Figures released by the ONS today suggest that net migration to the UK stands at an all time high, at 336,000. The UK government’s pledge to reduce net migration ‘from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands’ seems further than ever from being achieved. So why hasn’t the government killed off this compromising   …Continue Reading

A range of techniques and methods exist to assemble and present research findings in a way that will be ‘useful’ to policymakers. In public health, three of the most popular are Health Impact Assessments, systematic reviews, and economic decision-making tools (including cost-benefit analysis and scenario modelling). Despite the broadly shared goals, these methodologies have developed   …Continue Reading

We look back on a busy year, and talk about next steps for SKAPE SKAPE is celebrating its first anniversary today. We launched the Centre last June with a symposium on “Open Science, Open Society”, with guests Jill Rutter and Albert Weale. Other highlights of the year have included keynote lectures from Sheila Jasanoff, Jenny   …Continue Reading

In a range of areas, the neurosciences have been described as influential – changing, it seems, policies, ideas on mental health, and our notions selfhood more generally. In a Leverhulme Trust-funded project we are looking at the way the neurosciences are (and are not) adopted in policy, the media, and family life. In a recent   …Continue Reading

Much has been written about the ways in which quantified targets and performance indicators distort and compress the social dynamics they seek to represent. And scholars of science and technology studies have convincingly shown how such representations are not just descriptive but also performative, shaping our beliefs and norms about policy problems and appropriate responses.   …Continue Reading

Think-tanks play a key role in policy today. Yet, for scholars who are concerned with the dynamics within and between law and science, the place and impact of such organisations are often over-looked. To begin to remedy this, we held an event titled ‘Regulating Bioscience: Between the Ivory Tower and the Policy Room’ on the   …Continue Reading

International education assessments have become the lifeblood of education governance in Europe and globally. However what do we really know about how education systems are measured against one another and the effects this measuring produces? Operating as a new form of global education governance, international assessments create a powerful comparative spectacle focused on the performance   …Continue Reading

As evidenced in documents and reviews such as High Quality Care for All, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS, and the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement’s Patient Experience Book, references to ‘the patient experience’ have become increasingly pervasive in healthcare policy in the UK. While a concern with how people experience health and illness   …Continue Reading

In a wonderfully perceptive article from 1999, German sociologist Peter Weingart identifies two paradoxes surrounding the use of science in political debate (and we can apply this to expertise more generally). First, late modern societies show an unprecedented dependence on expert knowledge to assess the risks and consequences of political action. Politics becomes ‘scientised’. But   …Continue Reading

Professor Albert Weale FBA (UCL) writes about the challenges of knowledge democratisation Issues like the funding of highly expensive pharmaceutical interventions, new forms of animal breeding, dispersed chemicals in the environment, the genetic modification of plants or the choice among different forms of energy production make for hard public policy decisions. They are highly technical,   …Continue Reading