Scientific citizenships: self-representations of xenotransplantation's publics

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Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper was undertaken as part of the research project ‘Xenotransplantation: Risk Identities and the Human/Nonhuman Interface’ which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (L218252044) under its Innovative Health Technologies programme. The authors would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their very helpful comments and criticisms.

Notes

¹For present purposes, xenotransplantation can be defined as the transplantation of animal organs or tissues into humans.

²By ‘doing’ we mean to connote the ethnomethodological sense of the complex processes by which lay people perform themselves warrantably as citizens. This does not necessarily presuppose any pre-existing norm of being a citizen which people must follow. The process of arguing over the meaning of what it means to be a ‘good public’ or an upstanding ‘scientific citizen’ itself ‘does’ being a citizen. At the same time, resourcing such performances are models of citizenship that, in part, derive from the techniques of consultation, deliberation and, indeed, research (e.g. the focus group—see footnote 6). As such, scientific citizenship is also ‘made’ (Hacking, 1986).

³Regarding methodology, the data analysed in this paper are derived from 11 focus groups and 25 interviews with individuals who had some stake in the xenotransplantation controversy. For more detail on the focus groups, see the section on Method, Governmentality and the Making of Citizens. As to the interviews, 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals in research (immunology, virology, surgery), attached to regulatory bodies, in the media or associated with non-government organizations (animal welfare and patient advocacy organizations). Interviews usually took at least an hour. A standard qualitative interview schedule was used to guide discussions. For full details of methods see Michael and Brown (2003a).

⁴This is a very simplified rendering of ‘assemblage’. For instance, we make no attempt to unravel its machinic and enunciatory dimensions which are not directly relevant to present purposes. More germane is that such assemblages can be ‘territorialized’, ‘de-territorialized’ and ‘re-territorialized’. That is to say, their configuration—what links to what—can be routinized, unravelled, re-patterned. And all these can take place at the same time.

⁵It is worth noting that there are other underlying or systemic conditions which enable this generalized scepticism, most obviously in our data, the profit motive, and the perceived disposition of scientists to playing God.

⁶One can contrast this sort of configuration to what Michel Callon (2002) has called ‘hybrid forums’. In these, lay people and specialists are ‘scrambled’, that is, within which the identities of both are much more malleable and emergent. Callon both detects and advocates such forums. Also see Callon and Rabeharisoa (2003).

⁷Part and parcel of the ethno-epistemic assemblage perspective (that we do not have the space to explore here) concerns how publics qua scientific citizens are produced through various techniques, not only those formal mechanisms of voicing such as the consensus conference, but also social scientific methods such as the focus group. Here, there is a shift of analytic focus from ‘governance’ to ‘governmentality’. For more details of this dimension, see Irwin and Michael (2003).

⁸The position outlined here can, in some ways, be situated within a series of reflections that has characterized the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK). In the mid-1990s, there was a flurry of activity around the political role of SSK—for example, whether it could support the struggles of subordinate groups by revealing the contingency of expert knowledge, or whether it would be hijacked by elites (e.g. Ashmore and Richards, 1996). The present analysis nudges the reflective process in a different direction, namely the interrogation of the ways in which social scientific methods, such as the focus group, serve, albeit in fragmentary and contradictory ways, in the production of particular sorts of publics and scientific citizens.