Science and Public Reason

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. A pioneer in legal and political studies of science and technology, she has written many widely cited articles and chapters and is author or editor of a dozen books, including The Fifth Branch (Harvard University Press), Science at the Bar (Harvard University Press), and Designs on Nature (Princeton University Press).

• 1.  Public Reason  2. Product, Process, or Programme  3. In the Democracies of DNA  4. Restoring Reason  5. Image and Imagination  6.  Contested Boundaries in Policy-Relevant Science  7.  The Songlines of Risk  8. Judgment under Siege  9. Technologies of Humility  10.  What Judges Should Know about the Sociology of Science  11.  Expert Games in Silicone Gel Breast Implant Litigation  12.  The Eye of Everyman  13. In a Constitutional Moment:  Science and Social Order at the Millennium

'This collection brings together a quarter century of writing by Sheila Jasanoff on the sources and impacts of science and technology. In showing how they permeate public life, she demonstrates also that the field of Science and Technology Studies is no arcane specialty, but a research field of sweeping significance for law, history, administration, and the social sciences. At stake in the interactions of science with democratic institutions is public reason itself.' - Theodore M. Porter, UCLA, USA'This book fascinatingly asks: What begins where all that seems solid, all that modernity has created, melts into air, leaving no shared ground to stand on? Sheila Jasanoff's exciting answer: a new age and style of public reason that can shed surprisingly clear light on a world in turmoil.' - Ulrich Beck, University of Munich, Germany & L.S.E, U.K'No one has contributed as much as Sheila Jasanoff to furthering our understanding of the importance of law in the complex relationships that develop between politics and technoscience. Science and Public Reason is more than a collection of her most significant articles on the subject; this seminal book opens entirely original perspectives on what, in a globalized world, a new alliance between science, techniques and democracy could and should be.' - Michel Callon, Ecole des mines de Paris, France‘Sheila Jasanoff’s latest book demonstrates, once again, why she is at the very forefront of her field.’ - Bruce Ackerman, Yale University, USA