Science as a Cultural Human Right (Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights)

The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyones right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications. This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field. The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of post-truth societies. Dual use and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk. The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right , Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally. Drawing on the labors of generations of editors and engaging synthetically with old and new scholarship in a number of fields, the three volumes of this book make a concerted effort to address this situation, and, if this can in fact be done, to help begin to dislodge it. This project is carried out in several stages. The present volume opens in the medieval period, explaining the relationship between its title and its topic, setting out its premises, and offering a brief overview of the early English and broader European history of the terminology and idea of the vernacular. However, four of its first five chapters are set in the early modern and modern periods. These chapters explore the polemical but also structural role played by the medieval vernacular in the two opposed narratives about the Catholic Middle Ages and its Protestant repudiation that grew up out of the sixteenth-century reformations, and the strangely mutated forms in which these two narratives still survive, bot h for the few who study the period and the vast majority who do not. Because the staying power of these narratives makes a phenomenon that spans centuries, languages, and genres hard to see, let alone discuss as a coherent whole, five more chapters are then devoted to building the conceptual framework on which the rest of the book depends. Only then, at the half way point of the first volume, does the book begin a detailed investigation of the nature and significance of this phenomenon, and of some number of the many dozens of genres and thousands of individual writings, addressed to different audiences, from which it is made. The final two groups of chapters in this volume and all of its successor undertake the first and longer phase of this investigation. Working forwards in time, although with a good number of backward eddies and criss-crossings of centuries, this part of the book builds a stage-by-stage account of how the writings that make up the medieval English vernacular religi ous archive were produced, the roles they played during the periods in which they were copied and used, and the processes by which they were displaced by new bodies of texts, in different genres, languages, or orthographic systems. This account also maps the changing attitudes of these texts towards Christian belief and teaching, political theology, Church governance, and the vernacular itself" "The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), recognizes everyone's right to "share in scientific advancement and its benefits" and to "enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This right to science also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field. The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. This is reflected in the United Nations 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals that emphasize the importance of science and technology for sustainable development. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of "post-truth" societies. "Dual use" and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk. The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to assess scientific research and its products not only on their scientific, but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right, Helle Porsdam assesses the state of the field, and argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and connects the right to science tightly to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally"-- Provided by publisher The human right to science, outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and repeated in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, recognizes everyone?s right to ?share in scientific advancement and its benefits? and to ?enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications.? This right also requires state parties to develop and disseminate science, to respect the freedom of scientific research, and to recognize the benefits of international contacts and co-operation in the scientific field.0The right to science has never been more important. Even before the COVID-19 health crisis, it was evident that people around the world increasingly rely on science and technology in almost every sphere of their lives from the development of medicines and the treatment of diseases, to transport, agriculture, and the facilitation of global communication. At the same time, however, the value of science has been under attack, with some raising alarm at the emergence of ?post-truth? societies. ?Dual use? and unintended, because often unforeseen, consequences of emerging technologies are also perceived to be a serious risk.0The important role played by science and technology and the potential for dual use makes it imperative to evaluate scientific research and its products not only on their scientific but also on their human rights merits. In Science as a Cultural Human Right, Helle Porsdam argues robustly for the role of the right to science now and in the future. The book analyzes the legal stature of this right, the potential consequences of not establishing it as fundamental, and its connection to global cultural rights. It offers the basis for defending the free and responsible practice of science and ensuring that its benefits are spread globally