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担忧，其中包括从人类和环境安全到食品供应公司化的问题。这些研究人员在试图使他们的研究满足科学和社会目标的同时，必须找到驾驭这种审查的方法。该项目将研究赠地大学的学术科学家如何利用有争议的技术调整他们的工作，以满足多种科学和公共需求，这些大学明确以公共为重点。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。这将用于产生一种嵌入式社会科学研究的新模式，鼓励科学家实时批判性地思考他们工作的伦理影响。结果将是对科学家如何管理涉及有争议技术的研究项目和将社会科学家嵌入自然科学小组以提高科学和社会效益的新方法的丰富理解。该项目将结合访谈和人种学观察，为在赠地大学从事基因工程工作的农业科学家提供一套深入的资料，以捕捉在新兴农业生物技术背景下工作的赠地科学家的不同版本。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刻交织的历史中。这一理论框架挑战了传统实验室实践研究的界限，考虑了科学家在“封闭”的实地试验和封闭的实验室之外所参与的相互作用。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方面的学术研究。它还为自然科学研究中的社会科学家创建了一个嵌入式模型，该模型利用科学和技术研究中的思想，为与科学家就其研究的社会和伦理维度进行接触提供了机会。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.