Study Of Technology Research Articles

ABORDAGEM CTS NA FORMAÇÃO DO TÉCNICO EM QUÍMICA: ANÁLISE EM PROJETOS PEDAGÓGICOS DE CURSOS DE DUAS INSTITUIÇÕES PÚBLICAS MATO-GROSSENSES

A abordagem Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS) no ensino procura explicitar as inter-relações entre tais elementos e se constitui como importante estratégia para a construção do conhecimento científico juntamente com a formação da consciência cidadã dos sujeitos. Neste artigo, analisam-se aspectos dessa abordagem em dois cursos técnicos em Química, subsequentes ao ensino médio de duas instituições públicas mato-grossenses. Para isso, fez-se análise dos Projetos Pedagógicos de Cursos, tendo como referência a pesquisa documental e elementos da análise de conteúdo para o tratamento analítico, buscando por elementos textuais alusivos à abordagem CTS. A interpretação dos textos dos documentos demonstrou não haver a explicitação da abordagem CTS, prevalecendo a formação técnica. Contudo, é possível identificar no discurso que se extrai de fragmentos dos textos, mensagens que remetem à inquietude da formação técnica em contribuir para que se diminuam os impactos do setor produtivo industrial em questões ambientais e sociais.

Assembling organ donation: situating organ donation in hospital practice.

In this article I argue for the need to situate deceased organ donation in and as a hospital practice. This study puts the spotlight on the practical conditions that enable and emplace organ donation in the hospital setting. The analytical move serves the political purpose to inform and interrogate dominant policy framings intended to address the problem of organ shortage. I present an ethnographic investigation that draws upon a Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to make visible the sociomaterial arrangements that bring together people, things and politics in the assembling of organ donation at a Catalan hospital. A progressive and indeterminate process which might fall through and become disassembled at any given time. This, as I explain, challenges current opt-out policy that unnecessarily reduces donation to an individual choice to be decided upon in life. Instead, and drawing on ethnographic materials, I propose a situated and relational understanding of organ donation: an embedded health care and procurement practice enacted as a collective accomplishment. I conclude that (more) responsible donation policies need to be informed by, and attuned to, the situated practicalities and enduring tensions that condition and constrain the assembling of organ donation at the hospital setting.

Fake News is Not a Virus: On Platforms and Their Effects

Abstract This article attempts to uncover the intellectual, economic, and methodological structures that have led to the recent emergence of a particular notion of digital communication on social media platforms, one that emphasizes the power of (false) media messages to cause irrational political behavior and combines individual level understanding of media effects with a networked notion of society and information diffusion. After pointing out some of the real political-economic forces at work in setting the contours of this intellectual turn, I discuss how spaces between mutually constructed but overlapping paradigmatic understandings of media behavior lead to theories that serve as boundary objects, linking (and misunderstanding) older fields in order to advance new agendas. I then turn to the consequences of particular methodological choices, drawing on key works in Science and Technology Studies (STS) to make the point that these methodological choices not only establish scientific fields, they construct certain types of human subjects as well. The article concludes with a call for a more humanistic and interpretive approach to the understanding of political behavior and communication.

'Mandami un messaggio’: sulla comunicazione con i messaggi di testo come possibilità, costrizione e desiderio

'Send me a message': on communication with text messages as possibility, constriction and desire. The responsibility for deciding if, how and when an artefact shoud be used does not fall solely on the user. A significant amount of research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has highlighted the complex interrelationship that determines the way we use objects. Many elements attributable to both the social sphere and the technological dimension are responsible for the way the device is effectively used. In this article we intend to, firstly, understand the distribution scheme of responsibility proposed by the literature, in which users, objects and relative contexts constitute and configure practices of use. Secondly, we will try to explore a particular configuration of this scheme in which user's responsibility is greatly diminished. To illustrate and analyze the main aspects of this configuration, we will focus on the use of mobile instant messaging systems. This case study allows us to observe the ways in which smartphones, in certain contexts, impose a particular behaviour on people, reducing their responsibility in choosing the mode of use.

Vamos lavar as mãos? A música aliada ao ensino de ciências

Este estudo apresenta um relato de oficinas desenvolvidas com alunos dos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental, de uma escola pública localizada no município de Duque de Caxias, no Estado do Rio de Janeiro. O objetivo era explorar o potencial de músicas que permitissem a discussão e a construção do conhecimento sociocientífico, de forma lúdica e contextualizada. O trabalho foi desenvolvido em uma turma de quarto ano de escolaridade. Foi realizada uma pesquisa participante, envolvendo os alunos da escola. O tema das oficinas, “Lavar as mãos”, foi selecionado, considerando os problemas identificados na realidade local marcada por doenças recorrentes. A partir da contextualização realizada por meio de uma letra de música, nas oficinas, foi perceptível o envolvimento, a participação dos alunos, o estímulo ao debate e a questionamentos, além do desenvolvimento do senso crítico, caracterizando assim, os pressupostos de um ensino em Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS).

On the Potentialities of Spaces of Care: Openness, Enticement, and Variability in a Psychiatric Center

Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have turned their attention to the materiality of objects and buildings in order to examine what they make users do in practice. Taking a close look at a therapeutic community in a psychiatric day care center for teenagers, this paper joins these discussions by exploring the materiality of “spaces of care” as part of the center’s everyday practice. The analysis incorporates the concepts of scripts and dispositifs to describe the conditions of possibility in which caregivers and youths may position themselves in relation to others and to the space itself. This paper describes how spaces of care offer open, enticing, and variable conditions for fostering a dynamic of personal and relational responses as part of the care work. In this sense, the material environment entails potentialities in ways that are unpredictable but nonetheless consequential. Rather than arguing that material arrangements and things act, this paper draws attention to their impact via their potential within dispositifs of care that request participants’ attentiveness and responsiveness. Describing these potentialities brings out the subtler requirements of material environments in care practices that aim at circumventing the coercion of disciplinary spaces and their impersonal classifications.

Designing Technology, Developing Theory: Toward a Symmetrical Approach

We focus on collaborative activities that engage computer graphics designers and social scientists in systems design processes. Our conceptual symmetrical account of technology design and theory development is elaborated as a mode of mutual engagement occurring in an interdisciplinary trading zone, where neither discipline is placed at the service of the other and nor do disciplinary boundaries dissolve. To this end, we draw on analyses of mutual engagements between computer and social scientists stemming from the fields of computer-supported cooperative work, human−computer interaction, and science and technology studies (STS). We especially build on theoretical work in STS concerning information technology in health care and extend recent contributions from STS with respect to the modes of engagement and trading zones between computer and social sciences. We conceive participative digital systems design as a form of inquiry for the analysis of cooperative work settings, particularly when social science becomes part of design processes. We illustrate our conceptual approach using data from an interdisciplinary project involving computer graphics designers, sociologists, and neurosurgeons with the aim of developing patient-centered visualizations for clinical cooperation on a hospital ward.

Technologies, infrastructures and migrations: material citizenship politics

ABSTRACT This article aims to explore the multiple uses and consequences of different technologies and infrastructures in the context of migrations and how such uses and consequences inhabit and transform migrants’ rights and subjectivities. It reviews relevant literature at the intersection of citizenship, critical migration studies and science and technology studies (STS), focusing in particular on the current debates underway within critical citizenship studies that examine how technologies and infrastructures shape the ability to acts of citizenship. By mobilizing insights from STS, we focus on how these political subjectivities are shaped by certain sociomaterial and epistemic practices. By introducing the notion of material citizenship politics, the article outlines a way to differentiate three different constitutive forms between technologies, infrastructures and citizenship in migrations. Technologies and infrastructures can (1) constrain acts of citizenship in migration and border regimes; (2) constitute contestation and participation over citizenship; or (3) enable and shape alternative acts of citizenship in migration and border regimes. As it provides a theoretical background to the special issue, the article also serves as the introduction to the issue.

A abordagem de questões sociocientíficas nos trabalhos destaque do Salão UFRGS Jovem

Resumo: O presente trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a presença de Questões Sociocientíficas (QSC) nos resumos dos trabalhos que foram destaque no Salão UFRGS Jovem de 2019, na área de Ciências da Natureza e suas Tecnologias (CNT). O evento é realizado anualmente na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul e organizado pela Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa, tendo como público os alunos da Educação Básica e da Educação Profissional Técnica de Nível Médio. A pesquisa, de caráter qualitativo, partiu de um estudo exploratório dos 97 resumos destaque. Destes, os 49 da área de CNT foram analisados, originando categorias (BARDIN, 2009) referentes aos temas abordados. Autores como Pérez (2012), Conrado e Nunes-Neto (2018), Galvão e Reis (2008) e Santos e Mortimer (2000) embasaram este trabalho diante da abordagem de CTS (Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade) e das QSC. Entre os resumos analisados, 86% apresentaram a abordagem sobre QSC. O tema Saúde foi o mais abordado, com 14 resumos; seguido do tema Poluição Ambiental (13 resumos); Saúde Mental (6 resumos); os temas Agrotóxicos e Consumo Consciente (4 resumos cada); e Tecnologia no Campo (1 resumo). Assim, esses temas, presentes no cotidiano e na mídia, estão sendo trabalhados na Educação Básica por meio da investigação científica e compartilhados em evento científico, o que contribui para a formação do aluno e a construção do conhecimento.
 Palavras-chave: Pesquisa em Sala de Aula. Evento Científico. Questões Sociocientíficas.

Situated Computations: Bridging Craft and Computation in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival

Hand crafts, and the people who practice them, are typically seen as opposite to digital technologies. This paper challenges this split, and proposes eight principles for developing computational design tools that facilitate productive interactions across hand crafts and computational media. I derive these principles from my ethnographic and design studies of the wire-bending craft, which has been practiced in the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival since the 1930s, as well as from my development of an experimental digital design tool to build 3-D lines in space, informed by these studies. The tool, which enables users to generate linear designs and fabricate them using linear materials such as wire, is presented as an instrument to codify, reflect upon, and extend the Trinidadian wire-bending tradition. This paper acknowledges the Trinidad Carnival as a contested design space, political arena, and creative outlet through which individuals and communities express their imagination, innovation, and craftsmanship. Building on scholarship in computational design, science and technology studies (STS), and human-computer interaction (HCI), the paper delineates ‘Situated Computations’ as an approach to computational design tool-making that grounds these technologies in the social world by acknowledging the historical, cultural, and material contexts of designing and making.

ANÁLISE DA EXISTÊNCIA E ABORDAGEM DA CONCEPÇÃO DE CTS EM LIVRO DIDÁTICO DE QUÍMICA

This article presents, from the perspective of STS (Science, Technology and Society), one of the didactic resources most used by teachers: the textbook. The objective was to identify the conceptions present, regarding STS, in the textbooks of Chemistry for High School, belonging to the National Program of Didactic Book of the Ministry of Education. For that, a spreadsheet was created establishing criteria to be evaluated and a guide of definitions to increase the degree of impartiality of the analysis. Thus, this research opted for the collection adopted by the Federal Institute Catarinense (FIC), entitled "Chemistry", by the authors Mortimer and Machado, since the researchers worked at this institution and adopted this teaching material. After evaluation, through the proposed instrument, it was observed that the collection presents some shortcomings in its organization and contextualization - often exemplifying instead of contextualizing -, proposing closed activities and not relating them to everyday life. Therefore, it is identified that the work is relevant to its approach, but presents space for improvements regarding the items mentioned.

Sociotechnical Imaginaries: A Possible Contribution to Science Education

This is a conceptual paper that highlights notions of sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs; Jasanoff, 2015) from fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) that seem relevant to science education aimed at preparing critical and active citizens (Bencze, 2017). We extend our discussion to fields of future studies in science education to argue that a needed direction is not merely to get students to imagine desired (often personalized) futures (especially given social and environmental harms), but to interrogate how products of science and technology seem to delimit kinds of futures we ought to desire. That is, technoscientific futures are not just out there, but are already present, actively fashioning current practices and values. Drawing from STS literature, we demonstrate how STIs are enacted through two current technoscientific products: self-tracking devices and algorithms. We argue that such technoscience products have an active role in constructing certain kinds of individuals/publics (e.g., quantified citizens, calculated publics). Roles of material technologies in normalizing moral and political visions and future orientations need to be explicitly addressed in re-centering nature of technology as inseparable from nature of science (Roth, 2001). Notions of STIs further offer more nuanced approaches to discuss power at the interface of the public/private within STS Education (Pedretti & Nazir, 2011). Finally, notions of STIs may present us with new ways for (re-)encountering affect in science education (Alsop, 2016), as feelings of hope and anxieties contour (how we come to re-envision) imaginaries grounded in technoscientific worlds.

Negotiating digital marginalization: Immigrants, computers, and the adult learning classroom

ABSTRACT The discourse of the digital divide continues to shift from questions of physical access to questions of empowerment and equality. Implicit in this shift is the need to make sense of technology use within marginalized communities, prompting the central question of this study: What happens to marginalized individuals after they gain digital access, and importantly, training? To explore this question, I observed and assisted a group of 18 mostly transnational, Latina individuals during a five-month long computer class in Newark, New Jersey. The study positions computers as a kind of “boundary object” existing as a material thing embedded within associated systems, local meanings, and practices as interpreted by the researcher. The voices and experiences of the classroom participants are examined through cross-disciplinary theoretical frameworks drawn primarily from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and a specific transnational study. Thus, the article makes a contribution to the field of Communication by bringing these theoretical concepts into conversation with pedagogical ethnography and Internet Communication Technologies (ICT).

Paratactic commoning: collective knowledge production networking as political struggle

ABSTRACT Today we are confronted with an ever-increasing tactical control of rights to access, use and store data as a shared resource. Control of commons and commoning has never before been this computed, obfuscated and systematized in the history of mass communication. This article explores collective knowledge production networking, and self-organized community building, which are grounded on commons-based artistic intervention and political struggle. Focusing on the practices of Networks of Dispossession (2013 – present), which collectively compiles publicly available data and maps the exploitative and tactically obfuscated relations of capital and power in Turkey, findings reveal an emerging way of commoning that produces situated knowledges by information artifacts, material evidence, aesthetic forms and civic resistance. Departing from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, the article explores and introduces a distinctive notion of commoning, which is conceptualized as paratactic commoning.

Knowledge and legitimacy in asylum decision-making: the politics of country of origin information

ABSTRACT State institutions engage in the production of knowledge and representations about the countries of origin of asylum seekers. Building on science and technology studies (STS), critical migration studies and critical citizenship studies, this article analyzes the alignment of government Country of Origin Information (COI) with the public. We examine the different processes through which public legitimacy of asylum knowledge is fostered in three bureaucratic settings. The case studies highlight the variable legitimacy-constructing technologies and practices of publication (Norway), evaluation (United Kingdom) and consultation (European Union) vis-à-vis asylum-relevant information. We demonstrate how this shifting style in the knowledge-based governance of asylum does not consistently enhance legitimacy and stabilization of asylum-relevant information, and can provoke new forms of contestation in this environment of high-stakes policymaking. Finally, we highlight the lack of political subjectivity of asylum seekers to intervene in the production and possibly contest the legitimacy of this information about themselves and their country of origin.

Patient data work: filtering and sensing patient‐reported outcomes

AbstractWith digital patient‐reported outcome (PRO) tools in clinical practice, patients are given new tasks of providing data that aim at supporting and individualising care, simultaneously reducing unnecessary clinical visits. While the innovative potential of mobilising PRO data for care is increasingly explored, little attention is given to the efforts that the provision of PRO data rests on – that of the patients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among cancer patients receiving PRO‐based follow‐up care, we argue that with the increased reliance on patient‐generated health data, we need to consider patients’ data work. Drawing on emerging literature on healthcare professionals’ data work and the rich work in sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) on patients’ active engagement in shaping and managing care, we conceptualise PRO patient data work as two simultaneous processes: the process of data filtering – patients filter information to fit the envisaged recipient and purpose; and the process of data sensing – patients evaluate their embodied experiences. By doing so, we show that patients’ data work has implications beyond simply providing data that represent their experiences.

Objects of safety and imprisonment: Breathless patients' use of medical objects in a palliative setting.

In this article, the authors consider breathless adults with advanced non-malignant lung disease and their relationship with health objects. This issue is especially relevant now during the Covid-19 pandemic, where the experiences of breathlessness and dependence on related medical objects have sudden and global relevance. These objects include ambulatory oxygen, oxygen concentrators and inhalers, and non-pharmacological objects such as self-monitoring devices and self-management technologies. The authors consider this relationship between things and people using an interdisciplinary approach employing psychoanalytic theory (in particular Winnicott's theory of object relations and object use), Science and Technology Studies (STS) and phenomenology. This collaborative approach allows them to relate patient use of health objects to ways of thinking about the body, dependency, autonomy, safety and sense-making within the context of palliative care. The authors illustrate the theoretical discussion with three reflective vignettes from therapeutic practice and conclude by suggesting further interdisciplinary research to develop the conceptual and practice-based links between psychoanalytic theory, STS and phenomenology to better understand individual embodied experiences of breathlessness. They call for palliative care-infused, psychoanalytically informed interventions that acknowledge breathless patients' dependence on things and people, concomitant with the need for autonomy in being-towards-dying.

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.

The co-constitution of ageing and technology – a model and agenda

AbstractThis paper presents a model for studying ageing and technology. It investigates the theoretical gains that can be made by combining insights from Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although technology has become a much more salient part in the everyday lives of older people and investments are high in technologies to deal with the alleged challenges of demographic change, theory development about ageing–technology relations has not kept up with these trends. Partly this is due to the poor connection between the social scientific understanding of ageing and the technically focused discipline of gerontechnology. This has led to an interventionist logic that underlies much of the current and implicit theorising about ageing and technology. We briefly analyse the problems of the interventionist logic and then present a model that conceptualises ageing and technology as co-constituted. We propose this model – which we call the CAT-model – to highlight a number of fundamental ideas about ageing–technology relations. At the centre are four different arenas (life-worlds of older people, design worlds, technological artefacts and images of ageing) in and across which these relations can and should be studied. To develop the model, we build on our own theoretical and empirical work over the last decade, and on examples from recent scholarship that straddle the disciplinary boundaries between STS and Age Studies.

Use of the Science Technology and Society (STS) model with the help of Facebook in science learning for junior high school students

Research has been conducted to investigate the influence of the Science Technology Society (STS) learning model which is assisted by social media Facebook (FB) in science learning. This research was conducted in a group of junior high school students in Tondano, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. The research method is a Quasi-Experiment Posttest-Only Control Group Design. The experimental group was treated with the STS learning model assisted by FB, and the control group with lectures, discussions, question, and answer. The number of samples in the experimental group consisted of 25 students and the number of samples in the control group was 25 students. The results of the statistical analysis concluded that there was an influence of the STS learning model with the help of Facebook social media on improving student learning outcomes in science learning in junior high school students. The research data showed that the average post-test score of student learning outcomes in the experimental group was 88.5 higher than in the control group score was only 68.9. The implication of the research results is that the use of Facebook social media in the learning process will make teachers and students interact not only in the classroom. In addition, the STS learning model arouses students’ interest in science learning, especially related to strengthening scientific literacy