Barcoding Nature

Claire Waterton is Senior Lecturer in Environment and Public Policy at the Centre for the Study for Environmental Change within the Sociology Department of Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests are sociology/anthropology/cultural studies of science; the relationship of scientific knowledge to contemporary environmental policymaking; classifications of nature; and public perceptions of environmental issues and environmental risks. She has been recipient of research grants from the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the UK Natural Environment Research Council and the US Social Science Research Council and has collaborated in research with bodies such as the World Wildlife Fund, UK Government, English Nature, and the European Union. She is co-editor of the book Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance (Blackwell, 2003) as well as having contributed numerous articles to scholarly journals including Society and Space, Science and Public Policy, and Social Studies of Science. Rebecca Ellis Research associate working both in CSEC and CESAGen in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University in the UK. She has been the main researcher for 3 interdisciplinary research projects over the last 5 years, all of which focus on different dimensions relating to knowledge making for biodiversity. Her specific research interest lies in the practices and dynamics of epistemic and social inclusion at the interface of local knowledge and policymaking. The research project in which she is currently involved explores the implications for taxonomic, policy and public communities, of recent drives to molecularise and digitise taxonomy in the form of 'DNA barcoding'. Her previous research in the UK explored the harnessing of volunteer naturalist knowledge for biodiversity policy. She comes from a disciplinary background of Social Anthropology and her doctorate draws upon the anthropology of the emotions and the body as a way of understanding an Amazonian society's understandings of human-human and human--nonhuman socialities. Brian Wynne is an international figure in the sociology of scientific knowledge and Associate Director of the ESRC funded research Centre CESAGen (Lancaster). His work has covered technology and risk assessment, public attitudes to science and technology and what are called risk issues, and public understanding of science, focusing on the relations between expert cultures, lay knowledge, and policy processes. His sociology of scientific risk knowledges has integrated SSK with new understandings of public responses and attitudes, through providing a new understanding of the unacknowledged contingencies underlying scientific risk assessments. Professor Wynne has contributed both at academic and policy level on the issue of 'Green Genomics' -- for example genetic modification and its relevance to environmental issues and concerns. He has pursued this vein of research in several policy settings - including as Member of the Management Board and Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency, (EEA), (1994-2000), member of the Royal Society's Science in Society advisory committee (2000-2005), Special Adviser to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee Inquiry into Science and Society, (March 2000), and Chair of the European Commission's Expert Working Group on Science and Society.