In responding to ongoing viral outbreak emergencies, decision-makers constantly face the need to deploy governance measures to meet uncertain scenarios. One of the key aspects of such work is to identify different sources of threat, assess the risk that they pose, and to act in consequence. In this paper, we aim to direct attention toward ways in which science-based international governance practices reproduce various social inequalities by enacting social divisions based on categorizations into the threatening and the worthy of protection. We propose that these practices are usefully approached from the perspective we label more-than-human intersectionality and illustrate this with examples from the 2014 Ebola outbreak. More specifically, we argue that adopting a more-than-human intersectional approach importantly sheds light on connections between outbreak response and inequalities in global health that both precede and emerge in governance practices that provide unequally distributed access to care and protection. Furthermore, we claim that this approach extends our understanding of the role played by nonhuman actors in global health policy and the necessity to pay attention to how those nonhumans motivate specific paths for outbreak response that intersect with social positionings and subsequent dynamics of marginalization and oppression.
{"title":"More-than-Human Dynamics of Inequality in the Governance of Pandemic Threats: Intersectionality, Social Positionings, and the Nonhuman during the 2014 Ebola Outbreak","authors":"Jose A. Cañada, Satu Venäläinen","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.957","url":null,"abstract":"In responding to ongoing viral outbreak emergencies, decision-makers constantly face the need to deploy governance measures to meet uncertain scenarios. One of the key aspects of such work is to identify different sources of threat, assess the risk that they pose, and to act in consequence. In this paper, we aim to direct attention toward ways in which science-based international governance practices reproduce various social inequalities by enacting social divisions based on categorizations into the threatening and the worthy of protection. We propose that these practices are usefully approached from the perspective we label more-than-human intersectionality and illustrate this with examples from the 2014 Ebola outbreak. More specifically, we argue that adopting a more-than-human intersectional approach importantly sheds light on connections between outbreak response and inequalities in global health that both precede and emerge in governance practices that provide unequally distributed access to care and protection. Furthermore, we claim that this approach extends our understanding of the role played by nonhuman actors in global health policy and the necessity to pay attention to how those nonhumans motivate specific paths for outbreak response that intersect with social positionings and subsequent dynamics of marginalization and oppression.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42902410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aishwarya Ramachandran, Jerry Achar, G. Green, Brynley Hanson-Wright, Sophie Leiter, Gunilla Öberg
Few studies consider how changes in science studies education might reduce barriers to fruitful engagement with scientific practices. This paper is co-authored by the participants and instructor of a small interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. The seminar reflected on the role of value-judgments in science, considering the learning experiences of a science studies student (AR, first author) and four students (of a total of six students registered in the seminar) who have backgrounds in the sciences (JA, GG, BHW, SL), their responses to course materials, and outlines lessons learned with respect to interdisciplinary communication. AR was surprised to find that the science students enjoyed reading and engaging with science studies texts as she thought they would be apprehensive about the epistemic content, but they thought the texts effectively illustrated that science is influenced by social factors. Instead of expressing concerns about epistemic issues, the science students’ critiques pertained to the length of texts and writing style. They also felt that some texts “unfairly” attacked scientists, and could be “dry,” “abstract,” and overly “problem-focused” without offering concrete solutions. This study suggests that interventions which explicitly encourage conversation and collaboration between students in science studies and the sciences more broadly can play a crucial role in dismantling unknowingly held simplistic views of other disciplines. It also speaks to the critical necessity of broad interdisciplinary scholarship which explicitly includes both the natural sciences and humanities. AR noted she initially believed that science students would react negatively to outsiders’ critiques of the sciences and concluded that science studies education ought to include meaningful engagement with practicing scientists, which is rarely the case. This study illustrates the importance of using texts which have a style and vocabulary not felt as disparaging towards scientists when introducing science students or researchers to concepts in science studies. It also points to the need for studies investigating how students from different research backgrounds may learn to “see” their use of jargon and the implicit assumptions they make about their listeners’ familiarity or understanding of a specific idea.
{"title":"Changing Debates and Shifting Landscapes in Science Studies: Exploring How Graduate Students with Varied Backgrounds Think About the Role of Value-Judgments in Science","authors":"Aishwarya Ramachandran, Jerry Achar, G. Green, Brynley Hanson-Wright, Sophie Leiter, Gunilla Öberg","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.1179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.1179","url":null,"abstract":"Few studies consider how changes in science studies education might reduce barriers to fruitful engagement with scientific practices. This paper is co-authored by the participants and instructor of a small interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. The seminar reflected on the role of value-judgments in science, considering the learning experiences of a science studies student (AR, first author) and four students (of a total of six students registered in the seminar) who have backgrounds in the sciences (JA, GG, BHW, SL), their responses to course materials, and outlines lessons learned with respect to interdisciplinary communication. AR was surprised to find that the science students enjoyed reading and engaging with science studies texts as she thought they would be apprehensive about the epistemic content, but they thought the texts effectively illustrated that science is influenced by social factors. Instead of expressing concerns about epistemic issues, the science students’ critiques pertained to the length of texts and writing style. They also felt that some texts “unfairly” attacked scientists, and could be “dry,” “abstract,” and overly “problem-focused” without offering concrete solutions. This study suggests that interventions which explicitly encourage conversation and collaboration between students in science studies and the sciences more broadly can play a crucial role in dismantling unknowingly held simplistic views of other disciplines. It also speaks to the critical necessity of broad interdisciplinary scholarship which explicitly includes both the natural sciences and humanities. AR noted she initially believed that science students would react negatively to outsiders’ critiques of the sciences and concluded that science studies education ought to include meaningful engagement with practicing scientists, which is rarely the case. This study illustrates the importance of using texts which have a style and vocabulary not felt as disparaging towards scientists when introducing science students or researchers to concepts in science studies. It also points to the need for studies investigating how students from different research backgrounds may learn to “see” their use of jargon and the implicit assumptions they make about their listeners’ familiarity or understanding of a specific idea.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47570483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Sample, W. Boehlen, Sebastian Sattler, S. Blain-Moraes, E. Racine
Over the last two decades, researchers have promised “neuroprosthetics” for use in physical rehabilitation and to treat patients with paralysis. Fulfilling this promise is not merely a technical challenge but is accompanied by consequential practical, ethical, and social implications that warrant sociological investigation and careful deliberation. In response, this paper explores how rehabilitation professionals evaluate the development and application of BCIs. It thereby also asks how the BCIs come to be seen as desirable or not, and implicitly, what types of persons, rights, and responsibilities are assumed in this discourse. To this end, we conducted a web-based survey (N=135) and follow-up interviews (N=15) with Canadian professionals in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology. We find that rehabilitation professionals, like other publics, express hope and enthusiasm regarding the use of BCIs for assistive purposes. They envision BCI devices as powerful means to reintegrate patients and disabled people into social life but also express practical and ethical reservations about the technology, positioning themselves as uniquely qualified to inform responsible BCI design and implementation. These results further illustrate the nascent “co-production” of neural technologies and social order. More immediately, they also pose a serious challenge for implementing frameworks of responsible innovation; merely prescribing more inclusive technology development may not counteract technocratic processes and widely held ableist views about the need to augment certain bodies using technology.
{"title":"Brain-Computer Interfaces, Inclusive Innovation, and the Promise of Restoration: A Mixed-Methods Study with Rehabilitation Professionals","authors":"M. Sample, W. Boehlen, Sebastian Sattler, S. Blain-Moraes, E. Racine","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.961","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last two decades, researchers have promised “neuroprosthetics” for use in physical rehabilitation and to treat patients with paralysis. Fulfilling this promise is not merely a technical challenge but is accompanied by consequential practical, ethical, and social implications that warrant sociological investigation and careful deliberation. In response, this paper explores how rehabilitation professionals evaluate the development and application of BCIs. It thereby also asks how the BCIs come to be seen as desirable or not, and implicitly, what types of persons, rights, and responsibilities are assumed in this discourse. To this end, we conducted a web-based survey (N=135) and follow-up interviews (N=15) with Canadian professionals in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language pathology. We find that rehabilitation professionals, like other publics, express hope and enthusiasm regarding the use of BCIs for assistive purposes. They envision BCI devices as powerful means to reintegrate patients and disabled people into social life but also express practical and ethical reservations about the technology, positioning themselves as uniquely qualified to inform responsible BCI design and implementation. These results further illustrate the nascent “co-production” of neural technologies and social order. More immediately, they also pose a serious challenge for implementing frameworks of responsible innovation; merely prescribing more inclusive technology development may not counteract technocratic processes and widely held ableist views about the need to augment certain bodies using technology.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47003524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Angela Okune, G. Otsuki, Tim Schütz, Clément Dréano, Noela Invernizzi, A. Khandekar, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Alison Kenner, S. Raman, Federico Vasen, A. Windle, Emily York, Editorial Collective
In this editorial, we describe the work that has been undertaken by the ESTS editorial collective (EC) over the last two years towards establishing a publishing infrastructure for open research data. A broad movement in the scholarly community is pushing towards data sharing or “open data,” particularly in the natural sciences and medicine. Recognizing that there are compelling reasons why scholars are wary of data sharing and careful to protect their work, our EC has pursued experiments towards establishing a publishing infrastructure. The goal is to better understand the possible benefits for the STS community from data sharing and the role that a scholarly-run journal like ESTS could play in realizing such opportunities. The sharing of data could serve as an archive of work in/for STS; offer greater recognition of diverse contributions to scholarly research beyond individual author(s); enable reuse of data for new insights and pedagogical opportunities; and engender new forms of scholarly community in the field.
{"title":"Open Research Data: Experimenting Towards a Publishing Infrastructure","authors":"Angela Okune, G. Otsuki, Tim Schütz, Clément Dréano, Noela Invernizzi, A. Khandekar, Duygu Kaşdoğan, Alison Kenner, S. Raman, Federico Vasen, A. Windle, Emily York, Editorial Collective","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.1885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.1885","url":null,"abstract":"In this editorial, we describe the work that has been undertaken by the ESTS editorial collective (EC) over the last two years towards establishing a publishing infrastructure for open research data. A broad movement in the scholarly community is pushing towards data sharing or “open data,” particularly in the natural sciences and medicine. Recognizing that there are compelling reasons why scholars are wary of data sharing and careful to protect their work, our EC has pursued experiments towards establishing a publishing infrastructure. The goal is to better understand the possible benefits for the STS community from data sharing and the role that a scholarly-run journal like ESTS could play in realizing such opportunities. The sharing of data could serve as an archive of work in/for STS; offer greater recognition of diverse contributions to scholarly research beyond individual author(s); enable reuse of data for new insights and pedagogical opportunities; and engender new forms of scholarly community in the field.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49080279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Energy issues constitute a nexus of technological, political and economic challenges, particularly in light of the global climate crisis. Chinese banks and corporations, guided by a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure investment program called the “Belt and Road Initiative,” now account for one-third of global investment in renewable energy. In this ethnographic study, we explore the professional knowledge and practices of Chinese, Israeli and European engineers working on a pumped-storage hydropower project in Israel with financial and technical backing from Chinese energy firms. We examine how these experts construct and maintain a set of epistemic cultural practices within transnational flows of capital, technology, materials and expertise. Situating our findings within Science and Technology Studies (STS), we use the hydrological engineering concept of “turbulence” as a metaphor for the rapid transnational movements of engineering concepts and personnel in the renewable energy sector.
{"title":"Epistemic Turbulence in Renewable Energy Engineering on the Chinese “Belt and Road”","authors":"Zhuo Chen, B. Tilt, Shaozeng Zhang","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.1161","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.1161","url":null,"abstract":"Energy issues constitute a nexus of technological, political and economic challenges, particularly in light of the global climate crisis. Chinese banks and corporations, guided by a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure investment program called the “Belt and Road Initiative,” now account for one-third of global investment in renewable energy. In this ethnographic study, we explore the professional knowledge and practices of Chinese, Israeli and European engineers working on a pumped-storage hydropower project in Israel with financial and technical backing from Chinese energy firms. We examine how these experts construct and maintain a set of epistemic cultural practices within transnational flows of capital, technology, materials and expertise. Situating our findings within Science and Technology Studies (STS), we use the hydrological engineering concept of “turbulence” as a metaphor for the rapid transnational movements of engineering concepts and personnel in the renewable energy sector.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42142928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is a certain ‘failure’ in what we could call the modern development of the STS field over the past decade, i.e. a large number of studies—particularly empirical—that were deployed from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, one of their original and crucial objectives was to emphasize the local, situated, contingent character of the processes of production and negotiation of knowledge. However, these studies mostly concentrate on one part of the world, i.e. the most developed countries, precisely where modern science, commonly referred to as “Western Science,” developed. This limitation—surely intuitive or “natural”—has several consequences analyzed in this article. In summary, these limitations can be analyzed in terms of the objects of research (the various forms of knowledge) but also in terms of the theories and methods used to account for them. The aim is to discuss the construction of a double (or even triple) peripheral situation, which calls into question the old principles of symmetry and impartiality (Bloor 1976; Collins 1981): on the one hand, the peripheral character of the objects analyzed (i.e. science and scientific development outside Euro-America) and, in parallel, the peripheral situation of the communities of specialists who dedicate themselves to studying them. Connected to this, an additional question emerges: What are the theoretical frameworks and methodologies best suited to account for these objects in their respective contexts? Is it suitable to simply apply to these objects of study the same theoretical frameworks and methods commonly used to analyze hegemonic science? And last but not least, how to approach the (scientific, cultural, political) relationships between different contexts in a highly globalized world? This is the first of two parts: while in the first one I discuss the “failures” of the hegemonic paradigm in STS and its consequences in relation to non-hegemonic contexts. The second part—appearing in volume 8, issue 3—focuses on the consequences for the case of STS research in Latin America and the dynamics of its specific agendas. Those who seek to "provincialize CTS" (Law and Li, 2015), or those who sustain postcolonial perspectives (Anderson, 2012, Harding, 2008 and 2016, among others), promote a real and important advance, since they question the hegemonic model of STS and intend to broaden their agendas to account for and understand the dynamics of technosciences in the "other contexts". It is not a question of finding "new localities" in different "provinces", but rather that the processes of techno-scientific development -both in central and peripheral contexts- are crossed by the complex and heterogeneous societies, where we find, for example, perfectly internationalized scientific elites, generally trained in "central" laboratories, coexisting with a multiplicity of other actors, some of them seeking to reproduce the internationalized canons, others questioning them, while a last group is only oriented
在过去的十年中，我们可以称之为STS领域的现代发展存在一定的“失败”，即从20世纪70年代开始部署的大量研究-特别是经验性研究。事实上，它们最初和关键的目标之一是强调生产和知识谈判过程的地方性、情境性和偶然性。然而，这些研究大多集中在世界的一个地区，即最发达的国家，而现代科学，通常被称为“西方科学”，正是在这些国家发展起来的。这种限制——当然是直觉的或“自然的”——在本文中分析了几个后果。总之，这些限制可以根据研究对象(各种形式的知识)来分析，也可以根据用来解释它们的理论和方法来分析。目的是讨论双重(甚至三重)外围情况的构造，这对对称和公正的旧原则提出了质疑(Bloor 1976;Collins 1981):一方面，分析对象(即欧美以外的科学和科学发展)的外围特征，同时，致力于研究这些对象的专家群体的外围状况。与此相关，一个额外的问题出现了:在各自的背景下，什么是最适合解释这些对象的理论框架和方法?简单地将通常用于分析霸权科学的理论框架和方法应用于这些研究对象是否合适?最后但并非最不重要的是，在高度全球化的世界中，如何处理不同背景之间的(科学、文化、政治)关系?这是两部分中的第一部分:在第一部分中，我讨论了STS中霸权范式的“失败”及其与非霸权语境相关的后果。第二部分(载于第8卷第3期)侧重于拉丁美洲STS研究案例的后果及其具体议程的动态。那些寻求“将CTS省地区化”的人(Law and Li, 2015)，或那些坚持后殖民观点的人(Anderson, 2012, Harding, 2008和2016等)，推动了一个真正的重要进步，因为他们质疑STS的霸权模式，并打算扩大他们的议程，以解释和理解“其他背景”中的技术科学动态。这不是在不同的“省份”中寻找“新地方”的问题，而是技术科学发展的过程——无论是在中心环境还是外围环境中——都被复杂和异质的社会所交叉，例如，我们在那里发现，完全国际化的科学精英，通常在“中心”实验室接受培训，与多种其他行为者共存，其中一些人寻求复制国际化的经典，另一些人质疑它们。而最后一组仅由局部维度定向。
{"title":"Constructivist Paradoxes Part 1: Critical Thoughts about Provincializing, Globalizing, and Localizing STS from a Non-Hegemonic Perspective","authors":"Pablo Kreimer","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.1109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.1109","url":null,"abstract":"There is a certain ‘failure’ in what we could call the modern development of the STS field over the past decade, i.e. a large number of studies—particularly empirical—that were deployed from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, one of their original and crucial objectives was to emphasize the local, situated, contingent character of the processes of production and negotiation of knowledge. However, these studies mostly concentrate on one part of the world, i.e. the most developed countries, precisely where modern science, commonly referred to as “Western Science,” developed. This limitation—surely intuitive or “natural”—has several consequences analyzed in this article. In summary, these limitations can be analyzed in terms of the objects of research (the various forms of knowledge) but also in terms of the theories and methods used to account for them. The aim is to discuss the construction of a double (or even triple) peripheral situation, which calls into question the old principles of symmetry and impartiality (Bloor 1976; Collins 1981): on the one hand, the peripheral character of the objects analyzed (i.e. science and scientific development outside Euro-America) and, in parallel, the peripheral situation of the communities of specialists who dedicate themselves to studying them. Connected to this, an additional question emerges: What are the theoretical frameworks and methodologies best suited to account for these objects in their respective contexts? Is it suitable to simply apply to these objects of study the same theoretical frameworks and methods commonly used to analyze hegemonic science? And last but not least, how to approach the (scientific, cultural, political) relationships between different contexts in a highly globalized world? This is the first of two parts: while in the first one I discuss the “failures” of the hegemonic paradigm in STS and its consequences in relation to non-hegemonic contexts. The second part—appearing in volume 8, issue 3—focuses on the consequences for the case of STS research in Latin America and the dynamics of its specific agendas. \u0000Those who seek to \"provincialize CTS\" (Law and Li, 2015), or those who sustain postcolonial perspectives (Anderson, 2012, Harding, 2008 and 2016, among others), promote a real and important advance, since they question the hegemonic model of STS and intend to broaden their agendas to account for and understand the dynamics of technosciences in the \"other contexts\". It is not a question of finding \"new localities\" in different \"provinces\", but rather that the processes of techno-scientific development -both in central and peripheral contexts- are crossed by the complex and heterogeneous societies, where we find, for example, perfectly internationalized scientific elites, generally trained in \"central\" laboratories, coexisting with a multiplicity of other actors, some of them seeking to reproduce the internationalized canons, others questioning them, while a last group is only oriented ","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48527222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is an increasing interest among STS scholars to go beyond public understanding of science to look at the role of social movements in shaping alternate science and exploring the role of scientific dissent and the reconfiguration of the relations between scientists and citizens. The increasing popularity of citizen science that seeks to reengage the public in science needs to be situated within broader social movements that have argued for more conversations on science and democracy. This paper explores the idea of scientific dissent in India within a rich and vibrant tradition of People’s Science Movement(s). We suggest that the dominance of the technoscientific elite has been countered in part through creative dissent by citizens and scientists working together in envisioning knowledge futures. Specifically, a citizen’s manifesto—Knowledge Swaraj, is examined for its potential to present a frame for science in civil society rooted around the principles of plurality, sustainability, and justice that could reclaim the citizen’s autonomy or ‘self-rule’. Through the case study of the knowledge created by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) in India from 1976–1990, we show how creative dissent has enabled multiple conversations about science, medicine, and democracy that both critique dominant state and market narratives and presents an alternative through dissenting scientists.
{"title":"Creative Dissent in India: Knowledge Swaraj and the People’s Health Movement","authors":"Shambu C. Prasad, Mathieu Quet","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.471","url":null,"abstract":"There is an increasing interest among STS scholars to go beyond public understanding of science to look at the role of social movements in shaping alternate science and exploring the role of scientific dissent and the reconfiguration of the relations between scientists and citizens. The increasing popularity of citizen science that seeks to reengage the public in science needs to be situated within broader social movements that have argued for more conversations on science and democracy. This paper explores the idea of scientific dissent in India within a rich and vibrant tradition of People’s Science Movement(s). We suggest that the dominance of the technoscientific elite has been countered in part through creative dissent by citizens and scientists working together in envisioning knowledge futures. Specifically, a citizen’s manifesto—Knowledge Swaraj, is examined for its potential to present a frame for science in civil society rooted around the principles of plurality, sustainability, and justice that could reclaim the citizen’s autonomy or ‘self-rule’. Through the case study of the knowledge created by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) in India from 1976–1990, we show how creative dissent has enabled multiple conversations about science, medicine, and democracy that both critique dominant state and market narratives and presents an alternative through dissenting scientists.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47230196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In STS, dissent has typically been understood as resistance, a way of saying “no” that is intended to generate change in discourses, material systems, and forms of law and rule that would then govern those who are aggrieved. Using the case of La Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia (RSL) [Network of Free Seeds of Colombia], this paper builds on another approach most visible in feminist, decolonial, and indigenous STS that examines rebuilding rather than direct resistance. Drawing from interviews and participant observation, we show that RSL’s practices of “generative dissent” are temporally distinctive in three ways. Firstly, RSL’s emphasize knowledge-making in the present, they address bio- and social tempos situated in understandings of both the past and the future. Secondly, RSL re-form the bios revitalizing emotional and social capacities. And finally, they reshape human and more-than-human worlds by invigorating biosocial kinships and university-community epistemic ties.
{"title":"Seed Schools in Colombia and the Generative Character of Sociotechnical Dissent","authors":"Nathalia Hernández Vidal, K. Moore","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.487","url":null,"abstract":"In STS, dissent has typically been understood as resistance, a way of saying “no” that is intended to generate change in discourses, material systems, and forms of law and rule that would then govern those who are aggrieved. Using the case of La Red de Semillas Libres de Colombia (RSL) [Network of Free Seeds of Colombia], this paper builds on another approach most visible in feminist, decolonial, and indigenous STS that examines rebuilding rather than direct resistance. Drawing from interviews and participant observation, we show that RSL’s practices of “generative dissent” are temporally distinctive in three ways. Firstly, RSL’s emphasize knowledge-making in the present, they address bio- and social tempos situated in understandings of both the past and the future. Secondly, RSL re-form the bios revitalizing emotional and social capacities. And finally, they reshape human and more-than-human worlds by invigorating biosocial kinships and university-community epistemic ties.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45197345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the decades after the United States’ Civil War, city and state governments began to institutionalize organized public health, a process that gave physicians and chemists limited political power as officials. The emergence of boards of health as scientific-political institutions fostered but also undermined productive collaborations between chemists, physicians, and urban residents—collaborations of the sort that our contemporary citizen science hope to create, wherein experts and local lay persons shared authority. This paper interrogates the first phases of organized public health in Boston, Chicago, and New York City to reveal the forces that enabled productive collaborations between chemists and citizens, and to pinpoint how the demands of government and the law shifted the balance of power from local, embodied knowledge to quantitative measurement. For modern movements, these historic moments raise the question of how bodies can be mobilized as dissent—and of where scientists need to be physically located in urban environments and communities. Identifying and understanding the social and cultural factors that enabled collaborative dissent holds promise for contemporary urban environmental and health crises.
{"title":"Collaborative Dissent: Noses as Shared Instruments in the Nineteenth-Century Fight for Public Health","authors":"Melanie A. Kiechle","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.481","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.481","url":null,"abstract":"In the decades after the United States’ Civil War, city and state governments began to institutionalize organized public health, a process that gave physicians and chemists limited political power as officials. The emergence of boards of health as scientific-political institutions fostered but also undermined productive collaborations between chemists, physicians, and urban residents—collaborations of the sort that our contemporary citizen science hope to create, wherein experts and local lay persons shared authority. This paper interrogates the first phases of organized public health in Boston, Chicago, and New York City to reveal the forces that enabled productive collaborations between chemists and citizens, and to pinpoint how the demands of government and the law shifted the balance of power from local, embodied knowledge to quantitative measurement. For modern movements, these historic moments raise the question of how bodies can be mobilized as dissent—and of where scientists need to be physically located in urban environments and communities. Identifying and understanding the social and cultural factors that enabled collaborative dissent holds promise for contemporary urban environmental and health crises.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43312322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The analysis of dissent, or the mobilization of scientific claims to challenge existing political arrangements, has a long history in STS and was central to the formation of the field of STS itself and its current contours. Based on a conference that sought to bring together analysts and activists from around the world and from varied disciplines, this collection illuminates new temporal, geographic, and epistemological lenses through which scientists and other people have creatively challenged relationships of power. First, by attending to long-past practices and to the long-term development of styles and forms of dissent and resistance in Latin America, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the USA, contributors show how geography and situated forms of politics are mobilized in scientific dissent. Second, contributors also examine how political arrangements shape the ways that the movement of bodies, as well as their sensory qualities, is central to many forms of technoscientific dissent. A third focus, on epistemic politics, demonstrates how building parallel or alternative structures and systems of knowledge pose challenges to power arrangements, even when those systems are not mobilized to make formal legal or administrative challenges.
{"title":"Science & Dissent: Alternative Temporalities, Geographies, Epistemologies","authors":"K. Moore, B. Strasser","doi":"10.17351/ests2022.489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2022.489","url":null,"abstract":"The analysis of dissent, or the mobilization of scientific claims to challenge existing political arrangements, has a long history in STS and was central to the formation of the field of STS itself and its current contours. Based on a conference that sought to bring together analysts and activists from around the world and from varied disciplines, this collection illuminates new temporal, geographic, and epistemological lenses through which scientists and other people have creatively challenged relationships of power. First, by attending to long-past practices and to the long-term development of styles and forms of dissent and resistance in Latin America, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the USA, contributors show how geography and situated forms of politics are mobilized in scientific dissent. Second, contributors also examine how political arrangements shape the ways that the movement of bodies, as well as their sensory qualities, is central to many forms of technoscientific dissent. A third focus, on epistemic politics, demonstrates how building parallel or alternative structures and systems of knowledge pose challenges to power arrangements, even when those systems are not mobilized to make formal legal or administrative challenges.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49058467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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