(Low) Expectations, Legitimization, and the Contingent Uses of Scientific Knowledge: Engagements with Neuroscience in Scottish Social Policy and Services
(Low) Expectations, Legitimization, and the Contingent Uses of Scientific Knowledge: Engagements with Neuroscience in Scottish Social Policy and Services
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DOI：
10.17351/ests2015.003
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发表时间：
2015-01-01
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Pickersgill, Martyn
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Broer, Tineke;Pickersgill, Martyn
神经科学研究日益激发了政策制定者的想象力和希望。虽然在神经科学的基础上提出的各种断言已经被很好地记录下来，但较少被探索的是关于大脑研究的更多偶然的论述。在这篇文章中，我们分析了社会政策和服务参与者如何用神经科学术语、概念和发现来讨论他们的参与。例如，动员这些机构是为了充实和扩大现有政策的重点--例如，为不同的目标群体(如婴儿、刚退休的人等)吸引资金--以及帮助制定(新的)政策和服务。我们展示了，在这样做的过程中，引用神经科学可以如何协调政策参与者、实践者和父母之间的“相互想象的理解”。试探性和矛盾心理也出现在受访者对神经科学使用的描述中。他们认为，研究必须简化，以便使其与更广泛的利益攸关方(包括政客)相关，同时认为简化在某些情况下是有问题的。我们的分析突出了与神经科学的政策和服务接触中涉及的不同复杂性、矛盾、简化和工具化，使任何关于神经科学研究(关于)的想法在线性意义上决定政策的观点都是具有挑战性的。
Neuroscientific research increasingly sparks the imaginations and hopes of policymakers. Whilst the diversity of assertive statements being made on the basis of neuroscience has been well documented, less frequently explored are more contingent discourses regarding studies of the brain. In this paper, we analyze how social policy and service actors discuss their engagements with neuroscientific terms, concepts and findings. These are mobilized, for one, to substantiate and enlarge the focus of existing policy-for example to attract funding for different target groups (such as babies, people who just retired, etc.)-as well as to help develop (new) policies and services. We show how, in so doing, invocation of the neurosciences can act to align "mutual imagined understandings" among policy actors, practitioners and parents. Tentativeness and ambivalence also figured within our respondents' accounts of the use of the neurosciences. They argued that research had to be simplified in order to make it relevant for wider stakeholders (including politicians), whilst simultaneously considering simplification problematic in some cases. Our analysis foregrounds the different complexities, ambivalences, reductions and instrumentalizations involved in policy and service engagements with the neurosciences, rendering challengeable any notion that (ideas about) neuroscientific research "determines" policy in a linear sense.