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In the late 1970s, the media debate about recombinant DNA technology was Sweden’s first, but far from last, controversy about the risks and possibilities of genetic engineering. Based on the concept of knowledge cartographies, this study highlights how the main actors in the debate tried to make sense of what gene technology entailed, but also, and more importantly, how knowledge about the technology and its consequences should be communicated and disseminated in society. The article shows that the combination of a relatively unanimous research community with the absence of an organized and engaged public meant that the communicative line of conflict mainly came to stand between researchers on one side and the mass media and individual politicians on the other. Here, long-established trust in experts stood against a new approach in which the research community was held democratically and morally accountable. The whole debate can be understood as being placed in a transitional period in which the previously dominating authoritative knowledge cartography began to make room for a burgeoning public sphere cartography. The debate was also colored by its contemporary context; by other ongoing science-related controversies, such as that of nuclear power, and not least by the emergence of new journalistic ideals and broader public discussions about academic freedom and scientists’ communicative obligations.

Mindfulness meditation started its academic career in the 1970s within behavioral medicine and mind-body research. Now, you find it in psychotherapy, neuroscience and clinical psychology, but also increasingly in the social sciences such as education, organization studies, social work and economics. Mindfulness meditation is offered as a secular program for healing, self-understanding and growth, and has moved from the cultural margins (Buddhism) to the mainstream, both scientifically and culturally. The variety of problems that mindfulness addresses is made possible by the fact that it actually spans both the pathological and the normal or healthy. In actual fact, it collapses that distinction regularly. By introducing readers, listeners or viewers to a mind that is “mindless” in its normal state – running on autopilot, being lost in thought, always in a doingmode – it simultaneously pathologizes people’s normal mode of functioning. Mindfulness proponents claim to work with universal and transdiagnostic processes, which underpin both health and sickness. Hence, anyone endowed with a mind benefits from mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness has been able to connect to and makes sense of collectively experienced societal changes, and offers scientifically grounded (albeit patchy) guidance on how to relate to these. The initial focus on stress related problems, evident in the name of its first medical institution – The stress reduction clinic – resonated with growing societal concerns over the downsides of multitasking and “workaholism” in the 1980s, 1990s and onwards.

The consolidation of the USSTE research group in Umeå grew out of two favorable conditions: the Faculty of Arts’ economic crisis which was turned into a window of opportunity and the ability by the existing USSTE researchers at the time to constitute a credible recipient of such support. The future for USSTE depends both on how well its researchers can continue to perform according to established quality criteria, but also if it can manage to consolidate a sense of its own expertise, its own version of relevance, and engage in an international conversation on contemporary societal challenges.

This article sheds light on the ways that mindfulness self-help literature carries with it a number of built-in tensions. First, mindfulness questions whether there exists a fixed self, yet the self-help genre’s focus on a You that is encouraged to change – a self that is performing work on itself – seems to reinforce the notion of a self. Second, though mindfulness is demarcated as something different than quick-fix techniques for self-improvement, the reader is presented with numerous techniques and methods for observing, assessing, testing and documenting the self. Third, while destructive thoughts and emotions are not to be “fixed” or resisted, the explicit goal is to become free of them. Finally, although mindfulness refers to our stressful and self-absorbed culture as a problem, part of its cultural dissemination has been through a genre that more than others emphasize self-investigation as a pathway to self-improvement.