Habermas, biopower, and the regulation of genetically modified crops and foods
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper I combine insights from Habermas’s analysis of the democratic public sphere and Foucault’s concept of biopower to delineate barriers to democratic engagement in health and environmental policy processes, with a focus on rational-critical debate in the public sphere. I begin by demonstrating how Habermas’s approach provides a normative basis for critiquing certain power relations based on how they affect the information and opinions circulating in the public sphere and the development of forums for rational-critical debate. I then explain how Foucault’s concept of biopower draws attention to the more specific mechanisms through which those power relations have the effects that they do in health and environmental policy processes, especially over time. Finally, I apply these insights to the regulation of genetically modified crops and foods in Canada and argue that democratic engagement in this policy process will only improve if unequal power relations that hinder rational-critical debate are mitigated.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.093 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".