Social Studies of Science最新文献

Today, wet-bulb temperature is of vital importance in assessing the health effects of global warming. How did this heat stress index emerge? In this article, I turn to the research of industrial hygienist J.S. Haldane, who studied working conditions in mines in the early 20th century. The first warming of the thermo-industrial era was local, not global. It affected work environments, providing a fertile field of observation for occupational medicine and experimental physiology. These investigations revealed a wet-bulb temperature threshold beyond which efficiency deteriorates, which I interpret as the manifestation of an internal, climato-physiological contradiction between microclimates of production and labor power. However, as the long struggle of the Lancashire weavers against 'steaming' illustrates, an emerging labor environmentalism targeted these hostile atmospheric conditions. There, wet-bulb temperature and class struggle are combined in what I propose to call thermopolitics, which is understood as both government and conflict over temperatures. It was not just about controversies over regulatory standards; it was also about a clash between two opposing normativities, one quantitative, reduced to the physio-economy of productive efficiency, the other qualitative, vital, inviting us to rethink the notion of a democratic atmospheric politics. This article also shows that the theoretical wet-bulb temperature threshold used in some recent scientific literature is overestimated compared to empirical results exhumed from the history of science. This implies that, without decisive action, the tipping point for human heat tolerance could be reached sooner and more widely than anticipated.

The belief in science's inherent self-corrective nature has been challenged by growing concerns over research integrity violations, leading to heightened scrutiny of scientific processes. Examining 40 years of discussions in Science and Nature, this article explores how debates on issues around research integrity reflect important shifts in the very meaning of 'scientific self' when speaking about the self-corrective capacity of science as well as evolving 'geographies of responsibility' within the research system. These journals-key voices in science and policy discourse-offer a lens to explore these processes of gradual transformation. We identify key narrative threads and turning points in understanding who is accountable for ensuring research integrity-extending beyond individual researchers to include institutions, funding bodies, journals, and whistleblowers. The analysis highlights how the scientific community has progressively reassembled its self-image, adapting to complex systemic challenges while engaging diverse stakeholders. These narratives, we argue, do more than document instances of transgressions of good scientific practice: They map broader transformations in the research ecosystem, revealing changing values, roles, and expectations. By analysing these shifts, we offer new insights into the interconnections between integrity concerns and systemic change, and into the conditions necessary for fostering responsible research practices and sustaining (public) trust in science.

This study draws on Foucault's discussion on problematization and the perspective of multiplicity to examine five distinct agrifood solutions to malnutrition in the Philippines: rice biofortification, rice fortification, school gardening, brown rice consumption, and food supplementation. It highlights how these agrifood approaches have repeatedly re-emerged to address different formulations of the malnutrition problem across three historical periods. Furthermore, this research develops the concept of a 'problem-solution constellation' to illustrate how malnutrition and agrifood solutions form a pattern of juxtaposition in each historical period. By tracing problem-solution constellations across these three periods, the study also identifies certain agrifood solutions that did not emerge as viable in specific periods, which I term 'non-solutions'. Overall, this historical analysis of problem-solution constellations advances the theorization on problematization in Science and Technology Studies (STS) in two key ways. First, it demonstrates that solutions often coexist across multiple historical periods, underscoring the importance of foregrounding the interplay of solutions. Second, it suggests that STS researchers 'rescale' their analysis from a technology-centered approach to one that examines problem-solution constellations. This rescaling could provide valuable insight into how we approach global issues as grand challenges.

The contemporary prevalence of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods has resulted in a rich literature on the factors that shape computational research. This article draws on the laboratory studies literature to examine how platforms' socio-technical infrastructures shape contemporary computational social science research. Based on 18 months of online ethnography of a university laboratory and 15 in-depth interviews with its researchers, the article makes two main arguments. First, for computational social sciences, platforms function as laboratories where the social is selectively carved and transformed, to make it knowable with computational methods. Thus, it makes the case that platforms manufacture the objects of analysis in computational social research and provide the social as a domain. Second, because of the significance of social media platforms as data laboratories for computational research, in contrast to the claims of data sciences to be domainless, these sciences may derive some of their epistemological and occupational power, as well as their cultural authority, from digital capitalism.