This research note reflects on, and responds to, Lee and Ribes discussion of 'computational universalism', setting this in dialogue with Suchman's account of 'The uncontroversial "thingness" of AI' and with wider STS literature. In discussing the conceptual resources that STS has to offer with regard to studying computational universalism we reflect on existing scholarship oriented to technical vernaculars, digital practices and frictions, and event thinking. In closing we suggest that in studying computation we should attend not only to how our research objects are constituted through the analytical languages and tools we use to engage with them, but how we, as researchers and research community, are being made alongside our objects.

Protected areas are seen as one of the primary instruments to halt biodiversity loss, but it is not always clear if a protected status designation contributes to the preservation of endangered species and ecosystems. One way to address the issue is through monitoring, the regular counting and measuring of ‘nature’. However, more than merely representing nature in a protected area, monitoring enacts nature. In this article, I explore a specific protected area by way of an ethnography of different monitoring programs in Neusiedler See–Seewinkel National Park in Austria. Characterized as a quintessentially naturecultural landscape, the formal boundaries of the national park only partially match when and where monitoring is done. To make sense of the differences, I trace practices of monitoring of the soda lake ecosystem, vegetation, and geese as multispecies activities, shaped by both human and non-human performances in and of space and time. I thereby suggest considering protected area monitoring as a distinct knowledge practice that contributes to shaping protected areas as lived conservation infrastructures.

This article examines the information systems governing individual relationships to urban coastal waterways, drawing from two data publication initiatives in New York City. In these two cases, data structure and web design features cultivate specific forms of knowledge about water quality, pollution, and the health risks represented by recreational activities such as swimming and fishing. Analysis of the data structure and web source code shows the forms of knowledge concerning water quality each project facilitates or obscures. Findings are considered within the framework of an 'information order', which refers to the prevailing conditions for knowledge that are facilitated by communication practices, infrastructures, and tools. The study finds that both initiatives are shaped by their reliance on widely shared geographic information systems and web development frameworks, as well as their emphasis on enterococcus bacteria as an indicator of pollution, rather than other potential metrics. Such widely shared digital and observational features may facilitate and structure other forms of knowledge production now and in the future.

Anti-doping policy is a key component of integrity in sports, and one for which science and technology are central resources. It represents a genuinely transnational sector of policy-making that so far has received little attention in science and technology studies. Anti-doping has evolved into a worldwide detection and sanctioning system, supervised by a central regulatory body, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Looking at anti-doping as a case study of regulatory science in action, we analyze how WADA portrays and uses science and expertise in policymaking. We interpret these practices as performances directed toward the agency's various audiences, which reveal its modes of producing and legitimizing knowledge and shaping its civic epistemologies. We are working from publicly available WADA meeting minutes, regulatory documents, and other communications released by WADA. We use the rise of contamination concerns-from WADA's creation in 2000 through 2023-as a prism of study. Contamination was chosen as a sensitive and complex issue that shows the dilemmas that WADA faces, as it mobilizes science and expertise and exposes boundary conflicts in scientific advice. Our analysis illustrates how transnational policymakers participate in configuring civic epistemologies specific to an international community bound by a common legal and moral order.

Overshadowed by expert and public debates over reactor safety and waste disposal solutions, nuclear decommissioning is a variably long transitional phase during which host communities face numerous uncertainties regarding their future and nuclear sites' cleanup results. What happens to nuclear facilities when they become obsolete and need to retire? How much does it cost to dismantle a nuclear plant, and what are the socioecological implications of decommissioning projects? Focusing on one case in Italy, this study adopts a longitudinal approach to nuclear site biographies, demonstrating how national regulations, decommissioning funding schemes, technical and environmental characteristics of the facilities, and the socioeconomic conditions of affected communities concur to shape decommissioning projects. My approach builds on recent works on nuclear attachments exploring local communities' ambivalence toward nuclear installations. I argue that decommissioning processes should be analyzed considering larger management schemes, interests, and constraints that at multiple levels concur to form political economies of nuclear waste.

Nanotechnology is a scientific field where STS scholars have observed the influence of magical thinking. Here we contribute to that literature by describing a phenomenon in the field of drug delivery called the EPR (Enhanced Permeability and Retention) Effect. When the 'nano' boom of the 2000s brought intense interest from outside pharmacology, EPR spawned so many efforts and enterprises in nano-based drug delivery that it became the leading basis for nanomedicine's promise. Following the 2016 failure of a prominent nano-biotech firm exploiting EPR, the collapse of the field offers insights into the role such theories or narratives played in the formation of nanomedicine and, more broadly, how contemporary technoscience may incorporate elements of enchantment-particularly where exposed to financialization.

Computer ontology languages aggregate a number of properties that can be used to model knowledge for machine consumption. These languages are increasingly playing a role in gatekeeping the conveyance and dissemination of knowledge. This article presents a cultural analysis of owl:sameas-a property in a computer ontology language that seeks to formalize representations of identity and sameness in online databases. In this article, I examine the 're-formalizing practices' of the community of practitioners that revisited the specifications for owl:sameas after the standard was widely put to use in not so standard ways. Re-formalizing practices refer to the social activities that designers engage as they confront the contingency and mutability of formal representations. I argue that designers engaging re-formalizing practices can at times buckle down on the stability of certain logical properties even while appearing to make knowledge modeling more fluid; at other times, re-formalizing practices can invite more freeplay in a modeling practice, decentering the authors of ontology languages as central to meaning-making. This work furthers understanding of, not only how ontology languages delimit representational affordances, but also how social understandings of the meaning and appropriate use of their properties are enacted and iterate over time.

The paradigm of scientific medicine is among the most influential epistemic shifts in the past century, wherein randomized controlled trials (RCTs) represent the impartial arbiter of medical claims. Nevertheless, not all RCTs agree, and systematic reviews are invoked to reconcile them. We theorize how tacitness-beliefs, implicit assumptions, expectations, heuristics, unrecorded routines-accumulates within 'socio-epistemic bubbles', continuous regions of social density that decrease diversity and increase unwarranted certainty about healthcare studied by RCTs. To assess our theory, we analyze 20,117 meta-analyses extracted from 1,962 Cochrane systematic reviews. We find that being closer within 'social space' inscribed by scientific collaboration increases agreement across RCTs. Our analysis suggests that this amplified certainty can drive premature convergence affecting medical practice and population health. By increasing researchers' ability to perform an experiment in the way required to achieve an expected result, socio-epistemic bubbles represent the dark matter of the experimental process often obscured. Our findings imply hidden limitations associated with unmeasured social influence across the policy sciences, through which conflicting claims perpetuate and highlight the necessity of accounting for them to improve collective certainty.

This article examines how hacker culture, often conceptualized as immaterial and virtual, is in fact materially and spatially constituted through its entanglement with physical places. Focusing on Las Vegas and DEF CON, this article shows the emergence of hackerspectacle, a place-bound mode of interfacing that enables the dual-direction seepage of form and power: subcultural acts leave material residues in policies and design, while the city's spectacle economy filters back to script hackers' style, memory, and self-understanding. The article traces how a three-decade coupling between DEF CON and Las Vegas co-produces both the conference and the city. By intervening in hotel systems, accessing controls, and displaying infrastructures, hackers appropriate Las Vegas's visual language and spatial affordances to craft their placed identity. Conceptually, this case advances STS discussions on the materiality of digital cultures. Empirically, it shows a city-level co-construction. The article also diagnoses a drift from subversion to absorption as DEF CON mirrors Las Vegas's streamlining, commercialization, and surveillance. The article is based on original archival research, ethnographic work, and media analysis. It draws on DEF CON programs, hacker zines, public and anonymized interviews, news coverage, and visual materials, and it situates hacker practices within Las Vegas's legal, architectural, and economic history. It also offers a generalizable template for studying how technocultures take place, literally, and will interest readers of infrastructure studies, digital materialities, urban technopolitics, and the socio-spatial dynamics of subcultures.

How does knowledge production during crises challenge or maintain contemporary institutions? This article investigates expert knowledge on nuclear accidents in France in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi accident in March 2011. It examines the French and European 'lessons from Fukushima' learning exercise, using document analysis, interviews, and ethnographic observation of institutional experts' working practices. The article shows how nuclear safety experts produce limited commensurability. Specifically, through a comparative exercise, they render certain features of the Fukushima accident commensurable by relating them to a diversity of pre-existing evaluation scales and metrics of nuclear safety, while preventing different hypotheses, methods, and data from being brought to bear on nuclear safety. These operations rely on and consolidate experts' epistemic leeway, their discretionary ability to choose from several incommensurable epistemic resources. The article enhances our understanding of the politics of (in)commensurability for expert communities in the context of the pluralization of expert systems. It opens up questions about knowledge on crises, seeing these crises as episodes in which experts redefine the acceptable states of the world.