Steven Yearley

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Steve Yearley is Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge at the University of Edinburgh, a post he has held since 2005. He is currently seconded from the sociology unit to be Director of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, more often known as the Genomics Forum.

Yearley is known chiefly for three kinds of work within this field:
*theoretical analysis of trends within the sociology of scientific knowledge,
*the application of arguments from the sociology of scientific knowledge to environmental issues and to the understanding of environmental controversies and campaigning, and
* pioneering work that demonstrated how public participation in the evaluation of environmental modelling could lead to refinement and better uptake of the models.

Biography

Early life and education

Born in Walthamstow, North East London, in 1956, Steve studied Natural Sciences and then Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge University before doing his PhD in sociology at the University of York from 1978-81.

Career

Due to the scarcity of sociology jobs in the UK in the early 1980s, Yearley had a couple of short-term positions before he got a lectureship in sociology at Queen's University Belfast in 1983. It was in Belfast that he began to concentrate on environmental issues and in the late 1980s and early 1990s he was closely associated with Friends of the Earth, the Ulster Wildlife Trust and Northern Ireland Environment Link. He became the first Professor of Sociology at the University of Ulster in 1992, returning to Queen’s for a short stint as Professor there in 1994, and then moving to the sociology professorship at the University of York in 1995. He worked in York from 1995 to 2005, spending his last six years there as Head of Department; in York he worked closely with colleagues in the Stockholm Environment Institute. Yearley has also spent periods as Visiting Professor in Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, at the Technical University of Denmark and at the University of Melbourne.

Since 2006, Yearley has worked primarily as Director of the Genomics Forum, a novel form of research institute aimed at linking social research on life-science issues with a variety of audiences beyond the social sciences: policy makers, lobbyists and NGOs; public groups of various kinds; and practising scientists and medics. In this role he has collaborated with among others the Human Genetics Commission, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Scottish Government's Health and Wellbeing Directorate and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. At the Forum, he focuses primarily on environmental aspects of the life sciences (such as issues around synthetic biology) and on new ventures in public engagement with the science and technologies of genomics.

Published works

*"Science and Sociological Practice" (Open University Press, 1984)
*"Science, Technology, and Social Change" (Unwin Hyman, 1988)
*"The Green Case" (HarperCollins Academic, 1991)
*"Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization" (SAGE Publications, 1996)
*"Cultures of Environmentalism" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
*"Making Sense of Science" (SAGE, 2005)

References

External links

* [http://www.genomics.hss.ed.ac.uk/sy/index.html Steven Yearley]