Abstract
Investigating the role of geographical location in public engagement with science we examine the West Cumbria Managing Radioactive Waste Safely (MRWS) Partnership’s undertaking of one of the most extensive local public engagements with environmental risk science in the UK. The case study highlights the transformative impacts of this three-year long local engagement on both science and the public. Differently from other invited public engagements, organised as experiments controlled by scientists in spaces set aside from the everyday, the Partnership’s lay members led a process unfolding in the place that was potentially at risk. The Partnership had the authority to demand that scientists addressed issues of local interest. We frame the analysis with the notions ‘re-situating technoscience' and ‘re-assembling the public' to illuminate how scientific knowledge claims were modified and a new local public emerged, at the intersection of public engagement with science and public participation in environmental risk governance.
Highlights
The discussion of public engagement with science and technology in STS has recently approached time and space in ways drawing attention to new issues
Standard time-space configurations of public engagement with science have been conceptualised as experiments, highlighting that events are staged outside the realm of everyday experience and carefully controlled by scientists (Bogner, 2012; Laurent, 2016)
To increase the understanding of the involvement of science in place-making, and public engagement with science in the ‘wild’, we examine the work of the West Cumbria Managing Radioactive Waste Safely (MRWS) Partnership
Summary
The discussion of public engagement with science and technology in STS has recently approached time and space in ways drawing attention to new issues. The West Cumbria MRWS Partnership (the Partnership) was created to involve the local community and it undertook one of the most extensive public engagements with environmental risk science in the UK when examining the potential consequences of siting a facility for geological disposal of radioactive wastes in the area (West Cumbria MRWS Partnership, 2012).
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