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SOCL930: Policy, Publics and Expertise

Module Convenor: David Tyfield

Please note this is a condensed module given over three weeks.

Module Aims

On successful completion of this module students should be able to:

• demonstrate a critical understanding of policy and administrative worlds (in selected domains, such as science, technology, environment and new media) and trace their changing relationship to expertise and publics;
• appraise and value the relationship between policymaking and different forms of knowledge and expertise, both codified and uncodified;
• understand the significance of debates surrounding the interaction of scientific and technological expert and public knowledges in their historical and cultural context and assess their relevance and use for contemporary policy issues.

Course Approach

What is the proper role of knowledge and expertise in politics?  And whose knowledge and expertise matters? Since Plato argued in The Republic that society is best ruled by wise philosopher-kings, these have been key questions.  But in a globalizing, knowledge society increasingly characterised by dispersed communication channels and social media, they assume an unprecedented importance. In this module we will continue this debate, drawing on a range of theoretical resources in the social and historical sciences and a number of contemporary examples, from science, technology, environment and media studies.  In what should be lively and interactive seminar-based sessions, students will develop a thorough grounding in a distinctive, ‘Lancaster’ approach to understanding the mediated interaction of knowledge and policymaking.  The module will introduce the last 30 years of debates regarding expert knowledge and lay understanding in relation to policy making, and how new ways of thinking about policy (for science and technology in the first instance) are beginning to inform broader policy processes and experiments in the governance of today’s highly technoscientific societies. Sessions are organised into two hour seminars, incorporating an introductory and interruptible lecture together with discussion of a key reading, led by a student presentation.   

Topics Covered

Indicative list of topics:

• Introduction – What is Policy? (1) – Government, Governance and Globalisation.
• What is Policy? (2) – Comparative and Interpretive Perspectives.
• Experts and Expertise.
• Demonstrating Truth: the Staging of Science.
• The State and its Population.
• The State and its Publics.
• When Experts Disagree.
• Performing Publics.
• Neoliberal Governance.
• Policy as Experiment – the Case of Climate Change.

Assessment

One research essay of up to 5,000 words.  

Indicative Readings

Brown, Mark B. (2009) Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions & Representation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• Dewey, John ([1954] 1991) The Public and its Problems, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press
  Ezrahi, Yaron (1990) The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
• Collins, H.M. and Robert Evans (2002) ‘The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,’ Social Studies of Science, 32(2), pp. 235–96.
• Foucault, Michel (2003) ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975-76, tr. David Macey, London: Allen Lane.
• Jasanoff, Sheila (1990) The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Hajer, Maarten A. and H. Wagenaar, (ed.) (2003) Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Latour, Bruno (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, tr. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Scott, James C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Wynne, Brian (2006) Public Engagement as a Means of Restoring Public Trust in Science – Hitting the Notes, but Missing the Music?, Community Genetics 9(3): 211-220.

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