L Levidow
Biographic Data
| ID | 15819 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Levidow |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Levidow |
| SIGNATURE | LEVIDOW L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Open University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7481-0044 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 671 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Modern worldmaking and the 21st century colonial genocide in Gaza
Commonplace analyses of responsibility for Israel’s genocide against Gaza come in concentric circles. In the innermost circle, responsibility is attributed to Israel’s ruling politicians. The circle is widened to include the Israeli military, its settler-colonial political culture, the US’s massive military aid, and (most broadly) Western imperialism and racial capitalism. Extending the latter analyses, we situate this genocide in the globally he…
How does community food growing build community bonds? Insights from grassroots visual storytelling
Community food growing (CFG) builds community bonds and placemaking through emotional attachments. This process has been illuminated by grassroots visual storytelling, whereby CFG participants made short video stories about their experiences. The stories inspired community-building for better futures so as to encourage greater support for and participation in CFG. These stories were analysed to illuminate the social basis and roles of CFG. Partic…
Introduction: Participatory Knowledge Co-Production
This special Forum presents three articles that demonstrate efforts at participatory knowledge co-production. The three experiences were successful in the modest sense that they provided meaningful agency for participants and their knowledge roles, though in different ways. All three articles comment on the participatory turn that emphasizes an increasing role in public participation in scientific and policy data knowledge production and acknowle…
EcoSol-agroecology networks respond to the Covid-19 crisis: Building an economy of proximity in Brazil’s Baixada Santista region
In 2020–2021 the Covid-19 crisis worsened the harms from the hegemonic agribusiness model, while also providing opportunities for alternatives. Since long before the crisis, Latin American civil society networks had been building an agroecology-based solidarity economy (here EcoSol-agroecology for short). These networks have linked agroecological production methods with collective marketing through short food-supply chains (circuitos curtos), est…
Green New Deals: What Shapes Green and Deal
In the US and UK, Green New Deal (GND) agendas have gained significant support as means to reconcile environmental sustainability with a socially fairer economy. Their transformative vision has stimulated proposals such as more public goods, workers’ cooperatives, eco-localisation and caring activities. When seeking support from major political parties, however, GND agendas have undergone pressure to accept decarbonisation technofixes, as promote…
Commemorating Robert M. (Bob) Young (1935–2019): Free Associations Special Issue
This is a special invitation. As some SaC readers know, Science as Culture was launched in 1987 as a successor (https://easst.net/article/science-as-culture) to the Radical Science Journal. Started
Agroecological innovation constructing socionatural order for social transformation: Two case studies in Brazil
The Green Revolution exemplifies the capital-intensive modernization model of resource plunder and labor exploitation. This has provoked small-scale producers and civil society groups to counterpose an agroecology-based solidarity economy (EcoSol-agroecology), especially in Latin America. But their efforts encounter dominant models – of innovation, management, markets, nature, etc. – which limit alternatives. To clarify a transformative agenda, a…
Agroecological practices as territorial development: An analytical schema from Brazilian case studies
Made available in DSpace on 2020-12-12T01:48:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0\n Previous issue date: 2019-01-01
Sociotechnical imaginaries of low-carbon waste-energy futures: UK techno-market fixes displacing public accountability
To implement EU climate policy, the UK's New Labour government (1997-2010) elaborated an ecomodernist policy framework. It promoted technological innovation to provide low-carbon renewable energy, especially by treating waste as a resource. This framework discursively accommodated rival sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as visions of feasible and desirable futures available through technoscientific development. According to the dominant imag…
WTO GMO Dispute: Implications for the SPS Agreement
Metamorphosing waste as a resource: Scaling waste management by ecomodernist means
Which inclusive innovation? Competing normative assumptions around social justice
The concept ‘inclusive innovation’ has responded to an increasing realization that capital-intensive innovations have generally resulted in social exclusion, especially for lower income people. Towards alternatives, the literature has competing models of social inclusion – its forms, causes and remedies. These models depend on different normative assumptions about socio-economic in/equity, corresponding to divergent theoretical camps of social ju…
Introduction: Contesting Science and Technology, from the 1970s to the Present
Societal issues increasingly revolve around new roles of science and technology, or more subtly on technical expertise. This narrowly defines societal problems as technological ones, potentially (r
The rise of flex crops and commodities: Implications for Research
As a concept and phenomenon, 'flex crops and commodities' feature 'multiple-ness' and 'flexible-ness' as two distinct but intertwined dimensions. These key crops and commodities are shaped by the changing global context that is itself remoulded by the convergence of multiple crises and various responses. The greater multiple-ness of crops and commodity uses has altered the patterns of their production, circulation and consumption, as novel dimens…
An Ontological Politics of Comparative Environmental Analysis: The Green Economy and Local Diversity
This article contributes to comparative environmental politics by integrating comparative analysis with debates about ontological politics as well as science and technology studies. Comparative environmental analysis makes two tacit assumptions: that the subject of comparison (e.g., an environmental policy framework) is mobile and can be detached from its contexts; and that studying this subject in more than one location can identify its diffusio…
Introduction to SaC Forum: Public as Threats to Technoscientific Progress (Part I)
For the past couple decades, state and scientific bodies have identified public distrust, criticism and overt opposition as obstacles to technoscientific advance. To avoid or overcome such obstacle
European transitions towards a corporate-environmental food regime: Agroecological incorporation or contestation
Agroecological Research: Conforming—or Transforming the Dominant Agro-Food Regime?
Agroecology has three practical forms—a scientific discipline, an agricultural practice, and a social movement. Their integration has provided a collective-action mode for contesting the dominant agro-food regime and creating alternatives, especially through a linkage with food sovereignty. At the same time, agroecology has been recently adopted by some actors who also promote conventional agriculture. Agroecology can play different roles—either …
The 2003–2006 WTO GMO Dispute: Implications for the SPS Agreement
The 2003–2006 WTO GMO Dispute: Implications for the SPS Agreement
Introduction to Sac Forum: ‘Embedding Social Sciences?’
What should be the role of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in wider research agendas? How should SSH relate to the aims and assumptions of such agendas, especially as regards technoscienti
EU Research Agendas: Embedding What Future
Conclusions \n \nHorizon 2020 has extended the EU’s dominant policy framework promoting capital-intensive techno-fixes. Societal challenges are pre-defined in ways which favour such priorities. The EU’s problem-oriented focus may link various technoscientific disciplines in an interdisciplinary approach, but this maintains a marginal role for the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Given the promise to ‘embed’ the SSH across the EU research age…
UK Biofuel Policy: Envisaging Sustainable Biofuels, Shaping Institutions and Futures
Technoscientific innovation has played a central role in UK biofuel policy. When the government was proposing mandatory targets in 2007-08, public controversy over 'unsustainable biofuels' was channelled into prospects for future biofuels to avoid environmental harm and land-use conflicts. This vision serves as an imaginary-a feasible, desirable future. Societal benefits have been envisaged according to specific models of economic competitiveness…
Engaging Cooperative Research
Cooperative research involves upstream engagement of practitioners, introducing diverse knowledges and expertise in ways that can, in theory at least, generate new knowledge that is socially robust and publicly accountable. And yet, judging cooperative research solely in terms of accountability may underplay the transformative and nonaccountable/nonconvergent nature of research-the production, in other words, of the new when collectives are drawn…
Innovation Priorities for UK Bioenergy
UK bioenergy innovation pathways have been locked into current energy infrastructure through technological expectations, especially the reciprocal requirements of state bodies and industry. Over the past decade UK policy has given bioenergy an increasingly important role for decarbonising the energy system; technoscientific innovation has been expected to expand the range of biomass that can be sustainably converted to energy. Needing industry in…
The rise of flex crops and commodities: Implications for Research
As a concept and phenomenon, 'flex crops and commodities' feature 'multiple-ness' and 'flexible-ness' as two distinct but intertwined dimensions. These key crops and commodities are shaped by the changing global context that is itself remoulded by the convergence of multiple crises and various responses. The greater multiple-ness of crops and commodity uses has altered the patterns of their production, circulation and consumption, as novel dimens…
Assumptions in the European Union biofuels policy: Frictions with experiences in Germany, Brazil and Mozambique
The biofuel project is an agro-industrial development and politically contested policy process where governments increasingly become global actors. European Union (EU) biofuels policy rests upon arguments about societal benefits of three main kinds - namely, environmental protection (especially greenhouse gas savings), energy security and rural development, especially in the global South. Each argument involves optimistic assumptions about what t…
European transitions towards a corporate-environmental food regime: Agroecological incorporation or contestation
EU criteria for sustainable biofuels: Accounting for carbon, depoliticising plunder
Sociotechnical imaginaries of low-carbon waste-energy futures: UK techno-market fixes displacing public accountability
To implement EU climate policy, the UK's New Labour government (1997-2010) elaborated an ecomodernist policy framework. It promoted technological innovation to provide low-carbon renewable energy, especially by treating waste as a resource. This framework discursively accommodated rival sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as visions of feasible and desirable futures available through technoscientific development. According to the dominant imag…
State imaginaries of the public good: Shaping UK innovation priorities for bioenergy
GM crops on trial: Technological development as a real-world experiment
Coexistence or contradiction? GM crops versus alternative agricultures in Europe
Precautionary Uncertainty: Regulating GM Crops in Europe
Through the precautionary principle, governments acknowledge the limits of science as a basis for policy, while seeking to clarify scientific uncertainty. This tension is exemplified by the European risk regulation of genetically modified (GM) crops. The risk debate has been translated into various precautionary approaches, each with its own cognitive framing of the relevant uncertainties. Early safety claims took for granted intensive agricultur…
How biotechnology regulation sets a risk/ethics boundary
Which inclusive innovation? Competing normative assumptions around social justice
The concept ‘inclusive innovation’ has responded to an increasing realization that capital-intensive innovations have generally resulted in social exclusion, especially for lower income people. Towards alternatives, the literature has competing models of social inclusion – its forms, causes and remedies. These models depend on different normative assumptions about socio-economic in/equity, corresponding to divergent theoretical camps of social ju…
Pollution Metaphors In The Uk Biotechnology Controversy
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713695257
How does the World Trade Organization know? The mobilization and staging of scientific expertise in the GMO trade dispute
The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement procedure is a key arena for establishing global legal norms for what counts as relevant knowledge. As a high-profile case, the WTO trade dispute on GMOs mobilized scientific expertise in somewhat novel ways. Early on, the Panel put the dispute under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement through a new legal ontology; it classified transgenes as potential pests and limited all environm…
Proactive and reactive approaches to risk regulation
Democratizing technology—or technologizing democracy? Regulating agricultural biotechnology in Europe
EU agri-innovation policy: Two contending visions of the bio-economy
The knowledge-based bio-economy has gained prominence as a research and innovation policy of the European Union. As a policy framework the knowledge-based bio-economy has attracted two contending visions, which can be analyzed as imaginaries – strategic discourses prefiguring a possible, desirable future. In the dominant vision, life sciences will enhance productivity for European competitive advantage in global value chains. A rival vision links…
Framing environmental sustainability challenges for research and innovation in European policy agendas
"Recasting "Substantial Equivalence: Transatlantic Governance of GM Food
When intense public controversy erupted around agricultural biotechnology in the late 1990s, critics found opportunities to challenge risk assessment criteria and test methods for genetically modified (GM) products. In relation to GM food, they criticized the concept of substantial equivalence, which European Union and United States regulators had adopted as the basis for a harmonized, science-based approach to risk assessment. Competing policy a…
Divergent Paradigms of European Agro-Food Innovation: The Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) as an R&D Agenda
The Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE) has gained prominence as an agricultural R&D agenda of the European Union. Specific research policies are justified as necessary to create a KBBE for societal progress. Playing the role of a master narrative, the KBBE attracts rival visions; each favours a different diagnosis of unsustainable agriculture and its remedies in agro-food innovation. Each vision links a technoscientific paradigm with a quality pa…
Regulatory Standards for Environmental Risks: Understanding the US-European Union Conflict over Genetically Modified Crops
US and European Union (EU) approaches to the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are often explained using the ideas of ‘sound science’ and the ‘precautionary principle’. These stereotypes, however, can be misleading. They can conceal conflicts within jurisdictions and important interactions between them. This paper avoids these ideas and instead analyses conflicts and interactions associated with the regulation of GMOs in the USA…
Global Agrofuel Crops as Contested Sustainability, Part I: Sustaining What Development
This article analyses various causes of sustainability problems from agrofuels, especially from agri-industrial production methods in the global South. We will discuss the following questions: \n \n. How are agrofuel crops being promoted as sustainable, beneficent sources of energy*and at the same time criticized as malign, even unsustainable? \n \n. How does this conflict involve different accounts of sustainability
Farm inputs under pressure from the European food industry
Genetically modified crops in the European Union: Regulatory conflicts as precautionary opportunities
The first genetically modified crops and foods to be approved for commercial use in the European Union have prompted intense controversy. Food retailers and processors have been forced to take up the concerns voiced by their customers. New networks of groups have formed to oppose the technology. In response to these pressures, regulators who approved the products have had to reconsider questions they had previously dismissed or officially resolve…
Exploring the Links Between Science, Risk, Uncertainty, and Ethics in Regulatory Controversies About Genetically Modified Crops
European Biotechnology Regulation: Framing the Risk Assessment of a Herbicide-Tolerant Crop
As products of the "new biotechnology," genetically modified organisms have provoked a wide-ranging risk debate on potential harm, especially from herbicide-tolerant crops. In response to this legitimacy problem, the European Community adopted precautionary legislation, which left open the definition of environmental harm. When the U.K. proposed Europe-wide market approval of a herbicide-tolerant oilseed rape (canola), the proposal encountered di…
Science and the Labour Process
THERE IS A VERY IMPORTANT BOOK waiting to be written on the historical relationship between science and the labour process. It is widely recognized that the current revolution in microtechnology possesses serious implications for the structure of the labour market and the nature of white-collar work, but exactly where this latest stage of labour process development may be situated historically and how and why it is different from other periods of…
High‐tech busy beavers on film
Sex selection in India: Girls as a bad investment
(1987). Sex selection in India: Girls as a bad investment. Science as Culture: Vol. 1, No. sup1, pp. 141-152
The crisis in modern science: Report from the Consumers' Association of Penang conference
Science, Technology and the Labour Process. Marxist Studies
Chernobyl: Nobody's to blame
Sarcophagus, by Vladimir Gubaryev, trans. Michael Glenny, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, 81 pages, pb £3.50
Non‐western science, past and present
Nuclear accidents by design
The Accident (1955) by Dexter Masters, London: Faber & Faber, 1987, 336 pages, pb £4.95
Foreclosing the future
The critical theory of technology: Replies
1990). The critical theory of technology: Replies. Capitalism Nature Socialism: Vol. 1, No. 5, pp. 46-55
Women who make the chips
Cleaning up on the farm
The eye of the storm
Journal Article The eye of the storm Get access Kevin Robins, Kevin Robins Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Les Levidow Les Levidow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 32, Issue 3, Autumn 1991, Pages 324–328, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.3.324 Published: 01 October 1991
Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society
Proactive and reactive approaches to risk regulation
Impact assessment: Whose rationality
Agricultural biotechnology: Whose efficiency
(1993). Agricultural biotechnology: Whose efficiency? Science as Culture: Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 453-468
De‐reifying risk
Risk: Analysis, Perception and Management, by the Royal Society Study Group, London: Royal Society, 1992, 201 pages, pb £15.50 Social Theories of Risk, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Golding, London/NY: Praeger, 1992, 412 pages, hb £48.50, pb £18.50 Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, by Ulrich Beck, London: Sage, 1992, 260 pages, hb £35.00, pb £13.00
Scientizing Security: Agricultural Biotechnology as Clean Surgical Strike
Regulating GMO releases: Britain’s precautionary dilemmas
Rsum en franais p. 113
Science Skirmishes and Science-Policy Research
How biotechnology regulation sets a risk/ethics boundary
European Biotechnology Regulation: Framing the Risk Assessment of a Herbicide-Tolerant Crop
As products of the "new biotechnology," genetically modified organisms have provoked a wide-ranging risk debate on potential harm, especially from herbicide-tolerant crops. In response to this legitimacy problem, the European Community adopted precautionary legislation, which left open the definition of environmental harm. When the U.K. proposed Europe-wide market approval of a herbicide-tolerant oilseed rape (canola), the proposal encountered di…
Democratizing technology—or technologizing democracy? Regulating agricultural biotechnology in Europe
Biotechnology Regulation: De/Politicizing Uncertainty
‘Risk’ science has a double-edged character, posing both an opportunity and a problem for environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as implied above by the programme director of Greenpeace UK. Early on, activists cite scientific evidence to push an environmental problem onto the government agenda. Yet they subsequently lose the initiative, as the problem becomes transformed to one of official ‘risk management’, whereby value judgements…
Political science (70 works) · Sociology (45 works) · Economics (40 works) · Business (30 works) · Law (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Genetically Modified Organisms Research (24 works) · Politics (20 works) · Engineering (18 works) · Agriculture (17 works)