This book explores how parents understand and engage with childhood vaccination in contrasting global contexts. This rapidly advancing and universal technology has sparked dramatic controversy, whether over MMR in the UK or oral polio vaccines in Nigeria. Combining a fresh anthropological perspective with detailed field research, the book examines anxieties emerging as highly globalized vaccine technologies and technocracies encounter the deeply intimate personal and social worlds of parenting and childcare, and how these are part of transforming science-society relations. It retheorizes...

Since September 11, governments and the public have raised serious concerns about scientific research in the life sciences that might be used by state, sub-state or terrorist organizations in the development of biological or chemical weapons. These concerns have sparked a vigorous debate about the control, regulation and governance of scientific research in the life sciences. This state-of-the-art volume examines the full extent of the issues and debates, analysing what we have and haven't learned from the past. It includes an overview of recent scientific achievements in virology,...

Across the globe, controversies around vaccines exemplify anxieties thrown up by new technologies. Whether it is growing parental concerns over the MMR vaccine in the UK or Nigerian communities refusing polio vaccines???associating them with genocidal policies???these controversies feed the cornerstone debates of our time concerning trust in government, media responsibility, scientific impartiality, citizen science, parental choice and government enforcement.

This book is a groundbreaking examination of how parents are reflecting on and engaging with vaccination, a...

Focusing on the most widespread and persistent technology - chemicals - this volume peels apart the technology debate to look at the relationship between humans, technology and the Earth.

Since the mid 1990s, agricultural biotechnology - GM crops and foods - has been the focus of debate and conflict in many European countries. This title presents a series of comparative perspectives on the social, ethical and legal implications of genomics. It intends to capture lessons from the controversies of the 1990s.

This text takes stock of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology, and the complex ethical and legal questions facing governments, the public, investors and businesses worldwide.

Lessons and practical tools for successful environmental and other policy formulation in all jurisdictions for governments, professionals, researchers and post-graduate students.

As greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and contentious voices fill the air, the question gains urgency: How can people with widely varying viewpoints agree to address climate change? Each participant in the debate seems to have a different agenda, from protecting economic growth in developing countries to protecting the energy industry in industrialized countries, from those aghast at the damage done to the Earth to optimists who think we just need to adjust our technological approach. Debating Climate Change sorts through the tangle of arguments surrounding climate change to...

In Rationality and Ritual, internationally renowned expert Brian Wynne offers a profound analysis of science and technology policymaking. By focusing on an episode of major importance in Britain's nuclear history - the Windscale Inquiry, a public hearing about the future of fuel reprocessing - he offers a powerful critique of such judicial procedures and the underlying assumptions of the rationalist approach.

This second edition makes available again this classic and still very relevant work. Debates about nuclear power have come to the fore once again. Yet we still do not...

In Rationality and Ritual, internationally renowned expert Brian Wynne offers a profound analysis of science and technology policymaking. By focusing on an episode of major importance in Britain's nuclear history - the Windscale Inquiry, a public hearing about the future of fuel reprocessing - he offers a powerful critique of such judicial procedures and the underlying assumptions of the rationalist approach.

This second edition makes available again this classic and still very relevant work. Debates about nuclear power have come to the fore once again. Yet we still do not...