Joy Zhang

It’s been a few busy months but I’m delighted to say that it has also been quite productive.

New Book: my next book, Democratic Participation and the Cosmopolitics of Science, is now under contract with Springer. It will be part of their ‘Emerging Globalities and Civilizational Perspectives’ series. I’m quite excited about this writing project, as this will be a proper chance for me to reflect on my engagement with risk communications, public engagement as well as my long-term interest with the cosmopolitanisation process.

Of course, let’s not forget that I do have another book coming out next month: The Elephant and the Dragon in Contemporary Life Sciences. 

New Project: In January, I’ve also secured a small ISRF funding on the project ‘Decolonise global participation: Developing new conceptual and participatory paradigms’. Later this year, I, along with Prof. Peter Beresford, Dr. Bridget Penhale, Prof. Fiona Poland, Prof. Ewen Speed and Prof. Nicola Yeates, will conduct Delphi survey and organise a series of online forums with approximately 100 champions of political participation globally. We will look at various forms of political participation. It of course, will also involve novel forms of political participation, or enactments of diverse civic epistemology, aided by new technological advancements such as open-source intelligence, social media and the de-skilling of biomedical technologies. 

New Centre: This September, we will officially launch a new research centre I’ve established at Kent: the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice. This is interdisciplinary centre consist of an amazing group of researchers from Sociology, History, Philosophy, Bioscience, Computer Science, Religion, Law and Education. Our intellectual agenda is two-fold: 1) to understand how emerging science and technology both perpetuate and reshape value paradigms and vice versa and, 2) to investigate how inclusive and socially-sustainable production and application of knowledge can be promoted in a global yet ideologically fragmented world.

To put a long story short: we’ve set up a quite exhilarating intellectual space here!