Victor Horsley

Sir Victor Horsley (1857–1916) was a pioneer who shaped the development of neurosurgery and the direction of clinical medicine through his work with the British Medical Association, Medical Defence Union, and General Medical Council. Before the nervous system could be imaged, Horsley operated successfully on the brain and spinal cord, and performed palliative procedures on patients dying from brain tumours. Nevertheless, he became a social pariah due to his support for nationalised health insurance, child welfare and women's rights, amongst other causes. In this fascinating biography, leading neurologist Dr Michael J. Aminoff places Horsley's life and work in the context of the society in which he lived and explores his influence on the development of neurosurgery and social policies still in effect. The many underlying themes to the book include the interplay of science and politics, and the responsibility of physicians to themselves and for the welfare of society.

A Normative Model of Politically Neutral Expertise

Increasing interaction between science and politics requires analysis of the risks of science politicization. The author considers the threat of political control over the expertise and proposes a normative model which allows to avoid this threat. The author argues that the protection of the “hard core” of scientific rationality of expert’s activity is possible if the role of scientists is limited to the “technical” stage of the expertise (aggregation of scientific consensus on the problem). At this stage, the experts should make risks of the proposed strategies visible for public (the author calls this “risks externalization”). In turn, a decision on the compliance of the proposed strategies with the political interests of society should be made at the stage of open discussion. The author claims that separation of these two levels of expertise has the following advantages: (1) allows one to minimize moral and political pressure on experts; (2) makes it possible to involve all parties in the discussion, thereby neutralizing “privatization” of the public sphere; (3) allows one to aggregate distributed knowledge; (4) provides an opportunity for the distribution of responsibility among wider range of participants, thereby maintaining the democratic spirit in the community. The author criticizes the idea of “expert decisionism” and claims that it should be considered as an exceptional mode of expertise in extraordinary situation.

When Science Is Made an “Accomplice”

The article attempts to comprehend the relationship between science and politics and the use of scientific knowledge by various actors to promote their own political, ideological and other agendas. The author considers a few concepts that have resulted from the complication of various spheres of life and, accordingly, from the need for a new description and organization of science. These issues are also associated with new formats of relationships between science and society encouraged by the changing scientific, social and other contexts. The author notes that as a result, the scientific activity becomes more sensitive to social needs, yet also more susceptible to various social, political and other influences. This situation is illustrated with the ways in which social activists employ scientific knowledge and public science communication to advance their ideological positions, influence political and/or economic decisions and motivate civic action. The author points out the multiplicity of actors engaged in the assessment of scientific discoveries and the formation of the scientific and political agenda. The article assesses the importance of taking into account the political context of the relationship between science and society in the models of science communication. In conclusion, the author questions the possibility of conceptualizing the collective political agency of science without a thorough discussion of how it engages the role of non-scientific actors.

Engineering the Climate

Notions of the impending climate crisis have pushed a set of highly contested techno-scientific measures onto policy agendas around the world. Suggestions to deliberately alter, to engineer, the Earth’s climate have gained political currency in recent years not as a positive vision of techno-scientific innovation, but as a daunting measure of last resort. The controversial status of various so-called climate engineering proposals raises a simple, yet pressing question: How has it has come to this? And, more specifically, how did such contested measures earn their place on policy agendas, despite enormous scientific complexities and fierce political contestation? Global societal problems, such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics have brought the political relevance of scientific expertise to the foreground. This book speaks to scholarship in sociology and science studies, seeking to illuminate the essential entanglements between efforts to understand and efforts to govern such problems. By giving climate engineering a life of its own and following its dynamic trajectory as a contested object of expert work, this book sheds light on the reflexive and historically contingent interplay of science and politics as two distinct, yet increasingly interdependent, realms of society.

Some contributions of Habermas to the study of public communication of science

This theoretical essay explores three publications by Jürgen Habermas from the 1960s. The author deals with the critique of science, the production of knowledge and universities democratization. The objective was to extract from them clipings of reflections that can contribute to the studies of public communication of science. We consolidated the considerations into a graphic representation that summarizes the factors to be considered when thinking about the practice of science communication in society: the importance of considering the three interests that drive the production of knowledge - technical, practical and emancipatory, of promoting self-reflection of sciences in politicized and democratized universities, and the mediation of society in the interaction between science and politics, to subsidize decision-making based on social interests. We argue that the basis for a public communication idea of dialogical science - now widely defended - emerged in the German philosopher’s thinking in books published more than 50 years ago. However, that was not his central motivation at that time.

Reviews

The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate, by Andrew Dessler and Edward Parson, ISBN 978-1-316-63132-4, 2019, Cambridge University Press, 278 p. Structural Geology — A Quantitative Introduction, by David Pollard and Stephen Martel, ISBN 978-1-107-03506-5, 2020, Cambridge University Press, 434 p.

The lesson learned from COVID-19 and the climate crisis is not to let experts decide on policies: a response to Robert C. Schmidt

This is a response to the commentary by Robert C. Schmidt in this journal, in which the author suggests that for specific problems such as climate change or the current pandemic, decisions on policies should be made by scientific experts rather than by politicians. We argue that such ideas, which were brought up in the late 1960s and reconsidered more recently, do not take sufficient account of the nature of science politics, and their interaction. Furthermore, problem structures and resulting challenges for science and politics are not similar, but essentially different between climate change and the pandemic. Therefore, different solutions to the problems are required. There is a need to improve politics’ reliable recourse to scientific evidence in many cases. Yet, giving scientific experts such a strong position in decision-making ignores that most decisions, even if based on the state of scientific evidence (if there is such an uncontroversial state of evidence), ultimately require genuinely political choices about trade-offs of interests and normative issues that neither can nor should be made by scientists. Therefore, putting Schmidt’s proposal into practice would not solve the existing problems but instead create new problems.

Tūrangawaewae | A place to stand

<p><b>The landscape concealed beneath the concrete surfaces of our cities is replete with heritage stories representing the transformative evolution of the land, our culture and our ever-evolving society. The architecture upon these urban landscapes, however, is often only challenged to represent an architectural style (aesthetic), function (programme) or a public mask (branding) of the building. As a result, architecture tends to neglect the evolving identity of its context, allowing the stories of the site’s heritage to become lost beneath the growing layers of urban development. This thesis asks:How can urban architecture help to reawaken the transformative heritage stories that form place identity, enabling architecture as well as its inhabitants to have a place to stand | tūrangawaewae?</b></p> <p>Place identity for Māori is embodied in the concept of tūrangawaewae––a place to stand. For Māori, the place where a person learns important life lessons and feels a connection with their ancestors is usually the marae. In this place they have earned the right to stand up and make their voices heard. In this place they are empowered and connected to both the land and to one another. Tūrangawaewae––a place to stand––embodies the fundamental concept of our connection to place (“Papatūānuku – the land”). The research site selected to explore this question is the urban area in and around Te Aro Park in central Wellington, which was once the site of Te Aro Pā. This site provides the thesis with a rich polyvalent layering of stories, interweaving landscape heritage, Māori heritage and colonial heritage within a single architectural context. This thesis is framed as an ‘allegorical architectural project’, which is defined by Penelope Haralambidou as a critical method for architectural design research that is often characterised by speculative architectural drawing. The allegorical architectural project integrates design and text to critically reflect on architecture in relation to topics such as art, science and politics (Haralambidou, “The Fall”, 225).</p> <p>The design-led research investigation explores how an allegorical architectural project can help to enable urban architecture to reawaken the transformative heritage stories that form place identity—utilising speculative architectural drawing as a fundamental tool for enabling architecture as well as its inhabitants to manifest a sense of belonging. The thesis proposes an allegorical architectural project as a research vehicle through which place identity can be challenged and fulfilled. By positioning an architectural intervention and its context within a dialectic confrontation, it examines how an allegorical architectural project can represent and communicate the temporal and multi-layered nature of place identity within a static architectural outcome.</p> <p>By reconnecting architecture with site, and interpreting this connection allegorically within the design process, this thesis investigates how architecture can allegorically become the living inhabitant of a site, where the site itself gives architecture its tūrangawaewae, a place to stand.</p>

Tūrangawaewae | A place to stand

<p><b>The landscape concealed beneath the concrete surfaces of our cities is replete with heritage stories representing the transformative evolution of the land, our culture and our ever-evolving society. The architecture upon these urban landscapes, however, is often only challenged to represent an architectural style (aesthetic), function (programme) or a public mask (branding) of the building. As a result, architecture tends to neglect the evolving identity of its context, allowing the stories of the site’s heritage to become lost beneath the growing layers of urban development. This thesis asks:How can urban architecture help to reawaken the transformative heritage stories that form place identity, enabling architecture as well as its inhabitants to have a place to stand | tūrangawaewae?</b></p> <p>Place identity for Māori is embodied in the concept of tūrangawaewae––a place to stand. For Māori, the place where a person learns important life lessons and feels a connection with their ancestors is usually the marae. In this place they have earned the right to stand up and make their voices heard. In this place they are empowered and connected to both the land and to one another. Tūrangawaewae––a place to stand––embodies the fundamental concept of our connection to place (“Papatūānuku – the land”). The research site selected to explore this question is the urban area in and around Te Aro Park in central Wellington, which was once the site of Te Aro Pā. This site provides the thesis with a rich polyvalent layering of stories, interweaving landscape heritage, Māori heritage and colonial heritage within a single architectural context. This thesis is framed as an ‘allegorical architectural project’, which is defined by Penelope Haralambidou as a critical method for architectural design research that is often characterised by speculative architectural drawing. The allegorical architectural project integrates design and text to critically reflect on architecture in relation to topics such as art, science and politics (Haralambidou, “The Fall”, 225).</p> <p>The design-led research investigation explores how an allegorical architectural project can help to enable urban architecture to reawaken the transformative heritage stories that form place identity—utilising speculative architectural drawing as a fundamental tool for enabling architecture as well as its inhabitants to manifest a sense of belonging. The thesis proposes an allegorical architectural project as a research vehicle through which place identity can be challenged and fulfilled. By positioning an architectural intervention and its context within a dialectic confrontation, it examines how an allegorical architectural project can represent and communicate the temporal and multi-layered nature of place identity within a static architectural outcome.</p> <p>By reconnecting architecture with site, and interpreting this connection allegorically within the design process, this thesis investigates how architecture can allegorically become the living inhabitant of a site, where the site itself gives architecture its tūrangawaewae, a place to stand.</p>