Science studies
1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts.
[1] While staying a discipline with multiple metanarratives, the fundamental concern is about the role of the perceived expert in providing governments and local authorities with information from which they can make decisions.
The sociology of scientific knowledge arose at the University of Edinburgh, where David Bloor and his colleagues developed what has been termed "the strong programme".
[1] Latour and others identified a dichotomy crucial for modernity, the division between nature (things, objects) as being transcendent, allowing to detect them, and society (the subject, the state) as immanent as being artificial, constructed.
More recently, a novel approach known as mapping controversies has been gaining momentum among science studies practitioners, and was introduced as a course for students in engineering,[21][22] and architecture schools.
[24] A showcase of the rather complex problems of scientific information and its interaction with lay persons is Brian Wynne's study of Sheepfarming in Cumbria after the Chernobyl disaster.
[1][25] He elaborated on the responses of sheep farmers in Cumbria, who had been subjected to administrative restrictions because of radioactive contamination, allegedly caused by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.
[25] It turned out that the source of radioactivity was actually the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing complex; thus, the experts who were responsible for the duration of the restrictions were completely mistaken.
[25] The example led to attempts to better involve local knowledge and lay-persons' experience and to assess its often highly geographically and historically defined background.
[29] The Montserrat case put immense pressure on volcanologists, as their expertise suddenly became the primary driver of various public policy approaches.
It requires new, integrated methodologies for knowledge collection that transcend scientific disciplinary boundaries but combine qualitative and quantitative outcomes in a structured whole.
The designation of expertise as authoritative in the interaction with lay people and decision makers of all kind is nevertheless challenged in contemporary risk societies, as suggested by scholars who follow Ulrich Beck's theorisation.
