A Cautionary Tale About Cautionary Tales About Intervention

Abstract

Expressions of discomfort or concern with interventions by radical social science movements, such as Critical Management Studies (CMS) or Science and Technology Studies (STS) in public controversies have rested heavily on two concerns: fi rst, that radical social science is not useful to institutions like business and, second, that, in order to make themselves useful such interventions must compromise the radicalism of the social science program. A third concern has been that intervention is not the job of the social scientist. Recently, my and others' interpretations of my own intervention in law in one case have become something of an object lesson in the perils and pitfalls posed by legal interventions by STS scholars. This paper presents a more optimistic interpretation of my intervention experiences in fi ngerprint cases based on a broader array of experience than that single case. I suggest, fi rst, that we may need to think more carefully about how to measure the utility of critical social science interventions. Second, I suggest that there may be cases in which building alliances with mainstream scientifi c institutions may not necessarily constitute a failure of radicalism. I conclude by suggesting that the evaluation of expert knowledge is the job of STS, if it 'means business'.

Talking Heads and Bleeding Hearts: Newsmaking, Emotion and Public Criminology in the Wake of a Sexual Assault

“…Our expedition took two paths: the first and least successful-inspired by the work of Gregg Barak (2007;but see also 1988)-trailed the road of newsmaking, while the second, more fecund route, led us to direct community engagement. Following the tradition of using personal narratives 1 as a source of data (Smith 1992;Barak 2007;Cole 2009), we critically explore our encounter with public criminology. We reflect on these personal experiences in an attempt to better understand how the public responded to this highly publicized event and the role that criminologists played in shaping these responses.…”

Science, Technology, Society, and Law

“…45-46) (see also Aronson 2007). Aronson andCole (2009, Cole & bring an STS perspective to the use of science as a rhetorical resource in debates over the death penalty in the United States. Through a series of three case studies-the use of DNA profiling to show that factually innocent people are sentenced to death, the appeal to psychological knowledge to support the argument that the juvenile brain is not fully formed and therefore should be considered less culpable, and the use of medical knowledge in debates over whether lethal injection execution causes undue painthey show that the appealing notion of invoking science in these controversies also invites peril.…”

Bearing Account-able Witness to the Ethical Algorithmic System

“…My developing understanding of the system was entangled with the computer scientists and other project members' development of the system; there was no view from nowhere (Haraway 1997), and no complete account of the system. However, members of the ethics board responded that they expected something akin to an expert view (see Cole 2009;Lynch et al 2008) from me, not just on the technical features of the system, but also of the extent to which the system was achieving its ethical aims.…”