Recent major commitments made by many Western governments to the intensification of globally competitive investments in science on the one hand, and to public engagement in the domain of science, innovation and society on the other, raise important but ill-defined tensions and questions. Neo-liberal economic models of globalisation, manifest in such initiatives as the EU Lisbon Agenda, encourage the assumption that knowledge is a global universal whose primary meaning is to be defined in terms of instrumental commercial exploitation and control. And the recognition in Europe, and increasingly internationally, that this agenda raises major science and society issues, is being compromised by being framed in terms of the need for governments to secure public acceptance of the scientific, technological and social trajectories being generated by neo-liberal dynamics of innovation.
Against this background, the colloquium will gather together significant representatives from academia, non-government organisations and the policy world in order to explore a number of urgent questions:
What role is knowledge being made to play in the global economy?
How does this shape what develops and counts as ‘knowledge’?
How is the shift to more inclusive forms of knowledge- and policy-making interacting with the growth of corporate power and ownership of knowledge?
What effects are these developments having on public reactions to new developments in science and technology?
What are there prospects for a global civil society which can encourage the knowledge economy to assume more humanly responsive forms?
The colloquium will:
explore political-economic perspectives on global shifts in knowledge-production processes, and sociology of science insights into public reactions to science and technology
address issues of institutional design for attempting to reconcile public concerns with increasingly competitive global knowledge-investments
attempt to determine the form that critical interventions need to take if they are to be effective and appropriate |
