Eva Lövbrand, Post-doctoral fellow in Sweden with affiliations at Lund and Linköping Universities, and at CSTPR through the Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate (SPARC) project, will give a talk on Friday, April 9, 2008 on "The Democracy Paradox in Studies of Science and Society". The talk will be from 12:00 - 1:00 pm in the CSTPR Conference Room.

The talk is free and open to the public and will be held at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research's conference room. Click here for directions.

This will be a "brown bag seminar". Feel free to bring your lunches if you wish.

Abstract: Scholars of science and society generally argue that ordinary citizens should be involved in expert deliberations on subjects ranging from technological innovation and environmental risk management, to the setting of academic research priorities. To bring about a more interactive and inclusive citizen-expert relationship has been established as key to more legitimate decision-making and effective problem-solving in a vast range of issue areas. However, there is a paradox not far from the surface of this academic project of scientific or expert “democratisation”. Scholars calling for citizen engagement in science and technology policies are themselves experts, and most attempts to establish more democratic modes of expertise occur with little or no input from citizens. Are science and technology scholars bound by the prescriptions that they apply to other experts? Or do studies of science and society harbour a “democracy paradox”? By linking writings on scientific democratisation with deliberative democratic theory, this paper explores these questions.

Link to PowerPoint Presentation

Biography: Eva Lövbrand is a post-doc fellow within the Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at Lund University in Sweden. Her research at the department is mainly funded by the GreenGovern project and focuses on issues of legitimacy and justification in the emerging CDM and voluntary carbon market.

Eva is also affiliated with the Swedish Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research (CSPR) at Linköping University, and holds a part time post-doc fellowship at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at University of Colorado in Boulder, USA. Eva’s post-doc project in Boulder is funded by the NSF project SPARC (Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate) and focuses on the prospects for a democratisation of climate science and expertise.

Eva has a trans-diciplinary academic background. She holds a BSc in political science and a MSc in environmental science from Lund university. In June 2006 she defended her doctoral dissertation on the role of science and expertise in the Kyoto negotiations on land use change and forestry at the Department of Biology and Environmental Science at Kalmar university. Eva’s five years in Kalmar offered valuable insights into the natural sciences and raised her interest in the science-society relationship.