Making Futures Present: Co-producing Nano & Society

Nanotechnologies as a new field have entered the public stage on the background of debates around the entanglement of science, technology and society. Three starting obersvations are central: First we understand technoscience and society as co-produced, thus our ways of knowing and representing the world and our ways to live in it are closely tied together. Second, knowledge production is increasingly perceived as taking place in the context of application. Finally, new regimes of governing science and technology in contemporary societies including the introduction of increased public participation are called for. But also expectations and anticipation of potential technoscientific futures have come to play a central role in both building scientific and technological endeavours but also in the corresponding interaction between technoscience and society. Thus the very processes of making futures present as well as the creation of a "market of technoscientific promises" are crucial mecha-nism to investigate. Nanotechnologies are indeed of particular interest when wanting to study changing relations between science and society: From its very beginning, the Nano-field is closely interwoven with broader cul-tural narratives connecting technoscientific visions with both utopian and dystopian social imaginations. Second, as an enabling technology, Nano crosses a broad range of disciplines and potential fields of application, thus being confronted with multiple technoscientific and societal framings. Finally, nanotechnologies and their policy and public debates have to live with the historical precedent of the GMO case, which often provides a framework against which the societal dealing with Nano is assessed. Using a broad spectrum of qualitative methodologies-from interviews over scenario workshops to discourse analysis-this project`s focus will thus be on the very processes-be they individual or more collective-through which stakeholders such as researchers and policy makers as well as members of a broader public construct and assess the future potential as well as the potential futures of nanotechnologies. What ressources do they use to construct and evaluate their future prospects? In what cultural, media and policy contexts do these articulations of Nano & society take place and how do they feed into the assessments of the different actors involved? What value systems are refered to? How are these assessments interrelated with scientific work, policy making as well as with laypeople`s imaginations of relevant and welcomed innovations? What are their imaginations about adequate froms of governance and participation? These are but a few of the core questions to be addressed. In approaching them we will focus much less on risk discouses than on the very imaginations gravitating around technoscientific innovation in contemporary societies. Finally, our findings will be contextualised with the growing literature of case studies carried out in other countries and we will consider in how far the assessment of Nano should be seen as a globally framed phenomenon and on what levels it is more local and culturally rooted.

At the beginning of the 21st century nanotechnology was perceived as an important field of future innovations, with considerable potential to solve societal problems. The aim of this project was to investigate how scientists and citizens assess the potential of such new developments, but also their problems and limits. Posing the how question was central and meant investigating on the basis of which kinds of knowledge and experiences, but also on the basis of which values assessments were made.To address these questions we did interviews and group discussions with researchers and citizens as well as an analysis of policy documents and mass media articles on the topic. For the latter it is worthwhile mentioning, that compared to international debates, in Austria the public debates over nanotechnology have remained quite uncritical.We developed a specific method for the group discussions with citizens, which in a game-like environment allowed participants with little acquaintance with nanotechnology to develop a balanced position. Our results point to the fact that individual experiences, but also collective societal positions towards specific technologies played an important role in assessing nanotechnologies. Citizens in our discussion groups actually developed rather differentiated perceptions of nanotechnologys different areas of application. Nanomedicine with the exception of human enhancement was virtually unanimously welcomed, the fear mainly being a 2-class medicine with unequal access. Nano-food was addressed much more critically. Here, the debate gravitated not so much around risks, but rather around the issue of how food is connected to cultural identity, in particular in the Austrian context. It was quite surprising that nanotechnology in the area of information and communication technologies and surveillance was hardly problematized. In general we witnessed citizens who carefully pondered over their position and did rework it throughout the process.In the interviews with researchers it was striking that besides progress narratives little thought was spent on societal aspects and consequences, and this despite the dense discourse on the necessary engagement with questions of science and society in politics and in other research areas. This could be related to the fact that most of the interviewed researchers did stress that they were doing nano research, but that they did not really perceive themselves as being nano researchers. Instead they positioned themselves within their respective discipline of origin and saw no reason to engage with the societal consequences of this new research field.