Alexander Görsdorf email: alex_goersdorf (at) ksg.harvard.edu

Research

ALEX GÖRDORF's current research interest is on forms, possibilities and effects of public participation in technology assessment and risk management. His PhD thesis critically examines a popular participatory method, the Danish consensus conference, reconstructing the uses and empirical effects of face-to-face interactions as a means to bring about public reasoning. Previously, issues of expertise and citizenship, and problems of scientific advice in public policy have been at the centre of his work. A social anthropologist by training, he has a longstanding interest in combining in-depth empirical studies with social theory.

He has worked in a bioethics unit at a research center for molecular medicine and as a science journalist. He received his M.A in European Ethnology and Philosophy from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and was a stipendiary fellow in the PhD program of the Institute of Science and Technology Studies (IWT) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Recently, he was awarded a PhD fellowship in the project "transdiss - disciplinary research in transdisciplinarity" which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and concerned with using quality scientific research to tackle transdisciplinary problems and advise decision-makers.