Aant Elzinga
Aant Elzinga is professor emeritus at the University of Gothenburg. In 1984 he set up a unit for science and technology foresight at the Science Council of Canada. From 1991-1997 he was president of the European Association of Science and Technology Studies (EASST). He is founding member of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research's (SCAR)'s Action group for history of Antarctic science and Member of the International Advisory Board of the Netherlands Research Graduate School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC)
Professor Elzinga studied theoretical physics and applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario; History and Philosophy of science at the University College London (UCL); and Theory of science and research at Gothenburg University. He has been guest researcher at the Collegium Helveticum of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, and a Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (SCASSS), Uppsala University.
Elzinga has written on science policy from both a conceptual-critical and a practical point of view. In 1985 he introduced the concept of "epistemic drift”, denoting a shift from emphasis on internal quality control to external relevance assessments of research in contexts of strong political and commercial pressures. His research concerns tensions existing between objectivity and partisanship in research as a human activity and its forms of institutionalization in society.
Professor Elzinga combines history, philosophy, and the politics of science, giving science policy studies a broader, reflexive and more critical framework. Together with Andrew Jamison (1995) he has written on the concept of "policy cultures", referring to goals and norms associated with four different types of stakeholder groups - academic, commercial, bureaucratic and civil society. Critical studies on the co-production of scientific and social orders also dealt with evaluation procedures used by international development agencies, the interplay of internationalism and science and a brief history of Unesco. In addition Professor Elzinga is specialized in the history and politics of polar research in Antarctica, notably working on the role of geopolitical rivalry, by translation of national political agendas into scientific competition and cooperation between participant countries, a “sublimation of politics in science”.
