Here the contrast between the United Kingdom and France is striking. In her opening statement for the cyberconference, Suzanne de Cheveigne observed that traditionally strong state support for science has made PUS an irrelevant consideration in her country.
2.
A good survey of this research is Brain Wynne, “Public Understanding of Science,” in S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen, T. Pinch (eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London: Sage, 1995), 361-388.
3.
The latest installment of social epistemology, including a special focus on PUS, is Steve Fuller, Science (Milton Keynes and Minneapolis: Open University Press and University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
4.
Of course, I am alluding here to the rhetorical pitch of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London: Sage, 1979).
5.
Some readers may wish to know that Counterbalance did not advertise its religious interests other than to provide a link to its homepage at the foot of the cyberconference webpage.
6.
Unreflected in these figures is the considerable offline Latin American participation. My main Latin American correspondent, Ligia Parra, a Harvard-trained Colombian information scientist, conducted the cyberconference in Spanish on several regionally based lists. She translated some of the more notable contributions, which were then placed on our website. In short, we faced the tradeoff that the World Bank has successfully avoided. E-mail is easier to access and more accessible to more people around the world. The world wide web is often slow to access and requires information technology facilities that are still rare in many parts of the world. However, the big advantage of the web is that it is less vulnerable to user mischief, which proved to be the great strength of Counterbalance.
7.
The relatively large South African figure is due to 1998 being the first “Year of Science and Technology” for that country, whereby PUS would be used to raise the fortunes of the indigenous population. Despite the substantial SA participation in the cyberconference, it was difficult to determine whether science education was being used as a vehicle or a target for societal transformation. Nevertheless, the cyberconference website contains an interesting and informed exchange between the American anthropologist, David Haakken, and a student of mine, Isha Keymist, on the status of the “melanin hypothesis” invoked by American afrocentrist scholars to show the cognitive superiority of Blacks to Whites.
8.
The pattern witnessed here—of Western and non-Western scholars regarding multiculturalism in mirror-image terms—has been already noted by one Indian humanist brave enough to venture a sociology of knowledge analysis of “post-colonialism” as an academic growth industry in the West. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory (London: Verso, 1992).
9.
I defend the cross-cultural appropriation of useful knowledge on normative grounds in Steve Fuller, “The Future of Science and Future Studies,” in Z. Sardar, ed., Rescuing All Our Futures (London and Westport CT: Adamantine Press and Praeger Press, 1998), chap. 13.
10.
The problem to which Nakajima alludes is that the discourse of the Internet is so overwhelmingly conducted in English as to put off ordinary Japanese citizens. (It should be added that the same applies to the French.)
11.
In the United Kingdom, professorial chairs in PUS are currently held by Richard Dawkins (Oxford) and Lewis Wolpert (University College London). John Durant is the only non-scientist to hold such a chair (Imperial College London).
12.
A primer is James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation (New Haven: Yale, 1991).
13.
This result is the most disappointing one of the cyberconference. Although six of the original 20 invited opening statements were made by women, none gave special prominence to the gendered character of science, and only one of the subsequent contributors chose to do so.
