Workshops and Panels

This paper will analyze the double helix of state and market in formations of Chinese biotechnology over the past decade. In 2002, scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute surprised the world scientific community by publishing the Indica rice genome sequence. Large scale production of genetically modified (GM) rice may soon join GM cotton (while GM soy is imported from the U.S.) despite concerns for GM rice products already present in Europe. The projections of China as a major pharma producer and scientific force in the 21st century are juxtaposed against a backdrop of extensive concern for tainted food or fake medicines. Governance of contamination such as melamine laced pet food, diethylene glycol infused toothpaste, or unregulated heparin production entails complex tracking of local production and global commodity chains. National stories of endangerment, vulnerability, and concerns for purity in food and drugs reflect ongoing reframings of citizenship and increased risk from consumption. With rising fuel and food costs as well as increased riots, the politics of consumption will be examined in relation to the imaginaries of biotechnology.

Multi-national corporations are important actors in the global production of new biotechnologies for rice. This paper asks how multi-national corporations conceptualize national uptake of the genetic knowledge and genetically modified rice plants that they develop. Additionally, how do those countries that might utilize this knowledge or produce new genetically modified plants imagine the reception of these corporately-sponsored projects and engage with the corporations themselves? How are the relevant publics imagined within different national contexts in the discourse and development process? I will address these questions along three comparative dimensions. First, I focus on two different rice-related biotechnology projects—sequencing the rice genome and creating genetically engineered vitamin-A enriched golden rice. Second, I compare the work of two multi-national corporations—Monsanto and Syngenta—both of which have sequenced the rice genome and participated in developing golden rice. Finally, I analyze the corporate and national imaginary in two different countries, India and the Philippines.

Understanding the global pharmaceutical economy is bewildering enough at an empirical level, even before we attend to the question of theorizing or conceptualizing it. Part of the challenge of conceptualization concerns the development of an analytic vocabulary that is adequate to precisely differentiate the various empirical phenomena that we set out to make sense of. (I think here of conversations around concept work that Rabinow, Lakoff and Collier have had through their ARC collaboratory). In this paper, I attempt to think with and beyond “imaginary” as one such concept by working closely through four concepts that I have used at various points in my work—logic, ideology, strategy, and epistemology. None of these are “my” terms; all of them have a rich philosophical lineage, especially in Marxian and / or Foucauldian intellectual genealogies. But I wish to consider the work they might do, and the calibrations required of these concepts, in the context of the emergent forms of life and value that global pharmaceutical economies present to us. The empirical material that I will draw upon is based on my ongoing fieldwork, which traces the interconnections between: i. The outsourcing of global clinical trials to India, and the concomitant infrastructure building in India to attract these trials; ii. Emergent epistemologies of biomedical research that bridge the gap between academe and industry, as well as lab and clinic (what is known as translational research); and iii. Disputes around the interpretation of post-WTO intellectual property regimes in the Indian context. What the larger project seeks to do empirically, then, is to look at the articulations between clinical research, biomedical epistemology and property regimes, in a historical conjuncture that is marked simultaneously by attempts at global commensuration on the one hand, and the emergence of particular national legal and political trajectories on the other. I wish to explore how we might think about the actions of corporations, nation-states and global civil society actors as they shape and get shaped by law, capital and technoscience at such an emergent conjuncture.

This paper compares and contrasts characteristic stem cell research and regenerative medicine facilities in three Asian countries. While there is no unified “Asian biotech” in evidence—each country’s pattern is in stark contrast to the other two—there are continuities between the patterns in evidence and previous waves of Asian innovation and the national and intra-regional and international histories in question. The paper begins by describing disgraced scientist Hwang Woo Suk’s former work and lab facilities at Seoul National University as an example of biotech nationalism. The paper then discusses Singapore’s scientific personnel and real estate internationalism and Singapore’s investment in regulated but permissive basic stem cell research at its Biopolis facilities. Third, the paper describes medical and research facilities in Thailand, exploring emerging transnational networks of regenerative medical tourism. The axes of comparison include a focus on differences between: characteristic facilities; scientific strategies and specializations and hoped for pay-offs; the use of humans and animals; endorsed and de facto migrations and tourisms; economic investment and rationales; and emotional, familial, and nationalist, and transnational imaginaries. In sum, the paper explores the question of what each nation’s investment in this part of the biotech revolution tells us about the nation in question, as well as what these nation’s engagements with regenerative medicine adds to our understanding of biotechnology and its significance in a globalizing world.

This paper examines how the formulation of South Korea’s stem cell research policy, and the debates surrounding it, have been shaped by a contest over broader national sociotechnical imaginaries—that is, collectively imagined forms of life and order through which the nation state conceives and practices its sociotechnical relations. While stem cell research has been enthusiastically supported in South Korea, its significance has been understood and articulated somewhat differently than it has been elsewhere. Behind enthusiasm is public yearning for the development and protection of world-class “indigenous technologies” which would secure the techno-economic future of the Korean nation against foreign competitors. Though promises of future health benefits (e.g., curing degenerative diseases) have also played some role in fostering South Korea’s broad-based support for stem cell research, they have largely been interpreted through similar national aspirations (e.g., developing the world-leading cell therapy industry). The South Korean government’s decision to actively promote stem cell research has developed out of this cultural context and has been framed as a key step to the development of new biomedical industries—one of the nation’s ten strategic “next- generation growth-engine industries.” The government’s policy has not gone uncontested, however. Long before the infamous Hwang Woo-Suk scandal broke out, a group of progressive activists—including environmentalists, feminists, and public health advocates—began to strongly criticize the government’s handling of stem cell research. These activists were pro-reproductive rights and did not have a firm stance on the moral status of human embryos. But for them, the government’s seemingly unquestioning support for stem cell research embodied the “growth-first” ideology that they and their predecessors have fought hard against. Likewise, a pro-development alliance between science, technology, the state, and business—which the proponents of stem cell research deemed necessary to ensure the future and survival of the Korean nation— was seen as a threat to civil society, having the potential to subjugate justice and democracy to the so-called “national interests.” By situating South Korea’s stem cell research policy debates within this larger struggle over sociotechnical imaginaries, I will attempt to provide insight into the ways in which the meanings, purposes, and priorities of biomedical R& D are coproduced with South Korea’s distinctive yet contested ideas of public good, citizenship, and national identity.

I write about narratives of justification and narratives of nature that come from different constituencies, histories, nations—all spoken through the voices of Japanese scientists involved in genomics, bioinformatics, and systems biology. These narratives differ amongst Japanese scientists. Some are framed in distinctively Japanese culturalist terms, others as ‘scientific’ in the terms of notions of western/modern science, others in the language of posthuman, postmodern sciences. Further, as they are all in conversation, and oftentimes competition, with each other, their narratives are also deeply intertwined with each other and embedded in other narratives in place and time. Diversity within these narratives is my major focus. A second focus of this paper is the transnational production of science and technology, as embodied in these scientists; in current transformations in “the Japanese laboratory,” where students and researchers from around the world work; and in international collaborations. A third focus centers around the question: what it is the nation-state in a transnational scientific world? While some of these narratives are spoken and written to funding agencies and other policy oriented committees within “the Japanese government” (itself a diverse set of parties and narratives), this paper focuses less on state actors.

This paper examines the construction of a sociotechnical imaginary for the Indonesian Internet during the 1990s and early-2000s. The advent of the Internet in Indonesia was a highly ideological affair in which many engineers and innovators sought to establish the Internet as a space of “freedom” from state control. Some Indonesian engineers talked of using “guerilla” tactics to “liberate” wireless bandwidths so as to allow for the creation of “community” networks. The idea that the Internet should be a communicative space for an open and free society, independent of state power, is certainly not particular to Indonesia. However, an examination of the history of the Internet in Indonesia reveals that the construction of this sociotechnical imaginary there should not be taken for granted.

This paper focuses on the kinds of social and technical work that allowed an imaginary based on a politics of freedom to take shape in this setting: the efforts to build the first major campus networks, the creation of educational tools to allow campus groups and others to build their own networks, the use of “road shows” to draw in new users, and the use of writings in print media to shape people’s understandings of what the new medium should be. The paper also draws attention to the cultural particularities of this imaginary within the Indonesian context. While much about Indonesia’s Internet imaginary may sound familiar to outsiders, it was in fact an imaginary only obliquely informed by liberal politics. Rather, it harked back to two currents of opposition to Indonesian authoritarianism: the politics of radical Indonesian nationalism and the politics of Third World community developmentalism. The paper shows how these political currents informed both the political ‘content’ of the sociotechnical imaginary, and the means by which its proponents sought to communicate this imaginary to others.

In 1950, the leaders of the Republic of Indonesia faced profound internal conflicts over political ideology and religion, the new government struggled to establish a shared ideological foundation on which to build. One element of that foundation was the belief that most poverty in Indonesia was a direct result of the Dutch domination of the economy during the colonial era. Both successful leaders and aspirants alike justified their claims to authority on the basis that they could produce a just and equitable system that facilitated prosperity. Sukarno enshrined this ideal of “social justice” in the Pancasila, the five principles of Indonesian government.

As new leaders developed an economic roadmap for Indonesia’s future, varying definitions of social justice, and claims about the best methods to produce it became the substrate on which the sociotechnical imaginings of the Indonesian future was built. This talk explores late industrialization in Indonesia (1950-1980) as a socio- technical imaginary. As succeeding governments sought to produce an industrial society, they simultaneously struggled to show that they had eliminated the injustices and artificial restrictions of previous generations. Contending over the shape of industry (whether small-scale cooperatives, or large-scale heavy industry), and the political visions it should serve, the question of social justice never moved far from the center of debate.

At what levels are technoscience and power coproduced? The predominant analyses tend to focus on large institutions: states, NGOs, and international organizations. Yet as Sheila Jasanoff has written in States of Knowledge, “At whichever scale individual studies are framed, though, the findings help to clarify how power originates, where it gets lodged, who wields it, by what means, and with what effect within the complex networks of contemporary societies.”

The concept of coproduction may help to us to elucidate the ways in which power relations develop in mundane sociological settings. More intriguingly, though, are the ways in which technoscientific power, coproduced at the micro level, may shape coproduction at the macro level. It is equally intriguing that macro- level representations of coproduction may make a significant impact on coproduction at the micro level.

I will present three cases to show that the most micro level of coproduction, user skills with three particular technologies can have significant ramifications for states. The three cases considered will be historical and will be drawn from my own research on the history of Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean: 1) sugar cane farming in Mauritius, 2) guns in South Africa, 3) viticulture in South Africa.

This article explores sociotechnical imaginaries related to nanotechnologies in different political cultures. It examines how the role of science and technology is imagined in the political cultures in Europe, especially Germany, and the United States. It looks at how the meanings and functions of science and its relation to society are shaped in policy documents aimed at deliberating future developments of nanotechnologies and defining national science policies and research strategies. The paper looks at the explicit goals and underlying assumptions that shape such deliberations and policies in different cultures. By analyzing the recent “action plans” of Germany and the EU, and the U.S. “NNI strategic plan”, which are all crucial documents in the current (supra-)national nanotechnology policies, the paper shows how science and technology and their relation to society are imagined differently in the respective political cultures.

The paper explores what can be identified as some key aspects of sociotechnical imaginaries: It compares (a) the dominant ideals, visions, or images—the Leitbild—associated with nanotechnologies; (b) the expectations at the current early stage of R& D, i.e. the gains, profits, and risks projected onto nanotechnologies; (c) the ways the governance of nanotechnologies and of their risks is imagined in the different documents; and (d) the role society is imagined to be playing in nanotechnology assessment and development. While the German and European visions are described to be rather balanced, the imaginaries related to nanotechnologies in the U.S. are identified as being more asymmetrical. In both cases, however, sociotechnical imaginaries are assumed to be crucial for the assessment and governance of emerging technologies and they are seen as informing the civic epistemologies (Jasanoff) in the respective cultures.

The paper finally looks at broader cultural imaginaries or underlying attitudes that can be identified by analyzing the sociotechnical imaginaries in the different cultural contexts. By drawing on cross-national comparisons, the article aims at achieving a better comprehension of how S& T are perceived in and shaped by different (political) cultures.

In the period since the late 1990s the UK embarked on a series of institutional innovations intended to rebuild public trust in the government’s handling of science and technology. Crises over BSE and the commercialisation of GM crops challenged established patterns in science policy leading to a broadening of the expertise brought into policy making, a move to greater transparency, and efforts to ‘engage the public’. At the same time nanotechnology was becoming recognised as a potentially significant area of research. By 2003 nanotechnology was taken by the UK government as an example of the new dispensation between science, the state and citizens.

This paper explores the relationship between UK national political culture and the emergence of a global set of imaginaries focused on the promise of nanotechnologies. It will do so by intertwining two empirical narratives. The first follows those instances where UK national policy debates about nanotechnologies explicitly appeal to the global nature of nanotechnology in relation to a particular, or even exceptional, UK context. The second follows commitments to, and practices of, ‘public engagement’ with nanotechnology policy.

This paper argues that an analytical focus on moments of prediction and moments of discretion provides a key to understand the interplay between ‘nano’ as a global phenomenon and the period of flux in UK science policy. This paper will go on to chart a political geography of the differential scales of prediction and discretion. Who, where and with what scope has the capacity of discretion, and who, where with what scope has the capacity to predict? Movements between discretion and prediction operate both across social and technical domains, highlighting the dual socio-technical nature of political imaginaries.

Science and Technology Studies has in recent years developed some productive perspectives for thinking about science and its publics under two dominant and linked conditions: of globalisation, and commercialisation. These remain as-yet quite underdeveloped. For example, the dominant liberal tradition of imagining ‘publics’ as composed of already-formed individual subjects with completed values and preferences, which come into conflict to varying degrees with the forms of social intervention generated by techno-scientific innovation trajectories, has given way to sociology of scientific knowledge insights which identify publics and subjects already being imagined in techno-scientific work, prior to any material impacts thereof. These processes can be identified in the three case-study domains of the Harvard NSF project—stem-cells, nuclear energy, and nanotechnologies (inter alia).

In this paper I will review various cases from the post-war UK science and policy context, identifying especially how the social (including the salient ‘public’) has partly been imagined and materialised through what was primarily defined as purely technical and scientific. Thus with nuclear power, 1950s expansionist optimism effectively defined society as having no role other than receptive awe and deference towards almost extra-societal nuclear prowess; moreover this socio-technical imaginary was given corresponding material implementation. With stem-cells research and the ethical-political issues around ‘spare embryos’ as sources of materials, expert concern over social reaction imagined to be fuelled by media amplification of non-scientific thus illegitimate concerns was prospectively countered by an intensive campaign to stress not only the dramatic health benefits which this scientific trajectory would bring, but also the unique capacity of this method of promised tissue and organ development to deliver. In the UK like elsewhere in the EU, nanotechnologies and their imagined publics have been influenced by the GMO controversy which saw successful uninvited public engagement with GM techno-science and the socio-technical outcomes it was attempting to materialise in agriculture, food, international trade and so on. Thus the 2000 House of Lords Science and Technology Committee Report’s authoritative call for two-way public engagement with science and for the abandonment of the widely-criticised deficit model explanations of public dissent (which had been a critique also earlier aimed at nuclear explanations of public conflict), came to focus in practice substantially on the new domain of nano and nano-bio R& D developments.

This comparative review across the three salient substantive project domains within the UK will attempt to identify how the (direct, or indirect) imagination of publics in such socio-technical imaginaries corresponds with some of the technical parameters of these substantial future-shaping commitments. It will also attempt to highlight some of the factors in these imaginaries, their forms, and forms of material enactment, which have remained constant in the UK, as well as some changes.

Most East African countries lack adequate access to technologies such as computers, the Internet, fixed and mobile telephone lines and other communications technologies (ICT). At the levels of both international and national governance, significant resources are being directed to the formulation of ICT policy in Africa.

This paper examines how the Rwandan government envisions the social and political uses of ICTs and how this imagination of that technology has shaped, or co-produced, the government’s actions in creating policy and distributing technological artifacts. At least three relevant visions of ICT have informed efforts to create policies to regulate and promote this new technology in East Africa. Some advocates focus on “e-government” and argue that harnessing the power of ICT will increase efficiency in the delivery of government services. Others believe ICT can improve African participation in the global and domestic market place. A more utopian vision of ICT sees this technology as a tool that can help build social justice.

The vision most strongly evident in the Rwandan case is the second one: the idea that ICT can improve Rwanda’s socio-economic development dramatically and quickly. President Paul Kagame believes that ICT will allow Rwanda to technologically “leapfrog” into a “modern” digital-era global economy. Yet, this passionately embraced discourse is not wholly of Rwandan origin. This paper argues that the roots of this discourse lie deep in donor beliefs about the desirability of ICT in East Africa. Donors, I argue, through the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, more or less directed the formulation, development, writing and support of Rwanda’s ICT policy. Further, they promoted this very limited vision of the potential role of ICT as an economic driver which is—at least in part—a socio-technological imaginary. Donors and the Rwandan government have collaborated in constructing this socio-technological imaginary of ICT’s role, but also in promoting it as a seeming panacea for Rwanda’s problems.

UNECA has attempted to superimpose the same “cookie cutter” types of ICT policies upon the twenty three East African states that it as worked with. This limited vision of the role of ICT downplays local differences and needs, and emphasizes policy uniformity. The result of this flattened vision of the promise of ICT policy is the Rwandan emphasis on a near mathematical distribution model that goes for results like “a terminal in every school.”

The Government of Rwanda (GoR) can point to impressive successes in distributing the physical components of ICT widely throughout the country. Yet, the Government of Rwanda’s rapid yet narrow progress in the ICT arena—articulating only one imagination of ICT’s role in society—may place the resulting technological system at risk in the long term.

Big science research facilities usually have been in the planning and design stage about 25 years before they are constructed and ready to use. As one device is funded, competing plans for the next one proliferate. Gradually a consensus emerges in the relevant research community around one plan, and national academies are urged to place the facilities on priority lists for government funding of the design process. It might take another ten years of designing while enough commitment and funding is gathered for construction to begin.

During these decades of waiting a core community of expertise forms around the new technologies, refining designs and planning the eventual experiments. Government bureaucrats, politicians, and industrialists are enlisted to support the desired devices, forming another community of expertise. Each group regards the new devices as engines of progress, building futures with important, original ideas, artifacts, careers, and economies in multiple domains: the local construction site, the designing laboratories, the research community, the relevant industries, the policy makers, the politicians, and engaged civic groups.

Since WWII these processes have been glocal: an interesting mixture of very local to global processes. Although the costs of these devices have escalated to the billions, the numbers of people who bring about these projects is small. In one current case, the International Linear Collider [ILC], there might be less than1000 people now actively involved worldwide: 125 accelerator physicists, 500 experimentalists, 25 senior bureaucrats, 200 politicians, and 50 industrialists. Perhaps 100 have been committed to the project for twenty years.

During this long period of gestation, changes in local and global political economies can have large effects. In mid-December 2007 the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced it has decided to stop funding the ILC and they reaffirmed that decision on 7 February 2008. Last January funding for the ILC design process was cut drastically in the 2008 US Congressional budget. If 100 accelerator physicists with twenty years of design expertise and commitment are dispersed, the project could die. The transnational community of 1000 has been working to support those 100 designers for one more year until another budget might be written.

As these diverse scientists, bureaucrats, politicians, and industrialists from around the world build ILC coalitions they have begun building multiple strategic public narratives about the ILC: economic, historical, intellectual, and inter/nationalist. Some of these publics [local, national, and inter/transnational] have become engaged in investigating and appropriating the ILC for their own reasons. I also am studying how those narratives shift when multiple versions are juxtaposed at various nodes in the negotiation processes.

If built, the ILC would cost several billions of dollars and the huge construction project would last several years, transforming the local ecology. A location has not yet been selected. For 15 years most have assumed that it would be built in Europe, Japan, or the United States: it is assumed that the country that pays as much as 40% of the cost will become the home site. When France was selected as the site for ITER, a plasma physics big science facility, it appeared that the ILC probably would be built in Japan or the US. The recent budget decisions in the US appear to me to increase the likelihood of an Asian site for the ILC.

I have been following closely the developments in trans-national planning and policy making for the long emergent ILC: negotiations about the ILC development process at the levels of design groups, laboratories, the national and international physics organizations and their specialized committees, funding agencies, national governments, and international organizations, as well as civil society. Physicists in Asia, North America, and Europe are actively engaged in these negotiations, and physicists at many universities in 14 countries now participate in the ILC design process. Meanwhile bureaucrats have learned to weave together multiple international memoranda of understanding [MOUs] to build webs of support for these big science facilities and many companies have learned to seek these interconnected, potential unstable funding sources.

Studying any one of these groups would miss the emergent global webs of relationships and governance that is the ILC community. CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, was planned by a group of scientists, diplomats, politicians, and industrialists who wanted to begin building a united Europe in the wake of WWII. They thought that building laboratories was the best way to build Europe. Cooperating to construct, operate, and maintain a complex laboratory would generate a set of practices that then could be applied to other tasks. Large scale scientific research facilities have been arenas for emergent transnational cooperation and governance for sixty years. These communities of 1000 are transforming our worlds.

International Linear Collider [ILC]

This paper is not an attempt to look at imaginaries at a Nation State level because currently these imaginaries despite the idea of the Indian century are weak. The real ethnographic power emerges when we look at them at the level of the state, where each state embodies as it were a variant of the nationalist imaginary. This paper looks at Gujarat over the last few decades and explores how the use of technological and scientific imaginaries have allowed it to make transitions and legitimize them. The article focuses on the current post riot period when Gujarat has become the site of the Nano car. The paper argues that this phenomena cannot be understood without examining how the Chief Minister Narendra Modi uses technological imaginaries to play out his politics. The paper ranges over four periods beginning with Gujarat as a Gandhian and a textile imagination. It shows how every time the city reworks itself even through riots, it does so through the use of technological metaphors. Using the city as a site, it shows how Narendra Modi played with the idea of the consumer city, the science city, the new middle class city with the car as an embodiment. In fact, technological imaginaries are used to build and erase social memories. The paper discusses in particular how one road the SG Highway captures the future imagination of Gujarat as the epitome of a technological dream. Such an analysis challenges the current interpretations on purely communalist lines and shows how technological imaginaries make Modi a more lethal politician.

As Europe emerged from the ruins of World War II, and the geopolitical fractures of the Cold War were put in place, policymakers in the United States imagined a future for the old continent that was modeled on a vision of their own society and gradually implemented by the leaven of American leadership. The peripheral ‘other’ was linked to the imperial center by ties of blood and history. Fractions of indigenous elites were essential nodes for the co-production of a regime of order that was put in place to secure markets and to defend the free world from the communist threat. Science and technology, now crucial to the power of the modern state, were enrolled in this transformative project. During the 1950s and 1960s they provided the United States with instruments to mold institutions that cohered with Washington’s dream of establishing a ‘United States of Europe’ under American leadership. This paper will show how policymakers sought to instrumentalize American scientific and technological prowess in two key sectors, the nuclear and space, to selectively strengthen collaborative organizations in continental Europe. Supranational politically, civilian in ambition, transparent organizationally and industrially, these organizations would be ‘legible’, accessible to Washington’s panoptic gaze and open to American influence. They would also divert scarce resources away from military programs, above all in France, where increasingly strident demands for national sovereignty threatened the Cold War regime of order imagined by Washington as it struggled to stabilize the world system.

The second half of the 20th century saw the rise of distinctively global imaginaries—imaginaries that presumed that a growing array of societal problems could be understood, assessed, and managed on scales no smaller than the planet itself. In turn, these imaginaries—often driven by and encompassing of science and technology—have contributed to rising demands for the pursuit and institutionalization of global governance. In this essay, I explore the origins and shape of globalist imaginaries in the postwar era, their institutionalization in the United Nations Specialized Agencies, and their implications for emerging forms of transnational authority and governmentality. I also explore the implications of comparative sensibilities for a thoroughgoing understanding of the rise of globalism in world affairs.

This paper will analyze two contemporary regimes for envisioning and intervening in the field of global health: global health security and medical humanitarianism. Each of these regimes combines ethical-political and techno-scientific elements to provide a rationale for managing infectious disease on a global scale. However, they rest on very different visions both of the most salient health problems to work on and of the most appropriate means of approaching these problems. Global health security focuses on “emerging infections”—both natural and man-made—which typically emerge from the developing world and threaten the developed world. Exemplary diseases include SARS, avian influenza, and Ebola. Its problematic is one of preparedness for potentially catastrophic disease emergence—and thus key technoscientific interventions include developing real-time global disease surveillance capacities and rapid, flexible medical counter-measure production. This regime seeks to generate linkages between multilateral agencies such as WHO, OIE and FAO, national disease control agencies, and elements of local public health infrastructure such as diagnostic laboratories. Medical humanitarianism, on the other hand, focuses on diseases that already afflict the developing world, such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Its problematic is one of saving lives by providing access to existing interventions such as medication or bed nets, or through funding scientific research into new treatments or vaccines. In contrast to global health security, medical humanitarianism tends to develop “apolitical” connections—between global philanthropies, NGOs, scientific researchers (both in academia and in the private sector) and local public health workers. The type of ethical responsibility implied by a project of global health depends upon the regime in which the question is posed: the connection between health advocates and the afflicted can be one of either shared risk or of moral obligation to the other. The paper will explore the dynamics of these regimes through three examples: avian flu preparedness measures, malaria vaccine development, and the recent case of an airline passenger diagnosed with XDR-TB.

Over the past years national (and European) science policy as well as media discourses on technoscientific innovation have been key-agents in the production of certain kinds of societal futures. At the same time such potential futures are always closely intertwined with the assessment of the future potential of new technoscientific developments. These technoscientific futures as well as the orders embedded in them find their expression in a rich repertoire of promises and imaginaries narrated along with the technoscientific accomplishments expected to realize them. How these imaginaries are made local and thus recognisable, which promises seem reasonable and credible in a specific context and why, but also who are legitimate architects of these “Austrian technoscientific futures” will be key questions. To contribute to an understanding of how technoscientific imaginaries, models of society and locally compatible futures are assembled into seemingly coherent narratives, how and where these are then rehearsed and how some of them in the end manage to get stabilised (naturalised) in a specific national context, i.e. Austria, is thus the aim of this paper. The paper will use selected policy and media material from two scientific fields—genetics/genomics and nanotechnologies—collected in the framework of two recent research projects (Living Changes in the Life Sciences, ELSA/GENAU; Making Futures Present: On the Co-Production of Nano and Society, FWF). The material covers in particular the last decade. Both fields were established through extensive national research programmes and are staged as key-agents in national innovation policy and thus for economic and more broadly societal development. The analysis will draw attention to the technoscientific imaginaries exposed, will investigate the ways in which a specifically “Austrian societal model” gets performed and how this society is understood as ordered and will show what related potential futures are coproduced. Using a comparative gaze, the paper will look into important similarities and differences between these two technoscientific fields.

Agricultural biotechnologies, including but not exclusive to the cluster of existing and imagined future GM trajectories, have been strongly linked to the increasingly powerful agenda of climate change adaptation, and even mitigation. For example, drought and salinity resistance have been promoted as powerful reasons to adopt GM agricultural technologies as responses to climate change. As a universal global problem albeit with very different local variations and consequences, and with GM as an imagined (and asserted) universal technology, it might appear at first sight that not too many comparative dimensions would be evident in this field. Despite large investments and expected products, GM innovation has stalled in this domain as the gene-organism-environmental complexities of this trait have gradually become evident to research that, building upon the existing single-gene technologies and traits like herbicide-resistance, was expected, and promised, to yield useful results earlier. Bayer Crop Science now claims to be on the verge of bringing a drought-resistant variety of GM maize to field-trial applications. Other non-GM drought-mitigating plant technologies are also being trialed in agricultural R&D large-scale field-tests in China and elsewhere, with UK collaboration. Cosmopolitan innovation as a concept encompasses technical, environmental and social-cultural dimensions, and this normatively weighted concept will first be explained in the paper. Secondly we will analyse the ways in which technical imaginaries of social conditions and practicalities (e.g. farm-conditions and practices, farmer capacities and attitudes; regulatory constraints; market conditions) influence technical commitments and imaginaries as to what is feasible, desirable, and priority, thus the research and innovation agenda. Finally we will examine the comparative differences of such technosocial imaginaries can be detected between typical UK or European scientists, and Chinese scientists, and how these may be interpreted as variances patterned along comparative cultural or social (including economic and political) dimensions. Even where little or no such comparative variance is evident, the further question arises as to how has convergence been achieved, and with what implications; for example, for the flexible design of agricultural technologies appropriate to very different operating conditions, across hugely different environmental, economic, social and cultural countries/regions. In this sense, “cosmopolitan innovation” could be seen as innovation which respects—and reflects—local differences, yet can practically address global issues with global welfare imagination and commitment.

American debates over human embryo research have called into question the sorts of epistemic, normative and democratic arrangements sufficient to engender reasoned public discourse in American political culture. The public/private boundary has been central to American deliberations because policy questions have been largely confined to questions of public funding (and the regulation of publicly funded science), leaving aside questions of whether and how private sector research activities are regulated. As such, “the public” has referred to a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements, drawing them into association while at once demarcating them from the “private.” These elements have included discourse (both epistemic and normative), structures of scientific and technological innovation, institutions of democratic representation, goods (both moral and material), capital, etc. Thus the work of imagining the public—as a category of interests, as a collection of individuals, as a domain of normative deliberation—has been an essential feature of the debates from their inception. This paper will examine how one critical element of the “public” came to be a central focus of deliberation: the giving of public reasons. The paper contends that efforts to identify the types of reasons appropriate to public deliberation became a core locus for imagining the “public” more broadly, particularly between 1970s discussions of fetal research and the deliberations of the NIH Embryo Research Panel in the early 1990s. It further argues that assessments of reason-giving invoked, rearticulated and solidified broader imaginaries of the public and the place of science and technology within it. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the most persistent and consequential imaginaries of the public (and public reason) emerged not so much out of normative questions of democratic representation, but out of technical arguments over the accuracy of accounts of certain natural facts.

The literature on East Asian political economy repeatedly asserts that science and technology have played an important part in the rapid socioeconomic transformation of postcolonial South Korea. However, while some of its more recent findings challenge the conventional wisdom of neoclassical economics and modernization theory, the way it approaches science and technology remains largely traditional and context-insensitive. Attention is given to the active role of the state in promoting science and technology, to the unique patterns of technological learning and innovation at the level of firms, or to the ingenious efforts of scientists and engineers. Yet, the emphasis is predominantly on the impact and efficiency of these processes with respect to South Korea’s economic and industrial performance. The meanings, purposes, and content of science and technology, as well as the criteria for assessing their impact and efficiency, are taken as more or less given, rather than understood as products of particular social and historical contexts. STS can provide an antidote to this tendency, but the field’s focus on micro-level processes makes it difficult to link a contextual understanding of science and technology to broader social and political questions. The present paper argues that the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries (as defined in the panel abstract) can help remedy this problem by placing the co-production of science, technology, and socio-political order at the center of analysis. In particular, by drawing on three case studies of nuclear power, stem cell research, and nanotechnology, the paper illustrates the ways in which the imagination of the role and place of science and technology in society has embedded, and has been embedded in, the distinctive ideas of development, nationhood, and the state/citizenship in South Korea.

Science governance is deeply shaped by specific imaginations of the science-society relationship. Jasanoff and Kim (2009) have pointed to “sociotechnical imaginaries” that are expressed in the ways political cultures imagine social order related to scientific or technological projects. Following this perspective, this paper explores imaginaries in science governance in a particular political culture. Taking nanotechnologies in the United States as an example, the paper reveals the imaginaries and sociopolitical assumptions that are related to these emerging technologies and are expressed by relevant stakeholders. By drawing on interviews with policymakers and scientists, it is interested in the ways scientific innovation and its regulation are envisioned by involved actors in the US context. More specifically, the paper inquires how nanotechnologies, their risks, and their future are envisioned, and how their political handling and public involvement is projected by US stakeholders. Building on such investigations and addressing the methodological question of scale, the paper asks how such visions and perceptions of individuals can be seen as expressions of more general (sociotechnical, cultural) imaginaries related to a political culture.

Over the past years contributions started to look at how technologies get inscribed into national political cultures and participate in the creation of what was labeled “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff and Kim), thus in the establishment of imagined preferred forms of social life and social order organized around the development and implementation of technoscientific projects. This paper aims at taking a different turn and investigates what will be labeled “the sociotechnical imaginaries of the absent”. More concretely the paper will investigate how nuclear power and genetically modified organisms participated in the creating of sociotechnical imaginaries in the Austrian context and how that again was tied into wider ideas of national identity. Both nuclear power and GMOs have been “banned” from the Austrian context through complex technopolitical processes, thus making this absence present in multiple ways. Using John Law’s distinction, the paper thus addresses manifest technological absences, i.e. acknowledged and made explicit forms of absence, that have managed to occupy a space in the national context, to develop forms of materiality and to get woven into narratives that participate in the formation of sociotechnical imaginaries of a particular kind. The paper will first investigate the multi-sited processes through which these absences are made constantly present in order to keep the sociotechnical imaginaries alive. In a second move the question of how these “sociotechnical imaginaries of the absent” impact on upcoming new technologies such as nanotechnologies.

This talk describes what might be termed a global dispositif, or apparatus, for envisioning and intervening in potential disease outbreaks. The dispositif includes both social and technical elements: epidemiological methods for tracking disease incidence; global communication systems designed to transcend national reporting systems; diplomatic agreements to implement collective response mechanisms in the face of threatening events; and contracts with pharmaceutical companies specifying the production and distribution of medical countermeasures. It both responds to and helps to sustain a global sociotechnical imaginary of disease: one in which disease outbreaks – whether from naturally occurring pathogens, intentional bioattacks, or as side effects of technological development – continually threaten collective health and social order across national boundaries. The talk will focus empirically on the debate over the WHO’s declaration of H1N1 influenza as a pandemic – and the technical responses this declaration put in motion. It will ask: What is the collectivity that is brought into being through global disease tracking systems? And what populations are either included in – or excluded from – global systems of response?

A major shift began to occur in the imaginary that supported multilateral export controls efforts after the Cold War ended. For all of the history of export controls, they have always been about three goals: preventing foreign supply of a technology; ensuring domestic supply; or as a tool for foreign relations. International efforts, until 1996, focused solely on the first of these goals. All of them are based on an adversarial imaginary of “us versus them”. This is very different than the imaginary that has developed around new international efforts, most notable the Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies. This new imaginary is collaborative, focused less on controlling who gets access to malicious technology and more on creating a global system that ensures that any such decision is made by a state and not an individual or company within that state. Each of these imaginaries has their basis in imaginaries developed within national export control systems; that is, some systems are based more on collaborative imaginaries and others more on adversarial imaginaries. In this paper, I analyze how these competing imaginaries are vying for the necessarily political will to reform the multilateral export control system so that it is more in line with their imagination.

This paper reviews the legacy paradigms of sociotechnical imaginaries as they have been deployed as global scientific projects (e.g., the IGY or HGP), as national-building of scientific capacity (e.g., the LBA or Biopolis), as regional alliances (e.g. the ASEAN SNP consortium), and as “switching points” in new configurations of “republics of science” as re-imagined for public futures, requiring increased distributed, and local expertises (biodiversity policy conflicts, new translational medicine initiatives such as THISTI).

This talk explores the question of scale in the framework of the sociotechnical imaginary. Jasanoff and Kim have defined the sociotechnical imaginary as “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific technological projects.” This paper examines how the sociotechnical imaginary might be used to illuminate the longer term significance, or afterlife, of abandoned national policies, a situation in which the movement from national to subnational actors and scope of action must be considered seriously. A crucial methodological challenge is how to analyze the shift from state actors operating on a national stage to independent, local actors who use the imaginary to inform projects of dramatically smaller scope long after the demise of the original policies. The story I will briefly examine is that of cooperatives in post-colonial Indonesia. The technological dimensions of this story have usually been overlooked, in part because both Sukarno and Suharto gave little more than lip service to the idea of the cooperative as a serious instrument of technological development. However, my research indicates that the project of cooperative development in Indonesia was powered by a clear sociotechnical imaginary, one that reappears among local activists in Suharto’s Indonesia and in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Aside from investigating how to trace the action of an imaginary in time under these conditions, I will inquire whether it is sensible to view the sociotechnical imaginary as an agent of continuity in the face of interrupted or defunct policies, and in the process consider the implications of the dramatic differences of the scale of operation of the imaginary for the shaping of the national technical and social order in Indonesia.

While science and technology are ubiquitously embraced by modern states as driving forces for progress and prosperity, their construction in any given context is almost always closely intertwined with a particular imagination of nationhood and national history. Science and technology are not just mobilized—materially and symbolically—in the (re)imagining of nations in the sense proposed by Benedict Anderson. As Jasanoff has repeatedly pointed out, the contents, meanings and purposes of science and technology, the public good they should deliver, and the roles and identities of the state, scientists and technologists, and publics are also all simultaneously (re)imagined (or co-produced) in that process. The notion of “sociotechnical imaginaries” can help us examine the ways in which these constellations emerge and become stabilized or contested, and compare how they vary from one country to another. On the other hand, the focus on “nationally specific” sociotechnical imaginaries may well divert attention away from the very idea that nation, or nation-state, is itself constructed and hybrid and requires hard socio-cultural, political and material work to be maintained. Ironically, this may in turn lead to an overemphasis on the translocal or transnational scalability of sociotechnical imaginaries. By using the selective episodes of South Korean controversies (e.g., debates on nuclear power, energy policy, and stem cell research), the present paper explores a more nuanced approach to “national” sociotechnical imaginaries (and their relations to the “nation-state”). South Korea’s unique imagination of the role and place of science and technology in society has embedded—and been embedded in—distinctive, collectively shared ideas of nationhood, the state, and development. The paper suggests, however, that while the resulting sociotechnical imaginaries are powerful at the level of nation and nation-state, their boundaries are often diffuse, fragmented, and contentious.

This paper explores ways in which the biosciences in contemporary China frame cultural beliefs and meanings of biosecurity. We will analyze the double helix of state and market in formations of Chinese biotechnology over the past decade to address questions of scale and methods of study. In 2002, scientists from the Beijing Genomics Institute surprised the world scientific community by publishing the Indica rice genome sequence. Large scale production of genetically modified (GM) rice may soon join GM cotton (while GM soy is imported from the U.S.) despite concerns for GM rice products already present in Europe. The projections of China as a major pharma producer and scientific force in the 21st century are juxtaposed against a backdrop of extensive concern for tainted food or fake medicines. Governance of contamination such as melamine laced pet food, diethylene glycol infused toothpaste, or unregulated heparin production entails complex tracking of local production and global commodity chains. National stories of endangerment, vulnerability, and concerns for purity in food and drugs reflect ongoing reframings of citizenship and increased risk from consumption. With rising fuel and food costs as well as increased riots, the politics of consumption will be examined in relation to the sociotechnical imaginaries of biotechnology.

Some STS work has assumed an agonistic field of interests while paradoxically neglecting power. Rational actor models abound in STS, even though they have been undermined in many fields for decades. When I tell scientists that some STSers claim trust is unimportant in large, well-organized collaborations: the response is always laughter. Since the 1970s social and biological scientists have examined altruism and the study of commons has intensified in law, history, anthropology, and other fields; meanwhile, many have studied ethical practices in various communities. This basic research on altruism, commons, and ethics is already being used to make policies. For many decades anthropologists have argued that naming, jokes, stories, and gossip [NJSG] are significant practices for understanding any group’s ethos. NJSG are intimately entwined with evaluating research styles, aesthetics of research design, and ambiguities in making knowledge. All these phenomena, including trustworthiness, are constituted, transmitted, debated, and revised via NJSG. Forms of NJSG shift with gender, generation, and locality, while access to NJSG is restricted in multiple ways. NJSG practices are a crucial part of any community of shared practices Size matters: costs escalate for the new infrastructures; distributed research communities are imploding as new kinds of global laboratories are being designed and constructed. Trust matters as trans-local clusters merge and morph. The multi-cultural strategic actors who are continuously negotiating a shape-shifting glocal consensus usually are men. I have argued that crucial negotiations occur at fault lines where different kinds of researchers come together to develop new strategies about what they come to see as new, shared problems, willing to redefine research and infrastructure. Those ruptures and gaps are filled with NJSG, building trust, commons, and new exclusions. In my talk I will discuss how to examine NJSG in such sites.