Brian Wynne

Brian Wynne (Born January 14, 1947) is Professor of Science Studies and Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change (CSEC) at Lancaster. His education includes MA (Natural Sciences, Cambridge 1968), PhD (Materials Science, Cambridge 1971), MPhil (Sociology of Science, Edinburgh 1977). His work has covered technology and risk assessment, public risk perceptions, and public understanding of science, focusing on the relations between expert and lay knowledge and policy decision-making. He was an Inaugural Member of the Management Board and Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency, (EEA), (1994-2000) and a Special Adviser to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee Inquiry into Science and Society, (March 2000). He is also a member of the London Royal Society's Committee on Science in Society.

Expert and lay knowledge

In Wynnes contribution "May the Sheep Safely Graze?" to the book "Risk, Environment and Modernity" (1996), he elaborates on the responses of sheep farmers in Cumbria, who had been subjected to administrative restrictions due to radioactive contamination, allegedly caused by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. The sheep farmers suffered economical losses, and it turned out that the source of radioactivity was actually the nuclear reprocessing complex Sellafield, thus the experts who were responsible for the duration of the restrictions, were mistaken. This particular case illustrates how the exercise of scientific interpretation controlled the farmers and furthermore how scientific knowledge neglects specialist lay knowledges, as it defines lay resistances as based on ignorance or irrationality. It also indicates the social basis of scientific knowledge and its public credibility.

External links

[http://www.martininstitute.ox.ac.uk/JMI/People/fellows/Wynne+Brian.htm The James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization]