Social Studies of Science最新文献

Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize health policy counterpublics: temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism and advocacy. We examine a health policy counterpublic that has arisen in response to new forms of HIV public health surveillance by drawing on public documents and interview data from 2021 with 26 stakeholders who were critical of key policy developments. Since 2018, the national rollout of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs in the United States has produced sustained controversies among HIV stakeholders, including among organized networks of people living with HIV. This article focuses on how a health policy counterpublic formed around MHS/CDR and how constituents problematized the policy agenda set in motion by federal health agencies, including in relation to data ethics, the meaningful involvement of affected communities, informed consent, the digitization of health systems, and HIV criminalization. Although familiar problems in HIV policymaking, concerns about these issues have been reconfigured in response to the new sociotechnical milieu proffered by MHS/CDR, generating new critical positions aiming to remake public health. Critical attention to the scenes within which health policy controversies play out ought to consider how (counter)publics are made, how problems are constituted, and the broader social movement dynamics and activist resources drawn upon to contest and reimagine policymaking in public life.

What makes one dataset powerful for civic advocacy, and another fall flat? Drawing from a citizen science project on environmental health, I argue that there is an underacknowledged quality of datasets-their topology-that shapes the social, cultural, and political possibilities they can sustain or subvert. Data topologies are formal qualities of a dataset that connect data collectors' intentions with the types of calculations that can and cannot be performed. This configures how numerical arguments are made, and the sociotechnical imaginaries those arguments sustain or subvert. The citizen science project's data topology made any easy notion of shared exposure to pollutants, or singular health effects, unravel. The data appeared to tell a story of atypicality at scale, where each person suffers differently from different exposure. Lacking a central tendency, or pockets of tendency disproportionately carried by different subgroups, it became it harder, not easier, for citizen scientists to use data in regulatory contexts, where dominant sociotechnical imaginaries conceive of difference in epidemiological and toxicological terms.

Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members' activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements. Meetings are a protected space to comment on conducted research, to amend experimental set-ups, to test argumentation, and to outline potentially new directions of research. By participating in these practices, researchers, become members of the team as they get acquainted with the ongoing research; its scope, problems, and limits; the solutions at hand; and the know-how within the team. In functional terms, observed internal meetings seem to (a) ensure that the research team focuses on a specific research agenda by talking about and discussing ongoing research in the lab, (b) be used to discuss and assure the quality of the team's research output, and (c) generate and inspire new research within the team. Our findings suggest regular internal meetings, like shop talk, are constitutive of doing science by talking about ongoing research.

Calling attention to the growing intersection between the insurance and technology sectors-or 'insurtech'-this article is intended as a bat signal for the interdisciplinary fields that have spent recent decades studying the explosion of digitization, datafication, smartification, automation, and so on. Many of the dynamics that attract people to researching technology are exemplified, often in exaggerated ways, by emerging applications in insurance, an industry that has broad material effects. Based on in-depth mixed-methods research into insurance technology, I have identified a set of interlocking logics that underly this regime of actuarial governance in society: ubiquitous intermediation, continuous interaction, total integration, hyper-personalization, actuarial discrimination, and dynamic reaction. Together these logics describe how enduring ambitions and existing capabilities are motivating the future of how insurers engage with customers, data, time, and value. This article surveys each logic, laying out a techno-political framework for how to orient critical analysis of developments in insurtech and where to direct future research on this growing industry. Ultimately, my goal is to advance our understanding how insurance-a powerful institution that is fundamental to the operations of modern society-continues to change, and what dynamics and imperatives, whose desires and interests are steering that change. The stuff of insurance is far too important to be left to the insurance industry.

Stakeholder engagement has become a watchword for environmental scientists to assert the societal relevance of their projects to funding agencies. In water research based on computer simulation modelling, stakeholder engagement has attracted interest as a means to overcome low uptake of new tools for water management. An increasingly accepted view is that more and better stakeholder involvement in research projects will lead to increased adoption of the modelling tools created by scientists in water management. However, we cast doubt on this view by drawing attention to how the freedom of stakeholder organizations to adopt new scientific modelling tools in their regular practices is circumscribed by the societal context. We use a modified concept of co-production in an analysis of a case of scientific research on drought in the UK to show how relationships between actors in the drought governance space influence the uptake of scientific modelling tools. The analysis suggests an explanation of why stakeholder engagement with one scientific project led to one output (data) getting adopted by stakeholders while another output (modelling tools) attracted no discernible interest. Our main objective is to improve the understanding of the limitations to stakeholder engagement as a means of increasing societal uptake of scientific research outputs.

Immunotherapy is heralded as the 'fifth pillar' of cancer therapy, after surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and genomic medicine. It involves 'harnessing' patients' own immune system T-cells to treat cancer. In this article, I draw on qualitative interviews with practitioners working in oncology and patients in the UK, to trace metaphorical and discursive framing around immunotherapy. Immunotherapy aims to restore the functioning of the immune system to detect cancer (non-self), working with the self/non-self model that pervades immunology discourse more widely. Practitioners draw on metaphors that cement this self/non-self model, and that tend to depict the relationship between cancer and the immune system as an internal battle. Yet the discursive framing around immunotherapy also involves shifts that emphasize the body's own capacity to heal, where it is framed as 'gentle' or 'tolerable' on the body. Through this discursive shift, immunotherapy refigures the antagonism associated with the self/non-self model in the context of cancer. Analysing patients' embodied experiences of treatment, this article attends to the material realities and tensions provoked by this shift in discursive framing. This article contributes to feminist STS analyses of immunology discourse, and extends this literature by arguing that it is critical to address the material stakes of these discursive shifts by paying attention to patients' day-to-day experiences of treatment. The discursive framing of immunotherapy brings into being new forms of embodied patienthood in the context of cancer.

In the early 2010s, a spectacular fall in prices for a class of mineral commodities called the rare earth elements (REEs) and the collapse of hundreds of new exploration companies made clear the fragility of the high-risk markets around these companies and the strategies of legitimation that supported them. New regulatory processes built around technical disclosures generated vast stores of geotechnical data. Rather than generating trust among market actors, however, these processes dramatically altered the temporalities of global extraction and energized unruly narrative spaces. In their efforts to keep mineral claims active and companies afloat, REE-focused exploration experts have struggled to navigate different arenas of discussion while holding their respective logics in tension. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with exploration geologists and promoters, this article examines how experts federate flows of 'serious' and 'speculative' information in both carefully regulated reports and rumor-filled online forums. Such spaces are organized by aesthetic conventions and social criteria for establishing persuasiveness-forms that STS scholars have long analyzed as literary technologies. Rather than helping to secure experts' authority, however, I argue that the diverse literary technologies that now dominate exploration promotion and finance work have radically redistributed interpretive roles. In their struggles to mediate senses of 'crisis' endemic within venture markets, exploration experts must enact the ideals undergirding new regulatory requirements even as they learn to defer to the speculative musings of others.

Mathematics is often treated as different from other disciplines, since arguments in the field rely on deductive proof rather than empirical evidence as in the natural sciences. A mathematical paper can therefore, at least in principle, be replicated simply by reading it. While this distinction is sometimes taken as the basis to claim that the results in mathematics are therefore certain, mathematicians themselves know that the published literature contains many mistakes. Reading a proof is not easy, and checking whether an argument constitutes a proof is surprisingly difficult. This article uses peer review of submissions to mathematics journals as a site where referees are explicitly concerned with checking whether a paper is correct and therefore could be published. Drawing on 95 qualitative interviews with mathematics journal editors, as well as a collection of more than 100 referee reports and other correspondence from peer review processes, this article establishes that while mathematicians acknowledge that peer review does not guarantee correctness, they still value it. For mathematicians, peer review 'adds a bit of certainty', especially in contrast to papers only submitted to preprint servers such as arXiv. Furthermore, during peer review there can be disagreements not just regarding the importance of a result, but also whether a particular argument constitutes a proof or not (in particular, whether there are substantial gaps in the proof). Finally, the mathematical community is seen as important when it comes to accepting arguments as proofs and assigning certainty to results. Publishing an argument in a peer-reviewed journal is often only the first step in having a result accepted. Results get accepted if they stand the test of time and are used by other mathematicians.