Science policy and zombie sensibility: Introducing scientists and engineers to science outside the lab

• In Event: Questioning Intervention with and within Science and Technology Studies: A Roundtable

Abstract

A dominant sensibility of scientists and engineers is that science discovers, technology applies, people consume, and society benefits. The persistence of this linear narrative, despite repeated and vigorous debunking, recalls to mind a zombie sensibility. Perpetuating itself, virus like, in the minds of young scientists and engineers as they are socialized in the laboratory, vectors of the linear narrative go on to positions of authority across the ecosystem of technoscience and shape the discourse and practices of knowledge-making and doing. This section of our session will introduce an alternative training and education program, Science Outside the Lab, which was developed to render less susceptible to a linear narrative the fertile minds of science and engineering graduate students. The setting of Washington, DC—filled with other related and unrelated undead narratives—provides a powerful macroethics education inoculation for participants. Participants are exposed to the complexities of scientific expertise in science and engineering policy as well as of the actors involved in shaping science policy by speaking with researchers, policy analysts, decision-makers, lobbyists, advocates, and other actors in the technoscience policy ecosystem. Program motives, activities, outcomes, resources and fundamental assumptions will be explored, and reflected back in conversation with theory. The performativity of this destabilizing STS intervention, in particular, will be discussed as a means of advancing nuanced, non-linear narratives of rightful places of technoscience in society.

Author

• Michael Bernstein, Arizona State University