Crops on trial

URN 01/1083Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m01/34869 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo

Reflexive Interdisciplinary Research: The Making of a Research Programme on the Rural Economy and Land Use

This paper provides an account of the origins and formation of the UK Research Councils' Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme and its approach to promoting interdisciplinary working between social and natural scientists. The programme is set in the context of broader developments in science policy, including a policy discourse centred upon sustainable development and the knowledge economy and associated demands for greater accountability in science. Interdisciplinarity promises research that will be more relevant and responsive to public needs and concerns. In describing the provenance of the RELU programme, therefore, the paper seeks to lay out the different stages in its initiation and design to show how, to varying degrees, these were open to external scrutiny and influence. The process of developing the programme illustrates that it is not straightforward to make research agendas and funding more transparent and accountable. It also provides insights into the challenges that interdisciplinarity and accountability present to established science institutions. Copyright 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

‘The scientists think and the public feels’: expert perceptions of the discourse of GM food

Debates about new technologies, such as crop and food genetic modification (GM), raise pressing questions about the ways ‘experts’ and ‘ nonexperts’ communicate. These debates are dynamic, characterized by many voices contesting numerous storylines. The discoursal features, including language choices and communication strategies, of the GM debate are in some ways taken for granted and in others actively manipulated by participants. Although there are many voices, some have more influence than others. This study makes use of 50 hours of in-depth interviews with GM scientists, nonexperts, and other stakeholders in the GM debate to examine this phenomenon. We uncover rhetorical devices used by scientists to characterize and ultimately undermine participation by non-experts in areas including rationality, knowledge, understanding and objectivity. Scientists engage with ‘the public’ from their own linguistic and social domain, without reflexive confirmation of their own status as part of the public and the citizenry. This raises a number of interesting ironies and contradictions, which are explored in the article. As such, it provides valuable insights into an increasingly important type of discourse

Words of mass destruction: British newpaper coverage of the genetically modified food debate, expert and non-expert reactions.

This article reports the findings of a one-year project examining British press coverage of the genetically modified (GM) food debate during the first half of 2003, and both expert and non-expert reactions to that coverage. Two pro-GM newspapers and two anti-GM newspapers were selected for analysis, and all articles mentioning GM during the period in question were stored in a machine readable database. This was then analyzed using corpus linguistic and discourse analytic techniques to reveal recurrent wording, themes and content. This text analysis was complemented by 12 interviews with experts involved in the communication of GM issues, and 12 focus-group sessions in which members of the public reacted to selected newspaper texts and other GM material. Both in the press and in public reaction, the issue of GM was found to be intimately associated with other political events of the time, notably the invasion of Iraq. Except among experts, there was little awareness of the official national debate and issues were approached in more general terms. Pro-GM characterization of the issues as primarily scientific, both by newspapers and experts, was rejected by the anti-GM press and campaigners, and by the focus-group participants. They assessed the issues in a more global frame, rejecting scientists and companies as unreliable. In addition, they linked both US and British GM policy to the invasion of Iraq, and, by analogy, rejected pro-GM arguments as untrustworthy