Pub Date : 2022-08-20DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2114335
G. Rees, Deborah White
ABSTRACT The sexual assault trial of R v Hartman included evidence from a sleep expert who found himself increasingly marginalised within the scientific community. Marginalisation takes place following a scientific controversy, when those considered to be on the losing side find it increasingly difficult to be heard by the community, and in particular, their ideas are removed from core texts in the field. Given a marginalised expert's ambiguous status, and a scientific knowledge deficit on the part of legal actors, on what grounds does a judge base their decision around the evidential value of their testimony? An analysis of the judge's decision in the trial indicates that she evaluated the expert's evidence by employing a version of a socio-technical review that included expectations of scientific rigour based on mechanical objectivity and procedural correctness. Drawing upon these processes and expectations of sound science, the judge had little difficulty evaluating the expert's evidence and finding it unsafe. In particular, she drew attention to the expert's mobilisation of a conspiratorial discursive style, a product of his marginalisation. This supports certain STS claims that legal actors already have tools for evaluating appropriate expertise, and these continue to be the cornerstone of judicial decision-making around expert testimony, even in highly ambiguous situations like post-controversy science.
{"title":"Judging Post-Controversy Expertise: Judicial Discretion and Scientific Marginalisation in the Courtroom","authors":"G. Rees, Deborah White","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2114335","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2114335","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The sexual assault trial of R v Hartman included evidence from a sleep expert who found himself increasingly marginalised within the scientific community. Marginalisation takes place following a scientific controversy, when those considered to be on the losing side find it increasingly difficult to be heard by the community, and in particular, their ideas are removed from core texts in the field. Given a marginalised expert's ambiguous status, and a scientific knowledge deficit on the part of legal actors, on what grounds does a judge base their decision around the evidential value of their testimony? An analysis of the judge's decision in the trial indicates that she evaluated the expert's evidence by employing a version of a socio-technical review that included expectations of scientific rigour based on mechanical objectivity and procedural correctness. Drawing upon these processes and expectations of sound science, the judge had little difficulty evaluating the expert's evidence and finding it unsafe. In particular, she drew attention to the expert's mobilisation of a conspiratorial discursive style, a product of his marginalisation. This supports certain STS claims that legal actors already have tools for evaluating appropriate expertise, and these continue to be the cornerstone of judicial decision-making around expert testimony, even in highly ambiguous situations like post-controversy science.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"109 - 131"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42248923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-03DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2105691
Paulo F. C. Fonseca, Barbara E. Ribeiro, Leonardo F. Nascimento
ABSTRACT As supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the Bolsonarism movement has promoted the drug chloroquine for treating Covid-19 in Brazil, despite it being mostly rejected by mainstream health institutions as an effective treatment. This situation can be investigated through the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and ignorance studies supported by methods from digital sociology. Bolsonarist discourse does not contest scientific authority tout court, but rather constructs boundaries between what supporters of the president see as legitimate and illegitimate science. This institutionalised ignorance is produced and maintained through Telegram messenger, a backbone of the multi-platform media ecosystem of Bolsonarism. It is accomplished through boundary work: the exclusion or inclusion of knowledge via two complementary practices – pejorative accusations against mainstream science and the crafting of affective bonds with the chloroquine alternative. While the former aims to invalidate knowledge held by experts opposed to the use of chloroquine, the latter focuses on mobilising trust in an alternative model of science, which we refer to as patriotic science. This model of science is demarcated from mainstream science, framed as corrupt and ill-equipped for the needs of Brazilians. This case study advances STS resources for examining the epistemic demarcation between science/non-science, relevant to other polities and publics that use such boundary work to institutionalise ignorance.
{"title":"Demarcating Patriotic Science on Digital Platforms: Covid-19, Chloroquine and the Institutionalisation of Ignorance in Brazil","authors":"Paulo F. C. Fonseca, Barbara E. Ribeiro, Leonardo F. Nascimento","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2105691","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2105691","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 As supporters of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the Bolsonarism movement has promoted the drug chloroquine for treating Covid-19 in Brazil, despite it being mostly rejected by mainstream health institutions as an effective treatment. This situation can be investigated through the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and ignorance studies supported by methods from digital sociology. Bolsonarist discourse does not contest scientific authority tout court, but rather constructs boundaries between what supporters of the president see as legitimate and illegitimate science. This institutionalised ignorance is produced and maintained through Telegram messenger, a backbone of the multi-platform media ecosystem of Bolsonarism. It is accomplished through boundary work: the exclusion or inclusion of knowledge via two complementary practices – pejorative accusations against mainstream science and the crafting of affective bonds with the chloroquine alternative. While the former aims to invalidate knowledge held by experts opposed to the use of chloroquine, the latter focuses on mobilising trust in an alternative model of science, which we refer to as patriotic science. This model of science is demarcated from mainstream science, framed as corrupt and ill-equipped for the needs of Brazilians. This case study advances STS resources for examining the epistemic demarcation between science/non-science, relevant to other polities and publics that use such boundary work to institutionalise ignorance.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"530 - 554"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43403874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-27DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2101918
Pablo Kreimer
ABSTRACT Scientific work has always worked alongside promises of future developments. Promises, though, have very different consequences across different contexts. Indeed, the formulation of scientific promises in peripheral scientific contexts have different structures and consequences, compared to those in hegemonic sites. Promises are intended to provide solutions to important public problems. Yet in doing so, a scientific field or specialty is positioned as the most legitimate to solve these problems, displacing competing visions, questioning alternative actors, and building the epistemic bases with which to think about these issues. During these processes, scientific fields and technoscientific promises are co-produced. Since most of the studies on promises and techno-scientific expectations have focused on processes located in hegemonic sites, analytic tools must be adapted to analyze the emergence of techno-scientific promises and the corresponding development of scientific fields in peripheral locations. Facing structural barriers to transforming knowledge into marketable products, peripheral scientific elites do not have the same capacity to formulate solutions based on local knowledge. Chagas, a Latin American tropical disease, provides a good example of how scientific promises and scientific fields are co-produced in peripheral locations, along with various power asymmetries in a context of highly globalized knowledge. Through this example, it is possible to see how promises shape and are shaped by relations between different countries and research infrastructures. Because of the structural barriers that exist in peripheral countries, scientific promises often generate cutting-edge knowledge aligned with international agendas, but is almost never able to effectively address public problems.
{"title":"Techno-Scientific Promises, Disciplinary Fields, and Social Issues in Peripheral Contexts","authors":"Pablo Kreimer","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2101918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2101918","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Scientific work has always worked alongside promises of future developments. Promises, though, have very different consequences across different contexts. Indeed, the formulation of scientific promises in peripheral scientific contexts have different structures and consequences, compared to those in hegemonic sites. Promises are intended to provide solutions to important public problems. Yet in doing so, a scientific field or specialty is positioned as the most legitimate to solve these problems, displacing competing visions, questioning alternative actors, and building the epistemic bases with which to think about these issues. During these processes, scientific fields and technoscientific promises are co-produced. Since most of the studies on promises and techno-scientific expectations have focused on processes located in hegemonic sites, analytic tools must be adapted to analyze the emergence of techno-scientific promises and the corresponding development of scientific fields in peripheral locations. Facing structural barriers to transforming knowledge into marketable products, peripheral scientific elites do not have the same capacity to formulate solutions based on local knowledge. Chagas, a Latin American tropical disease, provides a good example of how scientific promises and scientific fields are co-produced in peripheral locations, along with various power asymmetries in a context of highly globalized knowledge. Through this example, it is possible to see how promises shape and are shaped by relations between different countries and research infrastructures. Because of the structural barriers that exist in peripheral countries, scientific promises often generate cutting-edge knowledge aligned with international agendas, but is almost never able to effectively address public problems.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"83 - 108"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43899618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2112167
D. Shaw
{"title":"Dazzled by the Sunshine Machines","authors":"D. Shaw","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2112167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2112167","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"412 - 417"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42477652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2101919
J. Chan
When Lorde (2003) suggested the master’s house could not be dismantled with the master’s tools, it prompted Le Guin (2004) to ask a series of questions: Are alternative tools to be invented to build our future? What should be unlearned? Must democracy and science also be discarded? Le Guin called the metaphor ‘rich and dangerous’ and was herself unable to answer the questions it raised. At issue was how necessary the radical refashioning of knowledge was for a successful transformation of material reality. Similar questions are also at stake in A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero, which asks whether abstract instruments forged within the logics of capitalism can be successfully deployed against water’s commodification. The book opens with an account of protestors at the World Water Forum in Mexico City shaking water bottles full of coins to denounce water’s commodification and demand it as a human right. Ballestero looks at the everyday labor of water experts, public officials, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, as well as the tools they marshal to contest competing conceptualizations of water – as either a commodity or a human right. This quest takes her not so much to watery sites themselves – like rivers, dams, or lakes – but unexpectedly to removed bureaucratic spaces like offices, meeting rooms, workshops, and computer spreadsheets. Ballestero attends to four technolegal devices as productive ethnographic objects, each materializing water in different ways. For Ballestero, these devices deserve to be gazed at with the same sort of wonder reserved for museum displays. Her approach draws on the old cabinet of wonder (Wunderkammer), which emerged in sixteenth century Europe and juxtaposed various curiosities collected from the far reaches of empire into new assemblages that transformed their meanings. Ballestero’s four devices of formula, index, list, and pact are framed as cabinet curiosities displayed in the pages of her book. By examining a formula used to calculate the price of water, the consumer price index used to secure water’s affordability, a taxonomic list used to undermine the public ownership of water, and citizen pacts used to encourage public care for water, Ballestero shows how these devices (re)materialize water in multiple ways and render water as commodity or human right. Some scholarship has noted the troubling lack of distinction between commodities and human rights. The legal scholar D’Souza (2018) claims: ‘The modern concept of rights owes its birth to that moment when land was transformed into a commodity and hundreds of thousands of people were evicted from the place they called their ‘homeland’’ (p. 5). Ballestero similarly highlights in her text Marx’s (1976) observation that ‘the very Eden of... innate rights’ is found within ‘[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange’ (p. 280).
{"title":"Re-righting Water’s Future with the Master’s Tools?","authors":"J. Chan","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2101919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2101919","url":null,"abstract":"When Lorde (2003) suggested the master’s house could not be dismantled with the master’s tools, it prompted Le Guin (2004) to ask a series of questions: Are alternative tools to be invented to build our future? What should be unlearned? Must democracy and science also be discarded? Le Guin called the metaphor ‘rich and dangerous’ and was herself unable to answer the questions it raised. At issue was how necessary the radical refashioning of knowledge was for a successful transformation of material reality. Similar questions are also at stake in A Future History of Water by Andrea Ballestero, which asks whether abstract instruments forged within the logics of capitalism can be successfully deployed against water’s commodification. The book opens with an account of protestors at the World Water Forum in Mexico City shaking water bottles full of coins to denounce water’s commodification and demand it as a human right. Ballestero looks at the everyday labor of water experts, public officials, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, as well as the tools they marshal to contest competing conceptualizations of water – as either a commodity or a human right. This quest takes her not so much to watery sites themselves – like rivers, dams, or lakes – but unexpectedly to removed bureaucratic spaces like offices, meeting rooms, workshops, and computer spreadsheets. Ballestero attends to four technolegal devices as productive ethnographic objects, each materializing water in different ways. For Ballestero, these devices deserve to be gazed at with the same sort of wonder reserved for museum displays. Her approach draws on the old cabinet of wonder (Wunderkammer), which emerged in sixteenth century Europe and juxtaposed various curiosities collected from the far reaches of empire into new assemblages that transformed their meanings. Ballestero’s four devices of formula, index, list, and pact are framed as cabinet curiosities displayed in the pages of her book. By examining a formula used to calculate the price of water, the consumer price index used to secure water’s affordability, a taxonomic list used to undermine the public ownership of water, and citizen pacts used to encourage public care for water, Ballestero shows how these devices (re)materialize water in multiple ways and render water as commodity or human right. Some scholarship has noted the troubling lack of distinction between commodities and human rights. The legal scholar D’Souza (2018) claims: ‘The modern concept of rights owes its birth to that moment when land was transformed into a commodity and hundreds of thousands of people were evicted from the place they called their ‘homeland’’ (p. 5). Ballestero similarly highlights in her text Marx’s (1976) observation that ‘the very Eden of... innate rights’ is found within ‘[t]he sphere of circulation or commodity exchange’ (p. 280).","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"408 - 411"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47639020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-23DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2090914
Charlotte Biltekoff, J. Guthman
ABSTRACT While the tech sector has seized upon the food system as an area in which it can have a major impact, innovators within the agri-food tech domain are dogged by concerns about public acceptance of technologies that may be controversial or simply not of interest. At the same time, because they operate within an investor-dependent political economy, they must demonstrate that the public will consume the products they are creating. To both secure markets and legitimate their approaches to problem-solving, entrepreneurial innovators draw on three existing imaginaries of consumers, each of which articulates with a particular tendency they have pursued in problem-solving. Reflecting a tendency of solutionism, those promoting technologies that promise minimal processing and/or short or traceable supply chains invoke a health- and eco-conscious consumer. In keeping with technofixes, those promoting technologies of mimicry invoke a complacent consumer. Reflecting the tendency toward scientism in problem-solving and related projections of public knowledge deficits, those promoting potentially controversial technologies invoke a fearful consumer and embrace transparency to inform and assure such consumers. By promising future consumers who will willingly accept emerging technologies, each of these imaginaries seeks to resolve – for investors – potential problems of consumer acceptance generated by the particular approaches to problem-solving innovators have adopted. While STS scholars have shown how public-facing engagement exercises and policy work are often limited by deficit-driven imaginaries of the public, in these investor-facing spaces possible objections are both imagined and overcome without any interaction with actual publics.
{"title":"Conscious, Complacent, Fearful: Agri-Food Tech’s Market-Making Public Imaginaries","authors":"Charlotte Biltekoff, J. Guthman","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2090914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2090914","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT\u0000 While the tech sector has seized upon the food system as an area in which it can have a major impact, innovators within the agri-food tech domain are dogged by concerns about public acceptance of technologies that may be controversial or simply not of interest. At the same time, because they operate within an investor-dependent political economy, they must demonstrate that the public will consume the products they are creating. To both secure markets and legitimate their approaches to problem-solving, entrepreneurial innovators draw on three existing imaginaries of consumers, each of which articulates with a particular tendency they have pursued in problem-solving. Reflecting a tendency of solutionism, those promoting technologies that promise minimal processing and/or short or traceable supply chains invoke a health- and eco-conscious consumer. In keeping with technofixes, those promoting technologies of mimicry invoke a complacent consumer. Reflecting the tendency toward scientism in problem-solving and related projections of public knowledge deficits, those promoting potentially controversial technologies invoke a fearful consumer and embrace transparency to inform and assure such consumers. By promising future consumers who will willingly accept emerging technologies, each of these imaginaries seeks to resolve – for investors – potential problems of consumer acceptance generated by the particular approaches to problem-solving innovators have adopted. While STS scholars have shown how public-facing engagement exercises and policy work are often limited by deficit-driven imaginaries of the public, in these investor-facing spaces possible objections are both imagined and overcome without any interaction with actual publics.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"58 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41754327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-23DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2087505
Markku Lehtonen
ABSTRACT Technological innovation needs construction of promises and expectations to mobilise resources and supportive networks, yet exaggerated promises risk leading to disappointment and undermining this very support. Drawing on an analysis of secondary literature and press articles, the concepts of hype cycle and Regimes of Economics of Techno-scientific Promises (ETP) are applied to examine the construction of the largely failed promise of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), designed to spearhead a French-led ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the 1990s. The debates on the EPR economics in France and the UK illustrate the country-specific features that condition the ability of an incremental in-between innovation, in an archetypically ‘modernist’ field of technology, to survive in today’s ‘presentist’ era of shrinking timeframes. The phase of disillusionment depicted in the hype cycle can better be described as two country-specific processes whereby the initial promise was continuously modified and requalified in order to maintain its legitimacy and credibility. As an incremental innovation, the EPR continues to struggle between the contrasting needs of demonstrating radical novelty and experience-based continuity. This tension is accentuated by the country-specific legacies and imaginaries, including the historically shaped ideological trust in the state and the market.
{"title":"Brand New or More of the Same Nuclear? (De)Constructing the Economic Promise of the European Pressurised Reactor in France and the UK","authors":"Markku Lehtonen","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2087505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2087505","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Technological innovation needs construction of promises and expectations to mobilise resources and supportive networks, yet exaggerated promises risk leading to disappointment and undermining this very support. Drawing on an analysis of secondary literature and press articles, the concepts of hype cycle and Regimes of Economics of Techno-scientific Promises (ETP) are applied to examine the construction of the largely failed promise of the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR), designed to spearhead a French-led ‘nuclear renaissance’ in the 1990s. The debates on the EPR economics in France and the UK illustrate the country-specific features that condition the ability of an incremental in-between innovation, in an archetypically ‘modernist’ field of technology, to survive in today’s ‘presentist’ era of shrinking timeframes. The phase of disillusionment depicted in the hype cycle can better be described as two country-specific processes whereby the initial promise was continuously modified and requalified in order to maintain its legitimacy and credibility. As an incremental innovation, the EPR continues to struggle between the contrasting needs of demonstrating radical novelty and experience-based continuity. This tension is accentuated by the country-specific legacies and imaginaries, including the historically shaped ideological trust in the state and the market.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"29 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46087423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-23DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2090328
F. Dedieu
ABSTRACT Taking an organizational sociology approach, the study of French pesticide regulation highlights the role of the unexpected effects of secrecies in organized ignorance. It demonstrates that the main regulator, the French food safety agency (ANSES), as well as the users of pesticides, the farmers, develop their own subcultures of secrecy to conceal information about their real practices. These subcultures support each other tacitly: the opacity created by farmers around their practices stifle knowledge production and reporting on their exposure to pesticides. Consequently, the risk standards are never called into question, which ensures that the French food safety agency maintains its scientific reputation. In turn, the fact that official standardization of risk is never challenged, impedes the reinforcement of pesticide regulations that would otherwise hamper day-to-day crop management. This tacit agreement between these combined subcultures maintains the illusion that the regulatory science used for risk management could control a broad spectrum of hazards, when in fact it has only a limited or even outdated knowledge of them. This deepens the definitions of organized ignorance. It demonstrates that non-knowledge production results not only from the complex mix of political, scientific and regulatory frameworks surrounding official expertise as STS researches tend to show, but also from more widespread and less perceptible sociological mechanism such as tacit understanding. Unexpected effects of intentional actions also count as much as willful actions in strategic ignorance production.
{"title":"Secrecies as Organized Ignorance: The Illusion of Knowledge in French Pesticide Regulation","authors":"F. Dedieu","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2090328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2090328","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Taking an organizational sociology approach, the study of French pesticide regulation highlights the role of the unexpected effects of secrecies in organized ignorance. It demonstrates that the main regulator, the French food safety agency (ANSES), as well as the users of pesticides, the farmers, develop their own subcultures of secrecy to conceal information about their real practices. These subcultures support each other tacitly: the opacity created by farmers around their practices stifle knowledge production and reporting on their exposure to pesticides. Consequently, the risk standards are never called into question, which ensures that the French food safety agency maintains its scientific reputation. In turn, the fact that official standardization of risk is never challenged, impedes the reinforcement of pesticide regulations that would otherwise hamper day-to-day crop management. This tacit agreement between these combined subcultures maintains the illusion that the regulatory science used for risk management could control a broad spectrum of hazards, when in fact it has only a limited or even outdated knowledge of them. This deepens the definitions of organized ignorance. It demonstrates that non-knowledge production results not only from the complex mix of political, scientific and regulatory frameworks surrounding official expertise as STS researches tend to show, but also from more widespread and less perceptible sociological mechanism such as tacit understanding. Unexpected effects of intentional actions also count as much as willful actions in strategic ignorance production.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"455 - 479"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45328492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-14DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2076587
Sarah Klein
ABSTRACT In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration reported in the journal Science that a disturbingly large proportion of psychological studies cannot be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). The ensuing ‘reproducibility crisis’ became a lightning rod for contesting what counts as legitimate research, and for negotiating the relationship between communication infrastructures and research practice. In the psychological and cognitive sciences, the Open Science community has advocated widespread reforms to incentivize transparency, encourage replication, and detect and discourage questionable research practices. The model of ‘openness’ underlying mainstream Open Science centers on sharing information to increase science’s self-correcting capacity. Against the backdrop of broad-scale transformations in Open Science, this case study depicts how scientists read. By examining the activity of a group of researchers ‘virtually witnessing’ an experiment together, this study reveals reading as a non-trivial process that matters for how research is apprehended and for how science is moved through time and space. The case complicates a disembodied, information-centric ‘openness’ pursued by mainstream Open Science reforms and advocates integrating situated and embodied resources into methods reforms, beginning with practices of reading.
{"title":"Between People and Paper: Inhabiting Experiment in a Journal Club","authors":"Sarah Klein","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2076587","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2076587","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 2015, the Open Science Collaboration reported in the journal Science that a disturbingly large proportion of psychological studies cannot be replicated (Open Science Collaboration, 2015). The ensuing ‘reproducibility crisis’ became a lightning rod for contesting what counts as legitimate research, and for negotiating the relationship between communication infrastructures and research practice. In the psychological and cognitive sciences, the Open Science community has advocated widespread reforms to incentivize transparency, encourage replication, and detect and discourage questionable research practices. The model of ‘openness’ underlying mainstream Open Science centers on sharing information to increase science’s self-correcting capacity. Against the backdrop of broad-scale transformations in Open Science, this case study depicts how scientists read. By examining the activity of a group of researchers ‘virtually witnessing’ an experiment together, this study reveals reading as a non-trivial process that matters for how research is apprehended and for how science is moved through time and space. The case complicates a disembodied, information-centric ‘openness’ pursued by mainstream Open Science reforms and advocates integrating situated and embodied resources into methods reforms, beginning with practices of reading.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"1 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48073559","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-20DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2076586
K. Mobach, U. Felt
ABSTRACT The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is one of the oldest, largest, and most emblematic European research infrastructures. Its history, as expressed through narratives of its own organizational identity, does not only reflect the development of its technoscientific activities but also strongly references a multiplicity of performances of Europe. By analysing these narratives of organizational identity over nearly seven decades, it is possible to observe an ongoing coproductive relationship between technoscientific and sociopolitical orders—more specifically between particle physics and Europe. Furthermore, there has been a considerable shift in the justificatory and explanatory relationship between these orders. In its first three decades, CERN was envisioned as an organization in which European unity could be accomplished through science. A broad vision of science as a common European language contributed to an imaginary of postwar Europe (re-)united through its cultural/scientific roots. Roughly since 1990, however, CERN has been presenting itself as a ‘laboratory for the world’, thereby constructing a new imaginary of Europeanness as an organizational and cultural resource to support global particle physics. Thus, there has been a narrative shift from European collaboration being promoted through science, to science on a world scale being promoted by a specific idea of Europeanness. Studying the temporal dynamics of coproductive relationships like these sensitizes us to shifts of balance between sociopolitical and technoscientific orders: it reveals which orders are narrated as drivers and which as driven as well as how this opens up or closes down justificatory narratives and ways of acting.
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