FW: (Kalpavriksh) QUESTIONING THE SCIENTIST'S STORY
Manju Menon
QUESTIONING THE SCIENTIST'S STORY
http://expressbuzz.com/magazine/questioning-the-scientist%E2%80%99s-story/22
4691.html
Interview by Pankaj Sekhsaria
First Published : 21 Nov 2010 10:24:00 AM IST
Prof Wiebe E Bijker is perhaps best known for the formulation of the
theory of the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and his first
book, 'Of Bicycles, Bakelites and Bulbs - Toward a theory of
Sociotechnical change'. He has been president of the Society for the
Social Studies of Science (4S) and executive committee member of the
Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). He received the 2006 John
Desmond Bernal Prize for his distinguished contribution to the field of
science and technology studies. He is one of the editors for the Inside
Technology book series published by the MIT Press, Massachusetts, and is
presently Professor of Technology and Society at Maastricht University
in the Netherlands. He gave one of the keynote addresses at the seminar
'Shifting Perimeters: Social and Ethical Implications on Human Genome
Research' organised by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS) and
the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore this week.
In this interview, he talks about his latest book, The Paradox of
Scientific Authority, his views on the social construction of science
and technology and his growing interest in and engagement with India.
Q) Let's start from the most recent - The Paradox of Scientific
Authority - The Role of Scientific Advice in Democracies - your latest
book written jointly with Roland Bal and Ruud Hendriks. What is this
paradox of scientific authority?
A) We presently live in highly developed societies, technological
cultures, that cannot exist without science and technology. At the same
time we see in Europe and the United States of America that this
authority of scientists and engineers is eroding. It is radically
different from the situation 20-30 years ago. We are seeing this around
issues related to nuclear power, genetic engineering and, most recently,
in the controversy over the report of the Inter Governmental Panel on
Climate Change. Now, that is the paradox that we talk about. How is it
possible that we live in a world that is so scientific and
technological, and yet at the same time we don't trust the scientists
and the engineers anymore?
Q) What then explains this paradox? What has changed in the last 30
years that this authority has come under question?
A) I think there is an increasing trend of questioning of authority -
more positively framed, a broader democratisation.
Q) Of society?
A) That's right. Authorities and institutions aren't trusted anymore
just because they have some fancy name or because they are
government-supported. In the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of work in the field
that I am working in, science technology and society (STS) studies, was
aimed at showing the limitations of scientific knowledge - to allow for
a more critical and democratic discussion of issues in which science and
technology play a role. There was a lot of effort to show the socially
constructed nature of scientific knowledge; that scientific knowledge
isn't dictated by nature. Nature isn't holding the hand of scientists
and writing the facts for them. No. It is scientists who design
experiments, who interpret data, who discuss the interpretations of
these experiments and their results. There is all this human work that
goes into creating scientific facts, that then also opens them up for
critical debate.
Q) How do you think The Paradox. is relevant to other situations, say to
a country like India?
A) One way of resolving the paradox, we suggest, is to create pockets of
scientific advice that function as a kind of bridge between the
scientific community and arenas of debate and policy-making -
institutions like the Health Council of the Netherlands that we discuss
in our book and the Academy of Sciences in the USA. This may be
surprisingly relevant in India, even though until recently scientists
and engineers in India seemed to have an unquestioned, high status.
Take the Bt Brinjal case. It clearly shows a very deep rift in society
about this one example of modern science and technology. This is
typically the situation where a high quality independent scientific body
could have played an important role and I was happy to hear that the
Indian Academies of Science were asked for advice. But it is clear that
they failed in what was, I think, a golden opportunity to play the kind
of important advisory role in democracy that we describe in this book. I
think that this failure has not only damaged the Indian debate on Bt
Brinjal, but also the general appreciation of scientific authority in India.
Q) Can you also tell us a little more of your increased engagement with
India? How did it come about and what are your present research interests?
A) I first came to India about six years ago on the invitation of Dr
Shambu Prasad of the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar, to
visit some research institutes that were working at the crossroads of
technology and society. I met Indian scientists and also Indian NGOs
that work on science and technology related issues. Dastkar Andhra, for
example, working with handloom weaving cooperatives, trying to innovate
technology, design, marketing and the social infrastructure to help the
weavers build up new stable livelihoods. I also met people from the
Centre for World Solidarity (CWS), the Centre for Sustainable
Agriculture (CSA), and the Central University in Hyderabad. I was
fascinated by the work going on in India - what I would call 'science
technology and society studies (STS)' work, though they didn't use that
label themselves. I realised that there is a lot that we in Europe can
learn from India about the larger democratic questions of science and
technology in and for society. That is what got me going.
Q) And what have been the specific areas that you've been working on in
India?
A) I have been supervising three European students who have been working
on their PhDs in India. One has worked intensely with CSA and studied
their efforts to upscale non-pesticide crop management. Another has been
studying tuberculosis in India and the most recent is presently studying
democratic governance of water resource management in south India.
Q) And the manifesto.
A) Yes, we are now in the final stages of a larger European Union-funded
project that works on the triangle of India, Europe and Africa. We want
to find out how countries can take into their own hands the development
of their science and technology, rather than just following, say, the US
or world trends. In India we worked with a broad set of, both, academics
and more NGO-related Indian researchers. In a workshop held two years
ago in the Adivasi Academy, Tejgadh in Gujarat, we formulated the first
draft of the manifesto. The manifesto takes as its central agenda the
principles of justice, sustainability and plurality of knowledge. It
very explicitly formulates that there are different kinds of knowledge
and that they all have their own merit; that they develop in parallel
and that scientific knowledge is just one of them though with its own
importance and merit. We are now re-writing it by including experiences
from concrete case studies on sustainable agriculture, on water
management, on reconstructing the built environment after the tsunami,
and on medical care. We'll be presenting it in 2011 and hopefully it
will spur further discussions and debate.
Q) And your future plans for India?
A) I hope to keep working myself and through my students. Hopefully,
we'll also have a separate India Inside Technology series co-published
by the MIT press and a local publisher to bring to India some of the
published work in science, technology and society studies.