Through a case study of what are known as 'relief models'-for example of areas of landscapes-this article approaches representational objects in and as practice. Such an approach implies following the multiplicity of practices that are gathered in representational objects to bring them into and maintain their existence, especially those that often remain unacknowledged by analytical attention. Most discussions of representational objects focus on their representational capacities and properties, paying less attention to the activities that ensure their ontological security as objects. Those activities concern not only the manufacture of representational objects, but also their maintenance-which is placed at the heart of this discussion. The maintenance of relief models manifests itself as a semiotic-material ecology. Entangled here are the ontological tact of the craftsperson, the affordances, resistances, and responsiveness of the materials, and the meaning-makings and stories that articulate and guide maintenance and repair. The practice of maintaining such objects, however, diverges from their production. Their production essentially accommodates metric distance since representation involves transporting a 'thing' through chains of reference. On the contrary, their maintenance aims to accommodate multiple temporalities. This involves not only the ways of being in time that are specific to each material that composes the object but also the idealized past of an unused object, its worn present, and its anticipated (repaired) future. By playing with the double meaning of the word 'representing', this article speculatively questions the extent to which practices of maintenance of, and care for, representational objects can inform a re-vision and rethinking of the relationships to what they are meant to re-present-that is, to what counts as nature.

The article examines the possibilities and limits of patient advocacy-led health technology design through a case study: a non-commercial mobile self-tracking app developed by a Finnish patient organization to advance medical care and research in endometriosis, an underfunded and understudied gynecological condition. Drawing on interviews with patient organization representatives, specialized clinicians and people with endometriosis, as well as written endometriosis stories, this article traces the evolving expectations around the app to understand the landscape of hopes and concerns in which patient advocacy-led design is conceived and received. This article identifies tensions in visions about how the app could be used as well as locates shifts in expectations as the app moved from an idea to everyday use. The article also shows how structural aspects of established technological systems, such as digital health infrastructures or data ownership relations, shape expectations about future uses of patient advocacy-led technology. This case study contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on self-tracking and health technology development by providing a nuanced understanding of how the dynamics of expectation in patient advocacy-led design operate in a complex and underdiagnosed gendered chronic illness.

In Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World every person is conditioned through technologies to fit their social role, which is the source of the society's alleged stability and rightness. This utopia of 'precision justice' is alive today in projects that deploy data and algorithmic models in decision-making in diverse branches of life to realize computing's promise to create more just societies. I identify the sociotechnical imaginary of 'precision justice' by analyzing the promise and contestation of the use of an algorithmic model to calculate exam grades in the United Kingdom during the Covid-19 pandemic. 'Precision justice' is the product of the coupling of a normative concept of just distribution with data practices of identification and risk assessment, and is characterized by interventionist action, optimal distribution, and system management. It crystallized in the contexts of the emerging 'information society' in the 1970s United States, when visions of the risks and opportunities of information in digital form converged with the popular theory and practices of distributive justice. At stake in this imaginary is the model of the human with which it operates and that it reproduces. Instead of keying people to a substantive and expansive concept of justice, the union of distributive justice and data practices bind people to indicators and allocate them to specific places in society. To move beyond precision justice, this article calls for the need to look at justice and data symmetrically, as a simultaneously epistemic and normative set of concerns that must be addressed together in terms of what worlds we want to build.

Damianos provides his views on the significance of the March 2024 decision by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to reject the proposal of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), the body we represent, to formalize the Anthropocene as a series/epoch of the Geological Time Scale. He draws upon 'four years of ethnographic observation' of the AWG, over which time this body provided him with access to its meetings and discussions. Given this access, the numerous misrepresentations within his article warrant redress. Ultimately, his conclusions mimic claims of influential figures within the governing bodies of the stratigraphic process: that the AWG were attempting to formalize the Anthropocene for political reasons and subvert the process through use of the media, and that the proposed definition was based upon claims about the future and not the past geological record. We refute those accusations, and emphasize that the proposed Anthropocene epoch, based on scrupulous and detailed analysis of the stratigraphic record, demonstrates striking and transformative Earth System change driven by the mid-20th century 'Great Acceleration' of human activities.

This article investigates why statistical reasoning has had little impact on the practice of friction ridge (or 'fingerprint') examination, despite both interest and some modest scientific progress toward this goal. Previous research has attributed this lack of results to practitioner resistance and legal apathy. This article seeks to complement those explanations through interviews with experts with a variety of perspectives on contemporary fingerprint practice about practical and mundane obstacles to the belated statistical revolution in fingerprinting. Based on these interviews, we argue that a 'forensic device' is required to incorporate statistical reasoning into fingerprint practice. This device would consist of a robust statistical model fronted by accessible, usable software. These components, in turn, require other components, such as large research data sets, markets, early adopters, government clients, education, and training. We conclude that the statistical revolution has been delayed not just by grand debates over the probabilistic nature of fingerprint evidence, but also by the seemingly mundane problems posed by developing and maintaining the kind of forensic device that would make such a revolution possible and practical.

This article examines meaning-making in a governmental technology demonstration, and its significance in the production of a durable artifice of innovation. STS literature has largely engaged with technology demonstrations in the context of commercial technology products, and through the lens of public knowledge-making: as events that elicit credence in matters-of-fact. I contribute to this discussion by turning attention towards a new context, governmental innovation, and approaching the format, not through its epistemics, but rather its aesthetic and affective registers. Over the course of a project aimed at building a governmental software system called the AuroraAI Network, to be used for the empowerment of welfare subjects, the Department of Government ICT at the Finnish Ministry of Finance produced a series of four highly theatrical events that sought to demonstrate the development of the AI system. Using social-semiotic performance analysis, I analyse these events as a kind of façade, one that presents the trappings of technology demonstration, but rather than advancing specific technical matters-of-fact, produces an affective and aesthetic sensibility of government innovation. By mobilizing the metaphor of façade, this research shows how empty innovation is made durable and successful.

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.

In this article, the authors identify the disciplines that have taken an interest in masks over time, as well as how, in what proportions, according to what concerns, with what developments, and possibly with what effects. They ask whether the multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives is likely to lead to the emergence and sharing of new concerns, especially environmental ones, or whether the balkanization and juxtaposition of disciplines may leave certain aspects in the dark and thus contribute to the persistent production of a certain kind of ignorance. Based on a bibliometric and textometric study of more than 6000 scientific articles (1892-2023), they show the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic has turned the study of masks upside down. It has encouraged the development of multidisciplinary and even interdisciplinary approaches, even if the legacy of almost exclusively medical sciences and engineering tends to severely limit hybridizations. The study highlights the possible emergence of a new movement of 'scientization of the popular', which leads scientists to incorporate the everyday concerns of ordinary citizens into the conduct of their research, thus challenging and reversing the well-known process of popularizing science.