A consensus exists in the science and technology studies literature concerning the importance and need for public participation in the governance of emerging and controversial technologies. Our argument is that public participation needs to be situated more sociologically by taking into account critical questions of national political epistemologies, and by understanding new relations between the global and the local in innovation trajectories. We aim to contribute to a growing literature on critical public engagement studies through bringing two empirical examples from the Brazilian context into focus: on genetically modified organisms and nanotechnology.
political culture; public engagement; globalization; nanotechnology; scientific controversies