Science Studies Scholars Research Articles

Engineering Heterotopia

My starting point is the present—certainly a critical and loaded moment for scholars of the modern Middle East. It is incumbent upon us to take a step back and to rethink how to create new concepts, new narratives, new explanatory schemes, new historicities, and new visions of the future. An engagement with science studies, understood broadly, is one possible way to begin such critical rethinking. It is an exercise that could also be mutually illuminating, as scholars of science studies have been debating the global nature of science and technology for the last decade, undoubtedly in reaction to the once European-dominated narrative of the history of science. The field of science studies has moved well beyond “diffusion” and “core-periphery” models toward more eclectic examinations of various processes of epistemic encounters, translations, mediations, and conflicts that shaped societies. These processes also shaped science and technology. Here, I would like to provide a brief outline of one mutual engagement inspired by the injunction to follow scientists, doctors, and engineers and to probe what was at stake in the knowledge they produced and how they “made society.”

Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor

Historical forms of domination and power, encompassed but not limited to social categories and hierarchies of difference, get built into seemingly non-human objects and the infrastructures that link them, thus sanitizing digital media technologies as human-free. Rather than questioning the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the human, fantasies about the revolutionary nature of new media and technology developments as posthuman carry forward and re-universalize the historical specificity of the category “human” whose bounds they claim to surpass. To begin to theorize some of the ways in which the notion of a revolutionary network of humans and things is both racial and racializing, the first part of this article develops a reading of Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of modern “man” as fundamentally constructed through racial-scientific notions of the biological and economic. We then think Wynter’s notion of homo-oeconomicus alongside Rifkin’s postulation that in fact the infrastructure revolution marks a paradigm shift away from capitalism. Through an analysis of several contemporary platforms (including Alfred and Amazon Mechanical Turk), we address the global-racial erasures and disappearances undergirding techno-utopic fantasies of a post-labor society. At the same time, as we argue, it is insufficient to merely point out the way in which human racialized and gendered labor underwrites techno-utopic fantasies. Instead, we move to a consideration of the epistemological and material shifts as well as legacies tied to prior post-Enlightenment revolutionary thought, such as that of Franz Fanon, to reconceptualize who or what can count as human. In conversation with feminist science studies scholarship on the posthuman, we grapple with what it means to think the subject of labor, and the human as subject, outside of the biological-economic imperatives of prior imaginaries.

The (Mis)Measure of Trans

Abstract This essay considers the utility of research questions that articulate aspects of transgender lives to the nontransgender populations with whom they share a wide range of bodily and lived experience. By foregrounding transgender's instability as a research variable, the authors argue for more precise methodological orientations in trans research, particularly regarding gender and sexual orientation. Drawing on their own data with trans men whose sexual attractions have shifted during transition, they argue against unidimensional interpretations of this experience. Feminists and critical race scholars suggest that race and gender frequently function as “proxies”: variables that reduce the complexities of biosocial bodily experience to more quantifiable forms of data. The authors argue that much of the research conducted with transgender persons suffers from similar reductions, narrowing the epistemological frameworks through which these populations are subsequently investigated and understood. By contrasting the National Transgender Discrimination Survey's focus on the measurable experience of discrimination with research that makes broader claims regarding “the transgender population,” the essay invites researchers to develop a set of best practices that resemble those of feminist science studies scholars.

Tag Writing, Search Engines, and Cultural Scripts

In this article, I explore the social, political, and ethical implications of search engine use and tag writing. Unlike scholars in economics, law, information science, and media studies who have weighed on these issues for more than a decade now, I argue that scholarship in rhetoric and composition has taken a narrow approach by connecting search engines and tag writing primarily with the teaching of research skills. Relying on a folksonomic approach, I conduct a case study of a Romanian online campaign that aimed to work with and against Google in order to change Romanians’ online identity. Based on this example, I show how search engines can be used, on the one hand, to write new identity scripts and to change cultural patterns, and, on the other hand, to reinscribe power relations and limited identity politics. I also argue that the campaign is an example of public rhetorical education that calls on us, teachers and scholars of composition, to rethink our pedagogies and to expand our teaching tools. Ultimately, integrating search engines and tag writing into the classroom can teach students to use technologies more responsibly and to reflect critically on their everyday writing practices, which, in their simplest manifestations, are powerful forms of culture-writing.

The case for policy-relevant conservation science.

Drawing on the “evidence-based” (Sutherland et al. 2013) versus “evidence-informed” debate (Adams & Sandbrook 2013), which has become prominent in conservation science, I argue that science can be influential if it holds a dual reference (Lentsch & Weingart 2011) that contributes to the needs of policy makers whilst maintaining technical rigor. In line with such a strategy, conservation scientists are increasingly recognizing the usefulness of constructing narratives through which to enhance the influence of their evidence (Leslie et al. 2013; Lawton & Rudd 2014). Yet telling stories alone is rarely enough to influence policy; instead, these narratives must be policy relevant. To ensure that evidence is persuasive alongside other factors in a complex policy-making process, conservation scientists could follow 2 steps: reframe within salient political contexts and engage more productively in boundary work, which is defined as the ways in which scientists “construct, negotiate, and defend the boundary between science and policy” (Owens et al. 2006:640). These will both improve the chances of evidence-informed conservation policy.El Caso para la Ciencia de la Conservación con Relevancia PolíticaResumenA partir del debate “con base en evidencia” (Sutherland et al. 2013) versus “informado con evidencia” (Adams & Sandbrook 2013), debate que se ha vuelto prominente en la ciencia de la conservación, argumento que la ciencia puede ser influyente si mantiene una referencia dual (Lentsch & Weingart 2011) que contribuya a las necesidades de quienes hacen la política a la vez que mantiene un rigor técnico. En línea con dicha estrategia, los científicos de la conservación cada vez reconocen más la utilidad de construir narrativas con las cuales pueden mejorar la influencia de sus evidencias (Leslie et al. 2013; Lawton & Rudd 2014). Sin embargo, sólo contar historias rara vez es suficiente para influir sobre la política; en su lugar, estas narrativas deben ser políticamente relevantes. Para asegurar que la evidencia sea persuasiva junto con otros factores en un proceso complejo de fabricación de políticas, los científicos de la conservación pueden seguir dos pasos: rediseñar el marco de trabajo a partir de contextos políticos salientes y participar con mayor productividad en el trabajo fronterizo, que se define como los métodos con los cuales los científicos “construyen, negocian y defienden la frontera entre la ciencia y la política” (Owens et al. 2006:640). Estos pasos incrementarán la oportunidad de políticas de conservación informadas con evidencias.

Finding a place for engineering studies in disaster STS? Creating the STS Forum on the 2011 East Japan Disaster

During the opening panel at the recent Society for the Social Studies ofScience/Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnologia (4S/ESOCITE) meeting in Buenos Aires, the 4S president (and editor of this journal), Gary Downey, challenged us to move beyond the traditional linear model of knowledge creation and utilization by reflecting on how many Science and Technology Studies scholars pursue novel ways of acting upon the world through scaling up their scholarship. This critical participation piece describes our attempt to forge an international research forum in the wake of the 2011 East Japan Disaster that constitutes one such attempt to produce scalable scholarship. Inspired by the deep reflexivity of autoethnography, this account examines the tensions inherent to such an endeavor, including the tensions between scholarship and engagement; personal and professional goals; research ethics and different international standards for scholarship; and the desire to make engineering visible versus the dominant STS (science and technology studies) framing of disasters research. This account should serve as a useful guide for others seeking to build international collaborations involving engineering studies, and other similar efforts to produce scalable scholarship.

Infrastructure and the state in science and technology studies.

Long-time scholars of science and technology studies (STS) may be surprised to learn that Winner’s question – ‘do artifacts have politics?’ – is not the foundation of contemporary literature on technological infrastructure and the politics of the state. The question was first raised in an article published in Daedalus (Winner, 1980), reprinted in The Social Shaping of Technology (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999), and then adapted for Winner’s (1986) book; is it now possible that artifacts and infrastructure no longer ‘have’

Infrastructural Inversion as a Generative Resource in Digital Scholarship

Digital humanities scholarship has regularly challenged characteristic organizational features of academic life in the humanities. For example, it is typically practiced in larger collaborative projects that produce output very different from the traditional scholarly monograph. Digital humanists often present their work in strikingly reflexive accounts that are reminiscent of what science and technology studies scholars have called infrastructural inversion, a method that defamiliarizes the socio-material infrastructure of research to expose the inner workings of knowledge production. At first sight, infrastructural inversion might seem to constitute the opposite of the older concept of articulation work, which designates the situated activity of coordinating and managing cooperative work processes. It is more useful, however, to think about infrastructural inversion as a specific form of articulation work. The inversions performed by digital scholars serve to highlight and problematize established ways of streamlining articulation work, for example, through the established model of peer review, or by using conventional forms of scholarly output. In turn, such systematic defamiliarization opens up new and potentially competing ways of imagining the organization of articulation work.

Health and Sustainability in the Canadian Food System: Advocacy and Opportunity for Civil Society

Health and Sustainability in the Canadian Food System: Advocacy and Opportunity for Civil Society

Neoliberal pharmaceutical science and the Chicago School of Economics.

In recent years, science studies scholars have critically examined several methods used by the pharmaceutical industry to exert control over knowledge about drugs. Complementary literatures on 'medical neoliberalism' and 'neoliberal science' draw attention to the economic ideas justifying such methods of organizing knowledge, and in so doing suggest that neoliberal thinkers may play an important role in developing them. As yet, the nature of this role remains unexplored. Relying on heretofore-unexamined archival evidence, this article establishes a direct link between the Chicago School of Economics and the mobilization of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1970s. It argues that economists affiliated with the Chicago School of Economics sought to influence pharmaceutical policy and science and constructed institutions to do so. These institutions--most notably the Center for the Study of Drug Development--remain highly influential. This article contributes to a historical understanding of how neoliberal ideas came to assume prominence in pharmaceutical policy, the management of science, and scientific practice.

The politics of buzzwords at the interface of technoscience, market and society: The case of ‘public engagement in science’

Emerging technologies such as genomics, nanotechnology, and converging technologies are surrounded by a constellation of fashionable stereotyped phrases such as 'public engagement in science', 'responsible innovation', 'green technology', or 'personalised medicine'. Buzzwords are ubiquitous and used ad libitum by science policy makers, industrial companies in their advertisements, scientists in their research proposals, and journalists. Despite their proliferation in the language of scientific and technological innovation, these buzzwords have attracted little attention among science studies scholars. The purpose of this paper is to try to understand if, and how buzzwords shape the technoscientific landscape. What do they perform? What do they reveal? What do they conceal? Based on a case study of the phrase 'public engagement in science', this paper describes buzzwords as linguistic technologies, capable of three major performances: buzzwords generate matters of concern and play an important role in trying to build consensus; they set attractive goals and agendas; they create unstable collectives through noise.

Navigating a Constitutional Moment: Reflections on Implementing Graduate Attributes in Canadian Engineering Education

This piece is a self-reflexive essay examining our experiences during an important transitional moment, what we will identify as a ‘constitutional moment’, in engineering education in Canada. We are a collection of scholars who specialize in the study of the interface between technology and the humanities and social sciences (most of us identify as Science and Technology Studies scholars). Housed within the Center for Engineering in Society, itself housed within a faculty of engineering, we find ourselves presented with dual challenges of introducing insights from the critical studies of the relationship between science, technology, and society into the engineering curriculum, while also maintaining legitimacy among the engineering faculty that we find ourselves a part of. This paper is a result of our attempts to understand the challenges in engineering education that are unique to our Canadian context and to systematize our responses to these challenges. The aim of this paper is to share our experiences navigating the relationship between the construction of our center's identity as an Engineering Studies hub and our critical participation in engineering education practice.

Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era by Brian Russell Roberts (review)

Reviewed by: Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era by Brian Russell Roberts Z. Hall Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era. By Brian Russell Roberts. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 2013. “The ambassadorial tradition in African American writing has remained uninterrogated in relation to one of the New Negro era’s major arenas of political culture. This political culture operated on the planetary scale of official internationalism, and it became co-constitutive with the cultural politics of New Negro artistic ambassadorship” (14). American studies, and African American and black diasporan literature and culture scholar Brian Roberts probes U.S. international diplomacy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to illuminate the “strong and weak, formal and informal, connections between official internationalism and African American culture” (10). His work “offers critical access to previously unrecognized black internationalists tradition produced as African American and U.S. imperial cultures have met and shaped one another” (8). Roberts arranges dialogues among the fields of anti-imperialist critique, African American literary studies, and studies in black transnationalism to demonstrate how the literary and diplomatic performances of African American writers functioned rhetorically to, at some moments, undercut [End Page 216] U.S. diplomatic intentions yet, at other moments, operated as a means of promoting the imperial sway of the United States. Arranged in three parts, Artistic Ambassadors outlines the interlocking dimensions of race, aesthetic, and international representation, and “outlines the ways in which black work in diplomacy played previously unsuspected roles in shaping major African American representational concerns, including the capacity of New Negro race men to speak for the nation’s black masses, the methods of race representation under dispute in the Booker T. Washington/W. E. B. Du Bois debate, and the signifying status of women and the black diaspora within domestic and international African American cultures” (6). Roberts examines the aesthetic and political representations of famous figures such as Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and others and brings them into dialogue with the work of lesser-known black official and unofficial writer-diplomats of the New Negro era. Part one articulated the struggles faced by luminaries such as Frederick Douglass and lesser known African American diplomats in creating a narrative for the New Negro to supplant the myth of the Old Negro—ranging from Jim Crow to Zip Coon, Rastus to Sambo, Uncle Tom to Aunt Jemima—created by white Americans. Part two described a politics of immanence in which race becomes incidental to New Negro internationalism. Insider status becomes paramount though performances of immanence were inevitably imperfect and incomplete. Part three examined the “integration of hip knowingness of black vernacular culture into official diplomacy’s traditionally staid approach to internationalism” (118). It would have been informative if this work examined how the antecedent rhetoric of the Old Negro contained in U.S. cultural exports, predating and contemporary with the deployment of African American diplomats, weighed on the effectiveness of the representatives. Robert’s debut book is a challenging and enlightening interrogation of the international and literary projects of New Negro era figures. In addition to African American and American Studies scholars, this text is of interest to political science and international studies scholars, and literary critics. Z. Hall Independent Scholar, Kansas City, Missouri Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

Studying Tensions between Imaginary Spaces and Concrete Places: The Method of Paired Biographies Applied to Scientists' Laboratory Lives

Spannungen zwischen imaginativen Raumen und konkreten Orten: Die Methode der ‚gepaarten Biographie', angewandt auf das Leben von Wis- senschaftlern in Laboren«. Spaces and places are at the center of the science studies scholarship. Some scholars focus on the spatial circulation of written traces; others focus on the socio-cultural hierarchies reflected in the spatial organization of the laboratories. But most privilege single-case studies as their research method. While single-case studies offer the advantage of providing rich and detailed ethnographic description of spaces, they often fail to explain how imaginary spaces of science are turned into concrete social settings, often with unexpected deviations from their creators' initial purposes. This paper ar- gues that a comparative approach, which I call biographies, can help us study the tensions between imaginary and real spaces of science. This meth- od of paired biographies is applied here to trace the attempts (both failed and successful) by two prominent physicists (J.R. Oppenheimer and E.O. Lawrence) to turn their imaginary scientific spaces into concrete places. This comparative approach, based upon paired biographies of various laboratory lives taken at different points in time, highlights the tensions between imaginary spaces of science and concrete architectural forms (themselves located in broader envi- ronments), and shows which unexpected outcomes derive from these tensions.

Scientific Reforms, Feminist Interventions, and the Politics of Knowing: An Auto‐ethnography of a Feminist Neuroscientist

Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide an auto‐ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority.

Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities

AbstractThe notion of the ‘urban laboratory’ is increasingly striking a chord with actors involved in urban change. Is this term simply a metaphor for urban development or does it suggest urbanization by substantially different means? To answer this question, we review the work of science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have empirically investigated laboratories and practices of experimentation over the past three decades to understand the significance of these spaces of experimentation in urban contexts. Based on this overview of laboratory studies, we argue that urban laboratories and experimentation involve three key achievements — situatedness, change‐orientation and contingency — that are useful for evaluating and critiquing those practices that claim to be urban laboratories. We conclude by considering some future directions of research on urban laboratories.

The Vilnius Declaration

The advent of the Horizon 2020 research-funding program offers social sciences and humanities scholars (SSH) in the European Union (EU) an unparalleled opportunity to collaborate with science and engineering to address profound societal challenges while advancing knowledge. How they respond to this opportunity will matter greatly for scholarship, for science, and for society. More than Euros and European scholarship are at stake: in the United States, the SSH have suffered a debilitating decline in fortune and public esteem. Strong and integrated European SSH research, conducted in collaboration with engineering and sciences, will invigorate our fields in a way that may cross the Atlantic and spark their resurgence in the United States. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have a catalytic and formative role to play in Horizon 2020 because they are experienced in the design, conduct, and analysis of collaborations that extend from SSH across the sciences and engineering, and then outward to engage policy makers, practitioners, and members of the public. Let me describe the Horizon program and the Vilnius Declaration and then outline some ways STS can contribute. Over the next seven years, Horizon 2020 will invest about €70B to support research and innovation, with €28B earmarked for seven major societal challenges (in brief: food safety and security, health and well-being, energy,

Mapping the new molecular landscape: social dimensions of epigenetics

Epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the DNA itself. The field is rapidly growing and being widely promoted, attracting attention in diverse arenas. These include those of the social sciences, where some researchers have been encouraged by the resonance between imaginaries of development within epigenetics and social theory. Yet, sustained attention from science and technology studies (STS) scholars to epigenetics and the praxis it propels has been lacking. In this article, we reflexively consider some of the ways in which epigenetics is being constructed as an area of biomedical novelty and discuss the content and logics underlying the ambivalent promises being made by scientists working in this area. We then reflect on the scope, limits and future of engagements between epigenetics and the social sciences. Our discussion is situated within wider literatures on biomedicine and society, the politics of “interventionist STS”, and on the problems of “caseness” within empirical social science.

Derrida, Stengers, Latour, and Subalternist Cosmopolitics

Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida’s program with Stengers’s and Latour’s. I read Derrida’s critique of hospitality and Stengers’s and Latour’s ontological politics as necessary complements for conceiving a care-oriented subalternist cosmopolitics, a process of composing common worlds that remains attentive to the limits of representation.

Fatuous measures: the artifactual construction of the obesity epidemic

Scholars in science studies have coined the concept ‘artifactual constructivism’ to denote the techniques, laboratory practices, conventions, observational methods, instrumentation and measurements that produce scientific facts. Applying artifactual constructivism to biophysical phenomena is not to deny that a particular phenomenon materially exists, but to highlight that it can only be known through the specific tools and techniques of measurement that bring it into being. This article examines some of the tools and techniques that have been deployed to understand the growth in American body sizes to argue that the ‘obesity epidemic’ is an artefact of particular epidemiological measures and conventions. It is not that they are wrong; it is that these tools can paint the picture in ways that may over-dramatize some elements and under-specify others and can also foreclose other problem conceptualizations. It will give specific focus to the use of the Body Mass Index to measure adiposity, the categorizations of BMI to determine rates of obesity, the attributable fraction technique to establish excess deaths and the use of the bell curve to define normality. The article will argue more generally that predominant ways of measuring the obesity epidemic inscribe notions of normative size that are based in averages and intensify the use of size as the litmus test for health or well-being.