Brendon Swedlow
DCES Research Fellow
2002 to 2003

Currently, he is on the faculty at Northern Illinois University's Department of Political Science. His new contact information.

Brendon Swedlow joined the Duke Center for Environmental Solutions as a Research Fellow in August 2002. He is helping design, conduct and author a study of risk selection and regulation in the US and Europe, combining close comparison of regulatory cases with survey research among the general public and various regulatory elites.

Swedlow received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and his J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of Law. His dissertation, "Scientists, Judges, and Spotted Owls: Policymakers in the Pacific Northwest," analyzes the roles scientists and judges played in institutionalizing ecosystem management in the federal government. The sociological and anthropological concepts Swedlow recasts and synthesizes to analyze this case can readily be used to understand and explain the many other instances in which some scientists gain policymaking roles denied to others. Swedlow is the primary editor of four volumes of the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky's papers applying these political cultural concepts in a wide variety of areas. He was also Wildavsky's primary research assistant on his final book project, "But Is It True? A Citizen's Guide to Environmental Health and Safety Issues," to which he contributed chapters on dioxin, Agent Orange, and Times Beach and on media treatment of scientists' views on cancer causation and global warming. Swedlow has been invited to share his account of the political struggle for scientific authority at workshops and conferences on biopolitics at UCLA; focusing on Bjorn Lomborg's work, on a panel regarding Experts, Analysis and Public Policy at the American Political Science Association meeting in Boston; and at a special Washington, D.C., conference devoted to The Next Generation of Leaders in Science and Technology Policy. Swedlow is currently designing online panels for a for a nonprofit group that will provide new ways for disagreeing scientists to communicate with each other and the public, and new ways for scholars to study them while they do so.

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