Science And Technology Studies Scholars Research Articles

Bird feeding devices exclude unwelcome visitors. More-than-humans shaping the architecture and technology of birdfeeders in twentieth-century Finland

In this article, we investigate the evolution of the birdfeeder and analyze it as a multispecies technology, a technological artefact that has co-evolved between multispecies interactions of humans, the target species of the feeding, and unwanted visitors. We use close reading as a method to examine pictures, design descriptions, photos and text sources published in Finnish magazines and newspapers from the late nineteenth century, when birdfeeders were first discussed, until the late twentieth century, with the aim of analyzing how birdfeeder designs and models have changed in relation to various (and especially unwanted) visitor species. Birdfeeders are visited not only by species that humans want to feed but also by several unwanted visitors, such as birds, mammals, bacteria and the weather. Being inspired by posthumanism and Science and Technology Studies (STS), we ask what the role of unwanted visitors has been as co-designers of technological artefacts, here the birdfeeder. Our article discusses the broader subject of how people welcome or exclude other beings from shared environments. We argue that it is vital for environmental humanities scholars to study artefacts and technology and vice versa, for design studies and STS scholars to examine non-humans. We hope to encourage other researchers to ponder how animals, and unwanted users in general, participate in designing technology and artefacts.

A Tale of Two Perspectives on Innovation and Global Equity

Both science and technology studies (STS) and innovation studies (IS) see great promise for technology to address global inequality, but they view it quite differently. This article compares the two approaches and examines whether and how they might learn from one another to achieve social equity and justice. To do this, I focus on the case of menstrual health innovation in India, an intervention highly praised as a clear example of potentially transformative “inclusive innovation.” The article argues that IS would benefit from understanding innovation as a sociotechnical system and taking the political dimensions seriously. Meanwhile, we STS scholars should learn to translate our grassroots-based, locally-sensitive solutions to policymakers oriented towards scalability.

Intersectionality and Science and Technology Studies

Over the past thirty years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understanding, critiquing, and intervening in complex social inequalities. Emerging from critical race and feminist studies, intersectionality has many shared analytic priorities with science and technology studies (STS), including an emphasis on co-emergent social forces, historical contingency, and interventions that challenge and enhance knowledge production. Despite these shared affinities, STS and intersectionality remain largely nonoverlapping scholarly discourses. Based on a systematic review of intersectionality in eight STS journals, we observe a slight increase in intersectionality’s usage over time but find that its relevance is contained largely to venues outside of the STS mainstream. Our study identifies some ways STS scholars have modeled intersectionality’s responsible use through citation practices, methodological integration, and normative claims about justice/injustice. We also consider what epistemic exclusion of intersectionality might foreclose. We argue that increased use of intersectionality would amplify engagement with justice in STS work, not only by introducing new questions and theoretical frames but also opening possibilities for new interdisciplinary formations. This is not simply an argument for greater inclusion of a term, but rather for transformation in epistemic accountability toward feminist studies and other social justice–oriented fields.

People’s Science Movement and the Missing People: Save Silent Valley Movement and the Scientisation of Environmental Debates in Kerala

Though primarily understood as New Social Movements (NSM), People’s Science Movements (PSM) in India are also a favourite theme for Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars. Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) is often projected as a pioneering reference point for studying PSMs. KSSP also figures in Environmental Social Sciences discussions because of its active involvement in the Save Silent Valley Movement (SSVM), one of India’s successful anti-dam environmental movements. While KSSP was foregrounded toabstract some attributes of PSMs by STS scholars, SSVM was one of the environmental movements epitomised to develop explanations on Indian Environmentalism. While agreeing with the PSM’s attributes conferred on KSSP, this paper questions the extent of SSVM’s commonalities with other environmental movements in the debates on Indian Environmentalism.

Curating Complexities in Art, Science, and Medicine: Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) in Public Practice

What does art have to lend to Science and Technology Studies (STS)? Might we see art and its display in museums and galleries as a method of performing STS ‘by material means’? And what roles might STS scholars play in art-science collaborations? Drawing on our experiences with collaborations at the intersections of contemporary art and biology, we explore the similarities and overlapping practices of these knowledge communities and make a series of observations about the potential of the area of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS) to refigure and complicate the art-science landscape. Our analysis emphasizes the museum as a material public forum and curation as a form of knowing, histories of art and science, and examples of scholarly facilitation and intervention in art-science. We examine emerging patterns in ASTS scholarship and emerging roles for STS scholars as facilitators, participant-observers, curators, and collaborators, particularly in art-science institutions and newly emerging STS and art contexts in Denmark, and specifically, the Medical Museion. Our analysis reveals the persistent third leg of curation, cultural history, or STS as party to collaborations between artists and scientists.

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).

Impermanence, Hybridity, Violence: Notes towards a Global Technology Studies

This short essay explores some of the issues at stake when science and technology studies (STS) are situated within a global frame. Global, in this reading, is both historical and aspirational. As historical, it rejects the East-West dichotomy, insisting instead on one world as the outcome of multiple unequal and uneven world-making processes. As aspirational, to consider what a global STS would look like this essay imagines a world where technology studies were invented in the megacities of the Global South. At once it becomes clear that familiar concepts need revision: illegibility gets added to legibility, repair and dismantling join production and construction, permanence and impermanence occupy the same register of privilege. Making particular what had been considered general forces a reconsideration of the objects, methods, boundaries and histories of our studies. This is further demonstrated by a comparison of hybridity/isation as it is understood respectively in STS and post-colonial studies. What becomes apparent is the relative absence of violence as a core STS concept, notwithstanding its centrality in the making of the modern world. Going global exposes intellectual foundations STS scholars have been unable or unwilling to acknowledge; this alone makes the exercise productive and worthwhile.

How to Be an Epistemic Trespasser

How to Be an Epistemic Trespasser

How to Win Games and Influence Football Players

How to Win Games and Influence Football Players

Diversifying the Deliberative Turn: Toward an Agonistic RRI

In its “deliberative turn,” the field of science and technology studies (STS) has strongly advocated opening up decision-making processes around science and technology to more perspectives and knowledges. While the theory of democracy underpinning this is rarely explicitly addressed, the language and ideas used are often drawn from deliberative democracy. Using the case of synthetic biology and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), this paper looks at challenges of public engagement and finds parallels in long-standing critiques of deliberative democracy. The paper suggests that STS scholars explore other theories of decision-making and explores what an RRI grounded in agonistic pluralism might entail. An agonistic RRI could develop empirical research around questions of power relations in contemporary science and technology, seek to facilitate the formation of political publics around relevant issues, and frame different actors’ stances as adversarial positions on a political field rather than “equally valid” perspectives.

Science, technology, security: Towards critical collaboration.

Science and technology play a central role in the contemporary governance of security, both as tools for the production of security and as objects of security concern. Scholars are increasingly seeking to not only critically reflect on the interplays between science, technology and security, but also engage with the practices of security communities that shape and are shaped by science and technology. To further help this growth of interest in security topics within science and technology studies (STS), we explore possible modes of socio-technical collaboration with security communities of practice. Bringing together literatures from STS and critical security studies, we identify several key challenges to critical social engagement of STS scholars in security-related issues. We then demonstrate how these challenges played out over the course of three case studies from our own experience in engaging security communities of practice. We use these vignettes to show that there is a rich vein of developments in both theory and practice that STS scholars can pursue by attending to the interplay of science, technology and security.

Beyond networks: Aligning qualitative and computational science studies

This article examines the thorny issue of the relationship (or lack thereof) between qualitative and quantitative approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although quantitative methods, broadly understood, played an important role in the beginnings of STS, these two approaches subsequently strongly diverged, leaving an increasing gap that only a few scholars have tried to bridge. After providing a short overview of the origins and development of quantitative analyses of textual corpora, we critically examine the state of the art in this domain. Focusing on the availability of advanced network structure analysis tools and Natural Language Processing workflows, we interrogate the fault lines between the increasing offer of computational tools in search of possible uses and the conceptual specifications of STS scholars wishing to explore the epistemic and ontological dimensions of techno-scientific activities. Finally, we point to possible ways to overcome the tension between ethnographic descriptions and quantitative methods while continuing to avoid the dichotomies (social/cognitive, organizing/experimenting) that STS has managed to discard.

Forty Years after Laboratory Life

There is an ongoing and robust tradition of science and technology studies (STS) scholars conducting ethnographic laboratory studies. These laboratory studies—like all ethnographies—are each conducted at a particular time, are situated in a particular place, and are about a particular (scientific) culture. Presumably, this contextual specificity means that such ethnographies have limited applicability beyond the narrow slice of time, place, and culture that they each subject to examination. But we (STS scholars) do not always or even often treat them that way. It is beyond common for us to speak about what one or another laboratory study reveals about the laboratory, or “science” much more broadly. Given the contextual specificity of our ethnographic laboratory studies, what justifies this presumed generalizability? Initially, this manuscript surveys typical responses to this question, but then it pursues an unusual one: the potential replicability of ethnographic results. This potential is hereby explored, via an ethnographic replication attempt—one designed and conducted in order to test the generalizability of a particular laboratory study, that of Latour and Woolgar’s classic Laboratory Life (1979). The results of the ethnographic replication attempt are reported, and a remarkable degree of replicability is established.

Intervention, Materiality, and Contemporary Somali Counterpiracy

AbstractTaking seriously debates in IR about the significance of materiality and noticing the prominence of materiality in contemporary counterpiracy interventions, this article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with insights from the poststructuralist intervention literature. Both literatures highlight the importance of “constitutive effects.” Poststructuralists do so with attention to the effects of intervention in constituting, temporarily, the meaning of sovereignty, and STS scholars do so with attention to constitutive effects that processes at the level of materiality give rise to. By combining these two literatures, this article asks: how might we think about the constitutive effects of material aspects of counterpiracy interventions? This question is explored through a focus on two donor-funded pirate prisons in Somalia. By operationalizing the STS notions of coproduction (Jasanoff 2004c) and solution/problem-framings (Beck et al. 2016), the article broadens the study of how intervention practices give rise to constitutive effects by explicitly attending to processes at the level of materiality. This approach enables the article to highlight an important tension in contemporary intervention practices: a tension between donor's desire to delimit intervention contributions and the risk that such contributions (including presumably more easily delineated material aspects) give rise to effects that challenge this faith in neatly delimited forms of intervention. This tension is not only relevant in relation to Somali counterpiracy, but also in other intervention contexts. The article thus illustrates how STS insights can help advance our appreciation of the manifold dimensions and effects of contemporary interventionism.

History of science and its utopian reconstructions

In recent years explicitly utopian visions have reappeared across the political spectrum. To a surprising degree these visions have drawn on histories and science and technology. What should scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) make of these developments? The concept of utopia has often been treated with considerable distrust in these fields, as an indication of closed end-directed blueprints, or as an indication of fantasies of limitless technological improvement and purification of categories. Alongside this uneasiness, however, HPS and STS scholars have also projected transformative ambitions, seeking to recover from the past different ways of knowing and relating to the human and non-human world. By engaging with critiques of utopia from thinkers including Karl Popper, Otto Neurath, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway, and exploring some of the utopian strands which have recurred in studies of science and technology—including the longing for integration, the association of science with planning, and the ways in which feminist scholars have envisaged alternative forms of science—we can understand the ongoing, and often unrecognised, utopian dimensions of HPS and STS.

Rethinking Scientific Habitus: Toward a Theory of Embodiment, Institutions, and Stratification of Science

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus has been largely absent in Science and Technology Studies (STS) despite its potential usefulness. In this essay, I develop the concept of scientific habitus as a useful way to think about scientific practices. I argue that scientific habitus may offer three contributions that illuminate scientists’ own micro-practices in relation to meso- and macro-level dynamics in the scientific field. First, the concept enables us to think of scientists’ worldviews and bodily techniques as objects of STS analysis. While the majority of STS scholars have focused on the construction of knowledge, scientific habitus allows us to study the construction of the scientists’ body and mind. Secondly, scientific habitus links individual practices with institutional contexts; it highlights how the micro-practices of individuals in scientific laboratories reflect and reproduce macro-social structural power dynamics. Third, scientific habitus reveals mechanisms of stratification within the scientific field. It helps unpack scientists’ practical decisions surrounding research topics, ideas, and data. It also helps explain why and how certain scientific projects are preferred and others left undone. Scientific habitus, therefore, has the potential to contribute to a more encompassing explanation of the relationship between societal structures and the internal logic of the scientific field.

Dimond, R. and Stephen, N.Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics. Printforce, The Netherlands: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. 147pp £43.99 (Hardcover) ISBN 978‐3‐319‐74644‐9 £34.99 (eBook) ISBN 978‐3‐319‐74645‐6

Rebecca Dimond and Neil Stephens’ book Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics documents how the UK became the first country to legalise mitochondrial donation. Mitochondrial donation is a technique developed to prevent the transmission of mitochondrial disease from mother to child using part of a donated egg to replace faulty mitochondria (Castro 2016). The book contributes to wider science and technology studies (STS) commentary on mitochondrial donation and is rich with data extracts, from both stakeholder interviews and documentary analysis. The text then employs a thematic analysis that is both ‘structural’ and ‘microsocial’ (p. 16) to demonstrate its thesis. The book argues, ‘The legalisation of mitochondrial donation is the latest iteration of a particular UK sociotechnical around human embryo research and use is rendered ethical through a permissive but highly scrutinised system’ (p. 1). The book realises this argument through rich historical examples as well as the mitochondrial donation case and, importantly, raises how this sociotechnical imaginary will impact future biotechnology debates in the UK context, for example, genome editing. Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics draws upon a theoretical base from within STS and sociology, particularly Jasanoff and Kim's recent work on sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Dimond and Stephens complete an effective unpacking of the sociotechnical imaginary and its relevance for the mitochondrial donation debate. Dimond and Stephens ground their claim of the UK's significant as a case study by citing its historical reputation as a permissive regulator of biomedical technologies. In providing this historical overview, the authors cite numerous examples from both interviews and documentary analyses that hone in on imaginaries and performances in debates in quangos, governmental bodies and parliamentary committees. After setting up these organisations as integral to the process of legalising biomedical technologies, the book examines how consensus-building activities and public gauging tools were used by these organisations to implement the legalisation of mitochondrial donation in the UK. The book's establishment of the lens of ‘for’ clusters and ‘against’ clusters represents a novel contribution to STS methodological approaches and assists in generating a new understanding of the mitochondrial donation debate. This approach allows the reader to visualise the networks and cements the authors’ claim that links forged by the ‘for’ group allowed them to establish a collective narrative surrounding mitochondrial donation techniques that was eventually integral to their success in legalising these technologies (p. 27). Dimond and Stephens also identify political strategies used by the ‘for’ cluster to achieve its goal. Examples of these strategies include the establishment of Doug Turnbull as a ‘promissory agent’ (p. 27) and collective action by the ‘for’ cluster to enact an ethical future which aligned with the established sociotechnical imaginary of embryo research in the UK (p. 27). Legalising Mitochondrial Donation: Enacting Ethical Futures in UK Biomedical Politics is of relevance to those interested in social constructivist approaches to new and emerging biomedical and, or, assisted reproductive technologies. As such, it is likely to appeal to STS scholars, medical anthropologists and sociologists. Scholars reading this book will benefit from the strong empirical and conceptual investigations of this text. Through examining the sociotechnical imaginaries, the book aims to explore the ‘operation of power’ (p. 131). However, the text could be more explicit about what this operation of power refers to, and the ways in which these operations of power were performed successfully by the ‘for’ cluster and unsuccessfully by the ‘against’ cluster. If this were achieved the reader could have a better understanding of the role of power dynamics within the particular sociotechnical imaginary set out by Dimond and Stephens. Dimond and Stephens’ book sits within a small but very well-established epoch of literature that employs critical approaches to the mitochondrial debate through interdisciplinary approaches. An example of such literature is the special issue of the journal Bioethics (Volume 31, Issue 1) that focused on issues raised by mitochondrial replacement techniques. Furthermore, Dimond and Stephens’ book builds upon critical perspectives on mitochondrial donation arising from bioethics, STS and social science disciplines, filling gaps in the academic discussion before building upon their own thesis using empirical data and conceptual approaches in this far longer text. The book highlights an emerging area of study where the authors look forward to the relationship between mitochondrial donation and the next ‘potential iteration of this imaginary’ (p. 137) which relates to the contestation of the genome-editing debate. Legalising Mitochondrial Donation gives a clear and concise historical account of the debate and Dimond and Stephens demonstrate their thesis, concerning the role that sociotechnical imaginaries play in the legalisation of new and emerging biomedical technologies in the UK.

Science, technology and innovation studies at a crossroad: SPRU as case study

The setting up of the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University 50 years ago represented a “transformative change” in the research on science policy and the understanding of the nature and origin of technological change and innovation studies. It influenced policymakers across the world in both the mature Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and the developing world. It made the topic of science, technology and innovation (STI) familiar to business studies scholars. Today though, the analysis of STI appears to be somewhat in crisis. On the one hand, there is growing evidence that the growth and welfare gains of new technologies and innovation are no longer forthcoming in an automatic “trickle-down” fashion. The knowledge and technology diffusion “machine” appears broken. On the other hand, there are growing environmental concerns about the negative externalities of unsustainable fossil-fuel-based growth as industrialization spreads across the globe. STI policy appears somehow stuck in an industrial efficiency and consumerism mode that is unable to address in a satisfactory way the impact of such negative externalities. Can the broader historical approach as popularized within the so-called Science and Technology Studies (STS) tradition provide additional, complementary insights? Yes, if STI and STS scholars are prepared to leave their respective conceptual comfort zones and address in complementary fashion some of the major societal policy challenges confronting science, technology and innovation policy today.

STS, Meet Data Science, Once Again

Science and technology studies (STS) and the emerging field of data science share surprising elective affinities. At the growing intersections of these fields, there will be many opportunities and not a few thorny difficulties for STS scholars. First, I discuss how both fields frame the rollout of data science as a simultaneously social and technical endeavor, even if in distinct ways and for diverging purposes. Second, I discuss the logic of domains in contemporary computer, information, and data science circles. While STS is often agnostic about the borders between the sciences or with industry and state—occasionally taking those boundaries as an object of study—data science takes those boundaries as its target to overcome. These two elective affinities present analytic and practical challenges for STS but also opportunities for engagement. Overall, in addition to these typifications, I urge STS scholars to strategically position themselves to investigate and contribute to the breadth of transformations that seek to touch virtually every science and newly bind spheres of academy, industry, and state.

Epistemological Luddism: Reinvigorating a Concept for Action in 21st Century Sociotechnical Struggles

ABSTRACTExplicitly dismantling or decommissioning existing sociotechnical systems seems to be unimaginable both within dominant public imaginaries and in academic thought. Indeed, ‘gee whiz’ journalistic narratives regarding emerging technoscience abound as many members of the public appear to eagerly await any new innovation coming out of Silicon Valley. At the same time, most science and technology studies (STS) research focuses on the creation of new technoscience, not its destruction or temporary decommissioning. Yet, lay citizens clearly engage in forms of Luddism: schoolchildren and overworked professionals take digital ‘detoxes’, a number of cities have dismantled their urban highways, and a growing movement of parents have opted their children out of their state’s standardized testing requirements. While all such efforts are rooted in the rejection of a technology, they vary in terms of their resemblance to 19th century English Luddism as well as with respect to Langdon Winner’s concept of epistemological Luddism. How might STS scholars better make sense of 21st century Luddism? This article conceptualizes a number of contemporary examples of technological dismantling with regard to their epistemological and political characteristics. We end with a call for research to better understand lay technological refusal, especially in comparison to elite-driven forms of disruption.