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What are the current challenges and opportunities for bringing actor-network theory (ANT) into issues-based science education? This article discusses experiences gained from introducing an educational version of ANT deploying digital technology into an upper secondary school science class. This teaching innovation, called "controversy mapping", has been pioneered in different contexts of higher education before being adapted to school education. Experimenting with controversy mapping in a Swedish science class raised both conceptual and practical issues. These centre on: (1) how ANT-inspired controversy mapping redesigns the citizenship training enacted by institutionalized approaches to issues-based education as socioscientific issues (SSI); (2) how controversy mapping reconfigures the interdisciplinarity of issues-based science education; and (3) how controversy mapping displaces scientific literacy and knowledge of the nature of science as guiding concerns for teaching in favour of new preoccupations with digital literacy and digital tools and methods as contemporary infrastructures of free and open inquiry.

AIM - To discuss how scientific confirmation of cigarette smoking as a major contemporary drug problem during the 1980s was preceded by a rising tide of clinical and pharmaceutical innovation dedicated to treating smoking as a problem of addiction. BACKGROUND - This current of innovation, commencing already in the 1950s, carried the smokers’ clinic and nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) into the world, both of which were originally invented and pioneered in Sweden. It is argued that both of these inventions were vital for advancing the problematization of smoking as a matter of nicotine addiction. While the British doctor Lennox Johnston is well-known for his early attempts to demonstrate the reality of smoking as nicotine addiction through auto-experimentation, the historical significance of Börje Ejrup’s founding of the first smokers’ clinics in Stockholm in the late 1950s has not been widely commented upon. Attempting to remedy this situation, the rise and fall of Ejrup’s clinics deploying lobeline substitution therapy as a cure for ‘nicotinism’ is outlined in the main body of the paper. FINDINGS - Although the clinical treatment of smoking as addiction lost momentum during the 1960s, the invention of Nicorette gum in southern Sweden at the end of the decade provided renewed impetus. Commencing in Helsingborg and Lund in 1970, the smokers’ clinic and NRTs entered into the long-term service of each other; a new combination that in just over a decade would succeed in propagating the reality of smoking as nicotine addiction on to a global stage.

A critical analysis of Bruno Latour's book 'We Have Never Been Modern' is presented. Topics discussed include the theory of a Great Divide, originating from 17th century philosophy, which separates the natural and social worlds and influences contemporary concepts of modernism.

Science and technology studies (STS) has cultivated a positive vision of technological controversies. By raising new issues to address, controversies are seen as generating more thorough and exhaustive processes of technology assessment. However, the ability to view controversies in this light remains dependent upon how technology is collectively imagined and understood. If it is envisioned as a classic technological fix then broader controversy is just what is intended to be overcome, not positively indulged. Albert Hirschman's distinction between divisible and non-divisible conflicts captures such varying evaluations of controversy. In particular, it helps analyse how the long-standing fix of geological disposal of nuclear waste has been persistently defended as a non-negotiable object of technological concern – a recipe for escaping controversy by permanently isolating nuclear waste from the biosphere. Comparing the Swedish and French programmes for the geological disposal of nuclear waste shows how defending the technological integrity of a non-divisible disposal concept has remained an institutional fixation for Swedish nuclear waste management for over 30 years. In contrast, legislative demands for a reversible disposal concept introduced in France in the late 1990s have arguably served to unravel a technological fix into a divisible object of collective concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The introduction of innovative models of healthcare does not necessarily mean that they become embedded in everyday clinical practice. This study has two aims: first, to analyse deliberate and emergent strategies adopted by healthcare professionals to overcome barriers to normalization of a specific framework of person-centred care (PCC); and secondly, to explore how the recipients of PCC understand these strategies.Methods: This paper is based on a qualitative study of the implementation of PCC in a Swedish context. It draws on semi-structured interviews with 18 researchers and 17 practitioners who adopted a model of PCC on four different wards and 20 patients who were cared for in one of these wards. Data from these interviews were first coded inductively and emerging themes are analysed in relation to normalization process theory (NPT).Results: In addition to deliberate strategies, we identify emergent strategies to normalize PCC by (i) creating and sustaining coherence in small but continuously communicating groups (ii) interpreting PCC flexibly when it meets specific local situations and (iii) enforcing teamwork between professional groups. These strategies resulted in patients perceiving PCC as bringing about (i) a sense of ease (ii) appreciation of inter-professional congruity (ii) non-hierarchical communication.Conclusion: NPT is useful to identify and analyse deliberate and emergent strategies relating to mechanisms of normalization. Emergent strategies should be interpreted not as trivial solutions to problems in implementation, but as a possible repertoire of tools, practices and skills developed in situ. As professionals and patients may have different understandings of implementation, it is also crucial to include patients' perceptions to evaluate outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Although conceptual definitions of personcentred care (PCC) vary, most models value the involvement of patients through patient-professional partnerships. While this may increase patients' sense of responsibility and control, research is needed to further understand how this partnership is created and perceived. This study aims to explore the realities of partnership as perceived by patients and health professionals in everyday PCC practice. Design Qualitative study employing a thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with professionals and patients. Setting Four internal medicine wards and two primary care centres in western Sweden. Participants 16 health professionals based at hospital wards or primary care centres delivering person-centred care, and 20 patients admitted to one of the hospital wards. Results Our findings identified both informal and formal aspects of partnership. Informal aspects, emerging during the interaction between healthcare professionals and patients, without any prior guidelines or regulations, incorporated proximity and receptiveness of professionals and building a close connection and confidence. This epitomised a caring, respectful relationship congruent across accounts. Formal aspects, including structured ways of sustaining partnership were experienced differently. Professionals described collaborating with patients to encourage participation, capture personal goals, plan and document care. However, although patients felt listened to and informed, they were content to ask questions and felt less involved in care planning, documentation or exploring lifeworld goals. They commonly perceived participation as informed discussion and agreement, deferring to professional knowledge and expertise in the presence of an empathetic and trusting relationship. Conclusions In our study, patients appear to value a process of human connectedness above and beyond formalised aspects of documenting agreed goals and care planning. PCC increases patients' confidence in professionals who are competent and able to make them feel safe and secure. Informal elements of partnership provide the conditions for communication and cooperation on which formal relations of partnership can be constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Person-centred care ( PCC) is increasingly advocated as a new way of delivering health care, but there is little evidence that it is widely practised. The University of Gothenburg Centre for Person-Centred Care ( GPCC) was set up in 2010 to develop and implement person-centred care in clinical practice on the basis of three routines. These routines are based on eliciting the patient's narrative to initiate a partnership; working the partnership to achieve commonly agreed goals; and using documentation to safeguard the partnership and record the person's narrative and shared goals. Objective In this paper, we aimed to explore professionals' understanding of PCC routines as they implement the GPCC model in a range of different settings. Methods We conducted a qualitative study and interviewed 18 clinician-researchers from five health-care professions who were working in seven diverse GPCC projects. Results Interviewees' accounts of PCC emphasized the ways in which persons are seen as different from patients; the variable emphasis placed on the person's goals; and the role of the person's own resources in building partnerships. Conclusion This study illustrates what is needed for health-care professionals to implement PCC in everyday practice: the recognition of the person is as important as the specific practical routines. Interviewees described the need to change the clinical mindset and to develop the ways of integrating people's narratives with clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, addiction has been medicalized anew through the rise of an influential ‘brain disease paradigm’. This questions the equivalence of addiction to drug dependence by re-emphasizing loss of self-control over unhealthy impulses as the disease locus. While showing continuities with the nineteenth-century vision of addictions as ‘diseases of the will’, neurobiology objectifies disease as disrupted neurochemical transmission and lasting neuroadaptation. The brain disease paradigm emerged together with rapid advances in neuroimaging technology as well as intensified research efforts to confirm cigarette smoking as nicotine addiction. After smoking achieved such recognition in the late 1980s, numerous other unhealthy impulses and appetites have likewise come under neurobiological investigation as prospective cases of addiction. Despite its technoscientific sophistication, neurobiology's biomedicalization of addiction remains as partial and ambiguous as past medicalizations. By confirming moral self-transformation anew as an indispensable component of treatment and recovery, neurobiology revives addiction as a moral disease in the process of its objectification. Furthermore, through its rediscovery of a classic nineteenth-century ‘liberal disease’ at the molecular level, the neurobiology of addiction is acting as a vital moralizing resource in the biomedicalization of health and illness more generally today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - With reference to the long-term struggle to confirm cigarette smoking as a manifestation of nicotine addiction, this chapter explores the extent to which new understandings of addictions as 'appetitive disorders' rather than 'dependence disorders' derive from treatment technology development as well as advances in basic scientific research. Approach - Through historical analysis it is discussed how cigarette smoking only became widely accepted as a real drug problem in the 1980s after it had been shown to be amenable to treatment as such through the use of novel nicotine replacement therapies. Findings - These replacement therapies succeeded in showing that the same drug that drew users into addiction could be redeployed to help draw up them out of it. Nicorette® could serve as at least the partial antidote to nico-wrong (cigarettes). However, as relapse to smoking has remained the most likely outcome of any smoking cessation attempt, so medicinal nicotine has also served to demonstrate that nicotine addiction is ultimately a problem of an uncontrollable appetite for cigarettes in excess of drug dependence. Implications - Pharmaceutical incursion on cigarette smoking commen-cing in the late 1970s pointed to the need for a new mental disease model of drug-related problems while also providing valuable new tools and insights for ensuing brain research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science popularisation is widely recognised as having its ‘political uses’ and as serving as a conventional means for buttressing the epistemic authority of the institutions of science in society. By separating the work of producing new knowledge from its dissemination, popularisation promotes public understanding and appreciation of science placed beyond public reach and influence. However, simply by insisting upon such a separation, so popularisation remains vulnerable to ‘capture’ by skilled and resourceful communicators intent on turning it against the established authority of scientists. This is a phenomenon which can be analysed in relation to the communicative strategies pursued by a collection of general practitioners, diabetics and self-styled dietary experts in Sweden championing a low-carbohydrate/high fat (LCHF) dietetics akin to the Diet Revolution initiated by Robert Atkins in the early 1970s. By dedicating themselves to achieving an overwhelming public presence in the propagation of simplified accounts of dietary science, the LCHF movement has been able to fashion science popularisation into a weapon capable of being turned back upon established dietary expertise in Sweden. In this effort they have proceeded on two fronts; firstly by debunking established dietary advice for failing to live up to idealised standards of ‘sound science’, and secondly, by effectively mobilising the personal testimony and endorsements of dieters themselves in order to publicly confirm the authenticity and trustworthiness of the LCHF regimen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actor-network theory and the notion of fluid technology are employed to account for the continuing and growing success of Swedish nuclear waste management (the so-called KBS Programme). Rather than offering a single, constant geological solution, Swedish success is based upon three forms of fluidity: the attachment of shifting meanings and significance to the geological disposal of nuclear waste; the introduction of variations in the working order of geological disposal; and the continuing pliancy of the implementing authority. By remaining fluid, Swedish nuclear waste management has enjoyed growing success not necessarily by bringing us closer to a long-term solution of the nuclear waste problem, but by upholding and developing its capacity to demonstrate that such a solution remains within sight and practical reach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to govern risk through freedom? The aim of this paper is to contribute to the theoretical discussion on, and the empirical understanding of, liberal authority and its governmental rationality of risk. The analytical question is that of how to govern risk through freedom and the empirical focus is a programme of mobility management in the Swedish city of Gothenburg-New Road Habits-grouping local initiatives concerning traffic control, air quality, climate change, and public health. These initiatives have coincided with a growing problematisation of `habitual car use' in the city. New Road Habits seeks to advance an individualised politics of risky conduct and the paper addresses some of the means deployed by the city to construct the bicycle as a prudent mobility choice and, in their interpretation, a vehicle of advanced liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, the template for Swedish nuclear waste management has been for industry to deliver 'nuclear fuel safety' after first demonstrating to government authority how and where it can be achieved. In other words, nuclear fuel safety has been something to be publicly witnessed before it is decided whether or not industry should be allowed to carry on implementing its plans. From the outset, these industry plans encompassed the completion of the Swedish nuclear power programme itself, as this was made contingent upon a demonstrated solution to the waste problem. However, after a national referendum on the future of nuclear power in 1980, industrial progress in nuclear fuel safety became directly connected with a safe phase out of a 12-reactor programme within 25 years of its completion. As plans for such a phase out have in turn grown subject to indefinite postponement, and as opposition to nuclear power has progressively mellowed, so the nuclear industry's highly resilient nuclear fuel safety programme appears set again today to validate nuclear new build both at home and abroad. Drawing on studies of three specific management tools - safety analyses, EIA consultations and alternative 'dialogue projects' - this article seeks to chart the unremitting and indomitable Swedish commitment to the mediation of nuclear waste management through industrial demonstration as this has withstood various attempts to introduce a greater element of public dialogue into the policy process in response to both siting conflicts and new environmental legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the long-standing association between the management of spent nuclear fuel in Sweden and the industry-led KBS (Karnbranslesakerhet/Nuclear Fuel Safety) research, development and demonstration project. This project was born under extraordinary circumstances during the 1970s when the future of nuclear power generation in Sweden was made conditional upon the nuclear industry's ability to publicly demonstrate the possibility of achieving 'absolute' nuclear fuel safety. Due to the success of the KBS project in bringing controversy to an end, and in winning the stamp of government approval for successive versions of its KBS concept, the achievement of nuclear fuel safety in Sweden has, for approaching 25 years now, centred on the stepwise implementation of the multi-barrier KBS-3 concept for the direct geological disposal of the nation's spent nuclear fuel. While the KBS-3 concept can be seen as representing a long-run victory of nuclear waste technology over conflictual nuclear politics in Sweden, this victory has remained incomplete so long as a site for a deep repository and the materialisation of the concept has remained undecided. Since 2002, the siting process has been re-centred on the KBS project's two historically preferred sites where Sweden's existing nuclear waste facilities are already clustered. As will be discussed in this paper, just when the KBS-3 concept appears close to fully materialising itself, it has run into yet another serious hurdle and an Environmental Impact Assessment process in respect of the Swedish Environmental Code - comprehensive environmental legislation introduced in 1999, more than 20 years after the KBS project was initiated. In facing this latest hurdle, it is becoming increasingly apparent that KBS-3, through the recent internationalisation of the Swedish nuclear industry, has outgrown its identity as a national solution to nuclear fuel safety, and is on the verge of mutating into a global platform in spent fuel/high-level waste management practice and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the proceedings from a virtual online debate on contemporary science communication as a world of political invention. From ex post to ex ante science communication; Engaging the ethical, legal and social aspects of scientific revolution; Contemporary convergence of scientific and political experimentation.

As the distance between science and society is collapsed with the growth of contemporary knowledge societies, so a range of different approaches to the democratic governance of science superseding its Enlightenment government is emerging. In light of these different approaches, this article focuses on the figure of the scientific citizen and the variable dimensions of a new scientific citizenship. Three models of democracy -- advanced consumer, deliberative and radical/pluralist -- are put forward as both partly competing and partly complementary frameworks within which the new rights and responsibilities of the scientific citizen can be articulated and discussed. In each case the theory and practice of scientific citizenship are viewed against the background of contemporary developments within the field of science communication; the rise of the public understanding of science movement; the new enthusiasm for advancing public engagements with science, and the legitimate place of different forms of public protest and dissent within new designs for democratic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the engagement of science studies with the Science Wars. Perception of science as culture; Public's distrust of science studies; Sociology of scientific knowledge; Feminist standpoint theorist.

Why is the technological performance of some industrial economies far superior to that of others? This is the question which underlies this paper and with which it seeks to engage. Two key constituents of innovative capacity are identified as effective supplies of information and skill. Within conventional economic theory the standard reason given for the under-supply of these two peculiar commodities is their shared vulnerability to the problem of 'market failure'. In the course of the paper we strive to move significantly beyond this market failure position, as concisely stated by Kenneth Arrow, and explore at length the significant role played by politics and moral regulation in the securing of effective powers of innovation. In relation to this latter task, an opportunity arises to place Wolfgang Streeck's neo-industrial vision of Diversified Quality Production under critical scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to unravel the post-Fordist debate. This is perceived as a recurrent debate about the future of capitalism which rages especially fiercely during periods of crisis and transition. Three different perspectives on post-Fordism are identified and explored, each one evolving out of a particular tradition within classical political economy and stressing different driving-forces behind the historical development of capitalism. An underlying theme within the paper is the existence of significantly contrasting views about the openness of the new phase of capitalist development: disagreement over whether post-Fordism is primarily about the inevitable diffusion of a pervasive new discipline or the formation of strategic initiatives and the making of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective: Although conceptual definitions of person-centred care (PCC) vary, most models value the involvement of patients through patient-professional partnerships. While this may increase patients' sense of responsibility and control, research is needed to further understand how this partnership is created and perceived. This study aims to explore the realities of partnership as perceived by patients and health professionals in everyday PCC practice., Design: Qualitative study employing a thematic analysis of semistructured interviews with professionals and patients., Setting: Four internal medicine wards and two primary care centres in western Sweden., Participants: 16 health professionals based at hospital wards or primary care centres delivering person-centred care, and 20 patients admitted to one of the hospital wards., Results: Our findings identified both informal and formal aspects of partnership. Informal aspects, emerging during the interaction between healthcare professionals and patients, without any prior guidelines or regulations, incorporated proximity and receptiveness of professionals and building a close connection and confidence. This epitomised a caring, respectful relationship congruent across accounts. Formal aspects, including structured ways of sustaining partnership were experienced differently. Professionals described collaborating with patients to encourage participation, capture personal goals, plan and document care. However, although patients felt listened to and informed, they were content to ask questions and felt less involved in care planning, documentation or exploring lifeworld goals. They commonly perceived participation as informed discussion and agreement, deferring to professional knowledge and expertise in the presence of an empathetic and trusting relationship., Conclusions: In our study, patients appear to value a process of human connectedness above and beyond formalised aspects of documenting agreed goals and care planning. PCC increases patients' confidence in professionals who are competent and able to make them feel safe and secure. Informal elements of partnership provide the conditions for communication and cooperation on which formal relations of partnership can be constructed., Competing Interests: Competing interests: NB is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of GPCC. The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article., (© Article author(s) (or their employer(s) unless otherwise stated in the text of the article) 2017. All rights reserved. No commercial use is permitted unless otherwise expressly granted.)