Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/3

In order to gain a better understanding of the challenges related to the sustainable governance of an emerging technology, and synthetic biology in particular, the study in Sociological Imaginations has focussed extensively on the case study method. The singular nature of this method allows the researcher to isolate a specific instance within its wider context in order to explain how social relationships are interwoven in a specific case. Here we have chosen to take a look at our own team, UCL iGEM 2014, so that we are able to see how this team’s work and environmental discourse is related to broader societal developments. In other words, why does the team choose to do the project that they have chosen to do in the light of the characteristics of the times we currently live in? The topic that is developed here involves the ways in which our environments are under the influence of scientific human practice and technological innovations. These are issues that necessitate questions of sustainability as the environmental implications and discourses surrounding the production and application of knowledge imply that there are positive and negative effects of the latter when it comes to the state of the environment. A case study about sustainability research entails therefore a search for models and practices that appear to pave the way to achieve sustainable outcomes. Furthermore, it also means that the researcher has to be engaged with a topic that requires interdisciplinary interaction and processing data that are potentially unfamiliar to the eye of the social scientist. Nevertheless, sustainability research is ultimately about how the social factor interrelates or manifests itself in relation to other spheres, where a variety of disciplines can have differing perspectives on how a solution might be devised. When making an attempt to explore why iGEM and this team can provide an insight in understanding, and thus enhancing sustainable practice and outcomes, it is key to consider the complex (social) world as something that is unmistakeably beyond our control. Regardless whether the use of multiple variables can keep track of intricate changes, these complexities cannot be definitively reduced to the models of social phenomena we seek to create in the meantime (Evans 2011).