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Team:UCL/Humans/Soci/Glos
From 2014.igem.org
Sociological Imaginations - Reconciling Environmental Discourses
Human Practice Team
Explore Sociological Imaginations
Overview | Introduction | Methodology | GlossaryConceptual Framework: The Governance Challenges of Synthetic Biology | Theoretical Framework: Opposing Paradigms in the Face of Environmental Decline
Chapter 1: Synthetic Biology for Environmental Reform | Chapter 2: UCL iGEM 2014 in the Risk Society | Chapter 3: Transcending Multifaceted Borders
Chapter 4: The Playful Professional and Sustainable Governance| List of References
Glossary
- Anticipatory socialisation: Adopting norms, values, standards and behaviour of a group, which non-members of the group aspire to join. Through social interactions and experience, these individuals learn to take on the role they have yet to assume in order to facilitate their assimilation and eventual participation in the group (Marshall 1998).
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- Accountability:
- Black-boxing:
- Commodification:
- Deskilling:
- Discourse:
- Dual-use technology: Technologies which can be used for more than one goal, usually having both civilian or peaceful purpose and military aims. They imply a dilemma "because it is difficult to prevent their misuse without forgoing beneficial applications. [...] [M]any of the emerging technologies with the potential to do the most good are also capable of the greatest harm" (Tucker 2012 :1).
- Ecological modernisation: Optimistic theory "that aims to harness the power of human ingenuity for the purposes of harmonising economic advancement with environmental improvement" (Cohen 1997:108; Huber 1985; Jänicke 1985; Simonis 1988).
- Ethnography:
- Cross-borderness:
- Governance: Refers, in its broadest sense, to the various ways and processes in which social life is coordinated. Therefore, alongside markets, networks and hierarchies, conventional governments are one of the modes in which institutions can be involved in governance, meaning that many heterogeneous actors are involved. Hence, the distinction between state and society has blurred so that new ways of governing are introduced, whether is be beyond the territoriality of the nation-state, or networks between government and other entities, or even by making adaptations to the way governments themselves work. The term governance, however, usually denotes how politics became less about governmental mechanisms of 'command and control', and more about procedures of 'consultation and deliberation', which sometimes favours an increasing presence of market mechanisms (Heywood 2002: 6).
- Ignorance: Knowing that the knowledge is limited in a certain area. It increases with every state of new knowledge.
- Interdisciplinarity:
- Late-modernity:
- Modernity and modernisation:
- Open-source:
- Oversight:
- Professionalization:
- Rationality:
- Reductionism:
- Reflexive modernisation: Process of modernisation that manifest itself in the risk society whereby reform and adaptations of already existing institutions (i.e. politics, science, economy) are essential to accomplish progress. The role of science and technology here is instrumental in re-evaluating such institutions like science itself, as technology is also considered to be the cause of the new hazards in this risk society. Science and technology are thus used in a reflexive manner to manage the risks of technologies developed in the process of modernisation. The adaptations and reforms are hence found in the way science, politics and business operate, thereby generating strategic concepts such as sustainability and precaution with which they can set out a new trajectory. On a political level, this reflexivity has expressed itself through subpolitical forms of non-governmental organisation and new social and environmental movements.
- Risk: A situation of uncertainty in which some of the possible outcomes involves an undesirable outcome. In this case, the way a system operates and behaves is well-known so that one can anticipate the outcome and quantify the distribution of risk probabilities. As a result, assessing risk can be calculated objectively and rationally under conditions of controlled uncertainty (Gross 2010: 61).
- Risk society: A society increasingly preoccupied with the distribution of (technological) risks, and "dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself" (Beck 1992:21). These risks differ from other times because "(1) they are undetectable by direct human sensory perception; (2) they are capable of transcending generations; (3) they exceed the capacity of current mechanisms for compensating victims" (Cohen 1997: 107) a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself.
- Self-governance and self-regulation:
- Socialisation:
- Sociology:
- Subpolitics: Expression of political modernisation where new stakeholders emerge and take on roles of leadership to drive institutional reform. This is especially the case in environmental governance where environmental movements, non-governmental organisations, businesses, and other stakeholders are increasingly present in political decision-making of environmental policy.
- Technologies of hubris:
- Transnationalism:
- Uncertainty: "A situation in which, given current knowledge, there are multiple possible future outcomes" (Gross 2010: 3).
- Upstream:
