Science And Technology Studies Research Research Articles

STS Researchers as Technology: Multiple Positionalities as Interpretations of Participant Expectations and Agendas

Science and technology studies (STS) researchers integrated into interdisciplinary research projects learn important lessons of collaboration dynamics by analyzing the lived experience of the research participants. Previous approaches of STS researchers included laboratory studies and reimagining the collaborative process as a research method. However, previous research on interdisciplinary projects repeatedly cites recurring challenges, indicating that more sharing of this lived experience is needed. My autoethnography of an interdisciplinary project interrogates the various positionalities I embodied as research technologies. In adopting a feminist analytical approach, this paper forefronts emotional affect and interrogates technological labels of the social science researcher to understand power dynamics and interpret what is meant by “good science” across disciplines. These findings help us understand how individuals appraise interdisciplinarity, setting realistic expectations for addressing future interdisciplinary collaborations more deliberately. Lastly, I also consider the ethical considerations necessary to care for the ethnographer in interdisciplinary collaborations, as they are often caught in the crosshairs of the frustrations in collaborating.

The Intersections between Sociology and STS: A Big Data Approach

This paper charts the changing intersections between sociology and science and technology studies (STS) using computational textual analysis. We characterize this “quali-quantitative” approach as a Big Data method, as this calls attention to the commixture of textual and numeric data that characterizes Big Data. The term Big Data, too, calls attention to the increasing privatization of both data and data analytics tools. The data mining was done using a commercial analytics tool, IBM SPSS Modeler, that to the best of our knowledge has not yet been used for STS or sociological research. The identification of intersections occurred as part of a larger project to analyze political-economic and epistemic changes within STS, focusing on academic publishing. These epistemic changes were identified qualitatively, through 76 interviews with STS scholars, and quantitatively, through a computational analysis of three decades of STS journals (1990–2019).

Affective Labor in Integrative STS Research

Science and technology studies (STS) practitioners regularly use qualitative research methods to describe the structures and practices of science. Despite a long history of collaborative inter- and transdisciplinary research in the field, key aspects of this type of research remain underexplored. For example, much of the literature on positionality has focused on the vulnerable position of participants and there is considerably less work on how investigators can be vulnerable. We examine how investigators in collaborative sociotechnical integration (CSTI) are vulnerable by presenting two examples of CSTI research that require researcher vulnerability. This vulnerability has an emotional dimension, which also necessitates affective labor. We integrate recommendations from feminist-scholarship to minimize the affective cost to investigators and explore how they might apply to qualitative research more broadly.

Legal Pluralism and Science and Technology Studies: Exploring Sources of the Legal Pluriverse

In introducing the contributions to this special section, we explore the links between social and juridical concepts of normativity and science and technology. We follow the Legal Pluralism challenge to the notion of state law as the sole source of normative order and point to how technological transformation creates a pluralistic legal universe that takes on new shapes under conditions of globalization. We promote a science and technology studies (STS)-inspired reworking of Legal Pluralism and suggest expanding the portfolio of legally effective regimes of ordering to include the normativity generated by materiality and technology. This normativity is amply demonstrated in the case studies included in the papers which make up this special section. We conclude that the inclusion of approaches developed in STS research helps analytically to overcome what we view as an incomplete law project, one unable to deal with the technicized lifeworlds of a global modernity. The contributions to this special section illustrate that technomaterial change cannot be understood without recognition of the role of normative impacts, and conversely, the legal pluriverse cannot be understood without recognition of the normative role of techno-material arrangements.

On Theory–Methods Packages in Science and Technology Studies

Our review essay contributes to the long-standing and vibrant discussion in science and technology studies (STS) on methods, methodologies, and theory–method relationships. We aim to improve the reflexivity of research by unpacking the often implicit assumptions that imbue research conduct and by offering practical tools through which STS researchers can recognize their research designs and think through them in a new way. To achieve these aims, we analyze different compositions of theories, methods, and empirics in three different STS approaches—actor–network theory, the biography of artifacts and practices, and ethnomethodology—by employing the concept of a theory–methods package (TMP). A selection of theoretical cornerstone texts and case studies in infrastructure research from each tradition serves as our material. Our findings point, first, to differences between the TMPs of the reviewed approaches and to the internal diversity of theory–method relationships in each approach. Second, we found some intriguing similarities between the approaches and discuss potential complementarities of their theory–method fits.

Introduction: Beyond the Production of Ignorance: The Pervasiveness of Industry Influence through the Tools of Chemical Regulation

Research on the influence of industry on chemical regulation has mostly been conducted within the framework of the production of ignorance. This special issue extends this research by looking at how industry asserts its interests––not just in the scientific sphere but also at other stages of policy-making and regulatory process––with a specific focus on the types of tools or instruments industry has used. Bringing together sociologists and historians specialized in Science and Technology Studies (STS), the articles of the special issue study the arenas in which instruments and practical guidelines for public policy are negotiated or used. The aim is to observe the devices in the making or in action, from the selection of actors to the production of thresholds, criteria, and other technical regulations. The introduction highlights how industry influence on expertise and regulation is undoubtedly far more pervasive and multifarious than has been conceptualized to date by social scientists. Putting this issue back at the heart of both the STS and social sciences research agendas is increasingly urgent and could lead to new inquiries able to highlight these logics even more widely, using fresh empirical examples.

The global embedding of automobility: Making a case for a hybrid STS framework of analysis

It is evident that Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers important insights for energy studies research. Yet, attending to global energy problems has received less attention within this budding research engagement. Building upon John Urry’s theorization of the global, this paper calls for considering the embedding of automobility in the global South in order for the growing STS and energy studies research to take the global seriously. Empirically investigating automobility is timely and STS’ diverse tool-box of theories is uniquely positioned for the task. With the street as locus, I propose a hybrid framework that draws upon several STS literatures to conceptualize the politics of automobility in the global south. Relying on STS for this purpose offers pathways towards just low-carbon transitions.

Making time, making politics: Problematizing temporality in energy and climate studies

Sociotechnical transitions are grounded within temporal scenarios, predictions of the future, and competing long-term trajectories. While decarbonization timescales are central to many energy and climate studies, we are missing a critical reflection about the politics behind time-making and temporality in transitions research. To shed light on the contested nature of time in energy and climate politics and explain the struggle over the temporal dynamics of transitions, we propose a stronger engagement with time based on the growing body of literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS). We argue that conceptualizing time—as co-produced and deeply intertwined not only with advances in science and technology, but also with the ordering of politics and society—allows us to contest a neutral, and apolitical framing of decarbonization timescales, transformation pathways, and mitigation trajectories. An STS-informed perspective on time-making brings to light societal struggles and competing ideas of social and political ordering attached to the different notions of temporality. This focus allows us to critically engage with the politics behind themes like climate emergencies, urgent decarbonization targets, or deadlines for phasing out fossil fuels. In forwarding this argument, we briefly revisit the role of time in energy and climate studies and take stock of earlier STS research on the construction of time and the politics of temporal orders. We conclude by discussing how an STS perspective on time can contribute to the research agenda outlined by Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues and suggest new frontiers for energy and climate research.

From indicators to indicating interdisciplinarity: A participatory mapping methodology for research communities in-the-making

This article discusses a project under development called “Inventing Indicators of Interdisciplinarity,” as an example of work in methodology development that combines quantitative methods with interpretative approaches in social and cultural research. Key to our project is the idea that Science and Technology Indicators not only have representative value, enabling empirical insight into fields of research and innovation but simultaneously have organizing capacity, as their deployment enables the curation of communities of interpretation. We begin with a discussion of concepts and methods for the analysis of interdisciplinarity in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and scientometrics, stressing that both fields recognize that interdisciplinarity is contested. To make possible a constructive exploration of interdisciplinarity as a contested—and transformative—phenomenon, we sketch out a methodological framework for the development and deployment of “engaging indicators.” We characterize this methodology of indicating as participatory, abductive, interactive, and informed by design, and emphasize that the method is inherently combinatory, as it brings together approaches from scientometrics, STS, and humanities research. In a final section, we test the potential of our approach in a pilot study of interdisciplinarity in AI, and offer reflections on digital mapping as a pathway towards indicating interdisciplinarity.

Situating Moral Agency: How Postphenomenology Can Benefit Engineering Ethics.

This article identifies limitations in traditional approaches to engineering ethics pedagogy, reflected in an overreliance on disaster case studies. Researchers in the field have pointed out that these approaches tend to occlude ethically significant aspects of day-to-day engineering practice and thus reductively individualize and decontextualize ethical decision-making. Some have proposed, as a remedy for these defects, the use of research and theory from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to enrich our understanding of the ways in which technology and engineering practice are intricated in social and institutional contexts. While endorsing this approach, this article also argues that STS scholarship may not sufficiently address the kinds of questions about normativity and agency that are essential to engineering ethics. It proposes making use of the growing body of research in a field called "postphenomenology," an approach that combines STS research with the traditional phenomenological concern with the standpoint of lived-experience. Postphenomenology offers a method of inquiry that combines STS's investigation into social and institutional dimensions of technology with phenomenological reflection on our lived experience of embodied engagement with technical objects and sociotechnical systems, particularly the ways in which these involvements affect our moral perception and agency. The aim in using this approach in engineering ethics is thus to illuminate moral dimensions of everyday professional life of which practitioners may not typically be aware. The article concludes with some concrete curricular interventions for engineering ethics classrooms.

Witness and Silence in Neuromarketing: Managing the Gap between Science and Its Application

Over the past decades commercial and academic market(ing) researchers have studied consumers through a range of different methods including surveys, focus groups, or interviews. More recently, some have turned to the growing field of neuroscience to understand consumers. Neuromarketing employs brain imaging, scanning, or other brain measurement technologies to capture consumers’ (brain) responses to marketing stimuli and to circumvent the “problem” of relying on consumers’ self-reports. This paper presents findings of an ethnographic study of neuromarketing research practices in one neuromarketing consultancy. Our access to the minutiae of commercial neuromarketing research provides important insights into how neuromarketers silence the neuromarketing test subject in their experiments and presentations and how they introduce the brain as an unimpeachable witness. This enables us conceptually to reconsider the role of witnesses in the achievement of scientific credibility, as prominently discussed in science and technology studies (STS). Specifically, we probe the role witnesses and silences play in establishing and maintaining credibility in and for “commercial research laboratories.” We propose three themes that have wider relevance for STS researchers and require further attention when studying newly emerging research fields and practices that straddle science and its commercial application.

Science and Technology Studies in Policy: The UK Synthetic Biology Roadmap

In this paper, we reflect on our experience as science and technology studies (STS) researchers who were members of the working group that produced A Synthetic Biology Roadmap for the UK in 2012. We explore how this initiative sought to govern an uncertain future and describe how it was successfully used to mobilize public funds for synthetic biology from the UK government. We discuss our attempts to incorporate the insights and sensibilities of STS into the policy process and why we chose to use the concept of responsible research and innovation to do so. We analyze how the roadmapping process, and the final report, narrowed and transformed our contributions to the roadmap. We show how difficult it is for STS researchers to influence policy when our ideas challenge deeply entrenched pervasive assumptions, framings, and narratives about how technological innovation necessarily leads to economic progress, about public reticence as a roadblock to that progress, and about the supposed separation between science and society. We end by reflecting on the constraints under which we were operating from the outset and on the challenges for STS in policy.

The Responsibilities and Obligations of STS in a Moment of Post-Truth Demagoguery

Scientific expertise and the free press have come under sustained partisan attack with the political ascendance of right-wing nationalism. This has put some science and technology studies (STS) scholars in the difficult position of defending the legitimacy of science while maintaining a characteristic agnosticism toward “the facts.” In this essay, inspired by a reading of Noortje Marres’s (2018) critique of fact-checking services, I seek to relieve some of the background anxiety I sense that perhaps STS research paved a path for the rise of right wing authoritarianism and “post-truth” politics. We are not dealing with a process of fact making in this environment, at least not of the scientific variety. Instead, we are dealing with political demagoguery. As scholars, we should therefore equip ourselves with the appropriate analytic and technological tools, and as many as possible, for engaging this political moment.

Fluid Drugs: Revisiting the Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals

This review discusses a growing body of scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) that examines how drugs are rendered efficacious in laboratories, therapeutic settings, and everyday lives. This literature foregrounds insights into how commercial interests and societal concerns shape the kinds of pharmaceutical effects that are actualized and how some efficacies are blocked in response to moral concerns. The work brought together here reveals how regulatory institutions and health policy makers seek to stabilize pharmaceutical actions while, on the front lines of care, pharmacists, health workers, and users tinker with dosages and indications to tailor pharmaceutical actions to specific circumstances. We show that there is no pure (pharmaceutical) object that precedes its socialization. Pharmaceuticals are not “discovered”; they are made and remade in relation to shifting contexts. This review outlines five key areas of ethnographic and STS research that examines such fluid drugs.

How Smart Grid Meets In Vitro Meat: on Visions as Socio-Epistemic Practices

The production, manipulation and exploitation of future visions are increasingly important elements in practices of visioneering socio-technical processes of innovation and transformation. This becomes obvious in new and emerging science and technologies and large-scale transformations of established socio-technical systems (e.g. the energy system). A variety of science and technology studies (STS) provide evidence on correlations between expectations and anticipatory practices with the dynamics of such processes of change. Technology assessment (TA) responded to the challenges posed by the influence of visions on the processes by elaborating methodologies for a “vision assessment” as a contribution to what is now increasingly known as “hermeneutical TA”. But until now, the practical functions of visions in the processes have not been explained in a way that satisfies the empirical needs of TA’s vision assessment—that is to provide future-oriented knowledge based on the analysis of ongoing changes in the present without knowing the future outcomes. Our leading hypothesis is that we can only understand the practical roles of visions in current processes if we analyse them as socio-epistemic practices which simultaneously produce new knowledge and enable new social arrangements. We elaborate this by means of two cases: the visions of In Vitro meat and of the smart grid. Here, we interpret visioneering more in its collective dimension as a contingent and open-ended process, emerging from heterogeneous socio-epistemic practices. This paper aims at improving TA’s vision assessments and related STS research on visionary practices for real-time analysis and assessments.

The Associations between Technologies and Societies: The Utility of Actor-Network Theory

This article discusses the strengths and limitations of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a framework for Science and Technology Studies (STS). While ANT was originally rooted in Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approaches, ANT has become a theoretical framework commonly used by scholars in numerous disciplines beyond STS, including Information Sciences. Although some scholars consider ANT to be now closer to sociomateriality studies, we claim that ANT differs from sociomateriality in that it suggests a different notion of power. In ANT, power results from actors’ associations enacted into being rather than the sociomateriality claim that power results from existing power structures. We draw from our work on information technologies and social movements to illustrate this important distinction, and to show how ANT can be further strengthened by including the study of histories, memories and trajectories, in order to better understand power relations as associations enacted into being. In this way, we offer a deeper understanding of ANT and its utility for STS research in general, and information studies in particular.

Assembling the Whale: Parliaments in the Politics of Nature

AbstarctIn the field of science and technology studies (STS), much research has been concerned with politics. Nevertheless STS research tends to disregard the work of conventional political institutions such as parliaments, especially in the politics of nature, which is often seen as delegating ‘nature’ to science. Parliaments work on nature-objects through documents; paperwork is crucial in its procedures for delegating an issue to be further worked upon at other sites, for securing the issue's return and for enabling a decision. This mode of circulating an issue amounts to a central infrastructure for taking nature into account in politics; this infrastructure enables ‘assembling work’ as a specific mode of parliamentary practice. In the late nineteenth century the Norwegian parliament handled a controversy over whaling. New species, questions and publics were entangled with the whale issue through the parliament's work, its tools and procedures. As such, parliament enabled, worked upon and modified the issue. By assembling the whale issue it performed a politics of nature in rich, complex ways. Hence, understanding the specific site where an issue is taken up is necessary in order to grasp its trajectory and to understand how conventional political sites do politics of nature in practice

Taking Roles in Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Reflections on Working in Post-ELSI Spaces in the UK Synthetic Biology Community

Based on criticism of the “ethical, legal and social implications” (ELSI) paradigm, researchers in science and technology studies (STS) have begun to create and move into “post-ELSI” spaces. In this paper, we pool our experiences of working towards collaborative practices with colleagues in engineering and science disciplines in the field of synthetic biology. We identify a number of different roles that we have taken, been assumed to take, or have had foisted upon us as we have sought to develop post-ELSI practices. We argue that the post-ELSI situation is characterised by the demands placed on STS researchers and other social scientists to fluctuate between roles as contexts shift in terms of power relations, affective tenor, and across space and over time. This leads us to posit four orientations for post-ELSI collaborative practices that could help establish more fruitful negotiations around these roles.

Studying Absences of Knowledge: Difficult Subfield or Basic Sensibility?

This paper comments on a special issue of Social Epistemology, vol. 28, no. 1 (2014) on absences of knowledge. The articles in this special issue make a strong case that studying absences of knowledge is important for the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). As single works and through the literature that they cite, they also illustrate how STS is increasingly framing absences of knowledge as an understudied and especially difficult topic (Rappert and Bauchspies 2014). I fully support paying more attention to absences of knowledge, and have long argued for doing so (e.g., Hilgartner 2001). However, I am unconvinced that the study of absences should be framed as a specialized “topic” or “area” or that radically new methods are needed to pursue it. Absences are too fundamental to the social aspects of knowledge to be imagined as a mere subfield. Instead, a broad sensibility attuned to the significance of absences should (and in many ways already does) inflect a wide range of STS research.

The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

Abstract Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication and in the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies have typically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of this study is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation and diffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles, particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science and humanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused on handbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belonging to the research area of science and technology studies (STS), broadly defined. To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000 words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed the methodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric) approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., science and gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change in cognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changing trends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similarity measures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role in either focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, they do not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged since the previous edition of the handbook.