(Low) Expectations, Legitimization, and the Contingent Uses of Scientific Knowledge: Engagements with Neuroscience in Scottish Social Policy and Services

Abstract

Neuroscientific research increasingly sparks the imaginations and hopes of policymakers. Whilst the diversity of assertive statements being made on the basis of neuroscience has been well documented, less frequently explored are more contingent discourses regarding studies of the brain. In this paper, we analyze how social policy and service actors discuss their engagements with neuroscientific terms, concepts and findings. These are mobilized, for one, to substantiate and enlarge the focus of existing policy-for example to attract funding for different target groups (such as babies, people who just retired, etc.)-as well as to help develop (new) policies and services. We show how, in so doing, invocation of the neurosciences can act to align "mutual imagined understandings" among policy actors, practitioners and parents. Tentativeness and ambivalence also figured within our respondents' accounts of the use of the neurosciences. They argued that research had to be simplified in order to make it relevant for wider stakeholders (including politicians), whilst simultaneously considering simplification problematic in some cases. Our analysis foregrounds the different complexities, ambivalences, reductions and instrumentalizations involved in policy and service engagements with the neurosciences, rendering challengeable any notion that (ideas about) neuroscientific research "determines" policy in a linear sense.

Contested futures: envisioning “Personalized,” “Stratified,” and “Precision” medicine

“…Existing theoretical and empirical contributions to the sociology of expectations have demonstrated how new and emerging biotechnologies and techno-scientific innovations are characterized by future-oriented expectations and visions that are manufactured and attached to the technologies as their “promise” (e.g. Broer and Pickersgill 2015; Borup et al . 2006; Brown and Michael, 2010; Brown, Rappert, and Webster 2000; Moirera and Palladino 2005).…”

“…Broer and Pickersgill 2015; Borup et al . 2006; Brown and Michael, 2010; Brown, Rappert, and Webster 2000; Moirera and Palladino 2005). These expectations are “a way of attracting and synthesizing different kinds of capital” (Broer and Pickersgill 2015, 48), including economic, but also social, cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986), that help to enroll different actors in support of particular research agendas and innovation models.…”

Social bodies and social justice

“…Recent years have seen the conflation of neuroscience with neoliberal and neoconservative political ideologies to conceptualise ‘risky’ populations, individualise social problems and justify particular interventions. In this regard, Broer and Pickersgill (2015) document the use of neuroscience within British social policy. They detail how neuroscience narratives emphasise individual responsibility (for self and community) and ‘[w]hile neuroscience may be leveraged by policymakers in ways that (potentially) reduce the target of their intervention to the soma … they do so in order to expand the outcome of the intervention to include society writ large’ (Broer and Pickersgill, 2015, p. 60, emphasis in original).…”

“…In this regard, Broer and Pickersgill (2015) document the use of neuroscience within British social policy. They detail how neuroscience narratives emphasise individual responsibility (for self and community) and ‘[w]hile neuroscience may be leveraged by policymakers in ways that (potentially) reduce the target of their intervention to the soma … they do so in order to expand the outcome of the intervention to include society writ large’ (Broer and Pickersgill, 2015, p. 60, emphasis in original). Whilst such interventions may be seen as attempts to build resilience, the ascription of vulnerability to individuals, alongside stigmatising strategies to promote personal responsibility regardless of the wider context, can have the opposite effect.…”

Routledge Handbook of Genomics, Health and Society

“…Although (shifting) ideas about a plastic biology are of evident significance to early intervention policy and practice, it is also striking that policy and service actors can be critical of how, and the extent to which, somatic notions impact discourse and initiatives (as discussed in more detail in Broer and Pickersgill, 2015b). Within social policy spheres more generally, there is likewiseon occasion -recognition of the partiality of, and contestation surrounding, much of the biological knowledge circulating therein.…”