This chapter is slightly different to those that have preceded it. As I worked on the chapters you have read so far, I increasingly felt that it was important to contextualise the discussions they contain (and the spaces that they describe) through a more explicit engagement with power. Indeed, I came to see this as even more urgent than thinking about technoscience in the context of democracy – the kinds of debates discussed in the preceding chapter. It is certainly important to consider the place of technoscience in democratic societies, and the ways in which it can be subject to deliberation and debate, but at the same time democracy is a slippery concept, and one that looks very different in different contexts. Many countries, spaces, and processes are not committed to the version of democracy that is celebrated in deliberative theory. It is therefore necessary to find ways of critically reflecting on technoscience and its place in collective life that do not simply end at the idea of democratisation. This chapter uses scholarship concerned with power and justice to do this, returning to many of the sites and processes I have discussed so far to consider their intersection with questions of equity – by which I mean questions of fairness and equitable access to the opportunities and benefits of contemporary societies.

Why should we critically interrogate technoscience's entanglements with collective life in this way, and reflect on how it relates to power and structural inequalities? The answer to this question is for me exemplified by a moment at a science communication conference I attended in 2023. Like many other fields, science communication has, over the course of the last years, started to reckon with the ways in which it continues to incorporate institutionalised racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression.

I have already mentioned (in Chapter 5) analyses of science communication that show the ways in which it is organised around Whiteness and middle-class values; other work has sought to explore what it might mean to queer, decolonise, or otherwise diversify science communication practice. Both the urgency and the sensitive nature of these moves became clear at the conference. Science has a history of oppressing Black and queer bodies, one Black participant said. How can it be held accountable for this? Similarly, it has a history of ignoring women's pain, and of framing their bodies as deviations from a male norm. Why should those of us who inhabit bodies subject to such forms of oppression or ignorance trust or celebrate it?