April 2012: Open lecture by Martina Merz & Michael Strassnig

During the last decade, various national funding agencies have set up targeted research programs promoting the investigation of nanotechnology’s potential adverse effects on human health, the environment, etc. Zooming in on such research programs with an interest in how they are established and governed in practice and to what effect in the realms of politics and science raises a number of important questions for the investigation of science dynamics. The following questions will feature in the proposed talk.

In science policy studies, funding agencies have been discussed as intermediary or boundary organizations that account for the stabilization of “the inherent unstable relationship of politics and science” (Braun/Guston 2003: 306). Concerning the aforementioned research programs this raises the question of how the science-policy relationship is negotiated by the scientists involved, be it in their role as members of a research pro-gram’s governing body (e.g. steering committee) on behalf of funding agencies, be it as project applicants and investigators. This also involves the question of how political framings of a research theme and its associated program are addressed, transformed, adapted, circumvented, ‘repelled’ (to use terminology associated with the Lotus effect), etc. in the process of implementation with an attention to the diversity of strategies and practices adopted in this process.

Targeted research programs are not stand-alone. They are established and implemented in the context of comparable programs elsewhere and in view of programs that address contrasting thematic perspectives. For the case at hand, programs on nanotechnology’s adverse effects interact with research on nanotechnology ‘proper.’ How does the framing of the former affect the contours of nanotechnology, viewed within the perspectives of different realms and actors? Of interest here are also the diverse systems of categorization used to define and determine what nanotechnology is about and what are its others. In this process, the identity of nanotechnology is remodeled in strategic ways.

The proposed paper contributes to scholarship on the practice of funding agencies as concerns science-policy relations as well as to current research on the dynamic of new research fields. It is based on a case study of the National Research Program “Opportunities and Risks of Nanomaterials,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation since 2010, and draws on qualitative data about the program’s governance and the funded projects’ practice as well as a comprehensive body of data concerning the recent configuration of nanoscale research as a scientific field in Switzerland.