Social Studies of Science最新文献

This is a commentary on 'Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science', by Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Luis Reyes-Galindo.

There is growing concern around the world about declining trust in the scientific enterprise. Some STS scholars argue that the solution is to move to a system of 'virtual diversity' where scientists are responsible for translating public concerns into their work. This commentary argues that this containment approach will have the opposite effect. The history of similar efforts suggests that scientists have trouble understanding the scope and urgency of public frustrations, and devalue the contributions of non-scientists, damaging the social fabric. A better approach for producing socially useful science and enhancing public trust is to create a truly inclusive scientific enterprise, which takes the knowledge and priorities of non-scientists seriously and engages them throughout the investigative process.

Cyber threat intelligence firms play a powerful role in producing knowledge, uncertainty, and ignorance about threats to organizations and governments globally. Drawing on historical and ethnographic methods, we show how cyber threat intelligence analysts navigate distinctive types of uncertainty as they transform digital traces into marketable products and services. We make two related contributions and arguments. First, building on STS research on uncertainty and ignorance, we articulate two kinds of uncertainty and their potential to interact. Coordinative uncertainty emerges from socially and technologically distributed processes of producing, interpreting, and reporting data that emerges when analysts create standards to make data travel. However, standards can be exploited by intelligent adversaries behaving in deliberately unpredictable ways. We argue that efforts to reduce coordinative uncertainty through standardization can thus ironically increase opportunities for adversarial uncertainty, creating a potential tradeoff. Second, we aim to show how STS can deepen and integrate studies of international security and political economy, by providing an example of how the geopolitical structuring of private industry shapes the science and technology that industry produces. In particular, we argue that the political economy of the cyber threat intelligence industry tends to produce relatively little knowledge about cyber operations that are conducted by governments in the U.S. and its allies, and more about cyber operations conducted by adversaries of U.S. and allied governments. We conclude with a reflection on the broader significance of these findings for the ways that coordinative and adversarial uncertainties refract through the political economies of technoscience.

This article presents a situational analysis of the expert advice offered by Independent SAGE, a group of scientists that formed in May 2020 in the UK to provide advice on the Covid response. Based on interviews with the group's members and partners, we argue that through its interventions Indie SAGE demonstrated an important alternative approach to linking science and politics in a time of emergency. They showed that the only way to ensure that policy and decision-making on Covid-19 was grounded in knowledge was by making expert advice public. Indie SAGE's decision to 'go public' was a response to the political situation in the UK, one in which scientific advice, in particular public health expertise, was being ignored, sidelined and contested as such. We identify four rationales for making expert advice public: openness, calling out, translation, and responsive engagement. We describe associated modes of intervention that Indie SAGE adopted in relation to different critical situations of Covid-19. Distinctive about their advice, we argue, is its prioritization of situational adequacy. Much of it was explicitly oriented towards addressing practical and existential challenges experienced by particular social groups, professions and everyday publics. We argue that this way of making science public in an 'ontological' register acquires critical importance in a political situation like the UK Covid response, which was marked not just by disagreements about science but growing contestation of science as such. In this respect, our study holds a wider lesson for the understanding of the role of evidence in public politics. To advocate for evidence-based governance, as Indie SAGE did, is not necessarily to endorse a post-political vision of government. When science is contested in a time of emergency, making evidence public becomes a key means for responding to the demands of situations. It is not only pragmatic but a critical accomplishment.

This comment critically examines Collins, Evans, and Reyes-Galindo's (CE&RG) concept of 'virtual diversity', proposed as a norm to safeguard scientific expertise in policy-making. CE&RG argue that scientists should acquire 'interactional expertise' in relevant 'non-scientific domains', enabling informed policy advice while preserving scientific integrity. This comment describes CE&RG's dualist approach, which separates epistemic and political concerns, and discusses its implications. It shows that for virtual diversity to contribute to the quality of and trust in expertise, this approach needs to be radically re-worked to include legitimacy-building processes. Using examples such as South Africa's AIDS policy and the COVID-19 pandemic, the comment argues that defending expertise requires ensuring the robustness of both scientific and political representations, of, in other terms, addressing expertise as a constitutional problem. Without a broader critical constitutional analysis, CE&RG's proposal risks reinforcing the crisis of expertise it seeks to remedy.

The size of India's food deficit became a pressing question for the Indian state in the early years of independence. As different organizations, government bodies, and individuals debated over the ways, means, and expertise needed to tide over the food crisis, policymakers realized that the primary requirement was to have a numerical understanding of the problem. Data became crucial to accurately assess production trends and compare them with requirements. This article looks into the use of statistical methods, particularly, random sampling and production estimation through a crop-cutting technique. Exploring the statistical survey work done by P.C. Mahalanobis in Bengal from the late years of colonial rule to the surveys conducted by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research under the supervision of P.V. Sukhatme and V.G. Panse, the article analyzes how different factors, such as varying revenue systems of different regions and administrative structures, power struggles amongst statisticians, and leverage gained by Indian statisticians from support they received from better known British counterparts, all played a role in determining the nature of statistical tools adopted in India to measure its food production. Inaccurate data continued to be a challenge for the Indian state until well into the late 1950s, and that can now be explained in terms of this discord between Mahalanobis-led Kolkata-ISI and the ICAR of Sukhatme's time. India continued to follow different methods of statistical survey of foodcrops, thus, the scientific/political establishment always struggled with the apprehension that they did not have the 'right' data to come up with the correct assessment of the scene.

What does a postcolonial inquiry into technoscience do? And what is it for? I develop these questions by reconsidering one powerful idea: that science and technology studies (STS) is postcolonial when it elucidates the hybridity, heterogeneity, and indeterminacy of global technoscientific formations, and does so to falsify colonial fantasies of hegemony expressed in imperious conceptual generalities and sovereign universalisms. Revisiting Warwick Anderson's expositions of postcolonial STS-initiated in this journal two decades ago-I reflect on the form and force of this critical operation. Despite an animating aversion to universalisms, the pursuit of hybridity and heterogeneity may ultimately universalize a liberal metaphysics of agency. This paradox suggests limits to the critical operation that pits hybridity and indeterminacy against hegemony in a postcolonial spirit.