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Ghosts, phantom pains, deceased people, ancestors, destroyed buildings, gods, silences... absence is an unusual, yet fascinating theme. Indeed, quite paradoxically, absence has a materiality and has effects on the spaces people inhabit and their daily practices and experiences. In this talk I consider the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to trace absence. Two such traces will be discussed in more detail: death and the absence of life, and silence and the absence of sound.

Recasting Mary Douglas’ (1984) famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out of
place’, I will argue that, while absence is matter out of place, it is still placed through matter. Although, strictly speaking, absence is a thing without matter, absence is ordered, remembered, evoked and made discussable and sufferable through materialities. And even though absence escapes - and can only ever be partially and temporarily contained in - certain places, it is within these places and through leaving various kinds of traces that absence comes to matter. 

During the last decade, various national funding agencies have set up targeted research programs promoting the investigation of nanotechnology’s potential adverse effects on human health, the environment, etc. Zooming in on such research programs with an interest in how they are established and governed in practice and to what effect in the realms of politics and science raises a number of important questions for the investigation of science dynamics. The following questions will feature in the proposed talk.

In science policy studies, funding agencies have been discussed as intermediary or boundary organizations that account for the stabilization of “the inherent unstable relationship of politics and science” (Braun/Guston 2003: 306). Concerning the aforementioned research programs this raises the question of how the science-policy relationship is negotiated by the scientists involved, be it in their role as members of a research pro-gram’s governing body (e.g. steering committee) on behalf of funding agencies, be it as project applicants and investigators. This also involves the question of how political framings of a research theme and its associated program are addressed, transformed, adapted, circumvented, ‘repelled’ (to use terminology associated with the Lotus effect), etc. in the process of implementation with an attention to the diversity of strategies and practices adopted in this process.

Targeted research programs are not stand-alone. They are established and implemented in the context of comparable programs elsewhere and in view of programs that address contrasting thematic perspectives. For the case at hand, programs on nanotechnology’s adverse effects interact with research on nanotechnology ‘proper.’ How does the framing of the former affect the contours of nanotechnology, viewed within the perspectives of different realms and actors? Of interest here are also the diverse systems of categorization used to define and determine what nanotechnology is about and what are its others. In this process, the identity of nanotechnology is remodeled in strategic ways.

The proposed paper contributes to scholarship on the practice of funding agencies as concerns science-policy relations as well as to current research on the dynamic of new research fields. It is based on a case study of the National Research Program “Opportunities and Risks of Nanomaterials,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation since 2010, and draws on qualitative data about the program’s governance and the funded projects’ practice as well as a comprehensive body of data concerning the recent configuration of nanoscale research as a scientific field in Switzerland.

Over the last two decades, social sciences have renewed their interest in patient organizations (POs) and activist groups in the domain of health and medicine. One of the main focuses of research about POs has been their engagement in the production and use of knowledge. Firstly, research has identified how certain POs actively intervene in “war on disease”, collaborating and critically engaging with biomedical researchers in what Steven Epstein (1995) has labeled “treatment activism”. These “treatment activists” learn science and progressively turn into credible interlocutors of scientists. Secondly, studies have documented how competencies and prerogatives are re-distributed between credentialed experts and lay members as POs collect, formalize and circulate patients’ experience, becoming what I suggest to call “experts of experience”. Thanks to this experiential knowledge, POs legitimately claim to take part in the shaping of health care services and health research policies. Thirdly, knowledge, and the collective negotiation about what counts as such, is seen to play a significant role in managing accountability and regulation processes in health care. POs are increasingly involved in such processes, contributing to and evaluating the “evidence-base” of collective decision-making (Moreira, 2011).

This expanding set of knowledge-related activities deployed by POs can be encapsulated by the concept of “evidence-based activism” (EBA). “Evidence-based activism” entails that the core of POs’ expertise is producing, staging and weighting different species of evidence within a process that involves a political appraisal of the issues at stake, of the competencies and prerogatives of the various participants, and of their own matters of concern. “Evidence-based activism” thus identifies a shift in POs’ mode of activism, from a situation where knowledge is seen as means to achieve the organization’s aims, to a configuration of action that reflexively engages with knowledge itself. In this communication, I will elaborate on this concept and provide illustrations drawn on a European research project called EPOKS that my colleague Madeleine Akrich and I are currently coordinating. This project involves comparative research between POs active in four condition areas (rare diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, childbirth practices) in four European countries (France, UK, Portugal, Ireland).

International Conference, organized by the Department of Social Studies of Science

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“Open Innovation” has become a dominant label to describe the work ethics of creative communities that embrace a Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) approach to independent technological development. The movement leverages traditions of craftsmanship with open source culture to promote experimentation through tinkering, the bricolage of old and new and a questioning of the current status-quo in global technology production. Lindtner explores in ethnographic detail how these values of tinkering, open source and hands-on technology production are taken up and mobilized in a hacker and co-working space in Shanghai, China. 
In this talk, Lindtner traces how the theme of maker and D.I.Y. technology production is often seen as a translocal phenomenon and rendered as a progressive and “cool” force in Chinese modernization. She illustrates how what is produced in the hacker and maker space are not only material objects, but also cultural imaginaries of alternate futures for organizational structure, infrastructures for international collaboration and technoscientific exchange. ICT and digital development in China broadly are often rendered by national political discourse as an ideal path towards modernity, as a move to transform  „made in China“ into „made by China.“ Lindtner’s research focuses on the complex and entangled paths of material and semiotic production around maker culture that emerge at the frictions of modernization discourse, foreign investments and transnational migration. She illustrates how the hacker and co-working space in Shanghai employs the framework of D.I.Y. making and sharing of technology to position itself as participant in Chinese Internet counterculture and as strategically aligned with free culture and open innovation projects in the U.S. In this process, Lindtner addresses the following questions: what models of global citizenship are embedded in the discourses of maker culture? Why do maker and D.I.Y. constitute such an attractive framework for the discursive and material practices of transnational collaborations? What forms of governmentality are inscribed in constructions of a technologically savvy, self-creating and transnational citizen?

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September 2011: Governing Futures. Imagining, Negotiating & Taming Emerging Technosciences

International Conference, organized by the Department of Social Studies of Science

When: 22-24 September, 2011

Where: Albert Schweitzer Haus, Vienna

Key Speakers: Barbara Adam, Daniel Barben, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Ulrike Felt, Arie Rip, Andy Sterling

Conference Website

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This project examines the entangled ethics and epistemology of humanized mice as a case study in how to make bioethics more responsive to core themes of science and technology studies. ‘Humanized animals’ are laboratory model animals engineered to express human traits that cannot otherwise be studied in a human because of experimental or ethical limitations. By engineering mice to express human versions of genes, scientists are able to track how that trait operates within an organism and infer how that trait might operate in humans. Humanized mice are becoming increasingly important for modeling traits that are considered important to humans’ moral and ontological status, such as brain biology or speech capability. Bioethicists have typically reacted to such experiments with the concern that these practices will make the mice too close to the special moral and ontological status of the human, and thus threaten that fixed and pre-determined category of ‘the human.’ However, drawing on STS-inspired historical and sociological accounts of animal modeling, I argue that humanized mice are but one aspect of an experimental apparatus of animal modeling that has drawn humans and lab animals into a contingent and co-constituting relationship in which their moral and ontological statuses are always in flux. In other words, the scientific practices of humanized animals are actually about producing a relationship of close enough. So how ought bioethics incorporate STS methods in this case? If the scientific practice produces an ongoing re-negotiation of ontological and moral boundaries, should bioethics be primarily focussed on policing those boundaries? In contrast with most bioethics literature, I argue that bioethical inquiry should focus on the conditions and consequences of drawing humans and mice into these ongoing relationships, thus making the moral, epistemic, and ontological apparatus of animal modeling the object of ethical inquiry. I thus advocate for a hybrid STS-applied ethics approach that incorporates both STS’s recognition that science and human values constantly remake each other and applied ethics’ impulse to intervene within scientific practice. In the case of humanized animals, learning how to respond to these contingent relationships and track their consequences for both humans and animals is a far more fruitful route than trying to determine and protect a ‘correct’ boundary between humans and animals. I also suggest that such a shift would be useful in bioethics in general.

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When: 9-11 June 2010

Where: Albert Schweitzer Haus, Vienna

Key Speakers: Philip Campbell, Ulrike Felt, Lisa Garforth, Pierre-Benoît Joly, Mike Michael, Helga Nowotny, Steven Shapin, Ruth Wodak

Conference Homepage

Video Stream of Panel Discussion

In recent years there has been a clear rise in scientific collaboration, as well as in studies on the subject. While most scholars examine disciplines traditionally known to be collaborative, such as physics and space research, my research focuses on biology. It investigates the growing collaboration in the life sciences, or the emergence of what is called 'big biology'. While the Human Genome Project is often presented as the first large-scale research project in biology, cooperation in the life sciences has a longer history. A comparison between centralised 'big physics' and 'big biology' reveals how the latter has a networked structure, which evolved in interaction with the integration of information and communication technologies.

While concentrating on the construction of these networks, I analyse three contemporary large-scale research collaborations: the Census of Marine Life that aims to make an inventory of life in the oceans, the Silicon Cell initiative that wants to design a replica of a cell in a computer, and the VIRGO consortium, which investigates host-virus interaction to develop a new therapy against influenza. These projects demonstrate how the process of making science bigger, or the 'supersizing of science', transforms the ways in which science is organised while it also changes the work of scientists involved.

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Based upon 100 hours of video documentation and extensive interviews (conducted in 2008 and 2009) with Kenyan research professionals, university administrators, religious leaders, journalists, shopkeepers, college students, and internally displaced refugees, our international research team investigated the unique role played by universities and research institutes during a violent political episode following the most recent presidential elections.

How Kenya descended into political violence and eventually reconciled long standing regional and tribal feuds is intimately intertwined with (1) the nation's colonial and post colonial history, (2) the institutionalization of its higher education and research sector, (3) the social construction of new media, information and communication technologies and to a certain extent (4) the global influence of newly elected US president, Barrack Obama, whose own family roots trace back to a pivotal tribal region within Kenya.

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Zweierlei Intentionen stehen hinter dieser Arbeit. Einerseits möchte ich die, meines Erachtens unbefriedigenden Antworten auf die spannende Frage nach dem Anfang der Wissenschaften, der ja je nach „Laune“ zu sehr unterschiedlichen Zeiten mit mich nicht befriedigenden Argumenten verortet wird, neu formulieren. Diese Formulierung schließt sich andererseits der Sichtweise der Edinburgh-Schule an, die ja u.a. sagt, dass „features of culture which usually count as non-scientific greatly influence both the creation and the evaluation of scientific theories and findings.” (Bloor , 1976)
Die hier skizzierte Perspektive der Edinburghschule weiter zu treiben ist folglich mein zweites Anliegen.
Wie der Titel des Referats andeutet, wird die Art der Rechtssprechung als wesentlicher Aspekt einer Kultur verstanden und deren Wandel als „cultural leap“ betrachtet. Einen, bzw. verschiedene „Kultursprünge“ dieser Art verstehe ich als Auslöser für die Entstehung von Wissenschaft.
Angemerkt sei dabei zweierlei: Erstens, „cultural leaps“ können von außen oder von innen angestoßen werden. Das kommt daher, dass Gesellschaften nicht unbedingt eine einheitliche Kultur, dafür aber allumfassende Rechtsformen haben.  Zweitens, ein derartiger „Sprung“ fällt manchmal weniger heftiger aus als der Begriff suggeriert, d.h. er benötigt manchmal viel Zeit. Warum so ein Sprung stattfindet und wie der Zustand davor und danach beschaffen ist, wird Gegenstand meiner Ausführungen sein.
Meine Annahmen werden anhand unterschiedlicher Beispiele aus der Antike überprüft und dargestellt. Der Bogen spannt sich dabei von Milet über Alexandrien bis Rom, wobei Athen keineswegs übersehen wird.

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The workshop aims at casting diverse perspectives at the phenomenon of "nanotechnology": which emerging forms of nanotechnology governance can we observe today? How do these new modes of nanotechnology governance compare with the governance of other technologies such as genetic engineering or nuclear power? How does nanotechnology governance differ between regions? In our workshop, we will approach these questions in an interdisciplinary discourse.

The first major theme of the workshop will be the comparison of nanotechnology governance with the governance of other technologies connected with risk. Current approaches towards nanotechnology are embedded in the history of risk technology governance in fields such as genetic engineering and nuclear power. The workshop will explore to which extent parallels can drawn between nanotechnology and other technologies, and what is peculiar to nanotechnology governance? Among other things, this part of the workshop focuses on questions of delimitation and demarcation in technology governance, and the phenomenon of governing under conditions of uncertainty. 

The second major theme of the workshop is devoted to the interplay between global and local levels of nanotechnology governance. We will explore how nanotechnology governance differs between regions. We are especially interested in the relationship between trends towards governance uniformity and variation caused by factors such as culture, institutions and historical experience. We will ask which impact such differences might take on emerging form of nanotechnology governance.

The workshop will bring together scholars and students working on political, social, philosophical and cultural aspect of science and technologies as well as researchers from nanotechnology and the life sciences.

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In mid 2006, the Indonesian government announced a plan to build a new nuclear power plant geared towards meeting soaring demands for energy in the country. The government is determined that time was ripe for Indonesia to go nuclear. While discussions on adopting nuclear power are steadily gaining currency among high officials and political elites, it is simultaneously being contested by a broad anti-nuclear alliance consisting of multiple civil society groups. This organized resistance is driven by suspicions that the government does not possess adequate capacity to handle high-risk technology. Using combined approaches of STS and social movement studies, this presentation discusses the contestation of nuclear risk discourses between scientific experts and grassroots groups. In situating the paper within post-authoritarian Indonesia, observations will be made on how shifts towards democratic change have allowed civil society groups to develop civic epistemology resulting in popular risk assessment over the proposed nuclear power plant. This form of risk assessment becomes ammunition for anti-nuclear groups to challenge scientific risk calculations by state technocrats.

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Im Rahmen von Konturen: Eine Veranstaltungsreihe zur öffentlichen Repräsentation von Wissenschaftler/innen finden unter dem Übertitel „Wissenschaft im Wandel“ vier Vorträge/Performances von Mitgliedern des Instituts für Wissenschaftsforschung statt. Die Präsentationen des Teams des ELSA/Gen-Au finanzierten Projekts "Living Changes in the Life Sciences. Tracing the Ethical and Social in Scientific Practice and Work Culture" werden sich mit aktuellen Trends und Veränderungen im Leben und Arbeiten in den Wissenschaften und in ihrer öffentlichen Wahrnehmung auseinandersetzen. Sie stehen jeweils im Dialog mit Kunst-Performances, die der Künstler Peter Brandlmayer organisiert hat. Die Vorträge/Performances werden in Kooperation mit der Ö1 Wissenschaftsredaktion veranstaltet.

Freitag 27.3.2009, 19:30 Uhr
Wissenschafltler/in sein oder werden: Geschichten vom Suchen oder vom Immer-schon-dort-gewesen sein
(Joachim Allgaier, Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, Ruth Müller)
< Bericht in science.ORF >

Freitag 3.4,2009, 19:30 Uhr
Wenn die Überholspur zur Normalität wird: Zeit im Leben und Arbeiten in der Wissenschaft
(Joachim Allgaier, Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, Ruth Müller) < Bericht in science.ORF >

Freitag 24.4.2009, 19:30 Uhr
Zusammen allein sein: Über Einsamkeit und Kooperation in der Wissenschaft
(Joachim Allgaier, Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, Ruth Müller)
< Bericht in science.ORF >

Donnerstag 30.4.2009, 19:30 Uhr
Früher war alles anders: Karriereerzählungen als Praxis der Erinnerung
(Joachim Allgaier, Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, Ruth Müller)
< Bericht in science.ORF >

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Für Viele ist klar: Unsere Zukunft ist Neuro. Die viel versprechenden Annoncen der Neurowissenschaften und ihrer Förderer erstrecken sich dabei nicht nur auf Erkenntnisse in der Grundlagenforschung, sondern v.a. auf eine Reihe von Anwendungen in der Medizin, der Ökonomie, dem Strafrecht oder der Pädagogik. All dies wird uns veranlassen, nicht nur eine neue Sicht von uns selbst, sondern auch ein neues Verständnis von Gesellschaftlichkeit zu entwickeln.

Der Vortrag will diese Voraussage problematisieren: Aus einer wissenschaftssoziologischen Perspektive ist es weniger die Hirnforschung, die die Gesellschaft nach ihrem Bilde formen wird (z.B. Singer 2003); vielmehr ist die Hirnforschung die Wissenschaft dieser Gesellschaft - einer neosozialen Wissensgesellschaft, die zunehmend auf die (neurowissenschaftlich und neurotechnisch unterstützten) Selbststeuerungskompetenzen ihrer (individuellen und kollektiven) Mitglieder setzt. An Beispielen (Neuropädagogik, Neurorecht) wird erläutert, warum heute klar ist, dass unsere Zukunft Neuro ist.

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Scholars have demonstrated that in addition to striving towards immediate goals, activists are often trying to change social norms by reframing policy problems. In this paper, I argue that attention should also be paid to how outsider advocates try to shift what I call the "epistemic structures" of policymaking—the patterns of reasoning, evidence, and expertise used to "know" a policy problem. 

Using the recent controversial history of patenting living organisms in the United States as a case study, I identify two types of sustained activist challenges to the epistemic structures of policymaking. In the first type of challenge, activists accept the dominant mode of reasoning to think through a policy problem, but offer new types of evidence and expertise that are more sympathetic to their goals. In the second type of challenge, activists offer alternative methods of reasoning, which require reformulation of existing evidence and expertise and inclusion of new types. I explore how activists mounted these challenges against traditional stakeholders and patent policymakers, and the responses they engendered.

Considering the epistemological dimensions of activism reveals a hitherto overlooked, but crucial, dynamic at work in the policy process, sensitizes us to how the political environment is linked to trends in intellectual history, and improves our prospects for a more stable resolution of these conflicts. This case study is based on archival materials and interview data from advocacy and industry groups, patent lawyers, the US Congress, and the US Patent and Trademark Office.
 
Her major Publications
"Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care," Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (April 2007)
"Architectures of Genetic Medicine: Comparing Genetic testing for Breast Cancer in the USA and UK," Social Studies of Science.35.1 (2005): 5-40
"The Patent is Political: The Consequences of Patenting the BRCA Genes in Britan," Community Genetics Supplement. Vol.8 (2005): 235-242.

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The increasing availability and use of the Internet as a new information and communication source in the medical context has become a central issue in both academic and policy debates. Notions like the “informed” or “empowered” patient express the central role of medical information for living “the right way”, the high expectation that the Internet would support patients to take more responsibility for their own health as well as the hope for quite fundamental re-orderings in doctor-patient relations.

This rather optimistic vision of the empowering potential of the Internet is however challenged in multiple ways. Policy makers as well as parts of the medical establishment regularly question the quality of the information provided, doubt people’s capacity to properly evaluate the “flood of information” and propose quality criteria to direct the user to “reliable” health information. Doctors sometimes appear to be frightened of losing their “knowledge monopoly”, thus creating difficulties for patients to express their own positions. Finally there are hints that patients themselves may prefer to take on the “passive patient role”.

This conference aims to explore these issues from various perspectives in order to obtain a more fine-grained understanding of the phenomenon. While much research on particular aspects of online health information and its implications has been done already, an integrated and comparative approach is still lacking. We thus would like to draw together and relate issues of patients’ possibilities for and limits to acquiring online health information, potential re-ordering of hierarchical doctor-patient relations, and policy imaginations of the role of the Internet in the medical field as well as actual policy interventions. Furthermore, we want to discuss how far criteria such as gender, education, age, the degree of affectedness and Internet skills influence and shape these developments.

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June 2007: Engineering European Bodies: When Biomedical Technologies Challenge European Governance, Bioethics and Identities

Final Conference of the EU Project “Challenges of Biomedicine (CoB) – Socio-Cultural Contexts, European Governance & Bioethics

When: 14.-16.06.2007

Where: University of Vienna, Universitätscampus altes AKH, Aula, Spitalgasse 2, A-1090 Vienna

Key Speakers: Stefan Beck, Marcus Düwell, Ulrike Felt, Dietmar Mieth, Carlos Novas, Brian Salter, Jan Staman

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Over the last few decades, biomedical technologies have played a crucial role in re-engineering the human body on multiple levels, as well as in re-defining individual and collective identities. These processes challenge established cultural understandings, the way we govern new technologies as well as bioethical reflection. With the enlargement and integration of the European Union questions relating to common governance of biomedical technologies including a European bioethics framework have to be critically addressed both theoretically and empirically. Which roles do socio-cultural differences play and how do they figure in shaping bodies and identities? What are the impacts on civic approaches to technologies, ethical argumentation and visions of governing? How are these differences handled in a common Europe?

To address these issues, this conference builds on a comparative and interdisciplinary European research project “Challenges of Biomedicine”. Going beyond the project it aims to bring together academics from bioethics, science and technology studies, cultural anthropology, medicine as well as policy makers on European and national levels.

The goals of the conference are to

• discuss empirical work and ethical reflection related to the topic of socio-cultural varieties in re-engineering bodies as well as concepts of choice, agency and identity
• investigate the implications of biomedical technologies for the delivery of health care and the public health
• debate implications of biomedical technologies for European and national policy arenas
• reflect on the methodological challenges of comparative and cross-disciplinary research

Plenary lectures addressing the key issues will be alternated by parallel sessions which are meant to bring together genuine empirical and theoretical work carried out in these areas within the project as well as by invited researchers.

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September 2006: Engaging Science & Society in the Ethics of Genome Research. Analyses - reflections – perspectives

Closing workshop of the ELSA Project "Let´s talk about GOLD!"   (Organized in cooperation with the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, IFZ, Work and Culture, Graz)

When: 21.-23.09.2006

Where: University of Vienna, Kleiner Festsaal, Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring, A-1010 Wien

Key Speakers: Mike Burgess, Stephen Hilgartner, Hilary Rose, Mariachiara Tallacchini

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The dynamic development of genome research raises fundamental ethical and social questions concerning its implications for our societies, a fact which equally applies to other emerging technosciences such as nanotechnology or "converging technologies”. Over the past decades, methods have been developed to reflexively engage with the implications of new technoscientific knowledge for social order. Ethical reflection and public engagement with the social dimensions of technoscientific development are two traditions dealing with these issues. Though both may be argued to share common goals, their relation to each other is unclear and often controversial as is reflected in the debate around "empirical ethics”.

This workshop is the concluding event of a project, which aimed at experimenting with a cross-over between these two traditions: engaging both scientists and members of the public with the ethical dimensions of genome research. Over the period of one year, a group of people met with genome researchers at seven Round Tables to discuss the ethical and social dimensions of their concrete project and genome research in general. To develop a better understanding of this engagement and possible mutual learning processes is the central goal of this project. The workshop aims at sharing and discussing the results of the analysis with the scientific community and practitioners working on similar issues. It will be organised around four thematic foci:

• Possibilities and limits of addressing ethics of genome research in a public engagement exercise
• (Non)Participating in which kind of governance?: Reflecting the Round Table as a participatory setting
• Talking science: Images, imaginations and conceptions of science/scientists as discursive elements
• Public engagement as mutual learning: Situated perspectives and learning processes

In order to allow for ample discussion time, the workshop will be organised around four plenary sessions, an opening and a closing panel as well as a poster session. Each plenary session will have an input from one invited speaker as well as from a member of the research team. A public event in German on Thursday, September 21st will be preceding the scientific workshop in English.

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September 2006: Information-Based Decision-Making in the Medical Context

Workshop of the TRAFO Project “Informed Consent: Space of Negotiation between Biomedicine and Society” (Organized in cooperation with the Clinical Department of Pathology, Medical University of Vienna)

When: 15.09.2006, 9.00-18.00

Where: University of Vienna, Universitätscampus altes AKH, Aula, Spitalgasse 2, A-1090 Vienna

Key Speakers: Oonagh Corrigan, Claus Hoeyer, Stefan Timmermans

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In recent years the relationship between the biomedical system and society has become scrutinized. This is partly due to rapid advances in biomedical technologies, as well as to general changes in society, which are reflected in new forms of the doctor-patient relationship. Our topic of interest is the question of decision-making within the field of biomedicine. In various areas informed consent has been established as a space in which the question of “adequate” information and possibilities of decision-making are negotiated. The workshop focuses on the process of decision-making within this setting by referring to its broader contexts. Central issues addressed are political factors, the role of standardization in biomedicine, concepts of tissue donation, and the clinical framing of informed consent.

This workshop is organised within the project “Informed Consent: Space of Negotiation between Biomedicine and Society”. The project aims at understanding how people who get confronted with consent forms and its concomitant conversation perceive and interpret the provided information. We are interested in how they arrange the information in regard to their pre-existing knowledge and experiences as well as in the situatedness of the informed consent process in a wider clinical and biomedical context.

In order to allow for ample discussion time, the whole-day workshop will be organised around four plenary sessions and a closing panel.

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November 2002: Envisioning Scientific Citizenship: Science, Governance and Public Participation in Europe

OPUS International Conference

When: 28.-30.11.2002

Where: University of Vienna, Kleiner Festsaal, Dr. Karl Lueger-Ring, A-1010 Wien

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Throughout Europe, heated debates are underway over new forms of public participation in issues linked to scientific and technological developments. Policy makers perceive that it is increasingly necessary not only to promote socially acceptable research and development, but to cultivate, simultaneously, "scientific citizenship". Introducing this notion would mean defining rights but also conferring obligations to create new forms of informed engagement. The objective is to give voice not only to stakeholders but also to other members of society in shaping future relationships between science, technology and society.

When highly contentious public issues arise, in what concrete ways can participation by different groups and individuals be assured - and legitimised? Where and how will issues concerning technoscientific change be debated and negotiated? At which point and how should potentially controversial innovations be brought to the public arena? What can different countries in Europe, learn from each other in handling these issues? And finally, what does this imply for a culturally diverse Europe in terms of appropriate structures and procedures?

The conference will take place near the end of the three-year OPUS project in the EC 5th Framework Programme (Raising Public Awareness in Science and Technology in Europe). OPUS is focused on exchanging knowledge and conducting analytical inter-comparisons amongst the different "cultures" of science-society relations in six European countries. It aims at opening up debate and questioning future directions to take in this domain, at all levels of European governance.

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