7 - Scientific Citizenship

Summary

Introduction

Citizenship is formally and historically connected to the nation state, even though this has not always been the case (cf Athens’ city-centred democracy). In today's understanding of democracy, however, scientific knowledge and technical expertise intersect with citizens’ ability to hold state power accountable to democratic values. Sheila Jasanoff (2017) describes how the nation state concentrates not only political power but also resources that enable investments in ‘big science’ projects. Based on these concentrations, she asks: if the demos should have a role in the technical framing and resolving of public problems, what analytical resources does STS provide to facilitate such participation? The answer to this question, as suggested by Jasanoff, is that ideas and practices around science and technology – priorities, investments, distribution channels, regulations, and so on – are co-produced with ideas about concerned citizens. Thus, STS scholars should call attention to the fact that practices of collective knowledge-making shape our very understanding of the demos to be served by democracy.

As we saw in the previous chapter, studies undertaken by STS scholars have focused on the relationships between modes of governing and how issues are made public and open to wider debate, how groups of the public are demarcated through the notion of invited and uninvited publics, and how the agency ascribed to invited publics tends to be circumscribed by instrumental motives. In this work, STS scholars frequently touch on one of the unresolved problems in democratic theory. This is about what properly constitutes the people. Yet, any democratic theory is based on an understanding that there is a people, a citizenry that is implicated in governing in indirect or direct ways and can hold government accountable. We discussed such unexplored assumptions in the first chapter of this book, and we referred to these as belonging to a shadow theory of democracy. The shadow is an inevitable companion to unacknowledged contradictions and taken-forgranted assumption within established ideas about democracy. If denied, it is a potential threat, but when openly acknowledged and dealt with, it is a potential resource to democracy.

STS scholars have suggested that citizen engagement with and contestation over science and technology should be understood as having a constitutive role in the development of alternative imaginaries of democracy. Such ideas point to the relations between governing bodies and concerned publics that are transgressing the boundaries of the nation state.