Dissertation Grant: Land-grant scientists and controversial agricultural biotechnologies

Agricultural scientists face public concerns around genetic engineering, which range from questions about human and environmental safety to corporatization of the food supply. These researchers must find ways of navigating such scrutiny while attempting to make their research meet both scientific and social goals. This project will examine how academic scientists at land-grant universities, with their explicitly public focus, adapt their work with controversial technologies to meet multiple scientific and public needs.

A social scientist will be embedded with the agricultural researchers to help them reflect on their roles, responsibilities, and the meanings of their work. This will be used to produce a new model of embedded social science research that encourages scientists to think critically about the ethical impacts of their work in real-time. The result will be an enriched understanding of how scientists manage research programs involving controversial technologies and new methods for embedding social scientists in natural science groups to enhance benefits for science and society.

This project will combine interviews and ethnographic observations to produce a set of in-depth profiles of agricultural scientists working in genetic engineering at land-grant universities to capture differing versions of what it means to be a land-grant scientist working in the context of emergent agricultural biotechnologies. It situates these analyses within the deeply intertwined histories of the land-grant university, democratic professionalism, the political economy of biotechnology, and scientific ideas of control and responsibility.

This theoretical framework challenges the boundaries of traditional studies of laboratory practices by considering the interactions scientists engage in beyond their “contained” field trials and walled-off laboratories. This project contributes to scholarship on emerging technologies and laboratory studies, and on public engagement and democratic theory.

It also creates an embedded model of social scientists in natural science research that uses ideas from science and technology studies to open opportunities for engagement with scientists about the social and ethical dimensions of their research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.