Societal Debate Research Articles

With great power comes great responsibility: why ‘safe enough’ is not good enough in debates on new gene technologies

New genomic techniques (NGTs) are powerful technologies with the potential to change how we relate to our food, food producers, and natural environment. Their use may affect the practices and values our societies are built on. Like many countries, the EU is currently revisiting its GMO legislation to accommodate the emergence of NGTs. We argue that assessing such technologies according to whether they are ‘safe enough’ will not create the public trust necessary for societal acceptance. To avoid past mistakes of under- or miscommunication about possible impacts, we need open, transparent, and inclusive societal debate on the nature of the science of gene (editing) technologies, on how to use them, and whether they contribute to sustainable solutions to societal and environmental challenges. To be trustworthy, GMO regulation must demonstrate the authorities’ ability to manage the scientific, socio-economic, environmental, and ethical complexities and uncertainties associated with NGTs. Regulators and authorities should give equal attention to the reflexive and the emotional aspects of trust and make room for honest public and stakeholder inclusion processes. The European Group of Ethics in Science and Technology’s recent report on the Ethics of Genome Editing (2021) is important in calling attention to a series of fundamental issues that ought to be included in debates on the regulation and use of NGTs to ensure public trust in these technologies and in regulating authorities. With the great power of NGTs comes great responsibility, and the way forward must be grounded in responsible research, innovation, and regulation.

Challenging ‘the elephant in the room’: the becomings of pornography education in Swedish secondary school

ABSTRACT This study was conducted among a group of Swedish teachers and a class of 14–15-year-old students and explored pornography education as part of secondary school sexuality education. Data were generated using mixed methods including teacher-researcher meetings, participant observation in class, student interviews, and teacher evaluation meetings, and were documented in the form of audio-recordings and notes. Donna Haraway’s work on string figuring was used to trace the threads constituting pornography education. A four-threaded string figure materialised how Swedish schools’ gender equality stance could provide a sound foundation for engaging with pornographic material. However, a gender-neutral approach to teaching frustrated these aims. The figure also foregrounded how normative societal debate makes it troublesome to acknowledge other than negative perspectives in teaching, problematised the engagement of students and a focus on pornography. Finally, the figure showed a discrepancy between the curriculum’s overall aim and the goals of subject-specific syllabi, making it troublesome to link the topic of pornography to specific school subjects. In summary, pornography education came into being as a complex figure in relation to adolescent sexuality and the school’s mission to provide a form of sexuality education that both problematises gendered sexual scripts and dominant norms with regards to pornography.

Residing in communal senior housing: situating the ageing self within debates of the universal welfare state

Abstract Currently, Nordic welfare societies are at a crossroads. Ongoing demographic changes – such as ageing, accompanied by challenges in financing adequate services for all – have highlighted the need to consider the roles of citizens and the state in a novel way. Balancing rights and responsibilities has always been at the core of universalism, even though, traditionally, trust in the welfare state's ability to fulfil its basic function of providing necessary services for all has been strong. However, of late, subtle signs of change have become more visible, and in practice, older people's housing and care provisions have been marked by the state's withdrawal. By employing narrative analysis, this study explores, through the experiences of residents in age-related intermediate housing, how older people make use of, negotiate and embed the arguments being made in societal debates on the rights and responsibilities of ageing citizens. The accounts showcase the ways in which these narrators are able to accommodate the sometimes contradictory elements in their narration, accept the demand for increased responsibility for their later-life arrangements and construct plausible portraits of themselves as morally responsible citizens. These subtle negotiations and the acceptance of personal responsibility indicate a change in their perceptions of and expectations from the citizens and the state. Whilst the findings comprise stories of good outcomes, they also question the legitimacy of the current welfare system's universalism and its ability to guide the way to achieve equally good outcomes for all in the future.

Effects of an issue-based microtargeting campaign: A small-scale field experiment in a multi-party setting

Political microtargeting is the subject of heated societal debate but not much is known about its effects, especially in non-US contexts. Microtargeting, used by political actors to send citizens tailored messages, could have the potential to overcome barriers that make generic political messages less effective. In this article, we present a small-scale field experiment, which serves as a case study to illustrate how microtargeting’s effects on citizens could be measured. The field experiment showed that receiving a microtargeted message via postal mail increased likelihood to vote for the microtargeting party, but this increase did not translate into actual votes.

Urban AI in China: Social control or hyper-capitalist development in the post-smart city?

Research and wider societal debates has explored the potentially transformative role of AI in extended social control and hyper-capitalist development in China. In this paper, we use those debates to reflect on experiments with Urban AI in China. The key issue is whether AI offers something distinctive or different compared with the logics and imaginaries of ideas of the smart city. Analysis of emblematic sites of urban AI management in the cities of Shanghai and Hangzhou demonstrates: the resonances and dissonances between urban AI and smart. But they also demonstrate distinctive and complex landscape of urban AI experiments that is not neatly captured in social control and free market applications perspectives on AI. Moreover, the urban experimental contexts in which AI is being rolled, reveal aspirations for creating new “digital empires,” exploring new limits on data power and potential social resistance. The paper makes a distinctive contribution by providing a new framework for comparing logics of computational urban management in the context of emerging AI applications. As such the paper provides a distinctive framework for situating future applications of urban AI management in China and identifies the future urban research priorities.

Manifestations of Social Exclusion in Qualitative Interview Material

Abstract In this article I examine manifestations of social exclusion in qualitative interview material that was gathered in Finland. In the focus are people with a foreign background whose experiences I study with a decolonising approach. Social exclusion manifests itself in diverse ways in the narratives of the interviewees and can be discerned, for example, as related to discriminative and racist attitudes, people’s appearance, colour of the skin, language skills, religion, study skills, work skills, gender, cultural norms, access to education, social class, future perspectives, transactions with the authorities, questions related to the right to stay in the country, or possibilities to obtain citizenship. The experiences of the interviewees embody a need of further examination of colonialist legacy in the Finnish context, a call for more monitoring and control of institutional structures involved in discriminative measures imposed on people with a foreign background, as well as wider societal debate when it comes to stereotypes and bias that can lead to social exclusion.

What Factors Influence the Interest in Working in the Public Health Service in Germany? Part I of the OeGD-Studisurvey.

As in many European countries, the Public Health Service (PHS) in Germany has had considerable difficulties in attracting well-qualified personnel for decades. Despite ongoing political and societal debate, limited empirical research on possible causes and explanations is available. To identify areas of action, we explored reasons for the (lack of) interest in working in the PHS by conducting two cross-sectional surveys among 3019 medical students (MS), public health students, and students from other PHS-relevant fields (PH&ONM) in Germany right before (wave 1, 2019/2020) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (wave 2, 2021). While interest in working in the PHS among MS was low, it was considerably higher among PH&ONM. The prevalent underestimation of the importance of public health and low levels of knowledge about the PHS were identified as potential barriers. Although core activities of the PHS were often considered attractive, they were repeatedly not attributed to the PHS. A negative perception of the PHS (e.g., it being too bureaucratic) was prevalent among students with and without PHS interest, indicating that both a negative image and potentially structural deficits need to be overcome to increase attractiveness. Based on the findings, we propose approaches on how to sustainably attract and retain qualified personnel.

The social tensions felt within: Explaining felt ambivalence about polarized societal debates through perceived opinion discrepancies in the social environment.

Within the context of polarized societal debates (e.g. abortion, racism, climate change), scholars often assume that individuals have clear-cut positions, either in favour of or against the debated issue. However, recent work suggests that such debates can also be breeding grounds for felt ambivalence. Moving beyond previous work that mainly focused on ambivalence as internal cognitive conflict, we propose and test a social discrepancy hypothesis, which suggests that the discrepancies ambivalents perceive between and within their own opinion and the opinion of actors in their social network and society (e.g. friends, family, opinion-based groups) positively explain their levels of felt ambivalence. In doing so, we quantitatively extend recent qualitative work by examining whether these social tensions are indeed felt within. To this end, we employed a multi-survey research project (Ns=184, 181, 187) in the context of different societal debates in the Netherlands. Supporting our hypothesis across different debates, results showed that ambivalents' perceived opinion differences in the social environment explained their felt ambivalence. This suggests that polarized societal debates offer social discrepancies that, for ambivalents at least, can facilitate an internalization of social tensions.

The why and how of trustworthy AI

Abstract Artificial intelligence is increasingly penetrating industrial applications as well as areas that affect our daily lives. As a consequence, there is a need for criteria to validate whether the quality of AI applications is sufficient for their intended use. Both in the academic community and societal debate, an agreement has emerged under the term “trustworthiness” as the set of essential quality requirements that should be placed on an AI application. At the same time, the question of how these quality requirements can be operationalized is to a large extent still open. In this paper, we consider trustworthy AI from two perspectives: the product and organizational perspective. For the former, we present an AI-specific risk analysis and outline how verifiable arguments for the trustworthiness of an AI application can be developed. For the second perspective, we explore how an AI management system can be employed to assure the trustworthiness of an organization with respect to its handling of AI. Finally, we argue that in order to achieve AI trustworthiness, coordinated measures from both product and organizational perspectives are required.

Moderate support for the use of digital tracking to support climate-mitigation strategies

The use of digital tracking of individuals throughout the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic renewed societal debates on the efficacy and ethics of digital surveillance to mitigate collective crises. While digital emissions tracking is being used to support climate-mitigation strategies, to date there has been limited exploration of the opportunities and challenges of deploying it at the individual level. Here, we assess temporal and regional differences in levels of support for the use of digital surveillance in times of crisis, such as climate change. Results from a global survey indicate moderate support for the use of digital tracking, including for personal carbon footprints. Response varied regionally, with the lowest support in North America and Europe. This study raises key questions—if digital surveillance tools could be part of a socially acceptable response to the climate crisis, is it worth exploring? Or is this an unacceptable risk for society?

Whistleblower protection in the digital age - why “anonymous” is not enough.

When technology enters applications and processes with a long tradition of controversial societal debate, multi- faceted new ethical and legal questions arise. This paper focusses on the process of whistleblowing, an activity with large impacts on democracy and business. Computer science can, for the first time in history, provide for truly anonymous communication. We investigate this in relation to the values and rights of accountability, fairness and data protection, focusing on opportunities and limitations of the anonymity that can be provided computationally; possible consequences of outsourcing whistleblowing support; and challenges for the interpretation and use of some relevant laws. We conclude that to address these questions, whistleblowing and anonymous whistleblowing must rest on three pillars, forming a “triangle of whistleblowing protection and incentivisation” that combines anonymity in a formal and technical sense; whistleblower protection through laws; and other norms and practices including organisational error culture.

Battered by Geopolitical Winds, Bulgaria Struggles to Restart Much Needed Reforms

Battered by Geopolitical Winds, Bulgaria Struggles to Restart Much Needed Reforms

In Search of Scholarly Impact

In Search of Scholarly Impact

Technology Adaptation and IoT: The Role of Actors in Technological Innovation Systems

Sustainability and its impact is one of the dominant contemporary societal debates of our times. “Internet of things” (IoT) technology has the potential to establish a more efficient and effective resource usage in many domains and is, therefore, considered a “game-changer” towards a greener future. However, in several domains its adaptation still lacks behind its potential. Within innovation systems, actors act as key drivers of IoT implementation play an important role but are, yet, an under researched area. Consequently, we investigate actor preferences and identify adaptation hurdles in the energy sector. By applying a multi-actor-multi-criteria methodology we find that while governments, grid operators, and public organizations favour fast implementation, households and low-tech firms prefer incremental implementation. Eventually, we make suggestions for future research and how to address the implementation hurdles. These results suggest that governments need to focus on addressing behaviour shift of specific actors to reach higher IoT implantation speed.

Epidemiological Profile of Child Victims of Abuse: Case of the City of Yaoundé, Cameroon

Purpose: Better prevention of child abuse requires knowledge of risk factors and situations. The general objective of this study was to determine the relative frequency of child abuse in Yaoundé and to draw its epidemiological profile.
 Methodology: the researchers conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2019, i.e., 5 years, in 4 referral hospitals in Yaoundé. All records of victims of abuse under the age of 18 years were included. The data collected were analyzed using Epi-info TM version 7.2 software. Ethical clearance was obtained to conduct our study.
 Findings: Of the 19,187 usable records, child abuse victims represented 0.68% (132). Most of the victims were female (121; 91.7%), under 11 years of age (106; 80.3%), middle siblings (46; 35.0%) and HIV infection was the most common medical history at 17.4% (23). The accompanying person for the first consultation was their mother (72/132; 54.5%). Four (3.0%) children had lost both parents. The main antecedent related to the legal guardian was HIV seropositivity, 70.2% (66/94).
 Conclusion: Child abuse, far from being negligible, concerned primarily girls under 11 years of age. HIV infection was a factor found in both the child victim and the legal guardian in our context.
 Recommendations: Pay particular attention to children outside marriage or living in a blended family. Encourage societal debates around the abuse suffered by children.

Bow-tie structures of twitter discursive communities

Bow-tie structures were introduced to describe the World Wide Web (WWW): in the direct network in which the nodes are the websites and the edges are the hyperlinks connecting them, the greatest number of nodes takes part to a bow-tie, i.e. a Weakly Connected Component (WCC) composed of 3 main sectors: IN, OUT and SCC. SCC is the main Strongly Connected Component of WCC, i.e. the greatest subgraph in which each node is reachable by any other one. The IN and OUT sectors are the set of nodes not included in SCC that, respectively, can access and are accessible to nodes in SCC. In the WWW, the greatest part of the websites can be found in the SCC, while the search engines belong to IN and the authorities, as Wikipedia, are in OUT. In the analysis of Twitter debate, the recent literature focused on discursive communities, i.e. clusters of accounts interacting among themselves via retweets. In the present work, we studied discursive communities in 8 different thematic Twitter datasets in various languages. Surprisingly, we observed that almost all discursive communities therein display a bow-tie structure during political or societal debates. Instead, they are absent when the argument of the discussion is different as sport events, as in the case of Euro2020 Turkish and Italian datasets. We furthermore analysed the quality of the content created in the various sectors of the different discursive communities, using the domain annotation from the fact-checking website Newsguard: we observe that, when the discursive community is affected by m/disinformation, the content with the lowest quality is the one produced and shared in SCC and, in particular, a strong incidence of low- or non-reputable messages is present in the flow of retweets between the SCC and the OUT sectors. In this sense, in discursive communities affected by m/disinformation, the greatest part of the accounts has access to a great variety of contents, but whose quality is, in general, quite low; such a situation perfectly describes the phenomenon of infodemic, i.e. the access to “an excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution”, according to WHO.

Large increases of multi-year droughts in north-western Europe in a warmer climate

Three consecutive dry summers in western Europe (2018–2019–2020) had widespread negative impacts on society and ecosystems, and started societal debate on (changing) drought vulnerability and adaptation measures. We investigate the occurrence of multi-year droughts in the Rhine basin, with a focus on event probability in the present and in future warmer climates. Additionally, we investigate the temporally compounding physical drivers of multi-year drought events. A combination of multiple reanalysis datasets and multi-model large ensemble climate model simulations was used to provide a robust analysis of the statistics and physical processes of these rare events. We identify two types of multi-year drought events (consecutive meteorological summer droughts and long-duration hydrological droughts), and show that these occur on average about twice in a 30 year period in the present climate, though natural variability is large (zero to five events can occur in a single 30 year period). Projected decreases in summer precipitation and increases in atmospheric evaporative demand, lead to a doubling of event probability at 1 ^circC additional global warming relative to present-day and an increase in the average length of events. Consecutive meteorological summer droughts are forced by two, seemingly independent, summers of lower than normal precipitation and higher than normal evaporative demand. The soil moisture response to this temporally compound meteorological forcing has a clear multi-year imprint, resulting in a relatively larger reduction of soil moisture content in the second year of drought, and potentially more severe drought impacts. Long-duration hydrological droughts start with a severe summer drought followed by lingering meteorologically dry conditions. This limits and slows down the hydrological recovery of soil moisture content, leading to long-lasting drought conditions. This initial exploration provides avenues for further investigation of multi-year drought hazard and vulnerability in the region, which is advised given the projected trends and vulnerability of society and ecosystems.

Restore politics in societal debates on new genomic techniques

End of April 2021, the European Commission published its study on New Genomic Techniques (NGTs). The study involved a consultation of Member States and stakeholders. This study reveals a split on whether current legislation should be maintained or adapted to take account of scientific progress and the risk level of NGT products. This split was predictable. New technological developments challenge both ethical viewpoints and regulatory institutions; and contribute to the growing divide between science and society that value ‘technological innovations’ differently. Such controversies are often characterized as ‘unstructured’ because of nearly unbridgeable positions on entangled scientific and value-laden issues. Initiatives for stakeholder involvement, such as consultation or participation, often focus on reaching a ‘shared vision’ without exploring the diverse societal concerns and values behind these positions. To resolve the EU stalemate in NGT regulation, we advocate to bring back politics in the EU decision-making process instead of hiding it under the veil of science, the need for regulatory change and public support. A more productive and justified use of genuine stakeholder participation is possible, if participants and deliberation design meet the criteria of what we call participation ethics. Drawing from our applied experience exploring the ethics of genetic modification, we believe that this approach can lead to more robust political decision-making and restore societal confidence in the governance of contested issues such as NGTs.

Deconstructing age(s): an analysis of the different conceptions of age as a legal criterion for access to assisted reproductive technologies.

Whether there should be restrictions for access to Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) is a matter of continuous medical, societal, and ethico-legal debate. One of the most controversial topics in this context is the use of parental age as a criterion to limit access to ART. Views are divided on whether there should be an upper age limit for one or both parents and on where such limits should be. Although this debate is centered around the issue of 'age' and although age-related limits are present in many legislations, the intrinsic ambiguity of the term `age' is largely overlooked. In this article, we build on gerontological, medical, and sociological literature on the concepts of 'age' and 'aging' to distinguish three conceptions of age that are relevant for ART regulation: the chronological, the biological, and the social-cultural one. Beyond mapping out these conceptions of age, we describe how they relate to ART and reproduction, and illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of relying on each of them as a basis for limiting ART access. Finally, we propose a template for defining legal age limits for ART access in the law, based on the refined understanding of the different conceptions of age that we outline and we discuss two potential objections to our proposal.

Perspectives on biotechnology: Public and corporate narratives in the GM archives

Societal Impact StatementThe contentious debate over genetically modified (GM) crops in Britain has entered a new era following Brexit and the development of gene editing. At the same time, the events of the 1980s and 1990s are now entering historical archives, including the GM Archive at the Science Museum in London. This article explores how fears of unnaturalness and arguments from historical continuity informed the British GM controversy. It also analyses the limitations of these modern archives. The concerns surrounding the naturalness and continuity of biotechnology have recently been resurrected following suggestions that gene editing will be employed in plant breeding.Summary This research examines the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops to Britain, including the backlash from environmentalist groups and the public that led to a de facto government moratorium on their commercialisation in 1998. Harnessing archival materials from the Science Museum's GM Archive, this paper shows that GM was viewed as an alien or unnatural technology in Britain, while campaigns from Monsanto and scientific supporters of GM attempted to show how recombinant DNA technology was simply the latest step in a long history of plant breeding. By moving outside the archive, it becomes clear that the creation of this narrative from continuity was a standard industry strategy. Appeals to the history of plant breeding was a strategy adopted by Monsanto well before the British GM controversy, while twentieth‐century food scares had already undermined public trust in government and industry. Public concern over the naturalness of biotechnology remains. Meanwhile, contemporary advocates of gene editing have begun to make similar arguments to those deployed in the 1990s, highlighting the similarity of gene editing to natural variation and selection.