By the rivers of Babylon: the 1889-cholera outbreak in Iraq, production of medical knowledge, and construction of scientific periphery

This paper is focused on the production and circulation of medical knowledge ‘from below’ in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, the aim is to investigate the link between personal and professional resilience and the sharing of knowledge and practices at a time of epistemic rupture. The empirical case intends to discuss a Community of Practice (CoP) formed by a network of health professionals spontaneously activated in northern Italy during the first pandemic waves. Dynamics within the network were examined through a grounded theory approach, bringing out some analytical categories from the empirical field – 18 video interviews. Emerging narratives within the CoP reaffirm the value of medical practice, highlighting how in a condition of structural crisis expertise can give meaning to individual action through shared processes of signification, filling the temporary absence of recognized and established knowledge: recognizing the relevance of CoPs in knowledge production and circulation could better integrate them into the healthcare organization to promote systemic change and sustainability.

In recent years, the public has become increasingly concerned about the use of medical technologies and pain management for seriously or terminally ill patients. The process of death and dying, particularly a hospital setting, is often characterized by feelings of abandonment and loss of control on the part of patients and their families. Efforts to legalize physician-assisted suicide California and Washington, and the success of the referendum Oregon, reflect the public's overwhelming dissatisfaction with what is perceived as physicians' unwillingness to recognize the suffering experienced by terminally ill individuals. Moreover, health professionals, legislators, and patients alike have expressed discontent with the high cost of end-of-life medical care. Taken together, these considerations suggest that innovative attempts to reform health care for the seriously and terminally ill are long overdue. The SUPPORT study represents a major effort this direction. The size and scope of this multisite study make it historically unique. A primary goal of SUPPORT was the development of a model intervention that would enhance the frequency and effectiveness of patient-physician communication about medical decisions. Yet patient care remained unchanged. The SUPPORT intervention's inability to produce any modification patient care illustrates profoundly the force and tenacity of Western biomedical culture. In matters of end-of-life decisionmaking, the production and application of medical knowledge reveal deep-seated values and beliefs about patient-physician relationships, control the practice of biomedicine, and the nature of human mortality. At its core, end-of-life decisionmaking a hospital setting rests on a set of tacit assumptions about biomedical reality that strongly influence the process and experience of death and dying. Power and Control Medical Practice Legitimation of authority biomedicine is expressed and reinforced through a hierarchy of social dominance. Central to this issue of authority are questions surrounding the creation and production of medical knowledge. When end-of-life decisions must be made, who determines what medical data have significance, what information is relevant and whose voices may be heard? Traditionally it is physicians who have held the reins deciding the substance and parameters of medical decisionmaking. Although current developments the reorganization of health care practice toward managed care and managed competition may result fundamental changes the balance of medical power, the conventional authority of physicians as the creators of biomedical knowledge is likely to remain strong. Patients, their surrogates, physicians, and nurses all participated actively Phase II, the experimental stage of the SUPPORT project. However, responsibility for implementing the interventions designed for SUPPORT rested heavily on the nurses. It was the nurse who spoke initially with a patient about his or her concerns and desires for medical treatment; it was the nurse who became the conduit of information about a patient's treatment preferences and prognostic status. To a certain extent, this means business as usual a medical environment where typically nurses are relied upon to talk to patients and their families and relay messages to physicians in charge. In the context of biomedical and social power, perhaps the supplemental knowledge generated by the nurses concerning advance care planning for end-of-life decisionmaking was contained an all too familiar package. The SUPPORT intervention yielded important information about patients and provided opportunities for that knowledge to be used and acted upon. Unfortunately, this production of knowledge replicated the historical pathways of patient care. Do physicians read the nursing notes patient charts or listen to nurses' requests on behalf of patients? If the physician reads the chart or discusses the issues with nurses, is the material taken seriouly? …

<i>Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements</i> by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds.

In 1777, word spread along the Amazonian coast that the “cruel contagion of smallpox” was circulating in the Portuguese frontier captaincies of Grão-Pará and Maranhão.1 Rumor often announced the arrival of smallpox before authorities.2 The rumors wound their way along the roads and waterways of Belém, the capital of Grão-Pará, to the ears of thirty-three enslaved Africans, all of them property of Chief Physician Bento Viera Gomes. They were terrified of the ongoing outbreak—and of their enslaver. They knew of Gomes’s attempts to prevent the spread of smallpox by inoculating a group of soldiers stationed nearby. The soldiers refused the inoculations, fearing the disease and the procedure.3 To prove the procedure was safe and effective, Gomes conscripted the thirty-three to serve in an inoculation demonstration for the soldiers. As Gomes remarked, the enslaved people “(although equally fearful)…had no choice but to obey.”4 Each of them, between the ages of three and twenty-five, underwent the procedure. All survived. Nevertheless, this brief chapter in the history of inoculation brings questions of survival, quality of life, and archival objectivity to the fore.The slave trade and slavery established power relations that shaped the terms of scientific and medical knowledge production and practice. European imperial and medical archives naturalize these power relations. It is the historian’s task to unsettle and expose them. The intellectual foundations that presuppose inoculation as an inherent good because it saved lives (and it certainly did) do not prioritize Black people’s healing and well-being. To do so requires affective labor that begins with archival critique and proceeds with speculation.We find this inoculation story buried in a flurry of accounts from medical practitioners around the Portuguese-American colonies discussing plans for the implementation of the Jennerian cowpox vaccine.5 As a show of expertise to the Crown, physicians like Gomes highlighted their prior experiences using inoculation and demonstrated their knowledge of the literature, citing works such as Thomas Dimsdale’s recently translated inoculation manual.6 Vague allusions to inoculations performed in the British colonies, the primary competition for Amazonian industries, also pepper the pages. Perhaps Gomes read the Letters and Essays published by the notorious physician John Quier who experimented with smallpox inoculation on young, pregnant, and elderly enslaved Africans in Jamaica.7Too often, the history of inoculation serves as a prelude to triumphalist narratives of the resounding success of the Jennerian vaccine. Yet in the archival record, undercurrents of exploitation are plain: “they had no choice but to obey.” Enslaved people were the ideal candidates for inoculation demonstrations because colonists and slaveowners viewed them as replaceable commodities, chattels, and units of labor.8 They were expendable, yet essential to the imperial project.9 In Grão-Pará, inoculation would enable the imperial project to proceed despite its health consequences. Most enslaved people survived smallpox outbreaks or inoculation only to die of other causes. Even lifesaving technical and medical advancements can work to maintain the social, environmental, and existential order. Rather than sustaining life, smallpox inoculation reproduced and maintained the intertwined systems of imperialism and slavery, with their violence, pernicious inequity, morbidity, and needless death.Perhaps we might imagine beyond the thirty-three enslaved Africans’ fears and their enslavers’ reputed successes, through wonder, speculation, and questions.10 How much care and tenderness persisted amid the violence? Did parents or siblings hold the three-year-old as they prepared to receive an inoculation? Were mothers forced to hand over their children to strangers in the process? Did they smell the infected, who braced themselves to have smallpox pus removed? Did the infected person look at the recipient reassuringly? Did they exchange words, prayers, hopes, or ask questions about the procedure? Perhaps the twenty-five-year-old assisted, hoisting the small children into their lap and calming them before the incision. Which women (because it was usually women) tended the children until they recovered? Who hovered, feeding them vegetables and broth while their fevers broke, administering treatments, and applying balms and oils to their skin, ensuring they did not scratch and infect their pustules, or worse, disrupt the incision? Even without answers, these questions and errant speculations trouble the foundational liberal narratives of inoculation as progress.Speculation offers a way to divest from autopoiesis in slavery’s afterlife.11 What if we pursued and imagined thriving, not just preserving life? We could then confront our current ontologies of health and healing, and include anti-racist, feminist, environmentalist, and abolitionist collectivist politics that far exceed the neoliberal health care offered by a practitioner–patient dyad. If we want healing to account for Black life and thriving, we will have to reckon with history. We must examine the suffering and death European medical intervention rendered permissible and sustainable for their imperial projects—as well as their enduring legacies in medicine, public health, and science.

The Belt and Road Initiative, proposed by the Chinese government in 2013, has exerted great influence, not only on geopolitics and the economy but also on scientific research. This paper investigates the relationship between scientific collaboration and knowledge production of the countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative project. To this end, we used 314,678 co-authored papers and 6,226,577 paper publications in these countries from 2009 to 2018 to measure scientific collaboration and knowledge production, respectively. Additionally, we selected the country’s economic level, the number of specialized disciplines, and political stability as influencing indicators. Methodologically, we established a dynamic panel model and used the generalised method of moments to empirically analyze the relationship between the two and the influencing factors. The results reveal that the scientific collaboration and knowledge production of the countries along the Belt and Road Initiative are mutually reinforcing and show accumulative effects. The number of specialized disciplines and political stability are major influencing factors for scientific collaboration and knowledge production. Knowledge production can facilitate scientific collaboration by increasing number of specialized disciplines, economic development and political stability. Scientific collaboration can weaken the promotion of knowledge production in a similar way, exclusive of economic development.

On the Production and Use of Scientific Knowledge About Ocean Sequestration

The traditional researcher-driven environment of medical knowledge production is losing its dominance with the expansion of, for instance, community-based participatory or participant-led medical research. Over the past few decades, sociologists of science have debated a shift in the production of knowledge from traditional discipline-based (Mode 1) to more socially embedded and transdisciplinary frameworks (Mode 2). Recently, scholars have tried to show the relevance of Mode 2 knowledge production to medical research. However, the existing literature lacks detailed clarifications on how a model of Mode 2 knowledge production can be constructed in the context of medical research. This paper calls for such further clarifications. As a heuristic means, the advocacy for a controversial experimental stem cell therapy (Stamina) is examined. It is discussed that the example cannot be considered a step towards Mode 2 medical knowledge production. Nonetheless, the example brings to the fore some complexities of medical knowledge production that need to be further examined including: (1) the shifting landscape of defining and addressing vulnerability of research participants, (2) the emerging overlap between research and practice, and (3) public health implications of revising the standard notions of quality control and accountability.

Reviewed by: Science, Policy, and Development in Africa: Challenges and Prospects by R. Sooryamoorthy Cathy Skidmore-Hess Sooryamoorthy, R. Science, Policy, and Development in Africa: Challenges and Prospects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Opening with the statement, "A great deal is written and known about Africa but not much about science from Africa, or what Africa can give to science" (1), Science, Policy, and Development in Africa posits that Africa-based science would benefit the global production of scientific knowledge as well as individual nations. Sooryamoorthy, a sociologist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, has written extensively on technology and science in South Africa as well as the role of science in development in both colonial and postcolonial Africa, and he argues for the need to integrate locally produced science into Africa's development plans. For Sooryamoorthy, it is critical to create knowledge and technological capacity, because production of scientific knowledge is necessary to obtain international funding and is a key component of economic growth. As the gap between rich and poor countries widens in terms of knowledge production, the gap in economic development and wealth also increases. However, national development policies of African countries still contain very little focus on science and technology. To remedy this, Sooryamoorthy suggests that science and development policies be more closely aligned with the objectives expressed in national development plans. He also argues for more African-centered scientific programs. [End Page 226] Science, Policy, and Development in Africa makes a strong argument for the development and use of Africa's human capital. Higher population produces greater demand for technology and a larger amount of human capital from which to draw new methods and invention. Lack of appreciation for scientific research also means that an insufficient number of people know how to carry out scientific research (234). Part of the development of human capital involves the creation of more African scientists and more development plans based in science. This requires institutional capacity. According to Sooryamoorthy, the African continent has a poor record of building institutions for development and advancement. To balance technology transfer, and with science developed locally, education is key. African governments need to rely less on foreign capital and make more use of indigenous knowledge, not just in agriculture and medicine but in development more broadly. This means incorporating local knowledge into the formal education system and breaking with some of the patterns created by history and global capital. Sooryamoorthy notes that under colonialism, scientific inquiry was focused on solving the problems of the colonizers, but he focuses his analysis on the postcolonial period and the challenges to Africanizing science. During the 1960s and 1970s, newly independent African countries often needed to develop institutions, such as universities. These universities were, in turn, concerned with the "Africanisation of research, creation of academic positions and expansion of scientific establishments" (45). However, the global recession of the 1970s and a dip in oil prices slowed the production of science, confined it to universities and the public sector, and limited the growth of universities and the public sector as well. This downturn slowed the Africanization of and growth of African science, because scientific development and collaboration is linked with the growth of universities, the number of students enrolled in the sciences, and gross domestic expenditure on research and development (GERD) (85). Sooryamoorthy's analysis indicates a high correlation between scientific production, wealth, and collaboration with the global scientific community. However, while essential, collaboration is often exploitative in the African context as "Africa is often mined for resources of interest to the international community, and African scientists become the under-recognized workers who collect those resources" (195–96). In regard to this and failures in development policy, Sooryamoorthy notes that the problems of science and technology (S&T) on the continent are twofold: first, social systems of science have not been able to attract "sufficient [End Page 227] political legitimacy" and international cooperation; and second, international aid cannot "replace local and national support in harnessing S&T for development" (285). To develop Africa's human potential and "science from Africa," a policy shift is also important. Sooryamoorthy makes use of Andrew Moravcsik's distinction between policy with science...

The fifteenth volume of Innovation Policy and the Economy is the first to focus on a single theme: high-skilled immigration to the United States. The first paper is the product of a long-term research effort on the impact of immigration to the United States of Russian mathematicians beginning around 1990 as the Soviet Union collapsed. The second paper describes how obtaining a degree from a US undergraduate university can open an important pathway for immigrants to participate in the US labor market in IT occupations. The third paper considers the changing nature of postdoctoral positions in science departments, which are disproportionately held by immigrant researchers. The fourth paper considers the role of US firms in high-skilled immigration. The last paper describes how strong growth in global scientific and technological knowledge production has reduced the share of world scientific activity in the United States, increased the immigrant proportion of scientists and engineers at US universities and firms, and fostered cross-border collaborations for US scientists.

Assault on the unknown: the historical and political geographies of the International Geophysical Year (1957–8)

This chapter explores the return of the problem of rhetoric for science in the modern period. In contemporary technoscience, rhetoric functions as an integral aspect of the production and circulation of knowledge as well as an often scapegoated reminder of the fundamental limits on knowledge understood as “objectivity” circulated by and for subjects experiencing nothing but “subjectivity.” By focusing on “entropy” as both a polyvalent term within thermodynamics and information theory and as an apparent constraint limiting and enabling the communication and production of scientific knowledge, the chapter points to the larger scaled ecosystem of attention within which the proliferating and diversifying locales of scientific knowledge production emerge in the modern and postmodern periods, an ecosystem labeled by diverse commentators as the “noösphere.”

The decolonization of knowledge is increasingly high on the agenda of applied and sociolinguistics. This article contributes to this agenda by examining how peripheral multilingual scholars confront their linguistic and epistemic exclusion from global knowledge production. Based on the product of such a challenge – a Chinese-centric special issue of Multilingua, a global academic Q1 journal, devoted to crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic and committed to furthering intercultural dialogue in research – we explore the decades-long knowledge production process behind that product and so provide a look into the “black box” of academic networking and publishing. Advocating for collaborative autoethnography as an inherently inclusive method, we focus on enabling academic and personal networks, textual scaffolding, and linguistic and epistemic brokerage. The article closes with three aspects of linguistic and epistemic citizenship that are central to inclusion, namely recognition of the value of peripheral knowledges, recognition of a collaborative ethics of care, and recognition of shared responsibility.

Oil geology as a scientific field has developed in parallel with the start of oil exploration in Brazil at the end of the 1930s. This chapter analyzes some features of this process. It focuses on different aspects of the activities of the National Petroleum Council (CNP in Portuguese). In Brazil, the development of this scientific field was supported by a State agency, networks of scientists, private companies, and universities—both Brazilian and foreign. This suggests that there were political, economic, and ideological interests at stake in the production of new scientific knowledge. The political context of scientific production, the networks through which this production circulates, and the purposes for which it is used are crucial to the understanding of a creole science. A term coined by environmental historian Stuart McCook creole science encompasses both the impact other spheres have in the production of scientific knowledge and the on-the-ground experience of this production. It also considers the intersections of nature, scientific discoveries, politics, economics, and nationalism. Such reflections are essential for an analysis of the development of the Brazilian field of oil geology. Here we will analyze a previously unreleased collection of documents of the CNP. The studies, exchanges, and breakthroughs made by both Brazilian and foreign scientists reveal these interactions and contribute to a broader understanding of the field.

Worldwide, the production of scientific knowledge (or simply search) has increased exponentially in recent decades. In Brazil, this increase has occurred, mainly, because of the creation of new programs for post-graduate (masters and doctorate) in scientific journals. However, it has not been even and universities in different regions of the country: it is concentrated in centres of excellence. This text seeks to characterize the differences in scientific production centres of excellence as opposed to other types of institutions, called peripheral and emerging. Thus, the principle considers the origin of these terms in Economics and Geography and its translation into other areas of knowledge. Then, with support in terms of concepts about 'know-how' and 'time to do' search, featuring Postgraduate Programs and universities as centers of excellence, peripheral and emerging. In sequence, indicates the limitations of the institutions and emerging Post-graduate programs to achieve scientific parameters of reference (data by financing agencies) that focus the international insertion of the search. Thus, shows that the emerging universities, as they take care of issues unrelated to their surroundings closest (to obtain resources of the agencies), tend to lose the opportunity to contribute in the resolution of local demands of regional development. This study, based on bibliographic data, concludes with considerations about the difficulty of measuring the social commitment of scientific production, debating the need to rethink criteria for the evaluation of financing agencies and establish ways to measure its impact on society, and policies for funding stimulate the production of knowledge with local insertion. Keywords: Emerging Universities; Peripheral Universities; Production of Knowledge; Regional Development.

This essay considers the creation of a gender identity clinic at Rikshospitalet, the National Hospital of Norway, in the early 2000s and its implications for the production of medical knowledge during that era. In the preceding decades, medical transition was overseen by an informal, self-organized, multidisciplinary team of medical experts, but this situation changed when a centralized gender identity clinic was established under psychiatric control. The essay argues that shifting institutional, societal, economic, legal, and bureaucratic circumstances redistributed expertise and authority on trans medicine. Economic framing, institutional frictions, patient activism, and media attention restricted the doctors’ room for maneuver and created a scientific crisis of legitimacy in trans medicine. These processes changed medical knowledge regarding medical transition; eventually, “sex change” and, therefore, all that is denoted by “sex” became intertwined with and inseparable from the politico-bureaucratic processes of reforming a modern public health-care system and welfare state. By anchoring the analysis in the history of science and expertise, this inquiry offers a new focus on the role of bureaucratic practices in the production, structuring, and circulation of medical knowledge in the welfare state.