Public Engagement in Synthetic Biology: “Experts”, “Diplomats” and the Creativity of “Idiots”

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to inspire experimentation with approaches to public engagement about emerging technologies, and takes synthetic biology as a primary site of interest. It does this at a time when the roles of critical scholars in the social sciences and humanities are becoming increasingly well documented for the contributions they make to how synthetic biology is discussed and understood through interdisciplinary collaborations. At the same time, practitioners of diverse forms of public engagement such as artists, designers, and DIYbiologists are not often (though are sometimes) explicitly involved in these collaborative assemblages, despite their abilities to contribute to a diversity of communications within and outside of the field. I connect the communication lessons being learned from interdisciplinary collaborations to public engagement practices on the basis of a “need for experimentation” that is sometimes more visibly exercised by artists, designers and DIYbiologists. I then use writings from philosopher Isabelle Stengers about the abilities of “expert”, “diplomat”, and “idiot” figures to enable the slowing down of thinking in relation to scientific and technological advances in order to explore such “experimentation” in communication. Stengers’ ideas are connected to public engagement in synthetic biology through creative and “experimental” communication practices that open up rather than close down questions about the field. I argue that public engagement practitioners and science communicators who want to slow down the—at times, misguided—public narratives of synthetic biology can look to controversies in interdisciplinary collaborations, and artistic activities in the field, for examples of communications that strive to create space for emergent, rather than decided, narratives about the field.