This paper explores how race comes to matter in the practice of police facial composite drawing. The confidential nature of criminal investigations prevented us from using research material collected through observations of police practices. The authors developed an experimental film project in collaboration with two forensic artists to illuminate the production of (visual) differences in the context of facial composite drawing. We recorded the process using a variety of technologies to produce different materializations of the drawing event. The experimental setting created a reflexive space for all participants, albeit not in the same way. Tinkering with the materials generated allowed us to analyze the enactment and slipperiness of race in practice. This paper combines written text with experimental montage to address three different practices through which race takes shape in the process of making facial composite drawings: 1) touching as describing; 2) layering and surfacing; and 3) articulating the common.
{"title":"Composite Method","authors":"Ryanne Bleumink, Lisette Jong, I. Z. Plájás","doi":"10.23987/STS.80293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.80293","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores how race comes to matter in the practice of police facial composite drawing. The confidential nature of criminal investigations prevented us from using research material collected through observations of police practices. The authors developed an experimental film project in collaboration with two forensic artists to illuminate the production of (visual) differences in the context of facial composite drawing. We recorded the process using a variety of technologies to produce different materializations of the drawing event. The experimental setting created a reflexive space for all participants, albeit not in the same way. Tinkering with the materials generated allowed us to analyze the enactment and slipperiness of race in practice. This paper combines written text with experimental montage to address three different practices through which race takes shape in the process of making facial composite drawings: 1) touching as describing; 2) layering and surfacing; and 3) articulating the common.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75197155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Open access (OA) in the Global North is considered to solve an accessibility problem in scholarly communication. But this accessibility is restricted to the consumption of knowledge. Epistemic injustices inhering in the scholarly communication of a global production of knowledge remain unchanged. This underscores that the commercial or big deal OA dominating Europe and North America have little revolutionary potential to democratise knowledge. Academia in the Global North, driven by politics of progressive neoliberalism, can even reinforce its hegemonic power by solidifying and legitimating contemporary hierarchies of scholarly communication through OA. In a critique of the notion of a democratisation of knowledge, I showcase manifestations of OA as either allowing consumption of existing discourse or as active participation of discourse in the making. The latter comes closer to being the basis for a democratisation of knowledge. I discuss this as I issue a threefold conceptualisation of epistemic injustices comprising of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and epistemic objectification. As these injustices prevail, the notion of a democratisation of knowledge through OA is but another form of technological determinism that neglects the intricacies of culture and hegemony.
{"title":"The Democratisation Myth","authors":"Marcel Knöchelmann","doi":"10.23987/STS.94964","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.94964","url":null,"abstract":"Open access (OA) in the Global North is considered to solve an accessibility problem in scholarly communication. But this accessibility is restricted to the consumption of knowledge. Epistemic injustices inhering in the scholarly communication of a global production of knowledge remain unchanged. This underscores that the commercial or big deal OA dominating Europe and North America have little revolutionary potential to democratise knowledge. Academia in the Global North, driven by politics of progressive neoliberalism, can even reinforce its hegemonic power by solidifying and legitimating contemporary hierarchies of scholarly communication through OA. In a critique of the notion of a democratisation of knowledge, I showcase manifestations of OA as either allowing consumption of existing discourse or as active participation of discourse in the making. The latter comes closer to being the basis for a democratisation of knowledge. I discuss this as I issue a threefold conceptualisation of epistemic injustices comprising of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and epistemic objectification. As these injustices prevail, the notion of a democratisation of knowledge through OA is but another form of technological determinism that neglects the intricacies of culture and hegemony.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79352982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Social scientists have proposed several concepts to give account of the way scientific life organizes. By studying “complexity sciences” – established in the mid-1980s by the “Santa Fe Institute” in New Mexico (USA) –, the present article addresses to interdisciplinary studies and emergent domains literature by proposing a new concept to describe this domain. Drawing from Bourdieusian sociology of science and STS, a “scientific platform” is defined as a meeting point between different specialties, which, on the basis of a flexible common ground, pursue together shared or parallel socio-epistemic objectives. Most of the specialties inscribed in complexity suffer from a relative marginality in their disciplinary field. The term “platform” refers to what the heterogeneous members of the collective mutualize, both in cognitive and social terms, in order to exist and expand.
{"title":"Complexity Sciences","authors":"Fabrizio Li Vigni","doi":"10.23987/STS.97027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.97027","url":null,"abstract":"Social scientists have proposed several concepts to give account of the way scientific life organizes. By studying “complexity sciences” – established in the mid-1980s by the “Santa Fe Institute” in New Mexico (USA) –, the present article addresses to interdisciplinary studies and emergent domains literature by proposing a new concept to describe this domain. Drawing from Bourdieusian sociology of science and STS, a “scientific platform” is defined as a meeting point between different specialties, which, on the basis of a flexible common ground, pursue together shared or parallel socio-epistemic objectives. Most of the specialties inscribed in complexity suffer from a relative marginality in their disciplinary field. The term “platform” refers to what the heterogeneous members of the collective mutualize, both in cognitive and social terms, in order to exist and expand.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47963230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pittinsky Todd L (2019) Science, Technology, and Society: New Perspectives and Directions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 270pages. ISBN 978-1-316-61689-5","authors":"Josie Coburn","doi":"10.23987/STS.101241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.101241","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75187884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blok A, Farías I & Roberts C (eds) (2020) The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory. London: Routledge. 458 pages. ISBN: 9781315111667","authors":"Helen Verran","doi":"10.23987/STS.100194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.100194","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78697017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public health research depends on access to population data. This article is a study of the practices and the work enabling data collection for public health research. In Denmark, a blood sample is taken from practically every single newborn baby through a national screening programme. These samples can be combined with other health data and used for research purposes without explicit consent from those giving the samples. With an ethnographic approach, I study the practices, the work and the workers of the Danish NDBS samples, and explore how newborn babies come to serve as an important national research resource. From these studies, I argue that the making of national research resources in this way is ‘mutual enablement’ of research data and care. The work of both health professionals and researchers mutually enables professional care and opportunities for collection of samples and data for research. It is through this mutual enablement of research data and care that newborn babies become a national research population.
{"title":"The Mutual Enablement of Research Data and Care","authors":"Francisca Nordfalk","doi":"10.23987/sts.98655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.98655","url":null,"abstract":"Public health research depends on access to population data. This article is a study of the practices and the work enabling data collection for public health research. In Denmark, a blood sample is taken from practically every single newborn baby through a national screening programme. These samples can be combined with other health data and used for research purposes without explicit consent from those giving the samples. With an ethnographic approach, I study the practices, the work and the workers of the Danish NDBS samples, and explore how newborn babies come to serve as an important national research resource. From these studies, I argue that the making of national research resources in this way is ‘mutual enablement’ of research data and care. The work of both health professionals and researchers mutually enables professional care and opportunities for collection of samples and data for research. It is through this mutual enablement of research data and care that newborn babies become a national research population.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68795449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal research remains a practice marked by controversy and moral dilemma. However, UK science-society dialogues on the issue are increasingly managed via one-way transmissions of information which construct publics as passive and attribute their concerns to a lack of ‘correct’ knowledge. Challenging such assumptions, this paper questions how and why people actively manage their interactions with animal research through entangled practices of knowing and caring. Based on an analysis of writing from the UK Mass Observation Project, this paper explores difficulties and discomforts associated with animal research which can cause strategic withdrawals from engagements with the topic. In doing so, it extends existing concepts of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ (Rayner) and ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey) to develop novel concepts of ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘strategic’ care. Finally, in examining desires to respond to animal research, I engage with Haraway’s notion of ‘response-ability’ to introduce the concepts of ‘responsive caring’ and ‘responsive knowing’
{"title":"(Not) Knowing and (Not) Caring About Animal Research","authors":"R. McGlacken","doi":"10.23987/sts.102496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.102496","url":null,"abstract":"Animal research remains a practice marked by controversy and moral dilemma. However, UK science-society dialogues on the issue are increasingly managed via one-way transmissions of information which construct publics as passive and attribute their concerns to a lack of ‘correct’ knowledge. Challenging such assumptions, this paper questions how and why people actively manage their interactions with animal research through entangled practices of knowing and caring. Based on an analysis of writing from the UK Mass Observation Project, this paper explores difficulties and discomforts associated with animal research which can cause strategic withdrawals from engagements with the topic. In doing so, it extends existing concepts of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ (Rayner) and ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey) to develop novel concepts of ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘strategic’ care. Finally, in examining desires to respond to animal research, I engage with Haraway’s notion of ‘response-ability’ to introduce the concepts of ‘responsive caring’ and ‘responsive knowing’","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68795323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper is an analysis of three elements of which depression as the primary target of current Western psychiatry and mental health care is made: the quest of psychiatrists to identify a depressive disease proper; the category of ‘major depression’ as defined by the diagnostic manuals; and the epidemiological view emphasising risk factors of depression. These elements are pivotal to the present understanding and experience of what depression is since they delineate the space of reasoning in which claims about depression are presented, problematised, and disputed. The paper presents how these elements have historically evolved and coalesced, and how depression has been formed and transformed as an object of knowledge and treatment in psychiatry and how the claims about depressive disorders acquire objectivity in the current mental health discussions. The paper also demonstrates how the quest of depression as a neurophysiological disease, consolidation of Major Depression as the diagnostic core of mood disorders, and the central role of the epidemiological notion of risk are both interlocked and discordant with each other in the current depression paradigm. In addition, tendencies of subversion of the depression paradigm are discussed.
{"title":"The depression paradigm and beyond","authors":"Ilpo Helén","doi":"10.23987/STS.101299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.101299","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is an analysis of three elements of which depression as the primary target of current Western psychiatry and mental health care is made: the quest of psychiatrists to identify a depressive disease proper; the category of ‘major depression’ as defined by the diagnostic manuals; and the epidemiological view emphasising risk factors of depression. These elements are pivotal to the present understanding and experience of what depression is since they delineate the space of reasoning in which claims about depression are presented, problematised, and disputed. The paper presents how these elements have historically evolved and coalesced, and how depression has been formed and transformed as an object of knowledge and treatment in psychiatry and how the claims about depressive disorders acquire objectivity in the current mental health discussions. The paper also demonstrates how the quest of depression as a neurophysiological disease, consolidation of Major Depression as the diagnostic core of mood disorders, and the central role of the epidemiological notion of risk are both interlocked and discordant with each other in the current depression paradigm. In addition, tendencies of subversion of the depression paradigm are discussed.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47261724","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
STS and 'aesthetic studies' share an interest in artifacts and the aim to describe and analyse both artifacts and their agency. The present article contributes to such dialogue, first by reconstructing the relation between Actor-Network Theory and 'aesthetic studies' and then by proposing an analytical model enabling the description of 'aesthetic practices', by considering artifacts as bodies. Such model draws on Latour’s (2004) reflection about bodies, on Ingold’s (2007) one about materials and especially on Fontanille’s (2004) semiotics of the body. To illustrate the relevance of the model, the article offers a description-analysis of the development of a prototype of an electronic circuit designed for a data glove.
{"title":"Bodies Translating Bodies","authors":"A. Mattozzi, L. Parolin","doi":"10.23987/STS.79694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.79694","url":null,"abstract":"STS and 'aesthetic studies' share an interest in artifacts and the aim to describe and analyse both artifacts and their agency. The present article contributes to such dialogue, first by reconstructing the relation between Actor-Network Theory and 'aesthetic studies' and then by proposing an analytical model enabling the description of 'aesthetic practices', by considering artifacts as bodies. Such model draws on Latour’s (2004) reflection about bodies, on Ingold’s (2007) one about materials and especially on Fontanille’s (2004) semiotics of the body. To illustrate the relevance of the model, the article offers a description-analysis of the development of a prototype of an electronic circuit designed for a data glove. \u0000 ","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45445042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article has two objectives: First, the article seeks to make a methodological intervention in the social study of algorithms. Today, there is a worrying trend to analytically reduce algorithms to coherent and stable objects whose computational logic can be audited for biases to create fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAccT). To counter this reductionist and determinist tendency, this article proposes three methodological rules that allows an analysis of algorithmic power in practice. Second, the article traces ethnographically how an algorithm was used to enact a pandemic, and how the power to construct this disease outbreak was moved around through by an algorithmic assemblage. To do this, the article traces the assembling of a recent epidemic at the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention—the Zika outbreak starting in 2015—and shows how an epidemic was put together using an array of computational resources, with very different spaces for intervening. A key argument is that we, analysts of algorithms, need to attend to how multiple spaces for agency, opacity, and power open and close in different parts of algorithmic assemblages. The crux of the matter is that actors experience different degrees of agency and opacity in different parts of any algorithmic assemblage. Consequently, rather than auditing algorithms for biased logic, the article shows the usefulness of examining algorithmic power as enacted and situated in practice.
{"title":"Enacting the Pandemic","authors":"Francis Lee","doi":"10.23987/STS.75323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.75323","url":null,"abstract":"This article has two objectives: First, the article seeks to make a methodological intervention in the social study of algorithms. Today, there is a worrying trend to analytically reduce algorithms to coherent and stable objects whose computational logic can be audited for biases to create fairness, accountability, and transparency (FAccT). To counter this reductionist and determinist tendency, this article proposes three methodological rules that allows an analysis of algorithmic power in practice. Second, the article traces ethnographically how an algorithm was used to enact a pandemic, and how the power to construct this disease outbreak was moved around through by an algorithmic assemblage. To do this, the article traces the assembling of a recent epidemic at the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention—the Zika outbreak starting in 2015—and shows how an epidemic was put together using an array of computational resources, with very different spaces for intervening. A key argument is that we, analysts of algorithms, need to attend to how multiple spaces for agency, opacity, and power open and close in different parts of algorithmic assemblages. The crux of the matter is that actors experience different degrees of agency and opacity in different parts of any algorithmic assemblage. Consequently, rather than auditing algorithms for biased logic, the article shows the usefulness of examining algorithmic power as enacted and situated in practice.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77159302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}