption inevitably leads to reflections about the integrity and credibility of science as we know it. While the current moment is marked by efforts to discredit scientific institutions, we should take this as an opportunity to ask ourselves what made such institutions stable in the first place. How did the knowledge infrastructures that legitimize some ways of knowing over others come into being and what is it that we want to protect here? Not asking these questions misses out on an essential part of the political disruption we experience today not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere, a re-evaluation of collective values. Advocating an apolitical and value-neutral understanding of climate science often leads to skepticism and lack of trust. Instead, making climate change a public health issue and accountable to local concerns might build public trust in organizations like the IPCC. In either case, it is a choice that is as important for the fate of democracies as it is for the future of scientific institutions.

Keywords: climate science; democracy; IPCC; inclusion; anti-science

For more information, consult the further readings below or hear Gina McCarthy discuss the question of how to practice good science on Vimeo.

References

  1. Edwards, P. N. (2010) A Vast Machine : Computer Models, Climate data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  2. Jasanoff, S. (2010) ‘A new climate for society’, Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2), pp. 233–253.
  3. Miller, C. A. and Edwards, P. N. (eds) (2001) Changing the Atmosphere : Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  4. Turnhout, E., Dewulf, A. and Hulme, M. (2016) ‘What does policy-relevant global environmental knowledge do? The cases of climate and biodiversity’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 18, pp. 65–72.

Further Readings

Hulme, M. (2009) Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jasanoff, S. (2004) ‘Ordering knowledge, ordering society’, in Jasanoff, S. (ed.) States of Knowledge. The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge, pp. 13–45.

Jasanoff, S. (2015) ‘Science and technology studies’, in Bäckstrand, K. and Lövbrand, E. (eds) Research Handbook on Climate Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 36–48.

Respond »

Placing the Golden Spike: When Did the Anthropocene Begin? (And Why the Question Matters)

Les Beldo | 24 February 2017
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons User Bahudhara - CC-BY-SA-3.0 The 'golden spike' marking the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) at the base of the Ediacaran Period.

The Golden Spike marking the Ediacaran period. Where would we place the spike to mark the human epoch? (Image Credit – Wikimedia User: Bahudhara CC-BY-SA-3.0)

In August 2016, the International Geological Congress voted to accept the suggestion first made by two acclaimed Earth scientists that we live in a new geological era defined by human-induced environmental and atmospheric change. “The Anthropocene,” as the scientists proposed to call it, “could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane” (1). Even before the proposal was accepted by an international body of stratigraphers, the suggestion of a human-dominated geological epoch provoked spirited responses across the social sciences and humanities. In a flurry of conferences and essays over the last several years, anthropologists, geographers, historians, and others have debated the merits of placing humans alongside asteroids and glaciers as agents of planetary geological change (2).

In 2015, Milwaukee’s Institute of Visual Arts invited its visitors to contemplate the Anthropocene with an exhibit called “Placing the Golden Spike” (the International Union of Geological Sciences marks exemplary sites for each geological epoch by driving a golden spike between layers of rock). I visited the exhibit along with other attendees of an interdisciplinary conference at the nearby University of Wisconsin. The exhibit sparked sustained discussion in the conference plenary sessions that followed, although none of the distinguished scholars at the conference could agree on when the Anthropocene began or what it should be called. Their answers tended to vary in line with what they had been studying throughout their careers. An anthropologist of the nuclear age placed the figurative spike in 1945 at the Trinity nuclear test site. Marxians pointed to the rise of capital in Europe as the obvious starting point and suggested changing the handle to the “Capitalocene” (3). A militant art historian of the Napoleonic era felt that European colonialism marked the dawn of the new age and earnestly suggested we rename it the “white supremacy-cene.”

The debate was emblematic of the scholarly disagreement that has accompanied the Anthropocene concept since its first appearance. Notwithstanding the dramatic impacts of industry and agriculture on the global environment, scholars have tended to disagree on almost every significant aspect of the concept, including what to call it. Donna Haraway, not in attendance at the conference, prefers the label “Chthulucene,” named after H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional, octopus-headed monster (4). Others have passionately argued that it would make more sense to call it the “Plantation-ocene” (5). The proposed starting points for these renamed eras are equally diverse, ranging from the discovery of fire to the agricultural revolution to the invention of the microprocessor.

STS scholars may have their own answers to the question of when the Anthropocene began or how to characterize it, but the STS approach can also help us understand what different answers to these questions tell us about the political and epistemological commitments of those who offer them. Any answer, as Jasanoff has observed in general of scientific knowledge, is bound to be produced in concert with the socio-political order it represents, a process STS scholars refer to as co-production (6). Academic disciplines are no exception, enabling the creation of knowledge through a shared understanding of who we are, as humans, and what we care about.

The concept of the Anthropocene is a useful provocation in the humanities and critical social sciences for the same reason that those fields might never have come up with the concept themselves: the idea of a global human epoch challenges some of the most cherished normative and intellectual commitments of the respective fields. Does it make sense to talk about a single anthropos when the industrial age has been marked by sustained systemic inequality? (7) How does all of humanity act as a monolithic agent? Does climate change matter more or less than nuclear fallout or mass extinction? Is there such thing as nature untouched by humans? The disciplines and their various sub-fields give different answers to these questions, all diverging from the original assumptions made by Crutzen and Stoermer (8).

Those two Earth scientists were able to coin a term because they agreed—even if not all of their fellows have joined them (9)—on at least three crucial and deeply value-laden points: first, what constitutes a shared humanity (their implied answer: all of homo sapiens); second, which human impacts matter most for naming an era (their answer: climate change); and finally, how should those impacts be measured (their answer: concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane in polar ice core samples). Adjust any one of those terms and you will get a different answer to the question of when the Anthropocene began. Adjust two or all three of the dials, and you may end up calling this current age something else entirely.

Keywords: Anthropocene, climate change, capitalocene, environment

References:

  1. Crutzen, Paul J. (2002) “Geology of mankind.” Nature 415 (6867): 23-23.
  2. See, for example: Latour, Bruno. (2014). “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History, 45, 1-18 // Haraway, Donna (2015). “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, 6, 159-165. // Haraway, Donna et al (2015). “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocoene.” Ethnos DOI: 1080.00141844.2015.1105838
  3. Moore, Jason W. (2014). “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” http://www.jasonwmoore.com/Essays.html
  4. Haraway, Donna et al. “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocoene,” 22.
  5. Haraway, Donna “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.”
  6. Jasanoff, Sheila. (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge. (p.3)
  7. Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J. B. (2016). The shock of the Anthropocene: The earth, history and us. London: Verso Books.
  8. Jasanoff, Sheila. “A History of Scales and the Scales of History”, Development and Change 48(3), May 2017.
  9. Autin, Whitney J. and Holbrook, John M. (2012). “Is the Anthropocene an issue of stratigraphy or pop culture?” Geological Society of America (GSA) Today, 22 (7): 60-61.

Further Reading:

Jasanoff, Sheila (2004). States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge.

Jasanoff, Sheila. (2004). “Heaven and Earth: The Politics of Environmental Images.” Earthly Politics. MIT Press.

 

Respond »

Where We’re Going, We Still Need Roads: Between the Law Lag and the Tech Lag Narratives

Gili Vidan | 9 December 2015
Image Credit: Car by Becca O'Shea from the Noun Project. Rather than looking at the law lag and tech lag narratives as mutually opposed, STS invites us to explore what vision of society and emerging technology they represent, and what is at stake when they get mobilized.

Image Credit: Car by Becca O’Shea from the Noun Project. Rather than looking at the law lag and tech lag narratives as mutually opposed, STS invites us to explore what vision of society and emerging technology they represent, and what is at stake when they get mobilized.

On October 21st, 2015 the future disappointed us. Fans of the Back to the Future trilogy were counting down to that day when Marty Mcfly and Doc Brown would take their time travel-enabled Delorean all the way from their 1985 present into the science fictional future. Just as the two protagonists were about to head to the future, Marty suggested they back up their time-travelling car, to have a bit more road to land on at their destination. Doc, having just come back from the future, responds with the classic line, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

Looking out the window in 2015, there are no banana peel-operated flying cars, hoverboards, or auto-drying jackets anywhere in sight. Our most innovative cars are still struggling with road-bound fixed-gear bikes (1). Comparing our near future to its cinematic counterpart, some commentators can’t help feeling underwhelmed by the technology that surrounds us. This sense of a lost trajectory of technological innovation can be called the “tech lag narrative.”

Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist, expressed this sentiment in his Science and Democracy Lecture at Harvard in March 2015. Referencing the cinematic trilogy, Thiel’s talk was titled “Back to the Future: Will we create enough new technology to sustain our society?” Thiel argued that our technological visions are no longer ambitious enough. He sought to distinguish “true technological innovation,” which is transformative, from what the tech industry is currently doing, namely, “more of the same.” Elsewhere, he has said, “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” (2). Through a book, lectures across university campuses, and his venture capital company’s manifesto, Thiel’s tech lag narrative seems to be winning over hearts and minds and wallets. Over the past few years, new product launches and high-priced startups have met with criticism of their overvaluation, the specter of another impending Silicon Valley bubble, and the beginning of a backlash (3). In late 2012, influential tech journalist Michael Arrington published a piece titled, “I’m Bored. What’s Next?” (4). Together, these tech lag voices are converging around one message—the future isn’t what it used to be.

These views of the state of technological innovation both echo and contrast with another common characterization of the relationship between technology and society—the law lag. This is the notion that technoscientifc inventiveness is an “agenda-setting force to which the law responds only by reaction” (5). Über offers a recent example of this narrative’s popularity. Commentators say that attempts to regulate Über’s operations illustrate the law lagging behind new fast-paced technologies (6). So which is right? Are we not producing enough transformative technology? Or is the rate of technological innovation too rapid for our outdated social institutions?

Rather than looking at the law lag and tech lag narratives as mutually opposed, STS invites us to explore what vision of society and emerging technology they represent, and what is at stake when they get mobilized. Reexamining the narratives in this light, we see how the tech lag and the law lag are in fact complementary.

Examining the debates surrounding the governance of emerging biotechnology, Benjamin Hurlbut observes that the law lag narrative casts the law’s role as reactive while science and technology follow their own proactive trajectory (7). Echoing Jasanoff (8), Hurlbut notes that through the law lag narrative, science and technology become the only sites from which innovation emerges, whether material or normative. Scientists and technologists thereby assume the authority (and responsibility) to characterize how society should progress (9). Law then is reduced to the task of preventing harm to society, harm as defined by the expert community. The law lag, Hurlbut concludes, is a “mechanism for delegating power” to scientists and technologists (10).

The tech lag narrative also assumes that novelty derives from technology. For example, in his recent book, Zero to One, Thiel defines the word technology as a form of “vertical or intensive progress” which results from doing new things (11). When mobilizing the tech lag narrative, its advocates still insist that innovation is primarily technological and made by scientists and technologists, while bemoaning the fact that it is not as visionary as it should be. As in the law lag narrative, experts in the form of technology entrepreneurs play the role of discerning real innovation. The startup is the privileged site where futures are constructed. Thiel’s definition of an ideal startup is “the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future” (12).

Comparing the law lag and the tech lag narratives in this way makes their repeated and concurrent invocation less puzzling. Both narratives suggest a strikingly similar trajectory to the future. Both are mechanisms for delegating power and responsibility for the construction of such futures to experts. The lag narratives obfuscate the fact that claims about how science and technology generate innovation are simultaneously also claims about who should prescribe how society ought to progress. Much like a Marty McFly stuck in 1955, Thiel seems to want to get back to a specific future: back when we were “on track” towards his vision of a future of novelty defined by tech entrepreneurs. Perhaps it is not our limited imagination that frustrates flying-car enthusiasts, but rather our insistence not to cede to Thiel’s entrepreneurs the tarmacked ground on which collective formulation of such visions should occur.

Keywords: law lag, tech lag, innovation, entrepreneurship

References:

  1. Matt McFarland, “How Fixed-Gear Bikes Can Confuse Google’s Self-Driving Cars,” The Washington Post, August 26, 2015.
  2. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Facebook Investor Wants Flying Cars, Not 140 Characters,” Business Insider, July 30, 2011.
  3. See: Farhad Manjoo, “Is Slack Really Worth $2.8 Billion? A Conversation With Stewart Butterfield,” Bits Blog, April 16, 2015; Francisco Dao, “Why Silicon Valley Innovation Has Stalled,” Pando, January 3, 2013. Ross Andersen, “Tim Cook Sounds Desperate Talking About the Apple Watch,” The Atlantic, September 9, 2015; Leo Mirani, “Are We Starting to Fall out of Love with Silicon Valley?” Quartz, April 18, 2015.
  4. Michael Arrington, “I’m Bored. What’s Next?” TechCrunch, December 30, 2012, Accessed October 18, 2015.
  5. Sheila Jasanoff, “Making Order: Law and Science in Action,” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, 3rd ed., 761–86. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press ; Published in cooperation with the Society for the Social Studies of Science, 2008.
  6. Noah Lang, “Employee or Contractor? Online Businesses Like Uber Need a New Category,” Newsweek, June 21, 2015.
  7. J. Benjamin Hurlbut, “Remembering the Future: Science, Law, and the Legacy of Asilomar,” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
  8. Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar : Law, Science, and Technology in America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995).
  9. Hurlbut, “Remembering the Future: Science, Law, and the Legacy of Asilomar,” 128.
  10. Ibid., 147.
  11. Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Crown Publishing Group, 2014, 5.
  12. Ibid., 8.

Further Reading:

Bijker, Wiebe E. “Why and How Technology Matters,” in Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, 2006, 681–706.

Hurlbut, J. Benjamin. “Remembering the Future: Science, Law, and the Legacy of Asilomar.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Jasanoff, Sheila. “Making Order: Law and Science in Action.” In The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Edward J. Hackett, 3rd ed., 761–86. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press ; Published in cooperation with the Society for the Social Studies of Science, 2008.

Respond »

Thinking COP21: Contradiction and Controversy in the Climate Crisis

Hilton Simmet | 30 November 2015
Protestors calling for Harvard to divest from fossil-fuels during Heat Week, April 2015. Looking at moments of contestation in the climate crisis reveals much about the broader political, economic, and social terrains in which the alleged contradictions are embedded.

Protestors calling for Harvard to divest from fossil fuels during Heat Week, April 2015. Looking at moments of contestation in the climate crisis reveals much about the broader political, economic, and social terrains in which the alleged contradictions are embedded.

I also find a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott a whole class of companies … Given our pervasive dependence on these companies for the energy to heat and light our buildings, to fuel our transportation, and to run our computers and appliances, it is hard for me to reconcile that reliance with a refusal to countenance any relationship with these companies through our investments.

–Harvard President Drew Faust, in response to calls for fossil-fuel divestment (1).

The climate controversy is rife with charges of contradiction. Student activists in the Divest Movement, aiming to get university money out of fossil-fuel extraction, are found by Harvard’s President Drew Faust to be “inconsistent” –boycotting the very companies on which the University and its students depend. Environmental economists are told by Pope Francis and the UK’s Schumacher Institute that it is a contradiction to rely on the very growth-based economic models that created the problem (2). And while developing countries hope for a new era of “sustainable development,” many note the contradiction between the energy-hungry symbols of development–industrial agriculture, superhighways, airports, and air-conditioners—and the imperatives of sustainability.

For the 195 nations meeting in Paris at COP21, if such contradictions get noticed at all, it will be only insofar as they get in the way of the conference’s more concrete and straightforward goals: to limit warming to less than 2◦C, reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 40-70% of current levels by 2100, create strategies of adaptation, and establish a global carbon market to further a new “zero carbon” and “resilient” development model (3). Yet in looking for change, conferees may lose sight of how these persistent contradictions suggest the “climate crisis” needs more than environmental regulations and a new price on fuel. Indeed, for STS scholars what appear as contradictions are sites of analysis that reveal how individual moments of climate controversy are embedded in a far larger matrix of contestation over the very political, economic, and social worlds that produced climate change.

To begin, President Faust’s claim that her students are being “inconsistent” in refusing to “countenance any relationship” with the fossil-fuel companies that support them overlooks her own moments of contradiction. She ignores, for example, the more basic dependence her students are trying to point out between Earth, its stable climate, and themselves (4). An STS scholar might observe that the entire point of Divest is to acknowledge the problematic ways the interests of fossil-fuel companies, politics, and universities are wound up in one another. Divestment, for the activists, is precisely about severing the problematic political ties that are preventing law-makers from crafting effective climate policy.

In Faust’s world, too, Harvard ought not to make its investments a “political tool.” She problematically raises thick walls between Harvard as an “academic institution,” a place of “pure” learning and research, and the dirty business of earthly politics going on around it. In effect, through this discourse of purity, Harvard divests from its ethical responsibility to the Earth. Yet as decades of STS work point out, scientific research is already directed by the interests of the world around it, just as research is not always agnostic in directing the world—as when climate scientists rightfully stress the urgency to act on climate change. Thus, what seems at first to be a debate about the coherence of the Divest movement finally emerges as a contestation over the nature of Harvard and its political relationships with the world.

While Faust’s contradictions call us to think about COP21’s broader political contexts, the Pope’s point about the contradiction of looking for a “market solution” draws attention to the interdependence of fossil fuels and economics. In “Carbon Democracy” (2009), Timothy Mitchell argues that petroleum-based industrialization created societies “with a peculiar orientation toward the future … [as] a limitless horizon of growth” and that “the economy” that was helpful in governing the age of fossil fuels “may be unable to create the processes that ended it” (5). This recalls Max Weber’s observation over a century ago, that “the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order” rests on a desire to consume and drive growth forward “until the day that the last ton of fossil fuels has been consumed” (6). Both Mitchell and Weber argue that the very pillars of contemporary economics—growth, international trade, and increased consumption—arose with the burning of carbon, oil, and gas. While it is simplistic to dismiss markets tout court, the relationship between the conceptual development of economics and our reliance on these fuels is challenging. It cautions climate negotiators about relying on economic assumptions built for a fossil-fuel era when advocating the passing of that era itself.

Finally, there is the contradiction of “sustainable development,” a notion that uneasily marries the symbolic social order of “development” (electric power, highways, etc.) with that of “sustainability” (e.g., stable climate, untouched forests). In the pre-COP21 conference “Our Common Future Under Climate Change,” hope was expressed that there can be a “new development model (low to zero, carbon resilient)” that will also “limit risks that changes in the climate will derail human progress” (7). In this view, seemingly the only modification that needs to be made to “development” is to make it zero-carbon, an unsatisfying resolution in that it takes for granted what is meant by the term “human progress.” Calling for a “new development model” (singular) implies there do not exist multiple, overlapping, even conflicting, understandings of human progress. STS scholarship suggests to the contrary that what is meant by “sustainability” and “development” needs to be examined against the multiple social meanings of “progress,” and it questions whether a single, internationally certified definition of such terms could ever be achieved (8).

Looking at these moments of contestation in the climate crisis reveals much about the broader political, economic, and social terrains in which the alleged contradictions are embedded. Analyzing a message from Harvard’s President brings out the contested (and deeply political) nature of one local climate controversy. Pope Francis offers a compass point toward thinking about the layers of assumption on which contemporary industrial economies are built. And “sustainable development” suggests not so much a “new development model” as a new window on the very meaning of social progress. Looking to COP21, similar moments are sure to arise, challenging the ways we think and engage, and allowing us to see and reimagine the worlds in which such contradictions arise. Ultimately the promise of COP21 thus may not lie in a climate treaty but in the very possibility for meaning and change in this contested moment.

Keywords: COP21; climate change; contestation; development

References:

  1. Drew Faust, “Fossil Fuel Divestment Statement,” Office of the President, October 3, 2013, http://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2013/fossil-fuel-divestment-statement.
  2. Coral Davenport, “Pope Targets Carbon Credits, Economists Favored Path to Change,” New York Times, June 18, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/world/europe/pope-targets-carbon-credits-economists-favored-path-to-change.html.
  3. Andrew C. Revkin, “In Paris Scientists Chart Varied Paths to a Sustainable Human Relationship with Earth’s Climate,” New York Times Dot Earth, July 11, 2015, http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/in-paris-scientists-chart-varied-paths-to-a-sustainable-human-relationship-with-earths-climate.
  4. This interdependence has been observed by a number of scholars. See, for example, Latour, Bruno (2015) Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique. La Découverte (2015) and Stone, Christopher D. (2012) “Should trees have standing? Toward legal rights for natural objects.” Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 3(0), 4–55.
  5. Mitchell, Timothy. (2009). “Carbon democracy.” Economy and Society, 38(3), 399–432. p. 422.
  6. Weber, Max. (2002[1905]). The Protestant ethic and the “spirit” of capitalism and other writings. New York: Penguin Books. p. 120-121.
  7. Revkin, Andrew C. “In Paris Scientists Chart Varied Paths to a Sustainable Human Relationship with Earth’s Climate,” New York Times Dot Earth, July 11, 2015, http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/in-paris-scientists-chart-varied-paths-to-a-sustainable-human-relationship-with-earths-climate.
  8. Jasanoff, Sheila. (2002). New modernities: Reimagining science, technology and development. Environmental Values, 11(3), 253–276.

Further Reading:

  • Jasanoff, Sheila. (2010). A New Climate for Society. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2-3), 233-253.
  • Mitchell, Timothy. (2013). Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.

Respond »

Breaking the Law? Assisted Reproduction and Tacit Normativity

Daniela Schuh | 17 June 2015
Nation-specific imaginaries of what it means to be a citizen are attached to practices of technologically assisted reproduction.

The US and France invoked different normative standards to admit biologically novel newborns to American and French citizenship, respectively.

“The problem is that the law hasn’t kept up with the advances in reproductive technology,” explained Mrs. Brisman, a New Jersey lawyer, when commenting on Ellie Lavi’s protracted attempts to register her daughters as U.S. citizens (1). When the American-Israeli mother gave birth in Tel Aviv, the U.S. State Department refused to recognize the parent-child relationship because the twins were conceived with egg and sperm from anonymous donors and thus were not biologically related to Mrs. Lavi. Born in Israel and lacking a genetic tie to a U.S. national, the twins were initially rejected for U.S. citizenship. This situation changed only with the reinterpretation of a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which now recognizes both genetic and gestational motherhood as a basis for claiming citizenship for a child.

Meanwhile, France’s Supreme Court dealt with the question whether twin boys borne by a surrogate mother in India for a French couple should be granted citizenship. Although there was a genetic tie between the intended father and the children, French judges decided to reject the couple as legal parents and denied citizenship. Uncertainties regarding the boys’ civil status were ironed out only when the European Court of Human Rights decided that France must recognize the parent-child relationship when citizens conduct gestational surrogacy abroad.

The U.S. lawyer’s statement above captures the prevailing sentiment about the law’s sluggishness in the American context but it also holds true for French public debates on surrogacy. At its heart is a picture of the law as a viscous body of rules that eternally trails behind the inexorable agenda-setting forces of science and technology. This perception of the relationship between law, science and technology is commonplace in public controversies about novel technologies and has been examined critically by STS scholars (2). Yet, the mere coexistence of the American and French stories on foreign surrogate mothering underlines the limitations of this narrative.

While giving birth was not at first sufficient to establish legal parenthood and citizenship under U.S. law, the situation in France was exactly the reverse. French authorities refused to recognize the lineage between the twins and the genetic father, and to accept the boys as citizens, precisely because the legal definition of parentage was keyed to the act of giving birth. These contrasting rules represent an unexpected nexus of two larger complexes of law that came into play in these situations.

On the one hand, there are nation-specific ways of controlling the degree to which the process of human reproduction can be mechanized and externalized with the help of novel technologies (e.g. in-vitro fertilization, gamete donation, surrogacy). On the other, there are regulations that tie bodies to political spaces, including nation-specific ways of obtaining citizenship and the rights and obligations that attach to citizens. The influence these bodies of law can have on people’s decisions to conduct fertility treatments abroad became evident in the case of the French couple that engaged a surrogate mother abroad to bypass France’s domestic legal restrictions. Here, we see that regulations already in place preconditioned new social practices that gave rise in turn to novel legal questions.

Comparison between the U.S. and France further illuminates the different choices of law made by the two countries’ legal authorities.  By extending the legal parenthood and citizenship from proof of a genetic relation to include the acts of gestation and giving birth, U.S. authorities reconfirmed that citizenship should be defined in biological terms. They admitted, however, that the regulations previously in place had defined the biology of motherhood too narrowly and therefore law needed to be brought in line with what technology had enabled. In effect, the U.S. decision affirmed the law lag narrative by conforming the law to a new understanding of reproductive biology.

This tacit delegation of normative authority to biological facts, however, is not universal, as the story of the French couple and their twin boys shows. In fact, French officials did not let their understanding of biology define the children’s civil status but rather evoked a set of norms that applied to their citizens whether they were conceiving children at home or abroad. According to French standards, surrogacy impermissibly exploits women and commodifies children. Merely banning the practice at home was not thought sufficient to meet French ethical demands, since citizens could always escape by engaging a surrogate mother in a country with liberal or no regulations on this matter. Hence, refusing to grant citizenship to children born through surrogacy abroad should be understood as France’s attempt to hold its citizens to French norms regardless where they happened to be in the world. Put differently, the country’s moral stance was thought to travel with its citizens, who were not allowed to break out of French normativity on so basic a matter as reproductive rights just because they were territorially no longer in France. Law in this sense took precedence over technology.

To sum up, each country invoked a different normative standard to admit biologically novel newborns to American and French citizenship, respectively (3). These contrasting solutions point to nation-specific imaginaries attached to different practices of technologically assisted reproduction, contrasting ideas about citizenship, and conflicting visions of how the future can and should be rendered governable in the face of late modernity’s rapid and destabilizing sociotechnical changes. STS critical tools that analyze not only technological outcomes but also the discourses that normalize (or fail to normalize) these outcomes help us to investigate further and to achieve a more profound and differentiated critique of biology and law. In this case it takes us beyond the simplistic assertion that the law always lags behind science and technology.

Keywords: law lag; assisted reproduction; parenthood; citizenship

References:

  1. Chabin, Michele, “In vitro babies denied US citizenship,” USA Today, March 19, 2012.
  2. For example, see Jasanoff, Sheila (2007) ‘Making Order: Law and Science in Action,’ in E. Hackett et al., eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 761-786. Hurlbut, J. Benjamin (2015) ‘Remembering the Future: Science, Law and the Legacy of Asilomar,’ to appear in Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyung Kim (eds), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
  3. Jasanoff, Sheila (2005) Designs on Nature. Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. (N.J.: Princeton University Press).

Further Reading:

  • Jasanoff, Sheila (2011) ‘Introduction: Rewriting Life, Reframing Rights,’ in Jasanoff, Sheila (ed), Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age (Cambridge MA: MIT Press), pp. 1-27.
  • Jasanoff, Sheila (2005) Designs on Nature. Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. (N.J.: Princeton University Press).
  • Jasanoff, Sheila (1995) Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
  • Hurlbut, J. Benjamin (2015) ‘Remembering the Future: Science, Law and the Legacy of Asilomar,’ to appear in Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyung Kim (eds), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Respond »

Framing British Drug Policy

Ian McGonigle | 30 October 2014
Khat functions not simply as the drug molecule cathinone, but rather as a nexus where fears of immigration, illicit international trade, Islamic terrorism, and ethnic segregation collide with purely medical consideration.

Khat functions not simply as the drug molecule cathinone, but rather as a nexus where fears of immigration, illicit international trade, Islamic terrorism, and ethnic segregation collide with purely medical consideration.

The effectiveness and legitimacy of British drug control policy are both in serious question. This March the latest assessments of the harmfulness of so-called “legal highs” came under attack by Prof David Nutt and Dr Les King. They used the term “sloppy science” to partially account for the misuse of figures on the number of deaths resulting from legal highs, but it is now clear that drug control in Britain suffers from deeper problems. Expert medical opinion is routinely ignored while conservative opinion and vested political values sometimes prevail. Politics seems to have displaced science in the realm of drug policy, with the result that some drugs that should be controlled are not while others that pose little or no danger are. It is therefore high time to dig into the mechanics of drug policy, asking what drives decisions and how a faulty framing of the issues can lead to perverse outcomes. The herbal high “khat” provides a good example.

In July 2013 the UK government banned khat, an herbal stimulant plant that contains an amphetamine-like compound called cathinone. The pleasurable effects of chewing khat leaves are not unlike alcohol. They include increased libido, talkativeness and gregariousness, along with the inhibition of hunger, anxiety, and fatigue. Khat has been chewed recreationally in the Arabian Peninsula and the horn of Africa – where it is autochthonous – for centuries. In Yemen and Somalia, khat is particularly associated with sessions where men gather to chew in group settings. Such chewing sessions resemble in some respects the public sphere of the coffeehouses of the European Enlightenment. These sessions foster a form of civic participation predicated on friendly discussion and debate on issues of shared communal interest (1).

Khat is a controlled substance in most of Northern Europe, the US, and Canada, although it is legal in Israel, most of Africa, and South America. And khat recently became an object of concern in the UK, after so-called ‘khat pubs’ (mafrishes), popular with Somali, Yemeni, and Ethiopian immigrants, spread across the country. In the mafrish, people gather to chew khat, spend time together, and socialize among peers. Since many of these chewers are Muslims, the mafrish phenomenon’s spread in Britain has sparked fears that these spaces may be incubating ground for Islamic terror networks (2).

In July of 2013 the UK government decided to ban khat, flying in the face of medical expert opinion and ignoring the advice of its own Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). An ACMD report found that “the harms of khat does [sic] not [sic] reach the level required for classification,” and concluded that compared with other popular recreational substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, or cannabis, khat indeed presents a very low risk of harm (Fig. 1; 3, 4).

Instead of making its decision based on the low risk to health, the Home Secretary cited “broader concerns,” such as clamping down on the UK’s possible role as a channel for khat export to other countries where khat is already banned, and so to further alignment with other G8 and EU countries’ drug policies (5). Though the logic underpinning the ban is no longer medical, the UK still treats khat as a class C drug, a classification normally based on health concerns, making it illegal to supply or possess, and criminalizing the communities that use khat recreationally.

Anthropologist Axel Klein (6) claims that the ban will in fact promote crime, not reduce it. By pushing organized khat trade underground, the UK action will spur illegal smuggling; and by eliminating a sanctioned social space for chewing, the ban will drive Muslims into the mosques, increasing the religious authorities’ grip on communal activities, thereby seeding fundamentalism. The message to East Africans and Yemenis is that one of their most valued social traditions is not welcome in the UK, echoing the government’s anti-immigration policy.

More importantly, the ban demonstrates the British state’s ability to weigh the personal sovereignty of its citizens against its own sovereign power to dictate what sorts of subjects there should be. When it comes to recreational drug consumption, sovereignty weighs in favor of the legal homogeneity of the global North over the cultural heritage of immigrant groups. The khat ban thus provides a window into the logic of global governance and the captive role of science in state rhetorics of justification. In this case a formal apparatus of public health protection – drug classification – is deployed, even though the scientific evidence it delivers is set aside for the sake of a regime of political control. Khat functions not simply as the drug molecule cathinone that entails health effects of negligible concern, but rather as a nexus where fears of immigration, illicit international trade, Islamic terrorism, and ethnic segregation collide with purely medical consideration.

As a hybrid of relationships between facts and politics, khat should not be seen either as a potentially risky pharmacological entity or as disputed focus of international law. In the khat ban, a state legitimately committed to protecting its citizens’ health and well-being took advantage of the apparatus of public health decision making to enact a policy that rests on an altogether different logic: the Class C classification was deployed to protect the British community against imagined terrorism and threatened cultural fragmentation. Even while the traditional British pub falls victim to deregulation and loss of community, the khat pub was banned as a locus of undesirable socialization and civic activity.

As a site of contradiction, the khat ban highlights how drug policy aimed at reducing harm to individuals can rub up against deeper political currents such that the facts determined by experts may get supplanted by the political sensibilities of international Realpolitik. Science and technology studies (STS) scholars are trained to read such contradictions carefully and to map the “boundary work” carried out when a substance is framed as either a pernicious drug, a promoter of anti-social behavior, or a global policy issue, especially when boundaries are drawn at the cost of a broader debate on citizens’ cultural and political rights in a diverse society.

The field of STS works to knock down the walls between science, politics, and policy, elucidating connections that have escaped notice and opening up a forum for a wider range of critical voices. Indeed STS is centrally concerned with reconnecting science, technology, and society with core democratic values. For British drug control policy, the STS concept of “framing” well illuminates the miscarriage of justice and the decay of democracy at stake in the khat ban. Viewing a harmless social activity as a potential breeding ground for terror, the British state rendered medical expertise a pawn in the hands of power, a rhetorical piece to be used or discarded for political ends. This is a step toward scientific bankruptcy, signaling that science has value for drug policy decisions only if it fits the predetermined political frame. Politicians, policymakers, and regulators must therefore urgently restore the integrity of drug policy, listening to experts when science is at stake and consulting widely when the issues are political. That would help bring drug policy decisions into line with democratic values and indeed with common sense.

Keywords: framing; drug control; khat

References:

  1. Wedeen, L. (2008) Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  2. McGonigle, I. (2013) Khat: Chewing on a Bitter Controversy. Anthropology Today 29(4): 4-7.
  3. Nutt, D., King, L.A., Saulsbury, W., and C. Blakemore (2007) Development of a Rational Scale to Assess the Harm of Drugs of Potential Misuse. Lancet369(9566): 1047-1053.
  4. ACMD, (2013) Khat: A review of its potential harms to the individual and communities in the UK. London: Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
  5. UK Home Office Announcement (2013) https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/khat
  6. Klein, A. (2013) The Khat Ban in the UK: What about the ‘Scientific’ Evidence? Anthropology Today 29(5): 6-8.

Further Reading:

  • Anderson, D. et al. (2007) The Khat Controversy: Stimulating the Debate on Drugs. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  • Jasanoff, S. (Ed.) (2004) States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge.

Respond »

When Parisian benches have politics: Street furniture and strategies of spatial exclusion

Aurelien Bouayad | 26 March 2014
Spikes in front of doors are among a number of architectural street strategies used to deter homeless people. (copyright by Survival Group)

Spikes in doorways are among a number of architectural street strategies used to deter homeless people.         (copyright by Survival Group)

Haussmannian façades and art nouveau Metro entrances are what usually come to mind when one thinks of Parisian architecture, but the French capital has recently embarked on a new anti-homeless architectural trend, following the examples of other American and European cities (1). Of course, homeless people have long been the target of spatial segregation: from fencing to restrict access to delimited spaces to the locking of park gates and the installation of secure door entry system to bar entrance to apartment block staircases and communal areas. But beyond these traditional methods, usual elements of urban architecture are being increasingly redesigned to “subtly” deter long-term occupancy. From barrel-shaped benches, to cactuses, pebbles and spikes on ledges and doorways, these material strategies inspired by anti-skateboarder architecture (2) embody the same not-so-avowable objective: excluding homeless people from the use of public space.

In his now canonical—yet still controversial—article “Do Artifacts Have Politics,” Langdon Winner put forward the provocative argument that technical things in themselves have political qualities. Departing from the idea that technologies are neutral and only gain political dimension through the social circumstances of their development, deployment and use, Winner argues that technical devices “embody specific forms of power and authority.” His account of Long Island’s low bridges, designed to limit the access of public transit users—i.e., racial minorities and low-income groups—to the area’s resorts and beaches, reveals how the physical arrangement of urban space can embody political purpose. The notion of “disciplinary architecture” is sometimes used to refer to such methods aimed at shaping behavior through the built environment (3).

The development of anti-homeless street furniture tells a similar story; this time, it is a set of innovations in the design of devices that embody a strategy of spatial segregation against a particularly discriminated social group. This furniture was intentionally designed and installed in order to banish a social category from public spaces—and, consequently, from the sight of their fellow citizens (4). STS stresses the idea that technological developments do not take place outside society, independently of social, economic, and political forces. Here, the installation of these devices tells us something about how France deals with a major political taboo (5): by making it disappear. By materially deterring “long-term occupancy” of park benches and bank frontages, anti-homeless street furniture has a direct impact on the (in)visibility of homelessness. Being physically banned from the Polis, the homeless are out of the sight of politics—more than ever.

Indeed, one of the most striking features of these new benches, spikes and cactuses, is the way in which they very often go unnoticed by the average citizen—thanks to the “subtlety” of their design. In many cases, these installations are overlooked until they are made visible by activist groups.

In 2006, a group of researchers from the European Observatory on Homelessness detailed the deployment of these “deterrence by design” devices across major cities in Europe: “One of the strategies purposefully implemented at Warsaw Central has been the removal of old wooden benches—used by homeless people for resting and sleeping—and their replacement with plastic seats designed to deter such activity. […] Railway station managers are satisfied with the results as the seats are durable, easy to clean and deter long term occupancy by homeless people looking for somewhere to rest” (6). In France, the whistleblowers were members of a collective of photographers, Survival, who started to collect visual proof of these “anti-sites.” After their artistic production was relayed by national media (7), the phenomenon eventually reached collective consciousness and entered public discussion. The photographers’ work resonates with the spectacular actions of the “Sons of Don Quixote” activists who, in 2006, created a protest tent city at Canal St-Martin in north-eastern Paris to bring the issue of homelessness—however briefly—out of obscurity and into public view during the 2007 Presidential campaign.

Hence, the latest deployment of disciplinary architecture in Paris demonstrates once again that we need to pay careful attention to what—and who—is made invisible, for such moves very often hide the exercise of power and authority. Writing about such phenomena, aimed at bringing the dark to light, remains a critically important project for STS.

Keywords: visibility; spatial exclusion; disciplinary architecture; technology studies

References:

  1. The phenomenon, indeed, is not so new. In City of Quartz, his classical study of the city of Los Angeles published in 1990, Mike Davis already noticed how street furniture was increasingly integrated in social segregation schemes.
  2. Skateboarders have indeed been increasingly excluded from the streets by the invention and the quick spread of “skate deterrents“—typically metal brackets that attach to benches or low walls.
  3. The method echoes with the recent controversies over the infamous Mosquito technology, a device used to deter young people loitering by emitting a high frequency sound (see this coverage broadcasted by CNN in 2010).
  4. For a broader illustration of these questions, see T. Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2002), pp. 35-74.
  5. In July 2013, the French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE) released a report showing that the number of homeless people in France has risen by 50% between 2001 and 2012, despite repeated political commitment of eradicating homelessness.
  6. European Observatory on Homelessness,“Homelessness and Exclusion: Regulating the Public Space,” 2006, p. 9.
  7. Le Monde, “Paris se hérisse contre les SDF,” 31 December 2009.

Further Reading:

  • M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1979.
  • L. Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics,” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. 19-39; but see B. Joerges, “Do Politics Have Artefacts?” Social Studies of Science, Vol.29, No. 3 (1999), pp. 411–431.
  • S. Woolgar, “The Turn to Technology in Social Studies of Science,” Science, Technology & Human Values, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1991), pp. 20-50.

Respond »

‘Nature’s’ (un)surprising lessons about Italy

Ingrid Metzler | 23 October 2013
Parents of children suffering from rare diseases, for whom stem cell therapy provides a glimmer of hope, appealed to the Italian government to keep stem cell clinics open by participating in diverse public forums, including the popular TV show 'Il Iene.' They acted neither as patients nor as consumers; instead, they acted as outraged citizens.Appearing on Italian TV show, 'Le Iene' and in other public media

Parents of children suffering from rare diseases, who appeared in various public fora, including the popular Italian TV show ‘Le Iene,’ to protest the government’s closure of clinics offering stem cell therapies, acted neither as patients nor as consumers; instead, they acted as outraged citizens.

When Italian science makes it to Nature, the prestigious British science journal, it is hardly ever good news for Italy or Italian science (1-3). Often, such news does not describe scientific breakthroughs, but interactions between Italian science and the Italian state. Written in concerned if not outright dismissive language, such reports tend to say more about how Nature thinks political authorities should deal with science than they do about why Italian authorities choose to act as they do. And, yet, it would be rash to dismiss these articles as quickly as they dismiss Italy. For one thing, they remind us about the importance of actors such as states.

Let us turn for instance to Alison Abbott’s March 26, 2013 report about “Stamina,” an Italian foundation that offered dubious stem cell therapies to patients, mostly children suffering from serious illnesses (3). The availability of such treatments, offered to patients in the absence of compelling evidence of their safety and efficacy and outside of standardized research protocols, was not new. Over the past couple of years, clinics offering dubious therapies have mushroomed around the globe, creating concerns for stem cell scientists, bioethicists, and regulators, who see the lives of patients as well as the future of the entire stem cell field placed in jeopardy.

What set the Stamina case apart from the others, effectively transforming it into a case about Italy rather than about science, was that Stamina had apparently received some sort of official political blessing from the Italian authorities. In Abbott’s words:

Clinics that offer unproven stem-cell treatments often end up playing cat and mouse with health regulators, (…). In Italy, however, one such treatment now has official sanction. The country’s health minister, Renato Balduzzi, has decreed that a controversial stem-cell treatment can continue in 32 terminally ill patients, mostly children — even though the stem cells involved are not manufactured according to Italy’s legal safety standards. (3)

Abbott’s otherwise very informative article did not make an effort to understand why Balduzzi decided to allow the compassionate use of these therapies. She did not give any voice to the health ministry, but focused instead on the comments of concerned Italian scientists. For the rest, the article depicted an assemblage of patients who failed to understand science, irresponsible journalists who misinformed publics, and state authorities that listened to popular demands rather than to scientists and their expert advice. The article, in short, presented the “deficit model” of lay actors that most STS scholars are familiar with—the model that sees publics (and policy makers) always in deficit because they fail to understand science properly and, as a result, act irrationally.

While it is tempting to look at this article through the same “deficit” lens that the article itself applies to Italy, merely reversing the accusation does not seem a promising strategy. It may be more helpful to take Nature’s framing seriously, but to add a little bit of complexity.

Perhaps, indeed, the Stamina case was all about inappropriate state action – but inappropriate in political rather than scientific terms. After all, as Abbott describes, the case gained notoriety when Italian health authorities made an effort to close Stamina’s doors back in 2012. Then, parents of children suffering from rare diseases contested this apparently unmotivated act of law enforcement. Some appealed to the courts. Others appealed to the President of the Republic via Facebook, or assembled in the streets.

Parents of children suffering from rare diseases also made it to Le Iene, a famous weekly TV show, that dedicates a lot of time to the failures of the Italian state, often with a big dash of irony. The prominence of this very stage suggests that Italian citizens were caught up in an episode of what Sheila Jasanoff describes as “civic dislocation,” that is a radical “mismatch between what governmental institutions were supposed to do for the public and what they did in reality” (4). In such moments, citizens often turn to non-state institutions for the trust and reassurance that they ordinarily expect from the state. Italian citizens had not necessarily failed to understand the science, in which they were perhaps not even particularly interested. More clearly, they did not understand the arbitrary actions of the public authorities and contested them in consequence. They acted neither as patients nor as consumers; instead, they acted as outraged citizens.

The concerns of Italian scientists, so well represented in Nature, should not be ignored. No doubt, they should have a say in what therapies are offered to people with illnesses. Putting the Stamina case in the context of Italian politics, however, suggests that stem cells are not only the property of science and scientists. They are also common property, since state authorities – and citizens and publics along with them – participate in envisioning how scientific advances should be harnessed in caring for the bodies and lives of citizens. The Nature article seems aware of this dimension of what Jasanoff and others have termed “bioconstitutionalism” (5). Yet, the article is based on a tacit assumption about how science ought to be enrolled in health care, taking it for granted that investing in scientific research and translating scientific advice into policy are the only ways in which a state should cater to citizens’ needs. And, yet, the Stamina story suggests that this assumption should not be naturalized too quickly. Other visions and settlements exist, for example, states may seek public input on how to balance the risks of experimental remedies against the demands of desperate citizens. Dismissing such balancing acts as mere irrationality might backfire in a future in which science depends on finding common interests with citizens.

Keywords: stem cells; public understanding of science; civic dislocation; bioconstitutionalism

References:

  1. Abbott, Alison. “Italians sue over stem cells,” Nature, 460 (19), doi:10.1038/460019a, 2009.
  2. “Shock and law.” Nature, 490: 446, doi:10.1038/490446b, October 23, 2012.
  3. Abbott, Alison. “Stem-cell ruling riles researchers,” Nature News, 26 March 2013.
  4. Jasanoff, Sheila. “Civilization and madness: the great BSE scare of 1996.” Public Understanding of Science, 6 (3): 221-232, 1997
  5. Jasanoff, Sheila, ed. Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. MIT Press, 2011.

Further reading:

  • Jasanoff, Sheila, ed. Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. MIT Press, 2011.
  • Ruha, Benjamin. People’s Science. Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press, 2013.

Respond »

« Older Entries