Sarah Davies gets to grips with a new project

Nanotechnology, most commentators agree, has the potential to change our lives irrevocably. Over the last few years academics and institutions have started to debate the ethics and impacts of such developments. ‘It seems likely’, a Royal Society report noted in 2004, ‘that some nanotechnologies will raise significant social and ethical concerns.’(1)

A swathe of surveys has attempted to assess public attitudes to nanotech, finding, for example, general optimism combined with concerns about regulation, risks and uncertainty and a deep distrust of government and industry’s abilities to manage these (2). However, so far little research has engaged at a deeper level with laypeople’s considerations of how (or indeed whether) our lives will be changed through nanotechnology. What will it be like to live in a world where sickness is cured before you feel ill? Or where every product we buy is tagged and can be tracked? And – most importantly – are these worlds that we want to live in?

The DEEPEN project – Deepening Ethical Engagement and Participation with Emerging Nanotechnologies – is a European partnership which seeks to consider these kinds of questions from multiple perspectives (3). It aims to develop ethical engagement with new nanotechnologies, drawing in thinking from philosophers, ethicists, and social scientists. Our fieldwork is now starting to open up laypeople’s reflections.

New methods

Most of us have little awareness of nanotechnology other than a vague sense that it’s a bit sci-fi. The DEEPEN fieldwork used innovative methodologies in order to sidestep some of these issues. We worked with six groups across the North East of the UK, selected by commonalities likely to be useful resources in considering nanotechnology and its impacts (one group involved people from a local church, for example; another was made up of enthusiastic users of technology).

Each group met for a three-hour evening focus group and, several days later, a one-day workshop. The focus group followed a relatively traditional format: an informal discussion around technology in people’s lives, followed by our introduction of nanotechnology and its projected applications and a discussion of these. The workshop – to which participants came having done some research of their own into nano – was more ambitious, drawing on theatrical techniques and the work of the dramatist Augusto Boal.4

Each one-day meeting involved two groups. Working separately in the morning, the groups discussed what they felt was the most pressing concern for the future which their research and the previous meeting had thrown up. They then developed a performance or presentation based around this. In the afternoon the groups presented their performances to one another and discussed, together, the issues depicted, the changes that could be made, and the implications for those controlling nano.

Recurring concerns

The process – as we had expected – more than demonstrated our participants’ capability in grappling with the science and the complex social and ethical issues it raises. It also gave us a rich source of data in forms that traditional focus groups do not allow: one group sang a song, for example, while another participant painted a picture representing her feelings about the discussion. Such modes of expression helped a deeper consideration of the futures under discussion – and additionally left us with some very creative responses as data.

While analysis of some 36 hours of recordings is at an early stage, themes and commonalities were apparent even as we ran the groups. Again unsurprisingly, people are not straightforwardly ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ technology – whether nano or more generally. However, questions and concerns were repeated from group to group: who is controlling the technology, and whether we can do anything about it; dehumanisation and the loss of individuality; the potential for great good but also catastrophe; concerns about risk and danger. A recurrent question was whether we really need these technologies – or if we’re creating high-tech solutions to problems that don’t exist.

These findings, as they are developed further, will feed into later stages of the DEEPEN project, in particular a deliberative event to be held in early 2009 involving nano-scientists and policymakers. We hope that some of our participants from this phase of fieldwork will return to take part in this. Certainly, it seems, they have much to say.

Reference

1. Royal Society/Royal Academy of Engineering. (2004), Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties. London: Royal Society.

2. See for example J. Macoubrie (2006), Nanotechnology: public concerns, reasoning and trust in government. Public Understanding of Science 15(2): 221-241

3. www.geography.dur.ac.uk/
projects/deepen

4. Boal is best known for his work developing the Theatre of the Oppressed. His emphasis on performance as a ‘rehearsal for reality’ inspired our work.

Dr Sarah Davies is DEEPEN Research Associate at the Institute of Hazard and Risk Research, Durham University