Karen-Sue Taussig: Ordinary Genomes: Science, Citizenship and Genetic Identities

Abstract

Of the many contexts in which one might research the social significance of biological and biomedical knowledge and technologies, the contemporary landscape of national identities and cultures is perhaps the most challenging and the least documented. Historians of science have crafted penetrating analyses of how science and technology have and have been shaped by the politics, economics and specific social systems of European nation states, particularly France, Great Britain, Germany and of course the United States. Such analyses become more difficult and controversial when tackling contemporary national contexts, with their volatile politics, diverse social constituencies, complex international relations and evershifting layering of power and class. Few scholars have dared to confront the nation as a unit of analysis in the social studies of science and technology, and those who did—like, most recently, Jasanoff (2005)—had to bear the brunt of critique from all corners of the humanities and social sciences, including sometimes justified complaints that such work tends to reify dangerous stereotypes of national culture by oversimplifying social trends on the basis of insufficient data. And yet, addressing the notion of national culture and its significance in our globalised and pluralistic social reality is a crucial task for scholars interested in understanding the social role of science and technology. STS scholarship has long argued that the social status, role and significance of scientific knowledge and technological artefacts is situated within specific local contexts, and thus cannot be assessed in any general or universalistic fashion. What is still far from being understood is how the local worlds of groups (or, to use a more fashionable term, networks) of actors intersect, fuse together and separate within specific national and international contexts.