Books

Can Science Make Sense of Life? (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
In this short book, I explore a series of moves by which the life sciences in the 20th century took on the responsibility not only to describe what life is but also to declare what life is for. The story can be seen as a long case study of co-production, in which the lines between is and ought become progressively blurred as society cedes ever greater normative authority to science.
Written for a general audience, this book distills my past work on the governance of science and technology to reveal new ethical and political problems arising at the frontiers of emerging technologies. The book argues that technologies both open up and close down the kinds of futures available to humanity. Systematic barriers to wider participation in the design of new technologies should therefore be identified and, ideally, dismantled.
Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); edited with Sang-Hyun Kim.
My introductory essay in this volume defines and develops the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. My concluding chapter charts how imaginaries become collectively accepted and renewed over time. For guidance on how to use the concept in your own research, see http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/research/platforms/imaginaries/.
Le Droit et La Science en Action (edited and translated by Olivier Leclerc) (Paris: Dalloz, 2013).
A collection of some of my law-related work, including a French translation of my well-known essay on co-production.
L’Innovatione Tra Utopia e Storia [Innovation between Utopia and History] (with S. Funtowicz and A. Benessia) (Codice Edizioni: Turin, 2013).
Click here to download a pdf of the English version of my essay in this book.

Science and Public Reason (collected essays with new Introduction and Afterword) (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge-Earthscan, 2012).

This collection draws together a dozen of my essays on risk, law, and comparative policy, and documents the central place of public reason as a connecting thread through several decades of my work.

Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); edited, with sole-authored introduction, conclusion, and chapter.

This book, like most of my edited volumes, introduces a new theoretical concept—bioconstitutionalism—to illuminate how ideas about life and lawfulness become entwined at the frontiers of the life sciences.

Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005; paperback 2007); Italian translation: Fabbriche della natura: Biotecnologie e democrazia (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2008); Chinese translation (2011).

Designs resumes my comparative research after a hiatus of several years. It offers a decidedly post-structuralist account of political culture, focusing particularly on the role of civic epistemologies in legitimating national responses to emerging biotechnologies.

Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); edited with Marybeth Long Martello, with co-authored introduction and conclusion, and sole-authored chapter.
My chapter in this volume explores the role of visual images in elevating environmental concerns to the global scale. Overall, the volume can be seen as a precursor to my later work on sociotechnical imaginaries.
States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004; paperback edition 2007); edited, with sole-authored introduction, conclusion, and chapter.
My theoretical essay here is regarded as the definitive account of co-production in STS. To download a pdf, click here.
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Oxford: Elsevier, 2001). Section Editor for Science and Technology Studies.
STS made its first appearance as a recognized field within the social and behavioral sciences in this edition of the IESBS. Readers will find some 65 articles by leading STS scholars scattered throughout the work. Besides editing the section, I wrote the entry on law and science.
Comparative Science and Technology Policy (Cheltenham, Glos., UK: Edward Elgar, 1997); edited (with introduction).
Compiled for political scientists rather than STS scholars, this volume remains potentially interesting to STS as an introduction to how other disciplines think about science and technology policy.

Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America, a Twentieth Century Fund book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); paperback 1997; Italian translation La Scienza davanti ai Giudici (Milan: Giuffré, 2001); Korean translation (Seoul: East-Asia Publishing, 2011).

This book contradicts or complicates many conventional ideas about science and law, including the “law lag,” the scientific illiteracy of judges, and the role of courts in producing “junk science.”

Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995); co-edited with Gerald Markle, James Petersen, Trevor Pinch.

Sometimes referred to as the second STS handbook, this volume actually provided the first comprehensive overview of the field on both sides of the Atlantic.

Learning From Disaster: Risk Management After Bhopal (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); edited (with introduction).

Many of my ideas about technology, law, and justice developed while I was working on this book and were first articulated in my introductory essay.

The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); paperback 1994; Chinese translation (Shanghai: Jiao Tong University Press, 2010).

Risk Management and Political Culture (New York: Russell Sage Founda­tion, 1986).

A spin-off from Controlling Chemicals, and my first significant sole-authored work, this little book showed how political culture affects the assessment and management of technological risk. I discovered STS while working on this book.

Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the U.S. (co-authored with Ronald Brickman and Thomas Ilgen) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer­sity Press, 1985).
My chapter on comparative risk assessment in this book grapples with STS ideas of boundaries, demarcation, and standardization, although I was unaware of parallel work in the sociology of scientific knowledge when I wrote it. Written in collaboration with two political scientists, my contributions were more sensitive to politics and institutional dynamics than was typical of contemporaneous STS work.