STS Scholars Research Articles

<b>Implicated in the Indicator Game? An Experimental Debate</b>

The rise of new modes evaluating academic work has substantially changed institutions and cultures of knowledge production. This has been reflected and criticized in the literature in STS and beyond. For STS scholars, these debates (should) however have an even more specific dimension. Many of us are experts on aspects of these changes. But at the same time, we too are part of the processes we are analyzing, and often criticizing. To put it slightly provocatively, often we cannot avoid playing the very same game that we scrutinize. This creates tensions that many of us reflect on, and it certainly has created many implicit and explicit normative stances on how to deal with them. Yet it seems that so far there has been little room in our field to reflect on and exchange this particular kind of experience-based knowledge. There are many different ways to engage with the dynamics of evaluation, measurement and competition in contemporary academia, or to play what we refer to colloquially here as the “indicator game.” With this debate, we would like to give room to the expression and discussion of some of these ways. This text is the introduction and prompt to an experimental debate. We discuss the state of the academic discussion on the impact of indicator-based evaluation on academic organization, epistemic work and identities. We use insights from these debates to raise questions for how STS and STSers themselves deal with the indicator game. In conclusion, we summarize our contributors’ arguments and propose the concept of “evaluative inquiry” as a new way of representing the quality of STS work in evaluative contexts.

Silent performances: Are “repertoires” really post-Kuhnian?

Ankeny and Leonelli (2016) propose “repertoires” as a new way to understand the stability of certain research programs as well as scientific change in general. By bringing a more complete range of social, material, and epistemic elements into one framework, they position their work as a correction to the Kuhnian impulse in philosophy of science and other areas of science studies. I argue that this “post-Kuhnian” move is not complete, and that repertoires maintain an internalist perspective. Comparison with an alternative framework, the “sociotechnical imaginaries” of Jasanoff and Kim (2015), illustrates precisely which elements of practice are externalized by Ankeny and Leonelli. Specifically, repertoires discount the role of audience, without whom the repertoires of science are unintelligible, and lack an explicit place for ethical and political imagination, which provide meaning for otherwise mechanical promotion of particular research programs. This comparison reveals, I suggest, two distinct modes of scholarship, one internalist and the other critical. While repertoires can be modified to meet the needs of critical STS scholars and to completely reject Kuhn's internalism, whether or not we do so depends on what we want our scholarship to achieve.

Of Blooming Flowers and Multiple Sockets: The Role of Metaphors in the Politics of Infrastructural Work

We explore the role of two metaphors for innovation and infrastructure integration in the development of a regional patient portal. Our premise is that metaphors have real consequences for agenda setting and decision-making; we view them as operationalizations of sociotechnical imaginaries. Drawing on our formative study of the portal project, we focus on the generative character of metaphors and argue that they are constitutive elements of information infrastructures. While the two metaphors in our study helped to make imaginaries of ‘integrated’ and ‘personalized’ health care more definite, cognizable, and classifiable, they also concealed the politics of infrastructural work. We argue that the act of ‘spelling out’ metaphors can open up a space for new imaginaries and alternative strategies. With this study we aim to contribute to existing knowledge about infrastructural work, and to renew the interest among STS scholars for the role of discursive attributes in information infrastructures.Keywords: metaphors, e-Health, information infrastructures

If Intervention Is Method, What Are We Learning?

In STS and Researcher Intervention Strategies, Brian Martin expresses his concern about the lack of strategic guidance STS offers for intervening in controversies in which actors are being marginalized. This is an interesting contrast with some classic critiques of Actor-Network Theory. Leigh Star famously argued that the over-emphasis of ANT on strategic action made it particularly poorly equipped to study heterogeneity––an analytical and political problem at once. I argue that guidance on intervention as research method should actively resist the urge to make intervention “strategic.” Considering intervention as a scholarly method for producing novel insights about our topics is diametrically opposed to considering intervention strategically, that is, as means to achieving predefined scholarly or normative goals. Drawing on previous, recent, and ongoing work on intervention as an equally non-strategic and non-detached method for developing new knowledge and new normativities, I explore how such work would speak to Martin’s challenge of intervening in controversies and what could be some interesting lessons such an experiment might spark. A strategic take on intervention is important for Martin because it challenges a linear model of STS knowledge production: scholars prioritizing the development of greater understanding of phenomena, hoping that such knowledge can then be beneficial for society later on. Approaching intervention as method, however, challenges problematic linear models of STS knowledge, not by inverting the linearity (from areas of social importance to knowledge production), but by extending non-linear scholarship to our own and others’ normativities. This allows STS scholars to take their concerns about the practices they are involved in seriously without violating their equal attachment to reflexivity, unpredictability, and situatedness. Such a prospect may help STS scholars to explore what it means to live the multiple membership of societally and academically concerned communities, which is what considering intervention strategically would make us lose.

Asians—a Doping-Friendly Race? Antidoping Research and Popular Discourse on Race in the Postgenomic Era

There has been a growing concern about a new way of thinking about race in genomics. STS scholars have tried to make sense of the ways race came to be a part of the scientific, medical, and legal fields in the name of genomics. This article adds to this STS literature on race and genomics with an analysis of antidoping science, a circuit of knowledge making that reifies race in terms of genomics but that thus far has been ignored by STS scholars. By engaging with the STS perspective on genomics and race, in this article I examine how antidoping regulatory knowledge on doping markers travels and how its operations are carried out both inside and outside this regulatory science. This study traces knowledge making about steroid doping regulations and its journey through the media and cyberspace, thus showing that regulatory efforts against doping were incidentally linked to the shaping of the idea of race in relation to genomics and personalized medicine, and especially that of Asian race. While the regulations, recommendations, and debates on the use of race in terms of genomics focused on biomedical research and practice, antidoping scientists are regulatory scientists on the periphery of biomedicine. Antidoping scientists did not, then, engage with debates on the use of racial categories when applying concepts of personalized medicine and pharmacogenomic studies in biomedicine. They used racial categories in their studies of the UGT2B17 gene without concern, and their research reinforced the shaping of racialist discourses on the idea of Asians as a doping-friendly race in the media and cyberspace. This case study suggests that, to improve academic and political intervention on race and genomics, STS scholars should expand their studies into peripheral disciplines of biomedicine such as antidoping science and other human regulatory sciences.

Beyond Innovation: Technology, Institution, and Change as Categories for Social Analysis by Thomas Kaiserfeld (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Innovation: Technology, Institution, and Change as Categories for Social Analysis by Thomas Kaiserfeld Benoît Godin (bio) Beyond Innovation: Technology, Institution, and Change as Categories for Social Analysis. By Thomas Kaiserfeld. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 174. $67.50. In recent years, a few students of technology have begun to question the rhetoric of “innovation studies.” The phrase comes from scholars of European origin, who have worked to develop a disciplinary discourse related to technological innovation under that rubric. According to scholars in this field, innovation studies originated at the Science Policy Research Unit in Brighton, England, and the forefather of such studies is the economist Joseph Schumpeter. To its practitioners, the notion of a National System of Innovation provides the best framework for the study of technological innovation. Beyond Innovation is one of several recent works contesting the field. The purpose of the book, writes Thomas Kaiserfeld, “is to demonstrate the multitude of ideas about technology, institution and change … beyond what is usually offered in innovation studies” (pp. 4–5). Kaiserfeld starts by discussing the concepts of technology, institution, and change. He then proceeds, chapter after chapter (no chapter has more than ten pages), to look at studies produced in STS whose analysis of technological change differs from that of “innovation studies.” While innovation studies places great importance on market forces and entrepreneurship, these STS-based studies bring many factors and analytic techniques into the study of technology, including evolutionary perspectives on technological change, social construction as an analytic mode, the study of technology in relation to performativity, the examination of agencies other than the entrepreneur, and more contextual studies of resistance to change. Kaiserfeld’s book is certainly a long-due beginning of the criticism of this now-dominant framework for the study of technological innovation. As the author points out, innovation studies and studies of technological innovation or of technology are quite different things. Studies of technology in an STS mode have a far greater scope than innovation studies do. Innovation studies is firm-centric and policy-oriented. It has very little to say on the social aspects of technology or the history of technology. At the same time, one may wonder: to what extent is Beyond Innovation really criticizing “innovation studies?” I am far from convinced that Kaiserfeld succeeds in this enterprise. Many of the concepts he discusses, such as knowledge, system, and evolutionism, are central to the work of scholars in innovation studies. Kaiserfeld does point to STS literature that covers these same issues in different ways, hoping to make us notice other literature on technology, not just that on innovation studies. All in all, Beyond Innovation is certainly a book that STS scholars will appreciate. Year after year, these scholars ask themselves, in workshops and conferences, how can one obtain more “relevance” and be heard more [End Page 244] by policymakers. Kaiserfeld makes some links between the two fields (STS and innovation studies). But it remains to others, namely historians, to do the same between innovation studies and the history of technology. Benoît Godin Benoît Godin is professor of science and technology studies, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montreal, Canada. He conducts research on the history of statistics on science and technology (Measurement and Statistics on Science and Technology: 1920 to the Present, 2005) and the intellectual history of innovation (Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation over the Centuries, 2015). Copyright © 2016 Society for the History of Technology

Representing Representation

This review essay of two edited volumes sketches how STS scholars have analyzed scientific representation and visualization in recent work. Several key foci have emerged, among them attending closely to materiality, engaging the digital through embodied action, turning to ontology, as well as benefitting from artistic practice and critique. In diverse ways these choices are informed by a discontentment with the Cartesian split of mind and body as well as the picture theory of language. Yet, naturalism endures as a template, an expectation, and sometimes a specter with and against which much representational work in science is done. What STS scholars have learnt about representation in laboratory and expert settings still awaits being employed more comprehensively for making sense of practices beyond the lab, especially in contested political, social and ecological environments. In setting out to do so, they ought to reflect on the kinds of logic that their practices of representing representation enact.

Quantitative and Qualitative STS: The Intellectual and Practical Contributions of Scientometrics

We provide an overview of the common origins of qualitative and quantitative forms of STS, offering a discursive account of this history. We then demonstrate how scientometric techniques can be used to address substantive research questions, and we provide examples relevant both to the origins of STS and its state of the art. Our purpose is not to provide an exhaustive review of either qualitative or quantitative methods, as there exist many methods textbooks for both (e.g. Moed et al. 2004; Franklin 2012), although contemporary STS has tended to neglect methods. The final substantive section picks up the themes of “big data” and “reflexivity”, and also provides some reflection on the current use of indicators. We argue for greater conciliation between qualitative and quantitative methods within STS, broadly defined. We suggest that such collaboration, by enriching the repertoire of methods available to STS scholars, provides opportunities for exploring new and old research questions. There are also two more pragmatic reasons for this plea for further integration of quantitative and qualitative approaches in STS. The first is the growing attention for “big data”, computational methods, and digital forms of representation of data and knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013; Borgman 2015). The second reason, especially for those STS scholars based in the academy, is that a deeper understanding of scientometrics is necessary for making sense of and for formulating informed criticism about university rankings, evaluations and the audit culture within which academics work (Dahler-Larsen 2011; Hicks et al. 2015 (also known as ‘Leiden Manifesto’); Halffman and Radder 2015; Strathern 2000).

STS and Enhancement Technologies – A Programme for Future Research

The concept of human technological enhancement originated as a tool for the moral classification of technologies, but has since spilled over from ethical debates to become a site for prospective technology development as part of a ‘converging technologies’ agenda. To date, enhancement and the technologies labelled as ‘enhancing’ have been underserved by STS research. While case studies do exist, there has been a dearth of co-ordinated investigation. This paper proposes a systemic programme for STS research on enhancement technologies based on five key challenges posed by dominant conceptions of enhancement as a way of understanding technological development. After setting out this agenda, a short history of the enhancement debate is provided to illustrate the changing meanings of ‘enhancement’ across different contexts. Recognising the limitations of critique alone, particular emphasis is given to the possibilities for productive engagement by STS scholars with the domain of enhancement across its multiple manifestations.

Symposium 2: Looking for black cats and lessons from Charlie

This paper is about a slow hunch. A hunch that a modest interference in networked learning, that we have called public click pedagogy (PCP), may, in some instances, usefully open up a side of networked learning that is often glossed. Learning new material, developing new skills, making new discoveries can be complicated, and messy. Few of us go from inexperienced to skilled or novice to master in anything like a simple, tidy or routine manner. We often learn more from our mistakes than our successes. We sometimes find ourselves in blind alleys or chasing down rabbit holes that appear to take us nowhere.What learners actually do when they try to come to terms with a new domain via formal or informal means, tends to be secret learner business. What is commonly made visible is how successful they are in coming to terms with the domain, something which is judged by people who have demonstrated knowledge and expertise in the domain. Our hunch is that a modest exploration of secret learner business by making public the fuzzy, pragmatic and messy business of learning may work as a useful complement to those elements of learning already made public. The label PCP draws attention to three characteristics of this work: that it is made public, that ‘aha’ or click moments which in a glossed account masquerade as the product of acute insight are traced carefully, and that accounts of these practices may operate pedagogically, for the learner, and perhaps, other learners.To explore the doing of networked learning we draw parallels with the doing of science as it has been studied by scholars in the field of science, technology, and society (STS). Looking at how scientists actually do science, STS scholars came to see that accounts of science as products of the scientific method glossed the messiness, noncoherence and fuzziness of what went on in the laboratory. To Bruno Latour, in the early days of STS, science was Janus-like, with two contradictory faces: science in the making and ready made science. More recently, John Law with others have extended this line of argument to examine the performativity of noncoherence.Drawing on this work, we examine three empirical cases, one of which is the preparation of this paper. We trace the negotiation of the ideas and arguments, our learning in the making, and the noncoherences which we partially domesticate through dialogue.

Contextualizing neuro-collaborations: reflections on a transdisciplinary fMRI lie detection experiment.

Recent neuroscience initiatives (including the E.U.’s Human Brain Project and the U.S.’s BRAIN Initiative) have reinvigorated discussions about the possibilities for transdisciplinary collaboration between the neurosciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. As STS scholars have argued for decades, however, such inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations are potentially fraught with tensions between researchers. This essay build on such claims by arguing that the tensions of transdisciplinary research also exist within researchers’ own experiences of working between disciplines - a phenomenon that we call “disciplinary double consciousness” (DDC). Building on previous work that has characterized similar spaces (and especially on the Critical Neuroscience literature), we argue that “neuro-collaborations” inevitably engage researchers in DDC - a phenomenon that allows us to explore the useful dissonance that researchers can experience when working between a “home” discipline and a secondary discipline. Our case study is a five-year research project in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) lie detection involving a transdisciplinary research team made up of social scientists, a neuroscientist, and a humanist. In addition to theorizing neuro-collaborations from the inside-out, this essay presents practical suggestions for developing transdisciplinary infrastructures that could support future neuro-collaborations.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Deficit Model, the Diffusion Model and Publics in STS

The start of the twenty-first century witnessed the flourishing of both the biosciences (particularly genomics) and initiatives around public engagement in science, particularly in the UK and USA. STS researchers have both followed and fuelled this latter trend. Hence, it may be helpful to review the genealogy of these recent developments and of STS concern for the publics of science. This provides a way of assessing whether STS activities have been contributing to making the sciences more open and accountable to their publics. One trail returns to the institutionalisation of Public Understanding of Science (PUS) in the mid-1980s. The critique of this movement by STS scholars through reference to the deficit model (of public understanding of science) also figures here. However, less attention has been given to other modes of conceptualising science and publics, including what Cooter and Pumfrey label as the ‘diffusionist’ or ‘diffusion’ model (of scientific knowledge), which they contend entrenched traditional views of scientific knowledge and of publics as receivers of such knowledge. More recently, investigations of the making of science in diverse locations, attention to multiplicity and co-production have taken STS in new directions. Nevertheless, the legacies of both the deficit and diffusion models of science and publics continue to influence STS and its ‘regimes of truth’. Questions remain around STS researchers' persistent failure to acknowledge the diffusion model, in particular, and the consequent retrenchment of traditional views of how science works, limiting prospects for substantial public engagement and more open, democratic modes of science.

De-Facto Science Policy in the Making: How Scientists Shape Science Policy and Why it Matters (or, Why STS and STP Scholars Should Socialize)

Science and technology (S&T) policy studies has explored the relationship between the structure of scientific research and the attainment of desired outcomes. Due to the difficulty of measuring them directly, S&T policy scholars have traditionally equated “outcomes” with several proxies for evaluation, including economic impact, and academic output such as papers published and citations received. More recently, scholars have evaluated science policies through the lens of Public Value Mapping, which assesses scientific programs against societal values. Missing from these approaches is an examination of the social activities within the scientific enterprise that affect research outputs and outcomes. We contend that activities that significantly affect research trajectories take place at the levels of individual researchers and their communities, and that S&T policy scholars must take heed of this activity in their work in order to better inform policy. Based on primary research of two scientific communities—ecologists and sustainability scientists—we demonstrate that research agendas are actively shaped by parochial epistemic and normative concerns of the scientists and their disciplines. S&T policy scholarship that explores how scientists balance these concerns, alongside more formal science policies and incentive structures, will enhance understanding of why certain science policies fail or succeed and how to more effectively link science to beneficial social outcomes.

Traveling Comparisons: Ethnographic Reflections on Science and Technology

This special issue aims to investigate some novel uses of the comparative method at the intersections of STS and anthropology through ethnographic accounts of technoscience in various Asian contexts. In today's globalizing world, knowledge is under constant negotiation and reordering around conflicting ideas of progress and development. Nowhere is it more evident than in the daily practices of living and working with old and new technologies. Scientists, mechanics, physicians, and farmers whom anthropologists encounter in the field see development, uniqueness, or backwardness in their innovations in the midst of complex relations, which connect local innovations and routines with the transnational circulation of people, objects, and information. How do these flows and unexpected connections stimulate innovators and users to make comparisons in their daily engagements with technologies? How should anthropologists and STS scholars reflect on the fact that while comparisons make connections, connections make comparisons as well? This introduction tackles such questions in order to account for the rich traffic between conceptual frameworks and methodological tools in the five articles that follow.

Framing the Discussion: Nanotechnology and the Social Construction of Technology--What STS Scholars Are Saying

The emergence of nanotechnology, with all its promises of economic, social, and medical benefits, along with dire predictions of environmental, health, and safety threats, has occasioned an active debate in the Science and Technology Studies field, in which we have seen five distinct conversations that frame the discussion. The topical threads include ethics, regulation, opportunities and threats including utopian/dystopian visions of the future, public perception, public participation. These conversational distinctions are not absolutes with firm borders as they clearly overlap at many points. Nonetheless, common to all is a strong sense that control and consequence are significant problems that have yet to be addressed adequately by the promoters of nanotechnology. A final section addresses articles on nanotechnology that exemplify the social construction theory of technology. We include herein a selective summary of this recent body of science, technology, and society (STS) journal literature focused on the social and ethical interactions of nanotechnology (SEIN) that has emerged in the last few years. The intent is not to be encyclopedic in coverage, but rather to seek to understand, in a general way, the key issues and concepts STS scholars are discussing. It is clear that STS-oriented scholars are well poised to grapple explicitly with the cultural, socio-political, and ethical dimensions of nanotechnology. Drawing on understandings of earlier socio-technical areas of interest and concern—nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, the human genome—such scholars have moved well beyond the questions of whether and where nanotechnology intersects society. More important is their effort to seek an understanding in depth of exactly how they are socio-politically, culturally, and ethically interconnected. In doing so, SEIN studies have at the same time become increasingly diverse and more sophisticated and mature over the course of the past decade. Scholars have quite rightly recognized the inadequacies of blanket ideas of moratoria versus non-regulatory environments, utopian versus dystopian futures, and whether or not the public has a role to play in nanotechnology decision making. Rather, a more sophisticated, often case specific, flexible understanding of the societal context of a given issue or concern is called for.

Engineering Improvement: Social and Historical Perspectives on the NAE’s “Grand Challenges”

The list of engineering "Grand Challenges" lately developed by the National Academy of Engineering enters a long historical tradition of such epically scaled to-do lists, dating back to the profession's U.S. origins in the mid-19th century. The mission statements, codes of ethics, and, later, lists of so-called grand challenges that have issued from engineering societies have served the dual function of directing engineers' work and supporting particular cultural roles for these bodies of experts. Almost all such plans, regardless of period or sponsoring body, have also blended highly practical aims of industrial and infrastructural development with more inchoate projects of societal uplift. The Grand Challenges of the NAE, currently playing a formative role in many engineering organizations and research and teaching settings, extend this lineage, working from a selective and self-confirming view of human welfare. We might bring to the Grand Challenges the type of critical, politically informed analysis that historians and STS scholars have brought to other sites of engineering activity and professionalization, to detect the nature of interests that underlay all such projections of engineering’s role in society. Who is served by the development of different technologies, products, and infrastructures? Who might be harmed? Most fundamentally, the Grand Challenges proceed from the premise that engineering research, construction, invention, and production are to take precedence over their absence, as befits a body dedicated not to the contraction of such enterprises but to their extension. Yet the interests of sustainability, global health, and other areas of human well-being might be best served in certain cases by just such a turning away from engineering. Making explicit the social and historical assumptions of the NAE’s Grand Challenges, and probing the implications of those assumptions for a diverse range of actors and communities, may pave the way for more thoughtful engagement with the humanistic and democratic potential of engineering.

Artefacts of not-knowing: The medical record, the diagnosis and the production of uncertainty in Papua New Guinean biomedicine

Anthropological and STS scholars of biomedical work have traditionally explored contexts where inconsistencies and lacunas in diagnostic knowledge-production are problematic for medical practitioners, and such scholars have consequently focused on the social and political processes by which such epistemic uncertainties are resolved. This article draws on ethnographic material from a Papua New Guinean hospital where diagnostic uncertainty is not rendered problematic and where the open-endedness of the diagnostic process gives rise to new forms of medical expertise and practice. The paper focuses on the medical record as an artefact of not-knowing that both documents and performs uncertainty as a valuable resource. It shows that medical records can operate as either technologies of 'opening' that multiply opportunities for pragmatic action within a hospital space or as technologies of 'closure' that move people and documents between spaces. Practices of not-knowing and knowing are therefore shown to be interdependent and interchangeable 'moments' of bureaucratic-biomedical work.

Mark B. Brown, Science in Democracy. Expertise, Institutions, and Representation: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA., and London, 2009.

In January 2011, German science policy advisers at federal level, the 2008 appointed German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, produced a cautious but positive review of pre-implantation genetic screening (http://www.leopoldina.org/en/policy-advice/recommendations-and-statements/national-recommendations/praeimplantationsdiagnostik-pid.html - accessed 21 April, 2011). Immediately, the advice was attacked as an example of politics-contaminated, instead of value-free science. But simultaneously, many seasoned science policy advisers came to the rescue and defended an advice that clearly spoke to the present political debate; and thus also addressed normative and pragmatic issues. The response to keep science ‘value-free’ is the typical tradition of science politics under high modernity in a political system of representative democracy. Scientific experts are seen as ‘delegates’ of citizens’ best judgment on the issue; and the delegation occurs under public accountability of elected legislative bodies or an executive accountable to such bodies. But at present, democratization of expertise, public engagement or direct public participation in science is the more popular and dominant response. This is partly rooted in social and political theories arguing a shift from government to governance. If the state is unable to represent all public concerns and questions involving the uses of science and technology of a fragmented and inchoate ‘protopublic’ (Dewey), more directly participatory and deliberative routes for (individual) citizen influence become attractive. Therefore, an unlikely alliance of egalitarian STS scholars, radical analysts of science, democratic theorists, and promoters of science-driven industrial innovation and some state bureaucrats have come to effectively promote more public engagement and participation in science (Caswill 2010; Wesselink and Hoppe 2011). In a sentence: science is to become more democratic, and democracy more scientific (In ‘t Veld 2010).

A Response to “The STS Challenge to Philosophy of Science in Taiwan”

Lamenting the absence of fruitful dialogue between philosophers of science and STS scholars in Taiwan, Ruey-Lin Chen argues that each field can and should help the other to improve. In particular, if I have understood Chen’s arguments correctly, philosophers of science could learn from STS to pay closer attention to the social aspects of scientific activity, to social understandings of what science is, and to the political or ethical implications of scientific practice in a modern technoscientific society like Taiwan. The field of STS, meanwhile, could benefit both reflexively and methodologically from the philosophy of science by paying more rigorous analytical attention to its own theoretical lineages, internal contradictions, and truth-claims; by attending more closely to the validity of the scientific arguments at the core of most STS case studies; and by developing its capacity as a discipline to proceed from the level of specific case study to generalization. Chen’s arguments for what STS has to gain from a dialogue with the philosophy of science are based on the proposition that STS is, fundamentally, a science, albeit a social science. Greater philosophical rigor, reflexive and interpretive, would thus contribute positively to its “normal development.” Certainly any scholarly field benefits from rigorous critical attention to its epistemological practices; it would be hard to disagree with Chen on that point. But do STS practitioners in fact construe the field asa“science,”andwhatmightthetraditionofAnglo-Saxonanalyticalphilosophythat Chen identifies as the forte of Taiwanese philosophy of science contribute to it? In my opinion one can make a strong case that STS (like “sociology of scientific knowledge” before it) is a project rather than a discipline or a science, and is recognized as such by its practitioners. It is a shared goal, namely, the unpacking and challenging of technocratic authority, that gives coherence to STS, rather than any aspirations to a unified theory, or any agreed bounding or framing of the object of analysis. The field of STS is essentially political, a spectrum of exercises in demystification ranging from the gendering of electric shavers to the transnational governance of nuclear power to claims about the separation of the social and the

Bidirectional Shaping and Spaces of Convergence

This article proposes a new bi-directional way of understanding the convergence of biology and computing. It argues for a reciprocal interaction in which biology and computing have shaped and are currently reshaping each other. In so doing, we qualify both the view of a natural marriage and of a digital shaping of biology, which are common in the literature written by scientists, STS, and communication scholars. The DNA database is at the center of this interaction. We argue that DNA databases are spaces of convergence for computing and biology that change in form, meaning, and function from the 1960s to the 2000s. The first part of the article shows how, in the 1980s, DNA sequencing shifted from passively incorporating computers to be increasingly modeled in digital coding and decoding. Information retrieval algorithms, reciprocally, were altered according to the peculiarities of DNA in the first sequence-storage databases. The second part of the article investigates the impact of these reciprocal interactions and globalization on the organization of research centers, ways of conducting big science, and scientific values. Through convergence and new technologies such as data mining, biology and computing were transformed technologically, institutionally, and culturally into a new bio-data enterprise called genomics.