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Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have been investing in improving human spaceflight capabilities through the development of reusable rockets to greatly reduce the cost of orbital launches. One such entrepreneur is the controversial Elon Musk who projects a techno-optimistic vision of the future in which humans live on other planets, enabled by his company's technologies. This is a technologically utopian and libertarian vision that has implications for ongoing contestations about the future of Earth and humanity. For Musk and his investors and supporters, their vision is about how human action in outer space will transform things 'down here', bringing about positive social change. While many celebrate such business leaders of Silicon Valley, critical voices challenge their evasion of current global challenges. Musk's techno-optimistic visions can be illuminated by the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries that draws attention to how public debates about science and technology also often evoke feelings of excitement, adventure, disappointment and anxiety. Science fiction narratives and digital simulations play an important role in conveying to multiple publics the desirability and feasibility of such imagined futures. However, although exciting in ambition and design, Silicon Valley visions of outer space futures offer little to the flourishing of humans and the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Techno-politics is alive and well in cities of the twenty-first century, most prominently with the rise of smart cities and the digitalization of urban life but also in the myriad debates about climate and environment, social cohesion and democracy, and economic prosperity and well-being. This commentary uses the special issue on 'Urban Techno-Politics' as inspiration to reflect on three emerging trajectories of cities as embodied in the New Urban Science, networked governance, and sociotechnical imaginaries. Knowing, governing, and imagining cities are three significant ways that techno-politics will be undertaken in the coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability, particularly as articulated in cities, acts as an imaginary that shapes science, technology and social order to attain desirable futures. Imaginaries of sustainability represent visions of social and natural well-being now and into the future. Like sociotechnical imaginaries, imaginaries of sustainability are both descriptive of potential futures and prescriptive about the futures that ought to be pursued. Proponents of smart cities tout the ability of technology and big data to accelerate democratization and public participation, yet these projects carry embedded assumptions about knowledge production, technological risks, public engagement and broader visions of the good life. Smart cities discourses and technologies shape and become enrolled in both imaginaries of sustainability and sociotechnical imaginaries. Through case studies of smart cities and sustainability in London and New York City, notions of technological progress are shown to be linked with progress on environmental and social sustainability issues. In both New York and London, smart cities are entangled with techno-political projects related to innovation and economic development as well as normative commitments to sustainability. Though imaginaries of sustainability present a set of goals and values for science and technology, techno-politics dominated by corporate actors and techno-scientific optimists may ultimately prevent cities from opening up space for alternative imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological advancements in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have spurred a controversial boom in oil and gas production. In Colorado, these debates take place directly in the suburban metro corridor, where local governments are turning to memorandums of understanding (MOU), negotiated directly with industry operators, to shape industry activity. We show that in Erie, the town that first pioneered this policy tool, these MOUs ostensibly welcome public participation in the planning and deliberation process but can unintentionally reinforce scientism-based governance. Citizen science challenged the local government’s deficit model of the public, but it also shored up scientific authority and triggered a government imaginary of anti-fracking activists as an unruly public. Residents countered this imaginary by electing officials committed to public engagement and transparency, which opened up debates to encompass quality of life issues that had been sidelined by the original focus on competing scientific evidence about pollution. While fracking-related citizen science does not appear to be directly responsible for the government turnover and its attendant shift in governance, we suggest it did enhance civic engagement related to general issues of fiscal responsibility, ethics and transparency that did play a role in the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical teams around the world are increasingly gaining ethical clearance to utilise face transplant surgery as a reconstructive surgical procedure. Analysis of the beginnings of the operation in Mexico vis-à-vis the early uptake of the procedure in France reveals that this controversial experimental medical field has become loaded with national significance. The primary issue of dispute has been the dependence on life-threatening immunosuppressant therapy in a procedure that treats otherwise biologically healthy people. Attempts to resolve related debate has resulted in the emergence of what my interlocutors refer to as an “ideal patient”, a person whose particular state of health and suffering render them operable within the current biomedical constraints. Drawing together the idiom of coproduction with the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries shows how this imagined patient category was refracted and stabilised as it entered into the Mexican context whilst producing patients and surgical experts as particular types ofbioethical subjects. The flexibility and normative value of the “ideal patient” mobilises and is mobilised by surgeons, who themselves emerge as national bioethical subjects responsible for saving the face of nations in the midst of broader changes surrounding how State's should respond to medical advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK and Spanish Stem Cell Banks hold politically controversial--but potentially therapeutically beneficial--human embryonic stem cells for distribution to research laboratories globally. The UK bank was the first of its type in the world, opening in 2004, and the Spanish bank used it as a role model in its own development. Both banks structure their operations in response to how their staffs imagine the publics in their nation make trust judgements about their work. Differences between the workings of each bank can be traced to differences in the collective imaginings operating at each bank--termed 'institutional imaginaries'--about how publics think. The UK bank sustains an imaginary in which distance lends legitimacy and disengagement signifies correct moral practice. It conjures a public that values a steady, safe and reliable institution--free from potential conflict of interest--about which the less news the better. This stands in contrast to the Spanish bank that conjures a public that retains an interest in legitimate, ethical guardianship of stem cell material, but which is less worried about conflict of interest in attaining this. Instead, for the Spanish institution, engagement with science and the media through the projection of the bank as cutting edge is deemed crucial for maintaining public support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the social and technological aspects of energy in the U.S. and also reflects on the national policies associated with it. She informs that Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations stated that the U.S. government's subsidized investment in biofuels has significantly contributed to a rise in world food prices and global famine. She further mentions that the U.S. policy makers make choices about how to allocate the costs and benefits of innovation.

How do children engage with science? How does science in one's childhood overlap with other scientific practices—or differ from them? According to prevalent developmental perspectives, particularly in science education, children's understandings are incomplete—an immature stage of adults' engagement with science. There follows a prescriptive model: an efficiently, playfully designed science education will generate scientifically educated young people, and perhaps even excellent scientists in the future. Such recent approaches to science education can be questioned via an ironic play with the concept of ‘childish science’, along three specific lines: children's life worlds are pervaded with/by science and are understood through children's imaginaries of science and their practices with science. More than simply incomplete adults, children develop their own sense-making through specific cultures, social relations and rationalities. When introduced to learning settings, specific materials and technologies matter; they represent, communicate and translate knowledges in ways dependent upon children's practices. These three aspects of ‘childish science’ provide a playful intervention for broadening prevalent approaches to science education. This special issue analyses science in childhood as a specifically ‘childish’ version of science. Children embed the world around them with meanings. Through these practices and meanings children become major actors in various settings, including schools, museums and their own homes. The analysis is informed by concepts drawn from childhood studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). In terms of practical implications, educators should recognise the specific roles of childish science, which cannot be fully anticipated, controlled or designed. Science education should not be over-optimistic about its methods and outcomes. It is worth learning more about childish ways of engaging with science and how they relate to other versions of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is both a historical and contemporary analysis of the Rockefeller Foundation's changing role in rice research over the past 50 years, and though there are many overlaps between them, focuses on three broad periods: first, the RF's early work in rice research, particularly through the establishment of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the Green Revolution era of the 1960s and 1970s; second, the development of the RF's rice biotechnology program in the 1980s; and third, the RF's focus on agricultural research in Africa, with rice research as a subset of their programmatic efforts, during the 1990s and beyond. Rice research in each of the different periods was driven by different framings of problems and potential solutions, incorporating wider ideologies, epistemologies, and key actors and networks, with the RF at the center. Viewed in this way, the Rockefeller Foundation's involvement in rice research cannot be seen 'simply' as an agricultural modernization project, but rather as simultaneously a sociopolitical project that extends particular modes of governance through homogenization and paternalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]