Science And Technology Studies Scholars Research Articles

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.

Tacit Knowledge, Secrecy, and Intelligence Assessments

With the noted intelligence failures prior to the September 11 attacks and the 2003 Iraq War, the US intelligence community has recognized the need to acquire new, outside expertise to mitigate against future intelligence breakdowns. This recent attention on intelligence outreach provides Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars with an opportunity to consider the role they might play in these efforts, as well as the various opportunities and difficulties that can shape these relationships, and the types of knowledge that can be produced and known from engagements with these secret communities. This paper provides a reflection on how two STS scholars have attempted to intervene into intelligence and the lessons learned.

Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below ed. by Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Mehos (review)

Reviewed by: Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below ed. by Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Mehos Ashley Carse (bio) Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below. Edited by Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Mehos. Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2012. Pp. xvi+ 319. $150. What do infrastructures want? The editors of this volume argue that an emerging class of inverse infrastructures want to be free. In the introduction, Tineke Egyedi, Donna Mehos, and Wim Vree identify a mismatch between, on the one hand, a new “mode” of infrastructural development (emergent, user-driven, self-organizing, decentralized, bottom-up) that occupies an “increasing share in the infrastructure landscape” (p. 1) and, on the other hand, what they consider to be an outmoded theoretical and governmental [End Page 570] status quo that is overly focused on designed, centralized, top-down infrastructures. Thus, the book operates at two levels. First, as a scholarly work, its contributors seek to theorize a “new reality of infrastructure systems and services” (p. xii). Here the book engages most deeply with the large technical systems (LTS) literature in the history of technology and science and technology studies (STS), particularly the work of Thomas Hughes (Networks of Power, 1983). Second, as a policy intervention, the editors and contributors call for new approaches to governing infrastructures. The primary intellectual and policy foil is Hughes. Beginning with the claim that Hughesian LTSs are the “dominant paradigm of contemporary infrastructure design” (p. 1), the editors argue that this paradigm no longer explains how infrastructures work in a changed governmental and historical context. The central thesis is compelling. As the editors point out, social and historical studies of technology have often overemphasized the importance of system builders (inventors, engineers, managers) in infrastructure development, thereby marginalizing the significant contributions of other actors, particularly users. Indeed, by analytically privileging design, centralization, and hierarchical control, many overlooked what STS scholars Geoffrey Bowker, Paul Edwards, and Susan Leigh Star have taught us to recognize: infrastructures are relational entities that meld the formal and informal, as well as the human and non-human, crosscutting scales and formatting social life in subtle yet profound ways. Inverse Infrastructures includes an introduction by the editors and Vree, two theoretical chapters, nine case studies, and a conclusion. Most of the contributors, who come from a range of fields, are associated with Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The case studies focus primarily on Europe, though a few look to the Global South. Together, the chapters on TV and radio systems, citizen-driven waste collection, wiki self-organization, wind energy development, community Wi-Fi, decentralized water supply, rural telecommunications, syngas infrastructure, and e-government flesh out, complicate, and even challenge the book’s theses laid out in the introduction. The chapters vary widely in terms of type of infrastructure discussed, disciplinary and theoretical orientation, spatiotemporal scale, and writing style; readers’ interest may also vary accordingly. As an anthropologist, I found myself most drawn to the chapters that ex-plored inverse infrastructures at a human scale, examining intimate social relations to reveal how and why various user communities choose to participate (or not) in building infrastructures from the “bottom up.” For example, Stefan Verhaegh and Ellen van Oost perceptively analyze the often unrecognized maintenance practices of keeping a community Wi-Fi network working, explaining that lay volunteers are motivated by “warm” relations of reciprocity, while technically skilled volunteers approach their contributions as identity projects. [End Page 571] The intellectual project at the core of Inverse Infrastructures is timely. Critical studies of infrastructure are ascendant in STS, anthropology, geography, planning, architecture, history, and elsewhere. Because many scholars are asking questions like those posed in the book, I was surprised that the editors and contributors (with a few exceptions) did not engage this multidisciplinary turn more deeply. For example, readers familiar with STS infrastructure studies may expect that the book’s title is an homage to Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s pioneering work. For them, “infrastructural inversion” describes an approach to the study of infrastructure—an archaeology of the often invisible values, politics, and moralities embedded therein—and reflects an explicit ethical agenda: revealing how infrastructures give rise to winners and losers...

Sipping Science: The Interpretative Flexibility of Science Cafés in Denmark and Japan

Science cafés were originally conceived as an informal, dialogue-based venue for public participation in science. The first science cafés took place in the United Kingdom and France in 1997–98. Two formats—one featuring a single speaker (United Kingdom) and one with a panel of speakers and a moderator (France)—resulted from these first initiatives. Since then, science cafés have been adapted to other sociocultural contexts, and today, science cafés are being conducted in many different countries and for many different purposes. We examine the emergence and development of science cafés in Denmark and Japan with particular focus on the role of science and technology studies (STS), national contexts of science communication policy, and cultures of public participation. We find that in both countries, despite different expectations of public deliberation about science and technology, science cafés have been easily embedded in the “new” scientific governance programs (Irwin 2006). This is mainly due to institutional support in the national research systems and the involvement of STS scholars who, in their support of public participation in science and dialogue-based science communication, have advocated science cafés as a meaningful way to intervene in science-society relationships. “Sipping science” in a science café, enabling public participation in science deliberations, has interpretative flexibility, appealing to a wide variety of people and stakeholders engaged in public communication of science and technology.

Practice, Plurality, Performativity, and Plumbing

Recent scholarship provides the opportunity for an assessment of the underexplored but promising marriage between science and technology studies (STS) and Internet governance (IG) research. This article seeks to provide such an assessment by reviewing and discussing, in particular, three volumes: Laura DeNardis’s The Global War for Internet Governance (2014, Yale University Press), The Power of Networks: Organizing the Global Politics of the Internet by Mikkel Flyverbom (2011, Edward Elgar Publishing), and Governance, Regulations and Powers on the Internet edited by Eric Brousseau, Meryem Marzouki, and Cécile Méadel (2012, Cambridge University Press). Approaching IG through an STS lens, these authors bring to the fore a number of related issues that political and legal sciences have addressed only incompletely so far, but are crucial to understand today’s governance of the Internet as a complex sociotechnical system of systems. In their research, STS scholars of IG highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute IG; the plurality and “networkedness” of hybrid devices and arrangements that populate, shape, and define IG processes; the performative function of these arrangements vis-à-vis the virtual, yet very material, worlds they seek to regulate; the invisibility, pervasiveness, and agency of infrastructure.

Asia as Method in Science and Technology Studies

One of the more exciting developments in science and technology studies (STS) is the emergence of institutions, research schools, and career paths in the field in Asia. Already it is clear that this constitutes no simple diffusion of STS from Western Europe and North America (or even Australasia). Asian developments are adding to the heterogeneity of STS, offering new approaches, different emphases, and fresh topics. How, then, is East Asian STS related to local technoscientific nationalism, to area studies, to postcolonial critique, and to the interrogation of globalization? In what ways is it distinctive? In particular, how might STS scholars negotiate a path between essentializing the East Asian historical experience and offering a fresh critique of technoscience and modernity?

Nascent Institutional Strategy in Dynamic Fields

This article analyzes the varied niches of an emerging academic field, Science and Technology Studies (STS), as a means of understanding intellectual and professional development. As a new, upstart entity in the established and inertial field of academia, STS has carved out a successful and expanding niche in the ecology of higher education via a variety of unique intellectual and institutional strategies. By adapting and reconfiguring organizational and professional structures of traditional liberal arts, the case of STS exposes three main themes in the organization of knowledge and higher education: reinvention, accounting, and professionalism. STS scholars endeavor to reorganize the distribution and organization of knowledge turfs, which often involve idiosyncratic, symbiotic, or competitive relationships with sciences, social sciences, and/or humanities. This often creates dilemmas regarding how to account for scholarly work using new, divergent, or incommensurable merit criteria or professional values. The article concludes with empirical analyses of the emergence and content of STS departments throughout the world and of Social Studies of Science, the flagship journal of the field. Data and evidence were gleaned from a variety of semistructured interviews with STS scholars, archival sources, and detailed citation records. As STS continues to grow and develop with its diffuse and eclectic foci, this raises questions of whether and how the field should or will be coordinated intellectually or professionally. These multivalent professional logics and values are sources of both vitality and tension in STS and illuminate larger issues of professional and intellectual organizational strategy in developing fields and realms of knowledge.

Promising pessimism: Reading the futures to be avoided in biotech

A number of science and technology studies (STS) scholars have suggested that the performativity of the ‘forward-looking statement’ is an important institutional element of contemporary biocapital. This paper considers how, when making projections that set up expectations about their futures, firms also acknowledge and detail the risk factors that they face in their operations. In other words, in addition to projecting optimistic scenarios, firms advance much more pessimistic images of futures that they wish to avoid: possible failures, disappointments and financial losses. I examine such pessimistic projections in company filings to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and investigate their discursive character. I ask what value such pessimism might hold for STS scholars interested in the mangle of science and capital. I sample the SEC filings of three companies: deCODE Genetics, DNAPrint Genomics Inc. and NitroMed Inc. In their own particular ways, these projections exemplify the volatility and the promise of the life sciences in the 21st century. My reading shows that such pessimistic risk factor statements provide interesting commentary on the dynamics of risk and innovation in the context of contemporary biocapital, raising questions to which analysts to date have given little attention.

The Chinese biopolitical: facing the twenty-first century

Today the dominant science and technology studies (STS) story about the politics “life itself” sees an epochal shift in which the classic Foucauldian biopolitics of the population has disappeared, giving way to new forms of politics focusing on the management of individual genetic risk. With most STS scholars focusing on the politics of frontier sciences and technologies, especially in the West, the biopolitics of population collectives has received little sustained attention. Based on close study of China, this paper argues that the familiar biopolitical story is Eurocentric, and that on a more inclusive map of the world the politics of population governance remains an essential terrain of the politics of life. In China, the politics of population has been crucial to the development of capitalism and to the nation's rise to global prominence. Responding to the challenges of a changing world economy, in the twenty-first century the biopolitics of population is mutating, becoming less econocentric and more focused on social and even human governance. Far from declining, the biopolitics of the population is becoming ever more significant, profoundly changing the way China and its people are governed. The story of biopolitics in the molecular age is more complex and collective than we had thought.

A Cautionary Tale About Cautionary Tales About Intervention

Expressions of discomfort or concern with interventions by radical social science movements, such as Critical Management Studies (CMS) or Science and Technology Studies (STS) in public controversies have rested heavily on two concerns: first, that radical social science is not useful to institutions like business and, second, that, in order to make themselves useful such interventions must compromise the radicalism of the social science program. A third concern has been that intervention is not the job of the social scientist. Recently, my and others' interpretations of my own intervention in law in one case have become something of an object lesson in the perils and pitfalls posed by legal interventions by STS scholars. This paper presents a more optimistic interpretation of my intervention experiences in fingerprint cases based on a broader array of experience than that single case. I suggest, first, that we may need to think more carefully about how to measure the utility of critical social science interventions. Second, I suggest that there may be cases in which building alliances with mainstream scientific institutions may not necessarily constitute a failure of radicalism. I conclude by suggesting that the evaluation of expert knowledge is the job of STS, if it `means business'.

Speaking Out

Bijker calls for scholars in science and technology studies (STS) to become public intellectuals by actively working toward “democratizing . . . technological culture.” Many STS scholars have developed practices that support democratic and public activity; yet, these typically require individual commitment with inadequate institutional support. The public work of STS scholars can be better supported through a program that includes (1) using specialist research in nonreproductive educational contexts, (2) redefining and revaluing academic service, (3) developing more accessible ways of writing, and (4) publishing and valuing STS-based texts that circulate among nonacademic audiences.

What is Political in Sub-politics?

Recent contributions by Collins, Evans, Jasanoff and Wynne to the discussion of how science and technology studies (STS) might contribute to understanding `subpolitics' — the complex, expert knowledge-intensive and distributed political issues technological societies have to deal with — and involvement of STS scholars in experiments to extend public participation in decision-making about science and technology are shown to be based on an un-reflexive use of an off-the-shelf conception of politics. This conception, grafted on the old model of the sovereign, frames political actors as `mini-kings': as subjects with preferences, interests, aims and plans that they want to be executed. To reveal the limitations of this conception of politics, I confront it with Aristotle's conception of politics. The conception of politics that has guided work in STS is shown to be based on too narrow a conception of political action that fails to properly account for the object of politics. I argue that Aristotle invites us to analyse the object of politics in ways that closely resemble the way in which STS has learned to analyse the object of experimental science. Although Latour comes close to the tasks that an Aristotelian conception of politics suggest, his Politics of Nature shares some of the limitations that trouble other work of STS in the political domain. Despite 25 centuries separating us from his conception of politics, Aristotle may help STS to understand the politics implied in subpolitics.

Science and Technology Studies on Trial:

This paper discusses materials from a legal case, People v. Hyatt (2001). This was a criminal case in which one of the authors (Simon Cole) agreed to appear as an expert witness for the defense. Cole’s expertise derived from his research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and so his appearance in the case exemplified STS research engaging in a public controversy about a contested form of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Cole’s STS work and his testimony proved useful to defendants seeking to restrict the admissibility of forensic fingerprint evidence in court, but before he could testify in the Hyatt trial, his own expertise was subjected to an admissibility hearing. During his testimony, Cole faced a number of dilemmas as he attempted to accommodate his own conception of science and STS with the terms and procedures recognized by the court. The hearing was transcribed, and the coauthors of this paper discussed the details of the transcript. Their discussion itself was recorded and transcribed, and portions of the two transcripts are juxtaposed in this paper. The paper discusses Cole’s difficulties and the dilemmas they exemplify, as a situated demonstration of some of the difficulties STS scholars face in their attempts to engage the ‘public sphere’.

Rethinking technology, revitalizing ethics: overcoming barriers to ethical design.

This paper explores the role of ethics in design. Traditionally, ethical questions have been seen as marginal issues in the design of technology. Part of the reason for this stems from the widely held notion of technology being "out of control." This notion is a barrier to what I call "ethical design" because it implies that ethics has no role to play in the development of technology. This view, however, is challenged by recent work in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Looking into the dynamics of technological change, STS scholars argue that human choices are present at every stage of a technology's development and, furthermore, that human values are reflected in the very design of artifacts. This alternative view suggests that ethics can and should be included in the design process. Drawing on examples from the privacy arena, I point to some of the potential advantages of addressing ethical concerns early on in the design of a technology. I conclude with some general strategies for bringing ethics back into design.

Philosophy, rhetoric, and the end of knowledge: the coming of science and technology studies

Steve Fuller argues that methods used in emerging discipline of science and technology studies (STS) are potential tools for breaking down communication barriers that exist between disciplines within academy, and between academy and society. He contends that STS scholars have empirically established constructed character of academic knowledge, and he calls for all scholars to acknowledge rhetorical component of knowledge production. In this context, knowledge becomes a political entity that governs people and their effects, rather than a thing or a property. Fuller advocates and demonstrates infusion of moral and political consideration into questions that had previously been confined to epistemology and philosophy of science. Fuller calls this position epistemology, and here he offers a positive agenda of research, teaching and political action to deal with complex problems of academic knowledge today. His four case studies reveal social epistemologist engaged in delicate interdisciplinary negotiations between philosophy and psychology, sociology and cognitive science, political science and economics, and humanistic and social scientific approaches to study of science itself. He shows that these negotiations have major implications, not only for structure and function of university, but also for conduct of academics in science policy forums. In addition, Fuller challenges those sceptical of his programme, including cultural relativists in general, and Stanley Fish in particular. Finally, he includes descriptions of both a course of study and a projected utopia, to invite readers to participate in the end of knowledge.