The current corona pandemic disrupts the entire world like and threatens not only public health, but our economies, social relations, democracies, rule of law, mental well-being and more. While we may have more understanding of the Sars-Cov-2 virus than half a year ago, much of what it does and how to combat it is still uncertain, despite a dazzling amount of research on it. That may be logical when new issues arise, but the situation is complicated by the fact that this quest for truthful knowledge about the virus is entangled with various (geo)political dynamics, government policy pressures, media reporting, platform moderation and public understandings of it all. It is therefore quite unclear what information is reliable, which experts to follow and what (epistemic) authorities to trust. Science and Technology Scholars are perfectly equipped with concepts, theories and methods to help us understand these complex dynamics, and guide us through the fog of uncertainty and manipulation. Yet they seem remarkably absent in public and scientific debates. What is going on?
{"title":"The Corona Truth Wars","authors":"Jaron Harambam","doi":"10.23987/STS.99550","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.99550","url":null,"abstract":"The current corona pandemic disrupts the entire world like and threatens not only public health, but our economies, social relations, democracies, rule of law, mental well-being and more. While we may have more understanding of the Sars-Cov-2 virus than half a year ago, much of what it does and how to combat it is still uncertain, despite a dazzling amount of research on it. That may be logical when new issues arise, but the situation is complicated by the fact that this quest for truthful knowledge about the virus is entangled with various (geo)political dynamics, government policy pressures, media reporting, platform moderation and public understandings of it all. It is therefore quite unclear what information is reliable, which experts to follow and what (epistemic) authorities to trust. Science and Technology Scholars are perfectly equipped with concepts, theories and methods to help us understand these complex dynamics, and guide us through the fog of uncertainty and manipulation. Yet they seem remarkably absent in public and scientific debates. What is going on?","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44191374","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}
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Review Nelly Oudshoorn (2020) Resilient Cyborgs: Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators Lucie Dalibert
{"title":"Nelly Oudshoorn (2020) Resilient Cyborgs: Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators","authors":"L. Dalibert","doi":"10.23987/STS.97562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.97562","url":null,"abstract":"HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Review Nelly Oudshoorn (2020) Resilient Cyborgs: Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators Lucie Dalibert","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47409952","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":"Futures in the Making","authors":"S. Chiang","doi":"10.23987/STS.98337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.98337","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"7 1","pages":"72-75"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81741337","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}
While palaeoanthropologists have travelled to Tanzania’s renowned human origins site of Oldupai Gorge for over a century, lasting collaboration has yet to be established with the Maasai pastoralists who inhabit the area. This paper uses actor-network-theory and the concept of enactment to compare palaeoanthropological and Maasai livelihoods and to explore why collaboration has been infrequent. Here we show that both groups’ subsistence strategies had to effectively navigate large political-economic contexts. To support their respective livelihoods, scientists and locals expertly acquired resources in non-scientific and non-pastoral worlds. Both Maasai peoples and researchers created and multiplied reality and ontologies by enacting composite – yet conflicting – versions of hybrid drought. The exigencies associated with palaeoanthropological and Maasai subsistence have hindered meaningful collaboration between the groups, despite the fact that members of both dug in the Gorge to address drought. While the legitimisation of scientific ontologies is ultimately well-intentioned, Maasai drought unfortunately remains unaddressed.
{"title":"Enacting Maasai and Palaeoanthropological Versions of Drought in Oldupai Gorge, Tanzania","authors":"P. Lee, Samson Koromo, J. Mercader, C. Mather","doi":"10.23987/STS.80516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.80516","url":null,"abstract":"While palaeoanthropologists have travelled to Tanzania’s renowned human origins site of Oldupai Gorge for over a century, lasting collaboration has yet to be established with the Maasai pastoralists who inhabit the area. This paper uses actor-network-theory and the concept of enactment to compare palaeoanthropological and Maasai livelihoods and to explore why collaboration has been infrequent. Here we show that both groups’ subsistence strategies had to effectively navigate large political-economic contexts. To support their respective livelihoods, scientists and locals expertly acquired resources in non-scientific and non-pastoral worlds. Both Maasai peoples and researchers created and multiplied reality and ontologies by enacting composite – yet conflicting – versions of hybrid drought. The exigencies associated with palaeoanthropological and Maasai subsistence have hindered meaningful collaboration between the groups, despite the fact that members of both dug in the Gorge to address drought. While the legitimisation of scientific ontologies is ultimately well-intentioned, Maasai drought unfortunately remains unaddressed.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"15 1","pages":"43-64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77116633","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 thinks with infrastructure about the stable movement of knowledge objects such as crime scene reports, traces, and order forms through the Swedish criminal justice system. Infrastructures span different communities and borders; the criminal justice system is made up of necessarily disparate epistemic cultures. Thus, they share a central concern: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another. Thinking with infrastructure, the article argues, makes it possible to widen analytical focus and capture the structures and the continuous work that resolve the tension between different sites and thus enable the stable movement of knowledge objects. Using sensibilities from infrastructure studies– for the resolution of tensions, for continuous maintenance, and for inequalities – the article argues that the criminal justice system enacts the knowledge objects’ stability across epistemic cultures. In other words, the stable movement of evidence-to-be through the Swedish criminal justice system is the result of infrastructuring, that is, of its continuous creating of conditions that facilitate movement and create and re-create stability. This perspective may be useful for studying the movement of knowledge also in other contexts.
{"title":"Attaining the Stable Movement of Knowledge Objects through the Swedish Criminal Justice System","authors":"C. Kruse","doi":"10.23987/STS.80295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.80295","url":null,"abstract":"This article thinks with infrastructure about the stable movement of knowledge objects such as crime scene reports, traces, and order forms through the Swedish criminal justice system. Infrastructures span different communities and borders; the criminal justice system is made up of necessarily disparate epistemic cultures. Thus, they share a central concern: Both aim for stable movement from one context to another. Thinking with infrastructure, the article argues, makes it possible to widen analytical focus and capture the structures and the continuous work that resolve the tension between different sites and thus enable the stable movement of knowledge objects. Using sensibilities from infrastructure studies– for the resolution of tensions, for continuous maintenance, and for inequalities – the article argues that the criminal justice system enacts the knowledge objects’ stability across epistemic cultures. In other words, the stable movement of evidence-to-be through the Swedish criminal justice system is the result of infrastructuring, that is, of its continuous creating of conditions that facilitate movement and create and re-create stability. This perspective may be useful for studying the movement of knowledge also in other contexts.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"2-18"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82432123","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}
It is often claimed that the rise of so called ‘big data’ and computationally advanced methods may exacerbate tensions between disciplines like data science and anthropology. This paper is an attempt to reflect on these possible tensions and their resolution, empirically. It contributes to a growing body of literature which observes interdisciplinary collabrations around new methods and digital infrastructures in practice but argues that many existing arrangements for interdisciplinary collaboration enforce a separation between disciplines in which identities are not really put at risk. In order to disrupt these standard roles and routines we put on a series of workshops in which mainly self-identified qualitative or non-technical researchers were encouraged to use digital tools (scrapers, automated text analysis and data visualisations). The paper focuses on three empirical examples from the workshops in which tensions, both between disciplines and methods, flared up and how they were ultimately managed or settled. In order to characterise both these tensions and negotiating strategies I draw on Woolgar and Stengers’ use of the humour and irony to describe how disciplines relate to each others truth claims. I conclude that while there is great potential in more open-ended collaborative settings, qualitative social scientists may need to confront some of their own disciplinary baggage in order for better dialogue and more radical mixings between disciplines to occur.
{"title":"Rethinking the ‘Great Divide’","authors":"David Moats","doi":"10.23987/STS.97321","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.97321","url":null,"abstract":"It is often claimed that the rise of so called ‘big data’ and computationally advanced methods may exacerbate tensions between disciplines like data science and anthropology. This paper is an attempt to reflect on these possible tensions and their resolution, empirically. It contributes to a growing body of literature which observes interdisciplinary collabrations around new methods and digital infrastructures in practice but argues that many existing arrangements for interdisciplinary collaboration enforce a separation between disciplines in which identities are not really put at risk. In order to disrupt these standard roles and routines we put on a series of workshops in which mainly self-identified qualitative or non-technical researchers were encouraged to use digital tools (scrapers, automated text analysis and data visualisations). The paper focuses on three empirical examples from the workshops in which tensions, both between disciplines and methods, flared up and how they were ultimately managed or settled. In order to characterise both these tensions and negotiating strategies I draw on Woolgar and Stengers’ use of the humour and irony to describe how disciplines relate to each others truth claims. I conclude that while there is great potential in more open-ended collaborative settings, qualitative social scientists may need to confront some of their own disciplinary baggage in order for better dialogue and more radical mixings between disciplines to occur.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"16 1","pages":"19-42"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88846047","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}
Clinician scientists are pivotal figures in translational research. Although the discourse on translational research is favorable to clinician scientists, their role within it and their view of themselves has received little attention. In this exploratory study, we analyze the view of clinician scientists on translational research by drawing on surveillance studies and the pragmatic sociology of critique and examining the potential for critique of science blogs. From analyzing science blogs and the blogging selves they represent, we find a fundamental dilemma of being torn between the two worlds of clinic and research. Although translational research seeks to support clinician scientists, it intensifies this conflict even further. The arguments of clinician scientist-bloggers are emotionally charged with feelings of contradiction, unpredictability, and skepticism. These feelings undergird a critical agenda that shows indignation as the result of being a pivotal figure in the discourse on translational research.
{"title":"Science Blogs as Critique — Building Public Identities in the Field of Translational Research","authors":"Barbara Hendriks, Martin Reinhart","doi":"10.23987/STS.75153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.75153","url":null,"abstract":"Clinician scientists are pivotal figures in translational research. Although the discourse on translational research is favorable to clinician scientists, their role within it and their view of themselves has received little attention. In this exploratory study, we analyze the view of clinician scientists on translational research by drawing on surveillance studies and the pragmatic sociology of critique and examining the potential for critique of science blogs. From analyzing science blogs and the blogging selves they represent, we find a fundamental dilemma of being torn between the two worlds of clinic and research. Although translational research seeks to support clinician scientists, it intensifies this conflict even further. The arguments of clinician scientist-bloggers are emotionally charged with feelings of contradiction, unpredictability, and skepticism. These feelings undergird a critical agenda that shows indignation as the result of being a pivotal figure in the discourse on translational research.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"19-38"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88125050","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 media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement. Against this backdrop, this article attends to how citizens confirm, debate and resist governmental framings of health information online. By drawing upon STS and affect theory, it centers on the digital mediation of feelings on a Facebook engagement site for HPV vaccination. While the public authorities framed HPV vaccination as a matter of love and fear, a wide register of positive and negative feelings were mediated on the site. The article proposes the notion of ‘digitalised literary devices’ to analyse how mundane literary habits, such as the use of punctuation, online have been transformed to digital devices that, for instance, mediate public feelings. By conceptualizing public engagement as ‘civic intensities’, it shows how digital devices, such as digitalised literary devices, mediate and intensify public feelings of engagement.
{"title":"Love and Fear?","authors":"L. Lindén","doi":"10.23987/STS.73095","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.73095","url":null,"abstract":"Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement. Against this backdrop, this article attends to how citizens confirm, debate and resist governmental framings of health information online. By drawing upon STS and affect theory, it centers on the digital mediation of feelings on a Facebook engagement site for HPV vaccination. While the public authorities framed HPV vaccination as a matter of love and fear, a wide register of positive and negative feelings were mediated on the site. The article proposes the notion of ‘digitalised literary devices’ to analyse how mundane literary habits, such as the use of punctuation, online have been transformed to digital devices that, for instance, mediate public feelings. By conceptualizing public engagement as ‘civic intensities’, it shows how digital devices, such as digitalised literary devices, mediate and intensify public feelings of engagement.","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"69 1","pages":"2-18"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83616976","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":"Pablo Kreimer (2019) Science and Society in Latin America. Peripheral Modernities. New York and London: Routledge. 270 pages. ISBN: 9780367218034","authors":"H. Vessuri","doi":"10.23987/STS.91389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.91389","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"6 1","pages":"73-74"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79544330","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":"Bernike Pasveer, Oddgeir Synnes and Ingunn Moser (eds) (2020) Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 312 pages. ISBN 9789811504051","authors":"Doris Lydahl","doi":"10.23987/STS.96996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23987/STS.96996","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45119,"journal":{"name":"Science and Technology Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"75-77"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85908516","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}