Travelling risks: How did nanotechnology become a risk in India and South Africa?

Abstract

India and South Africa have invested in nanotechnology since the early 2000s and have identified risks to human health and the environment as an important issue for governance. This is exemplary for a wider trend in which 'developing countries' play an increasingly prominent role in the development, production and use of emerging technologies. This validates the claim of the world risk society thesis that countries around the world are now confronted with the risks of emerging technologies. Little is known, however, about the way developing countries deal with the potential risks of emerging technologies. Starting from the observation that the risk colonization of nanotechnology in developing countries cannot be taken for granted, this article draws upon the relational theory of risk in order to investigate how nanotechnology became understood as an object of risk in South Africa and India. The article shows that nanotechnology was constituted as an object of risk in rather different ways in India and South Africa, demonstrating that the spread of risk discourses -and the emergence of a world risk society -cannot be understood without attending to the local context. The article shows that way risk is understood and dealt with changes as risk discourses travel around the world, giving many different faces to the world risk society.

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“…This perspective furthermore draws attention to all the practices involved in producing the knowledge about the object of regulation that enables objective forms of decisionmaking (de Vries et al 2011;Boholm 2015;Beumer 2017). For instance, in the case of risks to human health and the environment thousands of people work to isolate relevant properties, administer those in a particular dosage, carefully selected animal models, whose exposure to the risk object is in turn measured after a particular period, using carefully calibrated machines, operated by staff with the right educational background, who look for damage done by the risk object in predetermined organs in the animal models.…”

A cross-dimensional analysis of nanotechnology and equality: examining gender fairness and pro-poor potential in Canada’s R&D landscape

“…More recently, the normative governance of nanotechnology has continued as an explicit theme in the scholarship on RI (Fisher and Rip 2013;Pandza and Ellwood 2013;Radatz et al 2019;Wiek et al 2016). We contribute to this ongoing body of work, particularly work on nanotechnology, equity and RI in the global south (Beumer 2018;Foladori and Invernizzi 2018;Harsh et al 2018;Hartley et al 2019;Vasen 2017) and work on nanotechnology and gender (Ghiasi, Harsh, and Schiffauerova 2018;Meng 2018;Villanueva-Felez, Woolley, and Cañibano 2015) as well as work on RI in the global south (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016;Macnaghten et al 2014;Valkenburg et al 2020). More generally, we note that inclusion and gender are central concepts in prominent frameworks for RI (Owen and Pansera 2019).…”

Underemploying highly skilled migrants: An organizational logic protecting corporate ‘normality’

“…An object at risk is a valued entity that one wants to protect from threat (Boholm, 2003;Boholm and Corvellec, 2011). What is valued and considered at risk is contextual and variable as people understand and judge risks in terms of emic, locally defined values and concerns (Beumer, 2018;Boholm, 2003). In our case study, the narratives present the hiring of migrants as potentially harmful to organizational performance and everyday work, the object perceived to be at risk in this case being organizational normality.…”