Social Studies of Science最新文献

Biobanks are becoming ubiquitous infrastructures in zoology and other non-human life sciences. They promise to store frozen research samples for the long term for future use. That use remains speculative but nevertheless needs to be anticipated. Following the establishment of a physical and digital infrastructure for frozen samples in an animal biobanking project, this article explores how the future is anticipated to remember the past, and how frozen objects are shaped accordingly. Situating the biobank between mundane freezing routines in a research lab and the 'dry' and 'wet' collections of natural history museums, I argue that frozen research objects need to be conserved in two separate ways. The unavailability of cryo-objects in cold storage forces researchers to store materials independently of metadata, while retaining a link between them that allows for their reunion after thawing. The result is a split object, leading a double life at sub-zero and room temperature, linked only through the surface of special plastic containers. Following the making of such split objects, this article offers an elaboration of Radin's 'planned hindsight' as well as a reflection on the universality and particularity of biobanks as standardized scientific memory.

This article uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine the primarily East-Central European Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM). I ask how and why the IOM has survived as an institution since its inception in 1987, working especially with the personal archive of Vratislav Kubišta. Kubišta was a metallurgist and former Deputy Director General at IOM who after retirement sought to develop a local deep-sea mining museum. This is a story about the work that archives do, but even more about how institutions maintain archives. I draw on recent work in the history and anthropology of time and archival practice to situate IOM's history and Kubišta's collection in narratives of ruin, the unbuilt, and the experience of multiple temporalities within spaces of resource speculation and anticipation. I suggest that IOM's history highlights the contingencies of resources in the temporality of indefinite pause, their attendant data, and scientific labor and life under the shifting political, economic, and scientific circumstances of the ongoing not-yet. In broadening the history of what is once more a hotly contested potential resource, this account speaks to the claims of contemporary would-be seabed miners, who frequently frame the practice in terms of innovation, urgency, and novelty.

The 2002 film Minority Report regularly appears in tech press articles asking whether it 'predicted the future'. When such publications invoke the film as having 'predicted the future' or 'come true', what social and political claims are being made? How has Minority Report become a discursive tool for imagining, constructing, and criticizing sociotechnical worlds? In this paper, we evaluate the worldbuilding process and real-world trajectories of three technologies 'from' Minority Report, as refracted through the lens of tech journalism: gestural interfaces, targeted advertising, and predictive policing. We argue that science fiction does more than represent technologies; it participates in their social construction. Some technologies imagined in Minority Report operate as 'diegetic prototypes', and the journalistic witnessing public takes them up in complex ways, interpreting, misinterpreting, and remixing the technologies depicted in the film. We further argue that it is not only technologies that move between film and reality in this process, but entire sociotechnical imaginaries. We find that in tech beat interpretations of Minority Report, the interfaces between bodies and technologies reflect a Silicon Valley sociotechnical imaginary of disembodied cyborg subjects and deracialized surveillance that materially and discursively shapes how technologies depicted in the film are developed and received.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper unfolds the past and present uses of pigs that structured the emergence of a pig model of gut-hormone based appetite control, leading to the current scientific breakthrough in treatment of obesity. While the hyping of next generation medications for obesity and type 2 diabetes centers on the efficacy and profits attached to these drugs, I unfold how science embedded in this development had the in-vivo and in-vitro travels of Bettie-an obese Göttingen Minipig pig-at its heart. Tracing how she became embedded in a circuit of vitality connecting industrial agriculture and science on human health, I show how both are governed by a shared valuation of pigs' fat. Bettie's fat, however, was not to be eaten. Instead, Bettie was consumed in knowledge production. For pigs to enter this new trajectory, Bettie emerged as a promissory site for extraction of molecular information made possible by new visualization technologies and representational strategies that allowed for the coupling of human-pig physiology at the cellular level. While her travels were spurred by the hope of discovery of small molecules, Bettie allows us to grasp an important shift in science, as the insights derived from her work emphasized the importance of physiology and the environment for human obesity. In doing so, she served as a visceral model. On a larger scale, Bettie's entering science on human health reflects a recursive structure of knowledge in which the present problems with obesity and type 2 diabetes derive from the solutions to previous problems associated with alleviating hunger.

This is a review essay based primarily on the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, edited by Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone. It focuses particularly on the use of art for public engagement with science and technology and it also draws upon the following books: Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies (2023), edited by Henk Borgdorff, Peter Peters, and Trevor Pinch, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (2020) by Patrick McCray, and Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge (2022), by Hannah Star Rogers.

When a technology is seen as the right solution to a recognized problem, the development of alternative technologies comes under threat. To secure much-needed resources, proponents of alternative technologies must, in these conditions, restart societal discussion on the status quo, a process at once technological and discursive known as 'path creation'. In this article, we investigate discussion-restarting strategies employed by supporters of emerging technologies in the field of solar fuels, particularly the advocates of a technology referred to as 'artificial photosynthesis'. For illustrative purposes we explore four such strategies: revisiting weak spots, resizing the problem, redefining the game, and renegotiating labels. We conclude with a methodological reflection on the empirical study of discursive strategies in a socio-technical system. We further suggest a more systematic application of discourse-analytical and argumentation-theoretical insights that can complement current scholarship on path dependence and path creation.

In this article I follow the mystery of millions of tons of materials washed out to sea by the March 2011 Japan tsunami: a massive wave of lost materials expected to reach North American shores that never seems to officially arrive. I bring Gordon's conceptualization of haunting together with STS conversations about absence and invisibility to build on feminist approaches that do not take as given what is missing or what should be done. I begin by situating efforts to respectfully distinguish materials survivors call 'floating things' amidst a sea of concern for ocean plastic pollution. These efforts are then contrasted with what I initially perceived as the institutional erasure of floating things at sea, re-counting how some practices work to ensure materials can be ignored, cleaned-up, or used for other kinds of ocean science research. Yet, floating things refuse to disappear completely, as potential traces wash up on beaches, trajectories are modeled back into existence, and individual practices exceed institutional obligations. I argue that attending to hauntings by listening to ghosts and drifting with them is necessary for justice-oriented forms of care for absences. In the case of floating things, this means honoring survivor relations while resisting the perpetuation of Pacific narratives of danger from the outside.

How can we trace differing normative values, and especially in alternative imaginaries of environmentally sustainable futures? To address this issue, this article extends the sociotechnical imaginaries framework by providing conceptual tools to understand the underlying rationale of alternative environmental imaginaries-through an envirotechnical analysis. I analyse an urban river restoration project called the Isar-Plan in Munich, Germany, where the notion of 'renaturation' was at the centre a controversy over designs for the project. By positing the river as an envirotechnical landscape, the normative dimensions of nature, science and technology within environmental transformations can be constructively integrated within co-productionist analyses in science and technology studies. The article shows how existing societal values are shaped by prior systems and regimes, constructing local imaginaries of desirable environmental futures. Envirotechnical analyses also increase our ability to identify differing normative values, and could thus be further applied in cases where the normative assumptions behind opaque notions otherwise would be left underexplored.

This article analyses attempts to enact complexity in postgenomic experimentations using the case of epigenetic research on biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Enacting complexity in this research means dissecting multiple so-called biosocial processes of health differentiation in the face of stressful experiences. To characterize enactments of biosocial complexity, the article develops the concepts of complexity work and complexification. The former emphasizes the social, technical, and material work that goes into the production of mixed biological and social representations of stress in epigenetics. The latter underlines how complexity can be assembled differently across distinct configurations of experimental work. Specifically, complexification can be defined as producing, stabilizing, and normalizing novel experimental systems that are supposed to improve techno-scientific enactments of complexity. In the case of epigenetics, complexification entails a reconfiguration of postgenomic experimental systems in ways that some actors deem 'better' at enacting health as a biosocial process. This study of complexity work and complexification shows that biosocial complexity is hardly a univocal enterprise in epigenetics. Consequently, the article calls for abandoning analysis of these research practices using clear-cut dichotomies of reductionism vs. holism, as well as simplicity vs. complexity. More broadly, the article suggests the relevance of a sociology of complexification for STS approaches to complexity in scientific practices. Complementing the existing focus on complexity as instrumental rhetoric in contemporary sciences, complexification directs analytical attention to the pragmatic opportunities that alternative (biosocial) complexities offer to collective, societal, and political thinking about science in society.

What is the role of experts and their expertise in the context of trans-science, in which issues that are raised in scientific terms cannot be answered by science alone? This article examines the discourses and practices around safety of low-dose exposure to radiation in the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in Japan in 2011. Following the nuclear fallout, scientific experts and STS scholars in Japan debated what forms of science communication were adequate to address the situation. Ethnographic research and textual analysis of their debates show a shift in emphasis on the role of experts from cultivating 'public understanding of science' for the sake of science and policy to an 'expert understanding of the public' for the sake of the public and its diverse everyday concerns. Two forms of expertise are emerging: 'co-expertise' and 'intra-mediary expertise'. Both are parts of a transition from a paternalistic form of expertise to one that acknowledges the need to engage the public to address issues of scientific uncertainty. However, co-expertise ultimately upholds the existing political structures that shape risk governance, while intra-mediary expertise engages those often excluded from current structures of accountability. Discussion of the potentials and limitations of emerging forms of expertise in Japan show that epistemic justice is not enough. Civic justice that acknowledges diverse publics and their needs must be upheld in the uncertain sphere between science, politics, and everyday life.