Nanotechnology and Global Sustainability

Dr. Donnie Maclurcan is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Institute for Nanoscale Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, Distinguished Fellow with the U.K.-based Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, and Co-Founder of the Post Growth Institute – an international network inspiring and equipping people to explore paths to global prosperity that do not rely on economic growth. With fieldwork in Thailand and Australia, his Ph.D. from the University of Technology, Sydney, was an original and comprehensive assessment of nanotechnology’s possible consequences for global inequity. This work developed into the book Nanotechnology and Global Equality (2011) and research that has been translated into more than 20 languages. He is a past member of the Global Nanotechnology Taskforce on Implications and Policy, was Interim Chair of the International Free and Open Source Software Foundation, and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in 2010. In 2006 he founded Project Australia – a community organization helping people launch not-for-profit initiatives. He later launched Australia’s first professional speakers’ bureau for social innovators, uThinc.Dr. Natalia Radywyl is a social researcher and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, and Adjunct Research Fellow in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. As someone working across multiple disciplines, sectors and projects, Natalia advocates the role of critically-informed design, and seeking a common language to design for positive change. With interests in spatial and communications design, Natalia specialises in ethnographic approaches to understanding user experience and facilitating public engagement. Recent research includes her Ph.D. Moving Images, the Museum and a Politics of Movement (2008), which employed ethnography, social theory and cultural policy analysis to appraise visitor experience and codify the spatial ecology in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne; visitor engagement with urban screens and public space (2009-10); and viewer engagement with social media in the context of Australian public broadcasting (2011). As a social researcher she also has a strong grounding in policy, and consults to government on public behaviour change and agenda-setting. Natalia’s practice and research approaches are reflected in the interdisciplinary projects she has completed; these span languages, publishing, performance, music, interactive media and installation art. Natalia has also lectured in new media, media policy, theories of consumption and urban culture, and continues to publish about the role public institutions - such as broadcasters, museums and common urban spaces - play in mediating meaningful experiences in everyday life.

• Section I: LimitsNanotechnology and Limits to Growth. Nanotechnology and the Environment. Nanotechnology and Traditional Knowledge Systems.Section II: CapacityNanotechnology and Geopolitics: There’s Plenty of Room at the Top. Nanotechnology, Agriculture, and Food. Poor Man’s Nanotechnology—From the Bottom Up (Thailand).Section III: AppropriatenessNanotechnology and Global Health. Toward Pro-Poor Nano-Innovation (Zimbabwe, Peru, Nepal). Open Source Appropriate Nanotechnology.Section IV: GovernanceNanotechnology and Risk. Nanotechnology and State Regulation (India). Nanotechnology and Global Regulation. Nanotechnology without Growth.

"This is a field dominated by journal articles and popular periodicals. This book is a major step toward correcting that problem. [It exhibits] interdisciplinarity, focus on sustainability, and balanced perspectives. … This volume uses the interdisciplinary lens of sustainability to assess the promises and pitfalls presented by the emergence of nanotechnology…Despite the enormous potential of nanotechnology for good and for harm, there has been woefully little critical analytical attention paid to its social and environmental implications. This volume is an important corrective to that inattention. This book starts a dialogue that is absolutely vital if we are to have hope for democratic participation in determining the role, purpose, and direction of technological innovation." — Kenneth A. Gould, City University of New York—Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, USA