Dear all, we announce that the March 2006 issue of JCOM - Journal of science communication - (issue 1, volume 5) http://jcom.sissa.it/ is online. Comments, remarks and papers by you are kindly requested. Next issue will be online on the 21st June 2006. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Contents ........ EDITORIAL New scandals - time to rethink the rules? Pietro Greco http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/E0501-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/E0501/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ FOCUS Blind track Yurij Castelfranchi, Giancarlo Sturloni The people of Val di Susa (Italy) blocked the construction of the new high-speed railway line that should connect Turin with Lyons (France). This project is regarded as a strategic achievement for the economic development of the European Union, but local communities have a different concept of development and are asserting their rights through ad hoc experts' reports and the production "from the bottom" of new specialised knowledge. We shall describe these events as a case study to put ecological democracy to the test of facts, also through a comparison with the experimental actions taken in some Southern countries of the world. From Europe to Brazil, the debate on health and environmental risks resulting from modernisation is upsetting democratic societies and urging new forms of participation in the decision-making process. There is a clash between different "concepts of the world", in which communication strategies play a crucial role and from whose outcome the society in which we wish to live in will emerge. http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/F050101-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/F050101/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ ARTICLES Berliner Ensemble 1957 - Piccolo Teatro 1963. Science in the reception of Brecht's "Galileo" as from the press reviews on both stagings Francesco Cuomo http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/A050101-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/A050101/ Contemporary aesthetic forms and scientific museology Alessandra Drioli http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/A050102-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/A050102/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ JCOM is completed by contribution only in the original language of the authors COMMENTS Cui prodest Michel Foucault? Yurij Castelfranchi, Nico Pitrelli Do we have to drag in the thought of Michel Foucault to show the political (and not neutral), partial and local (and not universal and non-historic), active (and not merely transmissive) face of science communication? Do we need the work of the controversial French intellectual to dispute the anxious search - almost a quest like that for the Holy Grail - for the "best practices" in the dissemination of scientific culture? If we read over the pages that Foucault dedicated to words and things, to the archaeology and genealogy of knowledge, to biopolitics, we have few doubts. Two elements, on the one hand the central nature of discourse and "regimes of truth", on the other the concept of biopower (a "power over bodies"), enable us to reflect both on the important specific features of modern science in comparison with other forms of production and organisation of knowledge, and on the central role of its communication. http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C010101-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050101/ ............................................... Medicalisation Mario Colucci http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050102-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050102/ "For Your Own Good". Biopolitics told by J.G. Ballard Pierangelo Di Vittorio http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050103-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050103/ Convergent discourses: neoliberalism, technoscience and journalism Flavia Natércia da Silva Medeiros http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050104-en/ http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/05/01/C050104/ ------------------------------------------------------------------