"In my response to Andrew Webster’s examples I point to certain limitations, while fully supporting the thrust of his argument for a re-engagement of science and technology studies (STS) with policy making. When analyzing the policy implications of knowledge, the larger context must be...Read more
"While the distinction between civilians and combatants is fundamental to international law, it is contested and complicated in practice. How do North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officers see civilians in Afghanistan? Focusing on 2009 air strike in Kunduz, this article argues...Read more
"Quantitative health risk assessment is a procedure for estimating the likelihood that exposure to environmental contaminants will produce certain adverse health effects, most commonly cancer. One instance of its use has been a California air toxics public “right-to-know” law. This...Read more
"Scholarship in the social studies of science has argued convincingly that what demarcates science from nonscience is not some set of essential or transcendent characteristics or methods but rather an array of contingent circumstances and strategic behavior known as “boundary work” (...Read more
“This article examines a genetic ancestry testing program called the Living History Project (LHP) that was jointly organized by a nonprofit educational institute and a for-profit genealogy company in South Africa. It charts the precise mechanisms by which the LHP sought...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: The problem of how to make the transition to a more environmentally and socially sustainable society poses questions about how such far-reaching social change can be brought about. In recent years, lifecourse transitions have been identified by a range of researchers as...Read more
"This article examines some of the interactions between law, science, and society taking place during a trial (in Victorian England). By focusing on a restricted set of scientific and nonscientific actors (the law-set, a derivation of the core-set) engaged in negotiating the meaning,...Read more
"In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: The "participatory turn" cutting across technical approaches for appraising environment, risk, science, and technology has been accompanied by intense debates over the desired nature, extent, and quality of public engagement in science. Burgeoning work evaluating the...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: We argue that for scientists and science communicators to build usable knowledge for various publics, they require social and political capital, skills in boundary work, and ethical acuity. Drawing on the context of communicating seasonal climate predictions to farmers in...Read more
