Experts on public trial: on democratizing expertise through a Danish consensus conference

Citizen deliberation on technoscientific developments is regularly regarded as a hallmark of Danish democracy, embodied in particular by the Danish Board of Technology. Few empirically guided questions have been raised, however, as to how the Board’s democratic projects actually work. Through a case study of the May 2003 Danish consensus conference on environmental economics as a policy tool, the article reflects on the politics of expert authority permeating practices of public participation. Adopting concepts from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), the conference is seen as opening up the “black box” of environmental economics, forcing economists into attempted justifications of their shared normative and methodological commitments. The failure of environmental economists to reflect on their social value positions is suggested as key to understanding their less-than-successful defense in the citizen perspective. Further, consensus conferences are viewed alternatively as “expert dissent conferences,” serving to disclose a multiplicity of expert commitments. From this perspective, some challenges for democratizing expertise through future exercises in public participation are suggested

Scoping endangered futures: rethinking the political aesthetics of climate change in world risk society

In this article, I engage a key claim of Ulrich Beck’s theorizing of global risks, to the effect that socio-political collectivities are currently being re-imagined through the anticipation of endangered long-term futures. Such dynamics of temporal reordering are visible, the article shows, in the imaginative politics of climatic projections. To rethink the resultant political aesthetics of climate change, the article maps out the visual, experiential, and affective forms in which endangered climatic futures come to saturate public culture. Such encounters, the article suggests, constitute inter-media events, drawing on scientific, artistic, and mass media registers, and embodied in what Karin Knorr Cetina call scoping devices of information and visualization, involving particular ‘fateful’ time transactions. These conceptual suggestions are illustrated and elaborated by drawing on auto-ethnographic observations during a particular event of intense futurity, that of the international COP15 climate change conference held in Copenhagen during December of 2009

‘The Sustainable State’ of STS: Keynote at DASTS 2022

What is the role of science & technology studies (STS) in the collective search for a new ‘constitutional vision’ of the sustainable state, one that respects planetary ecological boundaries and enacts a ‘great green transformation’ of state, society, and its infrastructures? In this text – originating as a keynote presentation to the 2022 DASTS conference – I discuss, first, the kind of socio-technical imagination needed for STS research to navigate this contested knowledge-political terrain. Second, based on my co-authored book The Sustainable State (“Den bæredygtige stat”), I suggest four dimensions and collective research agendas that builds on and extends STS’s contribution: new ecological citizenships, new civil society transition alliances, new institutions of ecological democracy, and new socio-ecological markets. In extending established and fostering new analytical proclivities in alliance with other select knowledge practices, STS research will be key, I claim, to this collective building-site, arguably the overarching challenge facing our more-than-human societies.&nbsp

Complementary Social Science?:Quali-Quantitative Experiments in a Big Data World

The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of science, technology, and society, including in terms of how new large-scale social databases are currently changing the methods, epistemologies, and politics of social science. In this commentary, we address such epochal (“large-scale”) questions by way of a (situated) experiment: at the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen, an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, physicists, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists (including the authors) is setting up a large-scale data infrastructure, meant to continually record the digital traces of social relations among an entire freshman class of students ( N  > 1000). At the same time, fieldwork is carried out on friendship (and other) relations amongst the same group of students. On this basis, the question we pose is the following: what kind of knowledge is obtained on this social micro-cosmos via the Big (computational, quantitative) and Small (embodied, qualitative) Data, respectively? How do the two relate? Invoking Bohr’s principle of complementarity as analogy, we hypothesize that social relations, as objects of knowledge, depend crucially on the type of measurement device deployed. At the same time, however, we also expect new interferences and polyphonies to arise at the intersection of Big and Small Data, provided that these are, so to speak, mixed with care. These questions, we stress, are important not only for the future of social science methods but also for the type of societal (self-)knowledge that may be expected from new large-scale social databases

Initial stages of tundra shrub litter decomposition may be accelerated by deeper winter snow but slowed down by spring warming

The Arctic climate is projected to change during the coming century, with expected higher air temperatures and increased winter snowfall. These climatic changes might alter litter decomposition rates, which in turn could affect carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling rates in tundra ecosystems. However, little is known of seasonal climate change effects on plant litter decomposition rates and N dynamics, hampering predictions of future arctic vegetation composition and the tundra C balance. We tested the effects of snow addition (snow fences), warming (open top chambers), and shrub removal (clipping), using a full-factorial experiment, on mass loss and N dynamics of two shrub tissue types with contrasting quality: deciduous shrub leaf litter (Salix glauca) and evergreen shrub shoots (Cassiope tetragona). We performed a 10.5-month decomposition experiment in a low-arctic shrub tundra heath in West-Greenland. Field incubations started in late fall, with harvests made after 249, 273, and 319 days of field incubation during early spring, summer and fall of the next year, respectively. We observed a positive effect of deeper snow on winter mass loss which is considered a result of observed higher soil winter temperatures and corresponding increased winter microbial litter decomposition in deep-snow plots. In contrast, warming reduced litter mass loss during spring, possibly because the dry spring conditions might have dried out the litter layer and thereby limited microbial litter decomposition. Shrub removal had a small positive effect on litter mass loss for C. tetragona during summer, but not for S. glauca. Nitrogen dynamics in decomposing leaves and shoots were not affected by the treatments but did show differences in temporal patterns between tissue types: there was a net immobilization of N by C. tetragona shoots after the winter incubation, while S. glauca leaf N-pools were unaltered over time. Our results support the widely hypothesized positive linkage between winter snow depth and litter decomposition rates in tundra ecosystems, but our results do not reveal changes in N dynamics during initial decomposition stages. Our study also shows contrasting impacts of spring warming and snow addition on shrub decomposition rates that might have important consequences for plant community composition and vegetation-climate feedbacks in rapidly changing tundra ecosystems

Social identities and risk: expert and lay imaginations on pesticide use

Expert-based environmental and health risk regulation is widely believed to suffer from a lack of public understanding and legitimacy. On controversial issues such as genetically modified organisms and food-related chemicals, a “lay—expert discrepancy” in the assessment of risks is clearly visible. In this article, we analyze the relationship between scientific experts and ordinary lay citizens in the context of risks from pesticide usage in Denmark. Drawing on concepts from the “sociology of scientific knowledge” (SSK), we contend that differences in risk perception must be understood at the level of social identities. On the basis of qualitative interviews with citizens and experts, respectively, we focus on the multiple ways in which identities come to be employed in actors' risk accounts. Empirically, we identify salient characteristics of “typical” imagined experts and lay-people, while arguing that these conceptions vary identifiably in-between four groups of citizens and experts. On the basis of our findings, some implications for bridging the lay—expert discrepancy on risk issues are sketched out

Hvordan bidrager sociologiundervisning til realisering af den bæredygtige stat?

Hvordan bidrager sociologiundervisning til realisering af den bæredygtige stat