Colin van den Akker

Doktorand|Doctoral Student

About

Colin is a doctoral student at the Risk and Crisis Research Centre at Mid Sweden University. He studies how people make sense of the relationship between democracy and scientific knowledge in public decision making. His doctoral project is aimed at wind power in a European policy context. The project design is inspired by Science and Technology Studies and Interpretative Policy Research. Its aim is to study how moral and interpretative claims are related to available scientific knowledge in policy processes. Why are some claims validated and others rejected; on what basis is this selection made?

Area of interest

Ambiguity, participatory democracy, and renewable energy technologies.

Other information

Reading tips:

‘How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies’. Written by Bruno Latour. Freely available on the late author’s website.

‘Coping with Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Risk Governance: A Synthesis’. Written by Ortwin Renn, Andreas Klinke, and Marjolein Van Asselt. Available via open access.

‘Public Participation in Science and Technology: Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mistake’. Written by Brian Wynne. Available via open access.

The page was updated 4/2/2025