Scientised citizens and democratised science. Re‐assessing the expert‐lay divide

Abstract

During the last decade there have been growing calls for increased public inclusion in risk regulation. This paper investigates three of these proposals for a new relationship between science and the public, namely New Production of Knowledge, Postnormal Science, and Scientific Citizenship. These all concern how science can be democratised and how new relations between expertise and citizens can be negotiated and designed. By critically discussing the similarities and differences between these proposals, this paper examines the implications of the call for public inclusion in risk regulation. By way of conclusion, some warnings are raised concerning the belief in public inclusion as a cure‐all for making knowledge production and risk regulation more publicly credible and socially robust. The space created for public inclusion may work as means for legitimating decisions, diluting accountability and persuading the public, with the consequence that the expert‐lay divide may be reproduced rather than transformed.

Keywords:

• democratised science
• scientific citizenship
• public inclusion
• science communication
• expertise

Acknowledgement

This article is written as a part of the project ‘Risk regulation in late modernity’, financed by the Swedish Research Council. Earlier versions of it have been presented at the conferences Environment, Knowledge and Democracy, Marseille 6–7 July 2005 and New Perspectives on Risk Communication: Uncertainty in a Complex Society, Göteborg University 31 August–2 September 2006. I wish to thank Göran Sundqvist, Science & Technology Studies, Gothenburg University, for constructive criticism of an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. One of the most well‐known cases of popular epidemiology is that of Woburn, Massachusetts. A child was diagnosed with leukaemia, and his mother started to investigate the possible sources, suspecting that it was caused by contaminated water. In 1974 she asked the health department to investigate the fresh water in the area, but they refused to do so. She then conducted a survey among the local inhabitants and found that there was an increased level of leukaemia concentrated to the eastern part of Woburn. The health department dismissed the investigation on the grounds that it had not been conducted by an expert. The municipal board contacted a research laboratory, but no causal relation was found. However, lay people continued to conduct investigations, and with the help of a biostatistician they succeeded in showing that there was an overrepresentation of leukaemia in the area. Later it was found that two fresh‐water wells were contaminated by chemicals (see Brown and Mikkelsen 1990).

2. The metaphor is somewhat misleading, because it seems to be based on a science‐centred model – a diffusion model in the words of Latour (1987, 142) – where science constructs and delivers knowledge, and people are only included when it comes to the implementation phase. Even if the swimming metaphor aims to problematise this division of labour, it still conveys the image of a technocratic top‐down approach, where science is at the top and citizens at the bottom.

3. In Citizen Science, it is unclear how Irwin reconciles a symmetrical approach to rationality with his separation between expert and lay understandings (stating that living in the environment provides specific ways of knowing it, which constitutes the foundation for lay epistemologies). In his and Michael's later book Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge, they claim that it has become exceedingly difficult to talk of the public at all, and that there instead exist hybrid groups and assemblages (Irwin and Michael 2003, 85). Instead of there being a divide between expert and lay, they argue that actors now embody both lay and expert knowledge. Thus, even if expert and lay no longer serve as empirical categories, they still appear to be relevant analytical concepts for Irwin and Michael. An alternative interpretation is that the expert‐lay divide is not constituted by different rationalities – both categories are crowded with heterogeneous practices – but rather by context; they consist of the same kind of rationality (or rationalities), but depending on which social contexts they appear in they are categorised as expert knowledge or lay knowledge.