Francis Lee – författare

Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatist stance for the study of the making of values in society, exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine and asking how values are at play. This means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals and publics regularly do, in order to define what counts as proper conduct in science and health care, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing.A number of analytical and methodological means to investigate these concerns are presented. The editors introduce a way to indicate an empirically oriented research program into the enacting, ordering and displacing of values. They argue that a research programme of this kind, makes it possible to move orthogonally to the question of what values are, and thus ask how they are constituted. This rectifies some central problems that arise with approaches that depend on stabilized understandings of value. At the heart of it, such a research programme encourages the examination of how and with what means certain things come to count as valuable and desirable, how registers of value are ordered as well as displaced. It further encourages a sense that these matters could be, and sometimes simultaneously are, otherwise.

Memories of Tiananmen: Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989-2019 analyzes how collective memory regarding the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019. Drawing on data gathered through multiple sources such as news reports, digital media content, on-site vigil surveys, population surveys, and in-depth interviews with activists, rally participants, and other stakeholders, it identifies six key processes in the dynamics of social remembering: memory formation, memory mobilization, memory institutionalization, intergenerational transfer, memory repair, and memory balkanization. The book demonstrates how a socially dominant collective memory, even one the state finds politically irritable, can be generated and maintained through constant negotiation and efforts by a wide range of actors. While Memories of Tiananmen mainly focuses on the interplay between political changes and the Tiananmen commemoration in the historical period within which the society enjoyed a significant degree of civil liberties, it also discusses how the trajectory of the collective memory may take a drastic turn as Hong Kong’s autonomy is abridged. The book promises to be a key reference for anyone interested in collective memory studies, social movement research, political communication, and China and Hong Kong studies.

Förväntningarna på naturvetenskaplig, medicinsk och teknisk forskning är högt ställda i dagens samhälle. Statliga och privata finansiärer, näringsliv och allmänhet förväntar sig att de stora resurser som satsas på forskningen ska ge ny grundläggande kunskap men även skapa ekonomisk tillväxt och förbättra livskvalitet och hälsa. Även om förväntningarna har skruvats upp är dessa tankegångar inte nya. Sedan andra världskriget har staten försökt styra vetenskapen så att den kan uppnå sina dubbla syften. I arbetet har politiken samverkat med ledande forskare och representanter för det svenska näringslivet. I Det forskningspolitiska laboratoriet diskuterar en grupp forskare hur förväntningarna på vetenskapen har utvecklats från 1900-talet tills idag. Bokens fallstudier beskriver den parallella utvecklingen av forskning och forskningspolitik och fokuserar på på förväntningarnas betydelse. Boken ger dessutom en översikt över forskningspolitikens utveckling och synliggör därigenom de långa linjerna i dess historia.

The only booklength account of collective remembering and analysis of how the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019.