New commentary published on GM & public controversy

Picture from www.guardian.co.uk

Our commentary on the re-emergence of the public debate on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has recently been published here in the geography journal Area. The full title of the commentary is 'Boundaries, territory and public controversy: the GM debate re-materialised', and it's a very short article which can be downloaded by anyone with an institutional subscription to Area. It follows on broadly from the argument that Helen made in this post last May, on the protests related to GM wheat trials at Rothamsted Research. Instead of focusing on organisational learning, as the blog post did, we decided to focus on the materiality and spatiality of the GM debate and examine the multiple ways in which boundaries are being continually drawn and re-drawn.

Must we eat our own tails?

Building on my recent post on the Merton Stone blog about learning and environmental problems I will consider the concept of reflexivity and why it might be useful to studies at the interface between science and policy.

So firstly, what is reflexivity? Implying an act of 'self-reference' the term has a multitude of definitions across and within different academic disciplines. A rare point of agreement seems to be that reflexivity is a good thing and therefore we should have more of it. It is useful to distinguish between more inward-looking and outward-looking interpretations of reflexivity - and I would suggest that whilst the former have been more prolific, the latter are more constructive in theory and in practice.