To be Politicized, Or Not to Be. That is the Question

As I am presenting this week, I thought it would be useful to use this blog post to discuss politicized science as defined by Mark Brown as I have some issues with part of it.

To being with, there are three necessary and sufficient criteria that make science politicized: power, conflict  (over values and interests), and public.  Little emphasis is placed this last criteria, but it seems that without the public, there would be need to worry about politicized science. Brown does state how this definition is misleading as it assumes that science can be politics free. Even research that meticulously follows the scientific method has politics in it, even if just the hierarchy of the lab and lab funding.

Brown places a lot of emphasis on the first criteria: power. It is easy for science to become political as most sociotechnical issues revolve around power. Brown thought it would be useful to look at what is it not. Science won’t be political when there is:

• No conflict and no power: ie. Everyday/ordinary life
• Conflict but no power: ie. When a conflict is resolved trough open discussion and/or consensus.
• Power but no conflict: ie. Things that are latently political; conflict is suppressed

Foucault would say such a description is impossible if not erroneous. For Foucault, everything has power intertwined in it.

Taking this, in science advisory boards, when conflict of opinion is solved amicably through open and fair discussion, it is not political. From here, one way to prevent politicized in general is to equalize of power via collegial harmony and public acceptance. This seems almost an Utopian view of science and politics. I might be wrong, but even with a consensus is built, power and conflict are still in existence.

Brown also asks if this politicized definition implies this process is reversible? Now, Brown never comes back to address if it is reversible and how this could be done.  What the author does leave us is his ultimate goal for this book:  not to eliminate politics of expertise but to embed it. In essence, it might be reversible, but Brown doesn’t want to do that.

I think one major issue Brown seems to have is that he jumps around in the book from individual power to state level power. At time he focuses on national power and forgets about individual power. Other times, he focuses too much on individual power.