Dissertation Grant: Land-grant scientists and controversial agricultural biotechnologies

农业科学家面临着公众对基因工程的关注，从人类和环境安全问题到食品供应公司化问题。这些研究人员必须找到导航这种审查的方法，同时试图使他们的研究符合科学和社会目标。该项目将研究赠地大学的学术科学家如何以明确的公共焦点调整他们的工作，以满足多种科学和公共需求。一名社会科学家将与农业研究人员一起工作，帮助他们反思自己的角色、责任和工作的意义。这将被用来产生一个嵌入式社会科学研究的新模式，鼓励科学家批判性地思考他们的工作实时的道德影响。其结果将是对科学家如何管理涉及有争议的技术的研究项目和将社会科学家嵌入自然科学团体以提高科学和社会效益的新方法的丰富理解。该项目将联合收割机访谈和人种学观察相结合，以产生一套深入的农业科学家在陆地上从事基因工程工作的概况。赠款大学捕捉不同版本的是什么意思是一个土地赠款科学家在新兴农业生物技术的背景下工作。它将这些分析置于赠地大学、民主专业主义、生物技术的政治经济学以及控制和责任的科学思想的深深交织的历史中。这一理论框架通过考虑科学家们在“封闭”的现场试验和封闭的实验室之外所进行的相互作用，挑战了传统的实验室实践研究的界限。该项目有助于新兴技术和实验室研究，以及公众参与和民主理论的奖学金。它还创建了一个社会科学家在自然科学研究中的嵌入式模型，利用科学和技术研究的想法，为科学家提供参与其研究的社会和伦理层面的机会。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Agricultural scientists face public concerns around genetic engineering, which range from questions about human and environmental safety to corporatization of the food supply. These researchers must find ways of navigating such scrutiny while attempting to make their research meet both scientific and social goals. This project will examine how academic scientists at land-grant universities, with their explicitly public focus, adapt their work with controversial technologies to meet multiple scientific and public needs. A social scientist will be embedded with the agricultural researchers to help them reflect on their roles, responsibilities, and the meanings of their work. This will be used to produce a new model of embedded social science research that encourages scientists to think critically about the ethical impacts of their work in real-time. The result will be an enriched understanding of how scientists manage research programs involving controversial technologies and new methods for embedding social scientists in natural science groups to enhance benefits for science and society.This project will combine interviews and ethnographic observations to produce a set of in-depth profiles of agricultural scientists working in genetic engineering at land-grant universities to capture differing versions of what it means to be a land-grant scientist working in the context of emergent agricultural biotechnologies. It situates these analyses within the deeply intertwined histories of the land-grant university, democratic professionalism, the political economy of biotechnology, and scientific ideas of control and responsibility. This theoretical framework challenges the boundaries of traditional studies of laboratory practices by considering the interactions scientists engage in beyond their “contained” field trials and walled-off laboratories. This project contributes to scholarship on emerging technologies and laboratory studies, and on public engagement and democratic theory. It also creates an embedded model of social scientists in natural science research that uses ideas from science and technology studies to open opportunities for engagement with scientists about the social and ethical dimensions of their research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.