| Scientific controversies surrounding agricultural biotechnology have deep significance for the politics of food, the governance of technology, and the organization of public and private research. Debates over the ecological and human health impacts of genetically-modified crops not only reveal the high stakes of particular contested 'facts,' but also expose questions about the reliability of regimes of regulation and the public's trust in the scientific community. Powerful economic, intellectual, and political institutions struggle to guide patterns of scientific inquiry that influence policies and practices for developing and deploying agricultural biotechnologies.;Scholars in the social studies of science have long recognized the role of scientific dissent in the production of knowledge, but few have explored its heterogeneity as a social practice. The highly politicized field of agricultural biotechnology presents an ideal site to explore this complexity. In this context, the practice of scientific dissent becomes a window into the negotiation of social order. This dissertation focuses on three case studies of scientific controversy in agricultural biotechnology that occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s: David Quist and Ignacio Chapela's announcement that native landraces of Mexican maize had incorporated transgenic DNA fragments, presumably due to cross-pollination; John Losey and colleagues' finding that Bt corn pollen could harm monarch butterfly larvae; and Arpad Pusztai's announcement that rats fed GM potatoes developed physiological abnormalities.;Beyond contributing to the historical record of these controversies, this dissertation makes three theoretical claims about scientific dissent. First, the diverse practices of scientific dissent emerge as part of a pathway. This pathway reflects the predominantly promotional context of agricultural biotechnology, the appearance of contrarian science as a first spark of dissent, and the myriad challenges to the credibility of contrarian science. Contrarian scientists only become dissenters when they actively respond to those challenges. Second, the metaphor of science as performance reveals the significance of constructing publics to serve as audiences to scientific controversy. Third, when dissenters engage this metaphor self-consciously, they enact performances of dissident science, a form of scientific dissent that takes on an explicitly political character and challenges conventional relationships among scientists, publics, and politics. |
