Citizen Bureaucraft - I

Abstract

Science studies scholars have long tracked the variety of political and epistemic projects either conducted by or enrolling lay people to enact science. Whether it is scientists crowdsourcing data or activists questioning corporate or state research agendas, experimental methods, or the ends of research, citizen science encompasses the participatory production of scientific knowledge within and without institutionalized boundaries. As such, tracking the openings and foreclosures of citizen science has brought attention to the instrumental rationality and cultural authority of science underpinning both policy justification and public accountability, particularly in liberal democratic contexts.


In this panel, we seek to expand this conversation by examining the political possibilities of technoscientific engagement that is enabled through bureaucratic interventions rather than the lingua franca of science in multiple political contexts across the world. How might we examine social movements that must demonstrate bureaucratic literacy in order to challenge the boundaries and ends of technological and biomedical projects? For example, Indian anti-nuclear activists, labeled as ‘anti-science’ by the state and denied cultural routes to claiming expertise, have mobilized procedural and legal forms of argumentations to press moral claims. Even in the United States, activists must develop bureaucratic literacy to negotiate the procedural hurdles of ethics committees and regulatory agencies to challenge therapeutic applications for marijuana and psychedelics. We invite papers which explore how these less-examined and braided practices of “bureaucraft” (Joshi and McCluskey 2018) might expand our understandings of the mutual constitutions of bureaucracy and science as well as the political possibilities of bureaucracy itself.

Chair

• Monamie Bhadra Haines, Nanyang Technological University

Individual Presentations

• Cultivating Bureaucratic Expertise in Clinical Trials with Psychedelic Drugs - Katherine M Hendy, University of Michigan

• Biosociabilidad and the Citizen Science Practice in Social Networks - Maria da Costa, State University of Campinas; Jean Maicon Rickes Medeiros, PhD Student in Science and Technology Policy at Unicamp (PPG-PCT/Unicamp)

• Checking the Web for Public Facts: Can We Do This Together? - Noortje Marres, University of Warwick, UK

• Development of Framing in Legal Debates over “Voluntary Evacuation” in Fukushima Accident and STS Contributions - Hideyuki Hirakawa, Osaka University

• The Politics of Industrialization: Controversies about Gold Mining in French Guiana - Brice Laurent, Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Julien Merlin, Mines Paristech; Liliana Doganova, Mines ParisTech; Yann Gunzburger, Ecole des mines de Nancy

Session Organizer

• Katherine M Hendy, University of Michigan