Creating ‘Science’s New Social Contract’?

In this paper we shall give a background to some of the main theoretical literature on the subject of what has been called (by Gibbons) “science’s new social contract with society”; central to this new contract is what is called “Mode-2 knowledge production” (Nowotny) characterised by the more open approach of transdisciplinarity allied to an extended peer review. Mode-2 knowledge production also implies practical goals. In our paper we then compare these perspectives to two projects with a practical outlook, the first a workcompleted project on involving citizens in the assessment of local air pollution, and the second a work-inprogress project looking at closer engagement between women’s perceptions of possible environmental factors contributing to breast cancer and expert epidemiologists’ views of its causes. Finally we ask what are we doing. It seems to us that we are not just extending the peer review of “reliable knowledge” (after Ziman) to make it “socially robust knowledge” (after Nowotny et al); it seems that we are involved not simply in the “new production of knowledge” (after Gibbons) but that we may be involved, epistemologically speaking, in the production of new knowledge. This new knowledge, the co-creation of citizen and scientific expertise, is (in the case of our air pollution study) and has the potential to be (in the case of environmental risk of breast cancer) both socially robust and scientifically reliable.