Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
There are no easy instructions for responding to a view of the world in which technoscience is always social and society is shaped by technoscience. This view may change the ways in which we think about the role and place of science in society, but given the diversity of the interactions and mutual shaping between science and society, there is no single account of how to navigate these. However, three points to keep in mind are: technoscience is a human project, and embeds human values; it is never inevitable, and can be resisted; and technoscience is contingent, and could be otherwise. Part of our responsibility is to imagine how the world could be otherwise, and how technoscience might serve this.
Expertise can best be understood as something that is relational and shifting: what matters is whether you can give a convincing performance of being an expert. Whether one ‘is’ an expert therefore relies in part on the validation of others who credit you as such. Expertise in turn plays a role in shaping society. Expert advice populates the legal system, policy, medicine, and more. Reports of the death of expertise are therefore exaggerated.
Technoscience and society are intertwined in many ways. Science and technology respond to human needs and directives – during the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s, for example, research and researchers rapidly oriented themselves to understanding and intervening in the virus and its progression. The ways in which we live our lives and think about the world are also impacted by scientific knowledge and the technologies that we use. These interactions have also been present throughout the history of science, and have led to interest in the role and responsibility of technoscience for the public good.
Science and technology – captured by the portmanteau word technoscience – are central to life in the vast majority of contemporary societies around the world. They affect us on both individual and collective levels, shaping personal choices and experiences but also policy, politics, and shared futures. Society, technology, scientific knowledge, and everyday experience are intertwined and interconnected, and this book is about those interconnections.
Ignorance is not straightforward, but can be differently articulated and understood in different contexts. Rather than simply being an empty space or lack, it is socially constructed (with research and policy priorities taking knowledge production in some directions over others), and can take different forms. This is particularly visible in contexts of disaster and crisis. Disasters are one space in which taken-for-granted assumptions regarding hierarchies of knowledge production are contested, and where public meanings regarding technoscientific issues may differ from those within science.
Science and technology are constituted through values, choices, and politics, while our lives are themselves shaped through the implementation of technologies and scientific knowledge. This is particularly visible when looking at how technologies are developed and used. There is a constant push and pull between technoscience and society: technologies shape social life (the idea of technological determinism), but at the same time they are also created, appropriated, given meaning, and repurposed by people (in processes of social construction). Users of technologies are never passive recipients of them.
Publics consume and otherwise engage with technoscience in multiple ways. Such consumption and engagement is always active, and publics bring their own knowledges and epistemic practices to engagement with technoscience. While some such engagement may align with mainstream science or involve consumption of it for leisure purposes, other instances involve different forms of knowledge and of epistemic practice, where there are diverging aims, standards, and methods to those of institutionalised research. We therefore observe epistemic diversity.
Technoscience permeates leisure as well as politics. Representations of science in the media or in fiction shape our shared visions and imaginations not just of science, but of collective life and the future. Such representations are formed through particular conventions and logics, and have particular effects, for instance in solidifying certain futures over others, or hyping technologies or businesses. Public representations do not operate in isolation from the spaces, practices, and people they refer to, but function to co-constitute them.
Political decision making and government are a key space for the mutual shaping of society and technoscience. Such decision making draws upon technoscientific expertise (through expert committees or other forms of advice), while simultaneously rendering technoscience subject to policy in the form of laws, informal guidance, funding regimes, and evaluation and assessment of research. Technoscientific scholarship is thus constantly guided through the actions and priorities of policy systems, which have, for instance, sought to bring about research that is responsible, directed towards a shared understanding of the public good, and innovation-oriented.
What role do science and technology play in society? What is the nature of expert knowledge? What is science’s relation to democracy?
This introduction to science, technology, and society answers these questions, and more, by exploring contemporary research on topics such as expertise, activism, science policy, and innovation. It offers a comprehensive resource for considering the place that science and technology have in contemporary societies, and the roles that they can and should play.
Accessible to a non-specialist audience, it draws on a rich range of cases and examples, from nuclear activism in India to content moderation in Kenya. Framing science as always social, and society as always shaped by science and technology, it asks: what worlds do we want science and technology to bring into being?
