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- Title
Narratives of Mastery and Resistance: Lay Ethics of Nanotechnology.
- Authors
Davies, Sarah; Macnaghten, Phil
- Abstract
This paper contributes towards a lay ethics of nanotechnology through an analysis of talk from focus groups designed to examine how laypeople grapple with the meaning of a technology ‘in-the-making’. We describe the content of lay ethical concerns before suggesting that this content can be understood as being structured by five archetypal narratives which underpin talk. These we term: ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’; ‘kept in the dark’; ‘opening Pandora’s box’; ‘messing with nature’; and ‘be careful what you wish for’. We further suggest that these narratives can be understood as sharing an emphasis on the ‘giftedness’ of life, and that together they are used to resist dominant technoscientific and Enlightenment narratives of control and mastery which are encapsulated by nanotechnology.
- Subjects
NANOTECHNOLOGY &; ethics; HIGH technology &; ethics; MOLECULAR electronics; FOCUS groups; TECHNOLOGICAL forecasting
- Publication
NanoEthics, 2010, Vol 4, Issue 2, p141
- ISSN
1871-4757
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11569-010-0096-5