Sense and sensibility: Science, society and politics as co-production

Historical, philosophical and sociological studies of science have amply demonstrated that scientific change is not just about theory, but as much or even more about new epistemic objects and associated sensibilities. Change may be better understood if we analyze major and minor revolutions in science and the world as the result of chains of smaller changes in actual research practices, thinking and tinkering. Such small changes in research can be shown to resonate and tie up with one another and with elements and discursive repertoires available in wider culture. Detailed scrutiny of notebooks from working researchers, ethnography and other materials shows that scientific change does not come in one integrated revolutionary package and wholesale, nor does it arrive out of the blue, i.e. simply disregarding received views and ignoring existing knowledge and institutional structures. In hindsight, developments may be presented as breakthroughs, victories and discoveries, but that is another matter. That is how histories get made and presented in science and beyond, not how scientific change comes about or at best the retrospective part of it. This book is not about scientific accomplishments and breakthroughs as such but about the intimate ways in which knowledge production relates to social change. Or, to use the better-known phrasing: how knowledge and society are co-produced (Jasanoff 2004, 2005). In this chapter I shall discuss issues and themes that surface in several chapters or that apply to the collection as a whole. Reflecting on these themes in connection with the various chapters will, it is hoped, help to bring out once again the distinctive features of the idiom of co-production and its importance for making sense of the significant transformations and reconfigurations occurring in the world today. In so doing, the chapter aims to draw out co-production in a way that fully integrates the roles played by science and technology in such transformation as endogenous factors rather than coming in from some imaginary outside. The first section clarifies why I prefer to speak of sense and sensibility in discussing the virtues of the approach to co-production taken by the book’s authors. Subsequently, the second section describes this approach, which Jasanoff (2004) defined as the “interactional” perspective on co-production, in greater detail, and explores the preoccupation with institutions and institutional reconfiguration that is in my view distinctive for the approach. The third section reviews why the local and the global play a role in so many of the chapters. That such is the case should not surprise us, as many of the challenges that present themselves are global; yet they play out in local contexts. This not only invites the use of comparative approaches but also raises the question of how conceptions of “local” and “global” are themselves coproduced and what that implies analytically. Once we have discussed these wide-ranging aspects, we shall look at notions of (bio)constitutionalism, civic epistemology and sociotechnical imaginaries. I shall conclude with the politics of co-production