THE BREN SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT
at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Presents

"Science and Citizenship: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Expertise"

Hosted by Bren Professor Oran Young, Bren PhD student Darren Hardy,

and Center for Nanotechnology in Society Director Barbara Herr Hawthorn

Presenter's Statement

Inhabitants of the modern world live for all practical purposes in guided democracies. We elect our governments, but we have little or no control over the circumstances that most directly affect our everyday lives: the quality of our air, water, and food; the safety of our transportation systems; the durability of our consumer products; the ethical implications of our technological designs; and even the subject matter we are taught in schools. Most of these aspects of modern life are controlled by nameless, faceless experts, who are at best indirectly accountable to our elected officials. At the same time, politicians themselves are mostly not accountable for their uses of expertise. In this talk, I turn to the notion of citizenship as a starting point for reclaiming democratic control over government by non-accountable experts. I argue that citizens of contemporary democracies have acquired a set of basic "knowledge rights" over the past few decades. We need expanded theories of delegation to ensure that these rights are given full effect. Revamping rights talk and delegation theory in relation to expertise will lead to a new social contract for science, with important implications for new and emerging technologies.

Biography
Sheila Jasanoff is the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Her research concerns the role of science and technology in the law, politics, and public policy of modern democracies, with a particular focus on the challenges of globalization. She has written and lectured widely on problems of environmental regulation, risk management, and biotechnology in the United States, Europe, and India.

Dr. Jasanoff has written more than 80 articles and book chapters, and has authored and edited numerous books including States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (2004), Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (2004), and Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the U.S. (2005). She has served on many editorial boards including Global Environmental Politics, Social Studies for Science, and Environmental Science and Technology. She has served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as President of the Society for Social Studies of Science. She holds AB, MA, JD, and PhD degrees.

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