Skip diving or food waste: which is the bigger crime?

The practice of ‘skipping’ or ‘skip diving’ features intermittently in the news. Often an intrepid reporter dons his or her warm clothes and pals up with a group of skip divers or freegans for a midnight raid of some supermarket bins.

It all seems a bit of a joke when written up as a faux adventure into urban hippy lifestyles, but the issue of food waste is of pressing concern both locally and internationally and shouldn’t be taken so lightly.

Indeed, in the coming months three men, Paul May, Jason Chan and William James, will face trial for taking waste food from a skip behind an Iceland store. [After writing this post the Crown Prosecution Service decided to drop the charges, partly at the behest of Iceland, whose CEO made the request because the brand image was being damaged by public outcry at the prosecutions.]

Although initially arrested for burglary they will be charged under the 1824 Vagrancy Act for being in an enclosed area for an unlawful purpose. The three men took waste food totalling a value of around £33 and consisting of low-value items like tomatoes, mushrooms and Mr Kipling cakes.

Throughout the chain of food supply and demand there is food waste, from so-called ‘losses’ during harvesting, threshing and storage, through to the food that we, as consumers, leave on our plates at the end of a meal.

The oft-cited figure is that one third of food produced globally is wasted, amounting to around 1.3 billion tonnes.

In much of the academic literature and in the media the cause of food waste is the ignorant or vain consumer who fails to prepare food from fresh ingredients or throws out the less aesthetically pleasing banana at the bottom of the bowl. But even food left on the table or left to rot in the fridge cannot easily be attributed solely to wasteful consumer practices.

First, supermarkets are notorious for controlling the supply chain in ways that suit their brand image. Fruit, vegetables and other fresh foods end up as feed for cattle rather than humans because it doesn’t have the right look. Of course, supermarkets then sell food to consumers based on these aesthetic ideals which become entangled with concepts of quality, nutrition and feeding your family properly. But a wonky carrot is no less nutritious than a straight one.

The issue is further compounded when one considers the way in which supermarket supply chains and aesthetics of branding are understood as part of the global organisation of agriculture and consumption.

Reports that farmers in countries like Kenya can be wasting up to 40% of their crops because of corporate requirements for food size, shape and packaging should surely give us pause to think about the ways in which our consumption is shaped by norms of beauty, the ‘natural’ and taste. This kind of food waste comes about because of the extraordinary power that multinational corporations are able to exercise over growers.

Second, food consumption like other forms of consumption has to be understood as part of a dynamic and complex set of social practices that are connected to the management of neoliberal globalised societies. Too often the contemporary obsession with consumer choice and individual responsibility is used to lay blame at the feet of individual consumers for making bad choices.

However, individuals live within these webs of interrelated practices and cannot easily make choices about food purchasing, preparation, eating and disposal without also altering some rather obstinate norms and structures in the material, temporal and spatial dimensions of the family, care, health, illness and work.

David Evans from the University of Manchester has conducted work that is exemplary in this regard and challenges the idea that people waste food because they don’t care about it or are ignorant of problems we face with food wastage.

Indeed, his research suggests that people often do care about the food they waste but have to live within regulatory structures. Some are encouraged to adopt norms around health, for example by not eating products past their use-by dates.

We all also have to prepare food in ways that can fit our working and personal lives. For example, Evans relates the difficulties and decision-making processes of a young woman living alone as she tries to avoid food waste.

For her, ingredients for freshly-prepared meals waste too quickly. Unpredictably long working days, commuting home and exhaustion mean that the prospect of cooking a whole meal from scratch is difficult to stomach. A microwave portion for one would be so much easier and quicker.

So norms around nutrition and health lead her to buy vegetables and other ingredients that then go to waste because those norms don’t sit easily with other practices of managing time, space and work.

So skip diving doesn’t seem so silly, outlandish or – let’s be honest – criminal when seen against the background of corporate and social practices that structure our consumption of food. When supermarkets are throwing out literally tonnes of food because it has gone past its sell-by date, looks wrong or has damaged packaging it isn’t a crime for someone to make good use of this waste.

Skip diving and freeganism often do involve a whole scale shirking of contemporary practices of living and working.

I’d argue that this is because so much of what goes into food waste is interconnected in ways that is difficult to change without just rejecting it outright.

Blaming faulty consumers or criminalising skip diving is getting us nowhere. We need to change the way that food is managed throughout our practices – yes at the levels of local consumption but also all the way up to international production.

Forget the arcane laws about vagrancy – the real crime is systemic waste.

Tough on Crime? Lie detector programme for sex offenders doesn’t hold all the answers.

The Coalition has decided to drop the privatisation of polygraph, or ‘lie-detector’ tests for sex offenders. But the continued use of this flawed technology within the probation service is misguided and the whole programme should be scrapped.

Since the Offender Management Act was changed in 2007 to allow for the attachment of a polygraph condition to terms of probation, trials of the device for use with post-conviction sex offenders have been taking place in the Midlands. These concluded in 2012, were reported to be a success by the government and are due to be rolled-out nationally.

However, in scientific and legal communities the polygraph’s validity (whether it can detect lies at all) and its reliability (how regularly is makes an error in categorising truths as lies and vice versa) are highly contested and have been so since its early development at the turn of the 20^th century.

Above all, it is far from clear whether the use of these measures reduce reoffending rates or improve offender rehabilitation outcomes.

The polygraph machine was first adopted in the UK at the peak of a media-provoked cycle of one-upmanship between Labour and the Conservative Party over who could be toughest on crime.

This rhetorical contest has escalated over the last two decades and has always been most vociferous when it focussed on sex offenders – particularly paedophiles.

Tony Blair’s 2005 Labour Party manifesto promised to trial the lie detector for use in the monitoring and treatment of paedophiles post-conviction and thus opened-up the UK to the official use of the device for the first time.

The political justification for their use continues to rely on the idea that parties have to be seen to be being tough, as Justice Minister Jeremy Wright has said, “Introducing lie detector tests, alongside the sex offenders register and close monitoring in the community, will give us one of the toughest approaches in the world to managing this group.”

What about the scientific justification? According to proponents the polygraph works by measuring the concurrence of certain physiological responses (e.g. pulse rate) with deceptive behaviours. The use of the device with sex offenders would be to ensure they are being truthful about their behaviour during probation. However, deception can occur in the absence of these physical responses, and the physical responses can occur in the absence of deception. Moreover, the most extensive US National Academy of Science report on the device concluded that the polygraph’s reliability was flawed as regards its real-world generalizability and that additional basic research was needed.

Scientists involved in the UK trials with sex offenders have conducted research into its efficacy. However, rather than focussing on validity and reliability the research has concentrated on the value of the polygraph as regards the elicitation of ‘clinically significant disclosures’ (CSDs).

Such CSDs are typically used to evaluate the offender’s riskiness, change their treatment strategies or alter their probation conditions.

In this context, the validity of the polygraph is seen to rest not so much whether it can detect lies but whether it can get offenders to make more disclosures about their behaviours. Even if we accept this premise, the question of reliability is still valid: how often does it make mistakes in categorising those disclosures true or false?

The report on the 2012 trial has a worrying feature in this regard. It turns out that the majority of the disclosures are not made during the actual test but in the pre-test interview. As such, the polygraph’s role appears to be less a lie detector and more a threat or method of inducing confessions from offenders.

Reportedly, the use of the test is of value to offender managers because it gives them confidence that offenders are sticking to their probation conditions, discloses risk and allows managers to challenge risk.

Given the focus on numbers of CSDs it seems distinctly unwise to rely on the polygraph as a method for helping to determine risk and of inducing confessions, particularly when many of these disclosures are being made before actually connecting up the device to the offender. As such, a significant risk in adopting the polygraph in this context may be an over-reliance on the veracity of CSDs.

Offenders are likely to be able to manipulate the examination to their own means just as much as managers and examiners are able to use the examination to elicit CSDs.

There is no research at all on strategies the offenders may use to make CSDs in relation to anticipated examinations or during pre- and post-test interviews.

If an offender knows that they have breached the terms of their probation and fear that their examination is going to result in a ‘deception indicated’ result, then they might well offer less significant CSDs in advance of the examination in order to help shape the interpretation of their results.

Furthermore, we don’t have any information on what might happen when an offender has an erroneous result of ‘deception indicated’. When false positives occur, it could be risky for offenders to maintain that they are not lying. If the polygraph is to be believed, this means they are not acting in a trustworthy manner. In line with this suspicion their treatment and probation conditions might be changed. Might offenders provide CSDs that are themselves lies in order to convince the examiner and manager that they are now telling the truth? We have to know a lot more about this technology and how it is used before we trust it to help determine the riskiness of offender behaviours.

Finally, technologies used to manage sexual offenders often leak into other areas and it is possible that polygraphs could in future find use in other contexts of treatment and rehabilitation, particularly if corporations could profit from their adoption.

However, the government’s idea to privatise the probation service has received a poor assessment from its own internal reviews and has been dropped. Instead, the Ministry of Justice plans to go ahead with the programme, but will keep this part of the probation service in-house.

But this doesn’t go far enough. Focussing on how tough the programme is on offenders and on the value of ‘clinically significant disclosures’ papers over the critical question of whether these measures reduce reoffending rates and improve offender’s rehabilitation outcomes.

Ultimately, the safety of children, communities and the offenders themselves will not be improved by increasingly punitive measures if they do not tackle the causes of sexual offending, improve rehabilitation and reduce the rates of sexual offences.

The adoption of technologies that are seen to be tough on offenders should not be an end in themselves.

Innovation in the water industry: Is the price too high?

Innovation in the water industry: Is the price too high?

This past month has seen much debate about the rising prices of utilities in the UK, focussing on gas and electricity. The price hikes have come not long after reports that companies have made massive increases in profits, for example Scottish Power more than doubled its pre-tax profit to £712m in the year that it raised gas and electricity prices by 7%. This is important, not least because over 3 million people were in fuel poverty in 2011 [see tables here]). David Cameron says that the reason behind rising prices is the introduction of green levies. But when set against this background of fuel poverty means that people are being forced to choose not only between eating and heating, but also between eating and the hope for a habitable climate. I mention all of this to substantiate the claim that the politics of energy often include important considerations of cost and climate change, amongst other issues (for example, energy security) and the balance between the two, but also to highlight the impact of rising utility prices on poverty in the UK.

Questions about rising prices in the water industry often play out according to the same issues of climate change and poverty. But things have been relatively quiet of late for the water companies, which might, in part, be that the average cost of water per household is relatively small compared to gas and electricity, costing £388 compared to £1279 [1 + 2]. Nonetheless, water poverty is a very significant problem in the UK. In the period 2009-10, nearly a quarter (23.6%) of households were in water poverty (requiring that they spend more than 3% of their income on water).

From ‘Water Poverty in England and Wales’ http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/presentations/JRBWaterPovFRSUM2012.pdf

Prices have consistently risen since privatisation of the water industry in 1989, and have increased faster than overall prices in the UK and faster than average earnings. This is partly because of increasing costs of water provision and treatment, which is caused by a range of factors including climate change (flooding and drought), water practices (consumer and corporate ‘over-use’ and waste) and infrastructural problems (ageing of pipes and leakage in distribution). One key dimension to the increasing price of water is thus the costs of investing in innovations to help to tackle the effects of and reduce our contribution to climate change, and to fix the maze of Victorian pipes that are leaking under out feet.

In a recently published paper, Susan Molyneux-Hodgson (University of Sheffield) and I, presented findings from two years of research on the way in which a group of academic researchers tried to produce a bold technical innovation in the water industry. As part of that work we explored how academic researchers and industry actors worked together and how these groups explained the lack of funding for adventurous innovations. We identified a recurring story about the UK’s impregnable ‘innovation barrier’ for developing cutting-edge technologies, for which there is very limited funding since much of the available money from the UK research councils and from the companies themselves goes instead towards producing incremental improvements in existing techniques.

In our interviews with academics and industrial actors we found that the major narrative explaining the lack of industrial investment was that consumers were ignorant of the costs and ‘true value’ of water and were unwilling to pay the real cost of managing the network and developing novel technologies to help alleviate the problems of climate change and the ageing of the infrastructure. They blamed consumers for their influence on regulators, who seem to be unwilling to let the companies charge more.

Many academic colleagues in natural sciences and engineering bought into the idea that the problem wasn’t so much with monopolies profiting massively from essential water services – whilst the infrastructure aged and climate change got worse – but with consumers, who just couldn’t accept how much it would cost for problems to be fixed. Ultimately, then, the construction of the problem framed its own solution: actors wanted to educate the consumer about the value of water so that they will be willing to pay more for research and innovation, which they believe will help solve leakage and climate change problems.

But we would be rightly sceptical to think that higher prices for water would be used to invest heavily in research to fix problems and lower consumer bills because industrial priorities are not skewed towards investment in infrastructure and technical solutions. For example, across the UK market, investment in research and development varies from a piddling 0.02% of turnover up to the disappointingly tiny drop in ocean at 0.66%. In our interviews with industrial actors we found that they saw no clear incentive to invest in bold technological programmes of innovation if there wasn’t a clear profit to come from it.

Of course, the investment in technologies that might help to protect us against the increasing severity of floods and storms, shortages and droughts, and to help reduce the impact we are having on the global environment are not easily turned into short-term profit making ventures. But clearly, the cost to our water infrastructure, service provision and treatment would be astronomical if we allowed climate change to escalate and the infrastructure to crumble. Technologies are not the only thing we need to help alleviate these problems – we also have to look at consumer and corporate practices. But technological innovation is important. The costs of innovation are not too high, they are essential, but the companies still aren’t willing to pay.

Just like David Cameron wants to focus on green levies in tackling rising fuel bills, trying to educate consumers so that they see the true value of water and thus are willing to pay more is one way of trying to protect profits for shareholders at the expense of often impoverished people in the UK. Regulators of the utilities and our politicians have to be brave and challenge the industries to ensure that profits are not put ahead of the protection of fuel and water poor people in our country or at the expense of our climate and future survival.

Can Scientists Engage Critically with Capitalism?

At a recent meeting of the synthetic biology community, SB6.0, researchers from around the world descended on Imperial College London to discuss the state of affairs in standardising the engineering of biology. Embedded into the programme of events were some discussions of knowledge translation and that most recent of neoliberal terms for technoscience governance, ‘responsible innovation’.

Jack Stilgoe, an STS scholar at UCL, has been one important figure in cementing the use of this term in governance circles, which – understandably – both excites and troubles him. He, along with many of us interested in the sociology of knowledge, have seen responsible innovation be rapidly taken-up like a standardised plasmid by a competent cell. As biologists and sociologists alike will tell you, though: (cellular) context is important. So what happens in different spaces to the terminology and practices of responsible innovation? We don’t know as yet, but synbio is an interesting and important place to watch some of this unfold.

Responsibility sounds like a good word to hear in this context, and when coupled to innovation it promises perhaps a more critical engagement with the relationships between industry and academy. Synthetic biology is certainly a space in which these relations are currently being negotiated, whether in the production of artemisinin or the development of novel forms of pedagogy and sharing.

One of the primary tenets of responsible innovation, whatever form it might take in different sociotechnical spaces, is that innovators (whether they’re natural scientists, engineers, industrialists or so on) have to engage substantively with the concerns of publics. This means more than listening. It means changing what you’re doing and what you plan to do in your innovations by virtue of those engagements.

Scientists tend to think that public actors are mostly worried about frankenfoods and grey goo, assuming that publics misunderstand science and thus hold incorrect opinions about its implications. Indeed (though I’m so tired of saying it I want to scream) I still spend significant amounts of time in meetings explaining this assumption, challenging it and showing how alternative accounts of public actors are far more fruitful for engagement and – dare I say it – for science as well.

How is responsible innovation being adopted in synbio? In perhaps the most prominent example, the findings of the synthetic biology dialogue report  are not so much integrated into research practices but are instead regularly trotted out at conferences and in interviews as evidence that synthetic biologists and the RCUK are doing responsible innovation. It becomes used as a sign of responsibility but not a provocation to it. Some of the primary findings of that dialogue continue to be overlooked when synthetic biologists talk about their work. There’s still a huge reliance on the idea that  public actors are largely troubled by the objects of science: in this context, engineered microorganisms. Contrary to this assumption, the dialogue showed that the people involved  were not only interested in the objects of science but also significantly concerned with the processes and imaginaries of scientific innovations. One important question was about the use of public money to fund synthetic biology; the danger being that scientists could get too cosy with industry, patent everything, and focus narrowly on making a successful, profit-generating innovation.

Something of a stir was caused at the SB6.0 conference by activists from Luddites200 and Biofuelwatch handing out an open letter to the delegates as they entered the building. There were some conversations and tweets about it, and Tom Ellis from Imperial posed the questions from the activists’ letter to the panel on responsible innovation. I think this is a signal that synthetic biologists are interested in engaging with a debate about public and NGO concerns.

However, the letter seems largely to have been understood only as an uninformed attack on synthetic biology. For example, Alex Taylor wrote a quick blog post about the letter, where he noted how it raised interesting points for discussion. But he went on to deal mostly with the points he could transform into technical questions, or took up assertions in the letter he could pit against assertions of his own (synbio is bad; synbio is good). His response missed much of the message of the letter, which is primarily about the industrialisation of biology (clearly a question important to the Luddites200 movement, which is concerned with ensuring capital and technology serves the commonality and not vice versa). Take the following paragraph from the open letter:

“If the problem were just conceptual, it wouldn’t be so bad. But synthetic biology’s technocratic projects have massively damaging practical consequences. Time and again the cause of these disasters is that the technocratic mindset leads you to mis-define the problem as technical, when its real cause is social. Your tool is a hammer, so every problem looks to you like a nail. The real cause of climate change is industrial capitalism, and it can’t be fixed with biofuels. Such technofixes are always intended to keep the system that caused the problem going. And because they are part of the problem they perpetuate it: in the quest to supply our absurd overuse of energy and to prop up the profit-making of multinational companies, biofuels are already leading to environmental damage, hunger and the grabbing of land from Third World farmers.”

Of this, Taylor says:

“The author makes some interesting points about the use of biofuels and, presumably, GM (which is the research field that synthetic biology has seemingly assimilated). Whilst the inappropriate, unilateral and unethical use of these technologies is certainly something we, as a society, must be mindful of, I would point out that the potential benefits clearly warrant further investigation. Like all scientific endeavours, synthetic biology and its applications […] must be conducted in an evidence-based and academically rigorous manner. I do not deny that synthetic biology has the potential to be dangerous, but it is only through careful research – good science – that we find out how to make biotechnology better, cheaper and safer, and to study the consequences of human action – if there is evidence to be had that the natural world is at risk from human intervention then it is we, scientists such as those attending the SB6.0 conference, who are your strongest allies.”

This response positions questions of ethics and inappropriate use of technologies as things of which to be ‘mindful’ whilst ensuring that we explore the potential benefits. The appeal is to evidence-based application and academic rigour, coupled to promises of “better, cheaper and safer” biotechnology and an assertion that with evidence of risks to the natural world scientists will be on their/your side. This doesn’t respond to the argument put forward in the letter, which – in regard to biofuels – doesn’t concern their technical risks and costs but rather the way in which their adoption would support current structures of industrial (biotech) capitalism. These are not things about which evidence is easy to accrue or display.

Without wishing this blog post to become more a question of “can Alex Taylor engage critically with capitalism?”, (which would of course be an unjust focus) I do think his response is characteristic of technical experts when they discuss their work with NGO groups and social scientists in the context of questions about industry, capitalism and technology. This makes me wonder, can scientists engage critically with capitalism?

Synthetic biology is a good place to pose the question because it is resoundingly co-opted into the current development of the bioeconomy. David Willets announced a whole bunch of funding at the conference, there’s loads coming up for Centres from the BBSRC and EPSRC. Willets has also positioned synbio as one of the eight great technologies that will save the economy and – one is encouraged to imagine – the world. This happens because individual scientists and governance actors shape the present by promises of the future. For example, the politically-savvy Richard Kitney pushed hard for the UK RoadMap, is co-director of CSynBi and now runs the IKC in synbio. But it isn’t just people that make these things happen. In the story of industry, profit and engineering, the practices and norms of engineering were themselves importantly shaped by processes of industrialisation and vice versa. The notions of efficiency, standardisation, specialisation, abstraction and so on thus operate in both worlds as engineering shaped capital and capital shaped engineering. The ontological remit of synthetic biology to create novel parts has eagerly begun to embed this technopolitical economic system of norms, values and processes into biological material and the shaping of synbio research practices. Even the pursuit of sharing practices ostensibly intended to open-up knowledge and the material of synbio is based on such processes. The creation of these spaces of innovation with biological organisms are premised on a future in which more and more people have access to synbio techniques and materials, and on the meritocractic assumption that wealth goes only to those with merit. The imaginary and vision of synbio, borrowed from the computer industry, promises a bohemian, Google-like ‘Don’t Be Evil’, Silicon Valley of synbio entrepreneurs who built cool bio gadgets, saved poor people and made a fortune. This is the modern neo-liberal promise, in which anyone can unshackle themselves from poverty by using knowledge and their own bootstraps to pull themselves out of the structures in which they were born and reach the heights of social order.

All of this is so far removed from the practical concerns of activists struggling to make their voice and concerns heard that it’s no wonder everyone ends up talking at crossed wires. Activists are concerned, for example, with how contemporary neoliberal responses to the banking crisis only furthers austerity, making poorer people poorer and rich people richer. These are not questions for economists to worry about whilst synthetic biologists carry on making cool widgets. They have to be asked at the nexus of science and the economy, particularly when science is being positioned as the backbone of that economy. I imagine a lot of synthetic biologists genuinely hope their innovations will alleviate poverty and inequality and that they can do this through the processes in which they are embedded. But their dreams of the future are inherently invested with the ideology in which they have to work. If they want to secure funding, progress in their careers, train up new postgraduates and postdocs, secure a lab, be able to pursue their own interests and so on, they have to play the game of neoliberal technocracy. I empathise deeply with this situation because it is the one in which I also work. However, I’ve got a whole bunch of critical tools that, although they don’t allow me to completely remove myself from the context, allow me to critically engage with it. If there’s one thing science could do better in the current context of impact and responsibility, it would be to get more critical. Again, this doesn’t mean just being anti-capitalism or anti-technology, but rather engaging substantively with its processes, promises and implications.

As such, I think perhaps the most pressing question facing synthetic biology if it is to be truly responsible in its innovation has to be a detailed and deeply practical concern with whether the science is done in service of people everywhere or in the service of corporations. This is exactly the kind of thing that the participants of the synthetic biology dialogue have in mind. That means reassurances based on technical solutions won’t be adequate to the public concerns with synthetic biology.

The final sentence of the open letter states that “if humanity is going to get out of the hole that technocratic capitalism has dug, we need to stop digging.” This doesn’t mean quitting synthetic biology out of fear of mutant microorganisms. It isn’t threatening a revolt based on ignorance. Instead, it asks scientists to open themselves up to the contexts in which their practices are based because those scientific developments are part of those contexts. I don’t know the people at Luddites200, and I would not have written the letter with the same tone, but I think some of their questions are important to consider in ways that don’t reduce the issues to ‘merely’ technical problems. Responsibility here means taking seriously the challenge that synthetic biology might serve to further global crises and inequalities rather than ameliorate them. If synthetic biologists want to be truly responsible they have to talk openly about their plans to profit from their microorganisms. What was the justification for the funding of the research and how will that impact on the direction of the work? Where will the money go? Where did the money come from? And who owns the patents? What effects will the capitalisation of some synbio device have on economies outside of the UK, Europe and USA? Where will (un)employment happen? What will the labour be like and is it sustainable? What kinds of lives does the invention make possible and what kinds does it foreclose? These kinds of questions are not addenda to the issue of technical design. They cannot be fixed with kill-switches or bland assurances that ethics are being considered. These questions have to be built into the organisation of research projects, their funding, their obligations to social groups, their daily laboratory practices, and ultimately into the objects themselves.

The potential of responsible innovation will depend greatly on how the question of responsibility is understood. In the pursuit of their own academic interests, and in their important and valuable technical explorations and adventures in synthetic biology, it will be essential for synthetic biologists to ask: in the game of synthetic life, who wins and who loses?

The Grisly Truth about Truth Drugs Research

Damian Lewis from a scene in CIA TV drama ‘Homeland’

This is the second part of a post on truth drugs, the first part is here. 

Inscribed in the stone of the original CIA building was the motto, a line taken from the Gospel according to St. John, “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Of course, one of the major responsibilities of the Central Intelligence Agency is the collection and collation of intelligence materials in order to discern the truth of other governments’ plans and operations. In the era of fears about soviet espionage the intensity of this demand was perhaps as great as it is today in the context of terrorism. The Agency was under immense pressure to pre-empt the actions of soviet powers and one important mechanism in their pursuit of this goal was the extraction of information during interrogation of suspected spies and sympathizers.  Interrogations, however, were a difficult business, particularly as operatives were often trained in resistance techniques. The CIA thus reached out to science in order to improve their interrogation results. Though far from being the beginning of the role of psychology in military and security services this period was hugely influential in shaping the relation.

Dr Gottlieb

In 1953, the CIA collated their psychological research into a programme they codenamed ‘MKUltra’. The director of the programme was a chemist named Dr Sidney Gottlieb, who believed the Agency had to understand the ‘mind-washing’ strategies they felt their enemies were undoubtedly developing. Moreover, this fear made it vital that the US developed their own science in this area. Gottlieb thus became known as the ‘Black Sorcerer’ for his involvement with a number of projects concerned with controlling behaviour by use of drugs and a range of other techniques. His colleagues and collaborators involved, most notably, the notorious CIA officials General William Donovan, Colonel George H. White and Dr Stanley Lovell. Perhaps the most terrifying of their many psychological brutalities was the work conducted into ‘sleeper agents’, who they wanted to program to undertake covert actions, most obviously assassinations, without ever having known they wished to do so.

No less violent and degrading, however, a significant strand of research in the programme was to discover drugs that would influence behaviour in such a way as to improve interrogations. In short, one of MKUltra’s main goals was to find drugs that would compel suspects to tell the truth. As I described in a previous post, there was a ready-to-hand possible candidate in the form of scopolamine, a nightshade-derived drug. In the 1920s Dr Robert House had discovered that giving the drug to women during childbirth caused them to talk uninhibitedly about their feelings and thoughts, which led him to believe that scopolamine might help in criminal interrogations. Though his efforts to develop the truth drug into a policing tool largely failed, the CIA picked up his research thirty years later and began investigations for other such compounds.

Ergot fungus (growing on rye) is the source of LSD.

Among the drugs that the CIA tested were psychedelics, one of the most prominent compounds being lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. General Donovan believed that finding a ‘speech-inducing’ drug was vital to the security of the US and that this warranted any effort in its discovery. Chief amongst the many controversial actions undertaken with these substances was their use on unsuspecting US citizens, primarily men and women who were most vulnerable and on the fringes of society. The test subjects included unwitting prostitutes, homeless people and patients in psychiatric hospitals. George White created ‘safe houses’ in Greenwich village and San Francisco, from where he tested the drugs on these victims. White also set-up a study on sexual behaviour and prostitution to understand how these might be used to extract information. Using funding from MKUltra, a number of psychologists and psychiatrists working around the US in universities and private institutions were supported to conduct research on the effects of LSD and how it could be used to control behaviour. For example, between 1955 and 1958 over 1000 American ‘volunteers’ participated in a series of tests at the Army Chemical Warfare Laboratories in Edgeware, Maryland. In one case, 95 military personnel were given LSD in a fake drinks reception without their knowledge and then subjected to interrogation, polygraph examinations and put into isolation chambers to explore how their traditional security training stood up in the face of these ‘drug-enhanced’ interrogations.

A soldier on LSD during the Porton Down woodland operation.

A number of experiments in LSD thus involved  subjects being given these drugs without their consent and, as a result, it produced a situation in which people died and others suffered severe psychological trauma without any explanation. It wasn’t only in America that these kinds of covert, illegal experiments were being conducted. In the UK, scientists working for the MI6 science park ‘Porton Down’ gave military personnel LSD without consent and observed their interactions and attempts to conduct a staged operation in a woodland. Three of these men later sued the government and were awarded compensation in an out-of-court settlement in 2006.

Perhaps the most widely reported tragedy was the death of Dr Frank Olsen, a civilian employee of the US army, who specialised in ‘aerobiology’. He was invited to a cabin in the countryside for a semi-annual review along with several other scientists. At the cabin, Gottlieb and Robert Lashbrook gave the group each a drink from a bottle that contained 70 micrograms of LSD mixed with Cointreau. In the days after the ‘experiment’ Olsen went on to develop severe depression and Gottlieb and Lashbrook arranged for him to be treated by one of the CIA cleared LSD researchers in Washington. During the treatment, however, Olsen threw himself out of a hotel window on the 10^th floor and died from the fall.

The rhetoric that has often been adopted in the development of lie detection devices and truth drugs is that they represent a more humane way of getting to the truth when compared to physical torture. Indeed, in a documentary on the work conducted as part of MKUltra, one scientist involved argues that if there is going to be war, it is better that it is done using the least barbaric means possible. Robert House thought scopolamine might alleviate the practices of brutality used in police interrogations, as did the developers of the polygraph. The creation of fMRI lie detection has similarly been occasioned by claims that scanning the brains of suspects is far better than the practices used in torture camps like Guantanamo Bay. What this line of argument implies is that science can free us from the darker side of the pursuit of truth, shining the enlightenment into the cells of prisons, and throwing open the window of interrogation chambers. But the history of truth drugs cautions us to examine this thinking and to be mindful that not all scientists act in humane ways and that not all science ostensibly done in the service of peace and security is without consequence. It is difficult to know if the intelligence services are using contemporary developments in neuroscience to explore modern methods of information extraction. But if there are a couple of things we can learn from the history of lie detection they are that we seem unable to stop ourselves from pursuing the creation of these devices and that the desire for the truth can sometimes be a dark one, conducted in the murky and shadowy parts of scientific and military culture.

Some links:

MKUltra Documentary: http://vimeo.com/58514098

Video reporting on LSD Experiments at Porton Down: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqTH3OIMnsU

Senate Hearing on MKUltra: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/13inmate_ProjectMKULTRA.pdf

Nudge Nudge!

 

The Guardian reported today that job seekers are being forced to take apparently ‘bogus’ psychometric tests. The questionnaire that job seekers have been asked to complete was apparently exposed as a bogus test by The Skwawkbox Blog, which claimed the tests formed part of a ‘psy war’. It seems the bloggers showed that by going through the personality test without entering answers still resulted in the test providing a personality type.

I completed the test and, as with many such tests, I found it a struggle to complete because I became mired in the ambiguity of the questions and with their insistence on generalised statements. However, I can see how the test may have been designed with the ostensible purpose of helping to improve job seekers’ self-esteem. In particular, the questions posed by the test range across character traits that are socially approved (neighbourliness, compassion) and disapproved of (jealousy, vengeance) but the results of the test are all posed as strengths. The test finishes by encouraging users to ‘try to find a new way to use [your strengths] everyday’.

The test was developed by the Coalition Government’s ‘nudge unit’, which is overseen by David Cameron and operated by David Halpern.

The idea of ‘nudge theory’ is that population-wide behaviours can be shifted with relative ease if the right ‘nudge’ is found to modify individual choices. In this way nudge theory is firmly located within a particular economic tradition concerned with rational decision-making. Its proponents see it as a middle way of governing, neither an endorsement of a paternalistic state nor extreme libertarianism. Prof. Richard Thaler, one of its developers, believes nudge can give people freedom of choice whilst steering them in the ‘right’ direction. Away from total self-interest and negative behaviour towards social responsibility and self care. The premise, then, is that individuals can still make rational decisions, maintain an individualised identity and participate in free (market) choice.

Despite the obvious problems such thinking has begun to influence policy in the USA and the UK, for instance in the context of healthcare crises around obesity, smoking and so on, where individual behaviours have large social consequences. For example, in his book (with Cass Sunstein), Thaler argues that organ donations can be increased through ‘presumed consent’ (assuming consent to donate as the default) or ‘mandated choice’ schemes (forcing people to make a choice regarding donation when, for example, obtaining a drivers license). The idea, of course, is that these shifts in the structures that require, shape and produce choices will nudge people in the right direction towards agreeing to organ donation. Most people can agree it would be good to increase  organ donation.

The point of nudge, however, is that it doesn’t require companies to take any responsibility for shaping consumer choices, which they do from birth to death. And most of their marketing and advertising works to drive people towards negative health outcomes like obesity (through excessive consumption), diabetes (from sugar-loaded foods), cardiac problems (from fat-laden meals) or cancer (from smoking, drinking and eating too much). Ostensibly, neo-liberal ideology wants people to make free and informed choices but of course people can’t do so when billions of pounds are being spent every year on advertising hamburgers, crisps, ready meals, cigarettes and booze, and when massive corporations lobby the government to prevent legislation that would protect consumers from these unhealthy products.

Contemporary neo-liberalism, which nudge is understood to supplement, is having to bend over backwards in order to maintain an ideological commitment to preserving the rights of companies whilst giving individuals free choice. All of which flies in the face of extraordinary evidence that people are not rational decision-makers, or merely self-serving robots pursuing self-interest. The complexity of everyday life and consumption leaves the nudge theorists struggling to understand how to shape people’s actions whilst preserving a commitment to consumer choice in order to make sense of people’s actions for neo-liberal ideologues who won’t take any responsibility for governing nor for regulating markets – unless its to portion off parts of the NHS for their mates in business.

 

Scopolamine, Truth-telling and the Other Dr House

Portrait of Daniel Defoe

The reasoning that recording physical correlates can be used to discern truth and deception can be traced at least as far back as Daniel Defoe’s 1730 essay on the prevention of street crime. He wrote: “Guilt carries fear always about with it; there is a tremor in the blood of the thief.” Defoe advocated holding the wrists and measuring the pulse to detect a person in possession of false tongue.

As Geoffrey Bunn has recently argued, a range of important concepts emerged in the genesis of criminology, not least the notion of ‘criminal man’, whose animalistic, biological nature was the source of his criminal behaviour. So in the late 1800s and early 1900s the body was increasingly tied to the mind and the various inscriptions produced from reading the body became vital to theorising mental and emotional events. Similarly, the theorisation of the unconscious as a quasi-spatial repository of personal truths made the mind a focus for physiological study. Moreover, biologists of the time investigating heredity imagined memory to be material, conceiving of it as a vibration of cells in parents, which were then transmitted to offspring. This helped them account for the transmission of ostensibly non-physical qualities that nonetheless seemed to be transferred from parents to offspring.

These and a great many more small changes in the discourse of crime and the body helped to consolidate the idea that some technique or technology could be used to access the internal state of a criminal suspect resistant to interrogation. Practitioners of applied psychology, developing their work most fervently from the 1870s onwards, produced a central set of technologies that examined psychic states by monitoring physiological changes. The years from 1870 to 1940 thus saw the development of numerous lie detection devices such as truth serum, sphygmomanometers, pneumographs and the galvanic skin response monitors, some of which were consolidated into the ‘polygraph’ machine, patented several times from the 1930s onwards, and now used throughout the USA to police a range of suspect categories.From good historical work we now know quite a lot about the history of the polygraph machine, particularly regarding its early years of development and deployment in the USA. However, we know a lot less about the emergence and use of truth serum.

House administers the serum in Texas

In the 1920s a nightshade-derived drug, scopolamine hydrobromide, was trialled by one Robert House, a Texas obstetrician, for use in the interrogation of two prisoners at the Dallas county jail. Dr House had observed the effects of scopolamine on women during childbirth, alongside morphine and chloroform. This drug-induced state became known as ‘twilight sleep’, and was caused by blocking the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. House felt that the drug’s effects on women might be similarly produced in people suspected of concealment. The two prisoners interviewed by Dr House retained their original story indicating to the Dallas physician that they were innocent. The evidence was submitted and the prisoners were found not guilty at their trial. The use of scopolamine as a ‘truth serum’, a term coined by the media and eventually adopted by House, was short lived, mostly due to its dangerous side effects, and though it found brief use in the legal field it was generally unsuccessful.

Dr Gregory House and his slogan, ‘Everybody lies’.

Its popularity resided mostly within the media and was propelled not solely, but incessantly, by House. Much like the proponents of the polygraph, House believed that the truth serum would not only act on individuals to produce justice but on institutions also. He feared that the corruption of powerful members of society, both public and private, had reached severe levels, most dangerously so within the criminal justice system. At the time, aggressive interrogation methods had become endemic in US police investigations, a practice that became known as ‘the third degree’. The doctor saw his serum as the antidote to this social ill. As the more popularly known Dr Greg House from the US TV show says, ‘Everybody lies’. Indeed, the TV character of House seems to be a modern inheritor of the historical House’s cause for lie detection techniques. in the TV show, House regularly calls his patients on their deception and prevarications, and in a few episodes uses the hospital’s fMRI machine to scan their brains and determine whether they’re telling the truth or not.

However, the Dr Robert House’s hopes for a truth serum, that might act like a societal vaccine were never made real: he died in 1930 and the use of scopolamine as a truth drug mostly died with him. It was around this time that the ‘inventors’ of the polygraph were pushing their devices as cures for the corruption of police investigation practices. So although the idea for using chemical compounds in the interrogation of suspects survived, becoming known as ‘narco-analysis’ it never really competed with the rise of the polygraph machine. One important context in which it did endure, however was as part of the programme of human behavioural modification explored by the CIA in Project MKUltra, about which I’ll talk more in a future post. For now, here are some references that might be of interest:

Robert House, The Use of Scopolamine in Criminology

Geoffrey Bunn, The Truth Machine

Alison Winter, The Making of “Truth Serum” 1920-1940

Melissa Littlefield, The Lying Brain

Bacterial Cultures: How engineers make sense of microorganisms

Vast pools of sewage stretch into the distance at a facility

This post relates to a paper I recently published, which you can download here. 

Conducting an ethnography of a sewage facility, in the midst of sludge and mud and sewage I found my sociological nous rather tested: what was there to say about water treatment processes that could be remotely interesting? Everything was brown and wet. So it was more than my professional lenses that were steaming. Indeed, the stink permeated every fabric and seemed to coat every surface. The process engineers in the facility have a number of strategies for keeping themselves safe in this perilous space. A lot of these techniques have to do with routine practices of managing their bodies: becoming physically comfortable with the grime (“You get used to it.”), improving their balance when walking on wet mud (“My first fall nearly broke my back, so I was careful after.”), wearing two pairs of gloves and socks, and learning a variety of safety procedures (for climbing ladders and so on). Moreover, the process engineers use a range of scripts, anecdotes and narratives for understanding their relationship with the dirt and grime, which was particularly interesting to me when it involved their understandings of microorganisms.

The vast pools of brown sludge that bubble and threaten to engulf you if you trip are also full of bacteria. Intriguingly, the bacteria are similarly understood in relation to the body and practices of maintaining the body’s boundaries. There is an ambiguity about whether engineers understand their bodies as safely protected and separated out from the bacteria (practices are largely organised around covering and cleaning the body) or become attuned to their relation with the bacteria. This is because the engineers tell stories of immunological adaptation. Their stories often involve anecdotes of visitors getting sick, or of new employees getting used to the bacteria. A new recruit to a facility I visited described how he’d had stomach aches and felt sick on-and-off for the first few weeks of working there. He told me that his body had ‘adapted’ and that he now didn’t get sick from the bacteria. Your immune system, he said, “get’s used to them.” The grime is thus a permanent symbol of the omnipresence of bacteria – there’s no escaping them. Rather than coding the bacteria as simply ‘threatening’ or ‘dangerous’ the engineers ‘adapt’ their bodies and practices in ways that alter their understandings both of their bodies and of the bacteria. In this regard, the ontological status of the engineering body in the waste facility is importantly related to the ontological status of bacteria.

These observations of sewerage facilities formed part of our work on synthetic biology, which also involved observations in microbiology laboratories. In the lab, everything is suddenly white. White walls, white stools, white counters, white powders, white liquids, white equipment. I find myself wearing white lab coats. White gloves at the entrance, white gloves on the counter, white gloves stacked onto shelves three deep and ten across. I get used to the feeling of nitrile gloves. The lab is a place where things have to be clean, so there’s also a noxious smelling alcohol routinely spritzed and wiped across the counters.

I hold some bacteria in solution in a falcon tube.

Some of the labs are temperature controlled, whereas others are fine at room temperature. Some have distinctive whirring, clicking or screeching noises created by the specialist equipment.  But although they differ in important ways, they nonetheless share a significant common feature: they are all organised in order to safely manipulate the microbiological realm. This organisation, however, is ultimately determined not by the deterrence of release of these unique organisms, but by prevention of infiltration of more common species that might contaminate the lab apparatuses and thus ruin experiments. Indeed, in the lab the bacteria are at risk. They are engineered to be easy to manipulate and have thus become more susceptible to being out-competed by ‘natural’ bacteria. Practices in the lab are thus geared primarily around protecting the bacteria from the body. And whilst academic engineers are aware of the dangers of the bacteria with which they work, which are often quite minimal, they are generally most concerned with the dangers that their skin (covered with enzymes), the air (filled with stronger strains) and their equipment pose for their microorganisms. Indeed, the bacteria even look puny – tiny quantities in tiny flasks that are barely visible to the naked eye. This is a wholly different world to that of the sewage plant and the bodies of lab engineers are thus importantly different because of these different relations.

This is an important consideration when examining the governance and regulation of engineered microorganisms and when discussing ‘public’ understandings of this science. We explore these issues through other ethnographic episodes in the paper.

Bacterial cultures: Ontologies of bacteria and engineering expertise at the nexus of synthetic biology and water services, Engineering Studies

You can get the paper here:

http://www.academia.edu/3189976/Bacterial_Cultures_Ontologies_of_Bacteria_and_Engineering_at_the_Nexus_of_Synthetic_Biology_and_Water_Services

Risky Bodies and Dangerous Desire [II]

This is part two of some comments on sex offenders and lie detection (part one here). It is also a bit of a promo for my recently published paper on the topic, which you can download here.

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We are in a period in which child sex offences cause moral panics and thus help further the measures we are willing to take in punishing and policing them. Laws are passed under the names of the victims to remind us of the cruel and brutal acts committed against children. The media drives up fear and anger because it sells print, and because they know we need an enemy. The paedophile is now the sexual terrorist – his actions undermine the structural organisation of Western society by explicitly challenging the notion of ‘childhood’. This notion is not simply natural consequence of our biology but an entangling of ‘social’ and ‘material’ phenomena. Amongst a number of other causes of the entrenchment of the notion of the innocent child, was the fact that once we had machines and automation in factories, on farms, etc., we no longer needed children to do hard labour.  The contemporaneous emergence of psychiatry also welcomed a whole host of ways in which adult sexuality was connected to childhood experience, and thus the fracture of innocence became connected to criminal and deviant behaviour in adulthood. This is not to say that our bodies do not change as we grow older or that our emotional ability to manage relationships both sexual and familial does not similarly develop. Instead, it is to point towards the cultural production of a relation between innocence, sex and criminality that underscores the construction of sex offenders as contemporary monsters and underpins media and moral panics.

Against this background, a number of Western strategies of governance in education, sexual health and criminal behaviour can be seen to be geared around securing healthy, happy, playful and above all innocent lives for our children. The corollary of this is the ‘adult’ – the sexually, intellectually, economically mature individual now capable of work, reproduction and decision-making. Challenging the norms of childhood and adulthood, paedophiles are thus not only coded as monstrous because of the acts in which they engage but because their symbolic function is to uphold the binary they seek to destroy. This helps explain our punitive obsession with them and with their bodies. The paedophile is at the far edge in terms of the lengths to which we go to monitor, manage and predict criminal behaviour, and unique in regards to the kinds of treatments and punishments we mete out.

Indeed, current responses to sex offenders are not entirely oriented towards their criminal and violent acts. They also evidence a fear about the offender’s desire itself. In treatment, we don’t just want them to change their behaviours; we want them to change their desires. Practices of role-play, lie detection and plethysmography are sometimes used (particularly in the USA at the moment) to help steer desires towards ‘normal’ objects, both in terms of being age appropriate (not simply above the age of consent, but rather of a ‘normal’ age for the male being treated), sexually conservative (the desires should be quite vanilla) and heteronormative (male-male desire is coded as increased risk).

Is the response to terrible acts of violence that we just accept that because of the crime any punishment, any treatment is justified? Is it a woolly (or worse, ‘suspect’) argument to claim that sex offenders have rights too and that punishing their acts is sensible but changing their desires is not? Trying to put philosophy and politics aside, a pragmatic approach alone tells us that this isn’t a sensible system. If we accept – as we should – that a great many sexual offenders have committed violent and abusive acts against children, and that these should be criminal acts, then we should think pragmatically about how to respond. Whatever notion of punishment or law we wish to adopt, we can probably all agree that we would like to see fewer instances of such abuse. The social isolation of offenders in post-probation settings (named and shamed in the community, on the register, by the media) results in a lifestyle that facilitates further offending. Training the offender’s desires to fit the norms of a sexually conservative society surely only serves to further stigmatise their non-criminal sexual behaviours and desires.

By avoiding offenders and ostracising them we don’t protect children from further suffering, we place them at continued risk, precisely because offenders have no social resources to draw upon in changing behaviours and avoiding risky situations. If the only people who will talk to them are other offenders, it isn’t hard to see how recidivism becomes connected to social factors. The conceptualisation of the offender as monstrous and incurable at the level of desire conflicts with the demands that they change these desires. Orienting treatment using these binaries and norms is an impediment to the development of non-criminal sexual behaviour.

The days of chemical castration aren’t behind us and nor is the use of the polygraph. The recent reports of the ‘success’ of the polygraph trials for use with sex offenders here in the UK are evidence that further measures are consolidating around the criminal act of paedophilia in such a way that it constitutes fundamentally deviant human monsters. Our obsession with the bodies of these offenders comes at the cost of understanding their social practices and, ultimately, at the cost of actually reducing the risk of future criminal acts. We have to stop seeing sex offenders as monstrous and stop panicking about their crimes in order to be more able to respond effectively to them.

Pennines STS First Meeting

Yesterday, for one day only Copenhagen came to Sheffield. Well, not quite. I got together with colleagues from Manchester and across the Pennines for the first meeting of what we’re calling ‘Pennines STS’. It’s a chance for those of us on each side of the hills to discuss work in progress and develop ideas collaboratively. For the first meeting we did an ‘EASST/4S Revisited’, in which we all gave the talks we’d given in Copenhagen last month. It was great to see presentations on a range of subjects from interdisciplinary collaboration, through organic wine, boundary work, and photovoltaics to agency, networks and the Manchester riots 2011.

People and titles of talks

Paul Martin – political economy context of science and social science collaborations
Kate Bulpin – interdisciplinary collaborations in synthetic biology/iGEM
Andrew Balmer – playfulness and collaborations between science and social science
Kate Wiener – temporalities and practices of use and non-use in context of statins
Bridgett Wessels – agency, networks and reflections on ‘third modernity’
Matt Watson – photovoltaics, engagement and interdisciplinarity
Elisa Pieri – securitisation, city branding and police practices following the Manchester Riots 2011
Yin-Ling Lin – science and soc-sci/humanities students’ boundary working
Anna Krzywoszynska – organic wine, consumption, taste and branding

[Valuable contributions to discussion also came from Susan Molyneux-Hodgson, Celso Gomez and Rob Meckin]

In a way, much of the discussion turned on the perennial issue of what is we’re trying to do in Science and Technology Studies at the moment and the cognate and similarly recurrent interest in ‘working with’ scientists. Though the differences were sometimes subtle, there were alternative positions being put forward as to how STS might relate to scientific work, sometimes overtly and other times more implicitly. Kate Weiner’s work (conducted with Catherine Will) looked in two directions, both towards STS concepts of ‘users’ and to pharmaceutical science and its concern with patient resistance to drugs. In this regard, Weiner’s work took a traditional method of social research (interviews) in order to nuance concepts in both realms. From my perspective, Kate’s work followed the traditional academic pattern of social science, in that it sought to apply STS to science, rather than to collaboratively work on concepts and research with pharmacologists developing statin drugs or GPs prescribing them. This is the way that much STS work is done, which is not to critique it, but to point towards the established division between production of science and commentary on it, and the way in which the scientists generally seem to speak for the science and we speak for the users, or non-users as the case may be.

But there was an interest in trying to understand how we might work in different modes. Paul Martin’s disposition, for instance, seemed to be concerned with attending to governance and how it structures the relations between scientists and social scientists as regards responsible innovation.  Matt Watson and Anna Krzywoszynska’s current project was concerned with findings ways to produce ‘socio-technical efficiency’ using collaborations between social and natural scientists, and thus was a more locally-defined, context-specific undertaking. My own research has been oriented to (or is trying to move towards) ‘strategic power’, as Foucault would term it, rather than ‘structural power’, meaning that I’ve been trying to produce local moments of creative, collaborative play – though, so far, largely failing, I must admit. Which brings me to Yin-Ling and Kate Bulpin’s talks, in that they both drew attention to the ways in which the boundaries between disciplines are organised. Yin-Ling showed that it isn’t only science students who, whilst often eschewing claims to expertise, nonetheless police the boundaries of science but also humanities and social science students who engage in such work. Kate showed how a range of material, temporal and social factors were at work in producing a split between the engineers/modellers and the laboratory biologists during an iGEM project. In conversation with Kate and Susan Molyneux-Hodgson I discussed their interest in bringing interest back to disciplines by attending to the ‘disciplining’ process of education. We thus, collaboratively, pointed towards the ways in which identification of disciplinary expertise is accomplished through talk and practice and how these processes are importantly tied to contexts, norms and power.

I can’t say, in the end, whether we left hopeful or not as regards STS work and the potential for collaborations, but we certainly left with hope for the future of Pennines STS and these productive and exciting conversations.

We’re planning on future meetings so if anyone has an interest in attending then please contact me.