"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
"Sweden’s road safety policy, Vision Zero, seeks to eliminate deaths and serious injuries from traffic crashes, and it recognizes that the bottleneck in improving road safety is displacing mobility as the main priority of the road transportation system. This analysis considers the...Read more
"Unreasonable expectations about the nature and character of scientific knowledge support the widespread political assumption that predictive scientific assessments are a necessary precursor to environmental decision making. All too often, the practical outcome of this assumption is...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
"Standard approaches to defining and evaluating environmental risk tend to reflect technocratic rather than democratic values. One consequence is that institutional mechanisms for achieving citizen participation in risk decisions rarely are studied or evaluated. This article presents a...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: In this article, we argue that scientists and technologists associated with the nuclear industry are building support for small modular reactors (SMRs) by advancing five rhetorical visions imbued with elements of fantasy that cater to various social expectations. The five...Read more
"This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a ‘‘good society’’ realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report,...Read more
"This article traces past trends and current developments in medical computing in the United States. It suggests a link between shifts in emphases in medical computing and in federal government policy toward health care delivery. The development of medical computing was not driven...Read more
"Ulrich Beck and other theorists of reflexive modernization are allies in the general project to reduce technocracy and elitism by rendering decision making more democratic and robust. However, this study of U.S. climate politics reveals complexities and obstacles to the sort of...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: Infrastructure management has traditionally been based on a logic of predict and provide in which rising demand was met with an increase in infrastructure capacity. However, recent changes in political, economic, and environmental priorities mean that projects such as new roads...Read more
"This article argues that, in public and policy contexts, the ways in which many scientists talk about uncertainty in simulations of future climate change not only facilitates communications and cooperation between scientific and policy communities but also affects the perceived...Read more
