John Downer is a Lecturer in Risk and Resilience at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. For a time he was a Research Officer at LSE's ESRC Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR).
His research focuses on how (and how well) regulators, publics and policy-makers ‘know’ the risks of complex technological systems. His work takes insights from a close empirical study of technological knowledge-production and draws-out their implications for broad questions about risk and governance in a world of pacemakers and power stations. In the widest sense, it aims to bring the sociology of knowledge to bear on discourses about technology policy and governance.