Techno-scientific Activities Research Articles

Human reason versus arrogance technoscience and the replacement shadow. -Ethical evaluation and social control to regain power on the means and ends from the work of José Sanmartín

This essay analyzes from a personalistic bioethics the model of technological progress supported by an autonomy without controls and an imperative that is governed by the maxim: if it can be done, let's do it!, as a necessary and sufficient condition of progress. This puts us on the slippery slope between the technically feasible and the morally lawful. The pioneering work of the philosopher, José Sanmartin Esplugues 2 , urges reflection in the face of a technological profusion that sees the human being as a useful embodied object and offers powers of intervention on human life that were previously unimaginable. The reduction of the person to mere biological-material data opens the door to increasing deshumanization by subordination to the calculations of an instrumental rationalism. Underlying the desire to see ourselves at the top of the world and genetic techniques are the ultimate expression of a longing for human emancipation that aspires to take the reins of evolution through an abstract postbiological imaginary. Sanmartin proposes a model of ethical evaluation and social insertion of technoscientific activity that goes beyond the conventional categories of impact, use and effectiveness to distinguish social, cultural, economic, political and values correlates, in order to embroider a pattern that decides on the means and ends of human life through technologies that are neither innocuous nor neutral. A society without antidotes to manipulation that also teaches us to cultivate utopian dreams about human nature is easily malleable by elites who promise happy worlds and redeem us from our vulnerability.

On the Entanglement of Science and Europe at CERN: The Temporal Dynamics of a Coproductive Relationship

ABSTRACT The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is one of the oldest, largest, and most emblematic European research infrastructures. Its history, as expressed through narratives of its own organizational identity, does not only reflect the development of its technoscientific activities but also strongly references a multiplicity of performances of Europe. By analysing these narratives of organizational identity over nearly seven decades, it is possible to observe an ongoing coproductive relationship between technoscientific and sociopolitical orders—more specifically between particle physics and Europe. Furthermore, there has been a considerable shift in the justificatory and explanatory relationship between these orders. In its first three decades, CERN was envisioned as an organization in which European unity could be accomplished through science. A broad vision of science as a common European language contributed to an imaginary of postwar Europe (re-)united through its cultural/scientific roots. Roughly since 1990, however, CERN has been presenting itself as a ‘laboratory for the world’, thereby constructing a new imaginary of Europeanness as an organizational and cultural resource to support global particle physics. Thus, there has been a narrative shift from European collaboration being promoted through science, to science on a world scale being promoted by a specific idea of Europeanness. Studying the temporal dynamics of coproductive relationships like these sensitizes us to shifts of balance between sociopolitical and technoscientific orders: it reveals which orders are narrated as drivers and which as driven as well as how this opens up or closes down justificatory narratives and ways of acting.

The Socio-technical challenge between the two modes: how to engage Science and Technology Studies in a coherent Engineering practice?

The change in Indian political and economic conditions has brought about a change in the outlooks of academic producers and consumers alike. There has been an increasing demand for transparency and equity in government-supported modes of activity, as well as, an increase in engineering and technological activity. Demand has grown in the sectors of engineering and design. The government has concomitantly set up manpower production avenues in the form of engineering institutes and the creation of a design spine in the current engineering curriculum. While this dominant wave has continued, there is a counter growth from other academic sectors, such as Science and Technology Studies (STS), that emphasizes that the crux of technoscientific activities need to be comprehended to make their end results just and equitable to society. Most notable in this line of research is the study of large-scale technical systems, qua socio-technical systems, by both historians and sociologists. While both the engineering and STS academic literature have continued to grow steadily in these large technological systems, there is still a need for integrating the insights of STS into core engineering practices for systems design in Indian technological development trajectories. This chapter aims to highlight that the dichotomy of the two modes of knowledge production, in terms of state-led top-down and actor-led bottom-up, does not fare well for socio-technical systems. Thus, there is a need for tighter integration between the existing modes of engineering activity with the new alternatives, such as STS, with the long-term view of comprehending the two waves, Post–Nehruvian vs. new technoscientific consensus, together rather than seeing them as alternatives.

Harbinger of progress

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Portugal undertook in its mainland and colonial territories an ambitious modernising programme based on technoscientific grounds. From the late 1870s onwards, such programme was widely advertised in Occidente, the most important illustrated journal of the time that published several drawings of original photographs. In this paper, I will analyse the imagery based on authentic photography related to technoscientific activities in Portugal and its colonies, using a methodology that combines semiotics with photojournalistic analysis. I claim that Occidente, by publishing drawings of photos, was crucial to create an image of Portugal as a modern, technoscientific, and imperial nation, before the development of halftone printing and photojournalism.

E-Infrastructures and the divergent assetization of public health data: Expectations, uncertainties, and asymmetries.

In this article, we examine some of the expectations, frictions and uncertainties involved with the assetization of de-identified NHS patient data by (primary care) research services in UK. Pledges to Electronic Health Record (EHR) data-driven research attempt to reconfigure public health data as an asset for realizing multiple values across healthcare, research and finance. We introduce the concept of 'asymmetrical divergence' in public health data assetization to study the various practices of configuring and using this data, both as a continuously generated resource to be extracted and as an asset to be circulated in the knowledge economy. As data assetization and exploitations grow bigger and more diverse, the capitalization of these datasets may constitute EHR data-driven research in healthcare as an attractive technoscientific activity, but one limited to those actors with specific sociotechnical resources in place to fully exploit them at the required scale.

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.

Envisioning Technological Literacy in Science Education: Building Sustainable Human-Technology-Lifeworld Relationships

Present discourses on technology education are taking a positive and value-neutral approach with utilitarian and vocational overtones. The discourses generally lack discussions of human agency and human responsibility for techno-scientific activities and technological literacy. To support the emergence of a collective civic literacy, we argue in this text that technology education needs to take up critical and value-acknowledging aspects with emphasis on building sustainable relationships among human beings, technology, and lifeworld. To understand the relationship between human agency and modern technology, we examine the nature of technology in the dimensions of technology as causality and technology as a relationship of lifeworld. Discussing Martin Heidegger's perspectives on the causalities of technology, we question how the nature of technology situates human beings in power-related relationships to the world. Understanding technology as process and relationship of lifeworld, the paper extends its discussion of the responsibility of a dialectical human-technology-lifeworld relation based on a socio-technical and ethico-moral framework of technology. By recognizing human responsibility of and for modern technology, we outline a critical and reflective approach to technological literacy. The approach challenges the position of current approaches to technology in the attempt to provide a foundation for a contemporary pedagogy of technological awareness and values.

The sacred and the profane in life science work: The case of assisted reproduction laboratories

ABSTRACTReproductive medicine and assisted reproduction therapies have been developed over the last decades resulting in over five million babies. The handling of human reproductive materials and patients is based on the ability to combine health care work and techno-scientific expertise in both the clinic and the laboratory setting. This study of Swedish assisted reproductive technology clinics demonstrates that the active day-to-day manipulation of human reproductive materials enact both the ‘profane’, through treating the embryos as raw materials in standardized procedures enabling economies of scale, and the ‘sacred’ through enacting a separation, the potential to human life, the patients ordeals, and seriousness. The enactment of the profane and the sacred is mostly balanced but at certain points in the work procedures, their intersecting becomes particularly salient. Such points provide opportunities for the study of the sense making of professionals in organizational grey zones, during techno-scientific activities.

Epistemología y hermenéutica de la ciencia: una visión desde la obra de Kuhn

The aim of this paper is to show how you can develop a hermeneutics of science. For this, we will use Kuhn’s epistemological developments and we will develop a theoretical analysis of them. Finally, we will outline the elements which condition the techno-scientific activity. This paper seeks, in conclusion, to expose the elements that should be present in a hermeneutics of science.

Project Based Learning Activities in Engineering Education

<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;" lang="EN-US">In the present work, the author reports examples of his involvement in different teaching/learning methodologies during his five years of the Integrated Master Degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto. The aim is to explain how useful those experiences have been, allowing him to explore many techno-scientific activities within his engineering education while student as well as other <span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">transferable</span> skills and later, up to the present, as a professional in academic environment. The author wishes to underline the excellent opportunity he had to practice reflection processes as an essential methodology of his engineering education.</span>

The Universe will be televised: space, science, satellites and British television production, 1946–1969

This essay uses material from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) archives to show how space-related technoscientific activities played a key role in the development of BBC television. The essay focuses on a crucial period when this influential cultural institution transitioned away from radio as their primary broadcast medium in the 1930s and 1940s to reluctantly embrace television in the 1950s and 1960s. Space-related activities, including astronomy, cosmology, rocketry, aerospace engineering, astrophysics and interplanetary research, played a key role in the modernization of BBC television broadcasting in two intersecting ways. Space-related material provided informative, yet popular, programmatic material that helped BBC television compete in an increasingly commercialized media market, and, later, space projects supplied technologies that impacted on the mechanics of broadcast production and transmission. The profile and prestige of space as a topic, in particular, its visuality, the drama of exploration it presented, and its association with celebrity scientists like Bernard Lovell and Fred Hoyle, meant that such programming became a crucial business asset for the BBC and a professional asset for ambitious producers who saw its commercial potential. Following the launch of Sputnik in 1957, space technology became further intertwined with the development of British broadcasting as the fields of satellite communications and broadcasting transmissions infrastructure converged. In particular, BBC producers promoted the potential development of communication satellites within their television programming by portraying such satellites as plausible and necessary for the advancement of civilization, and most crucially, as a prospective British Space Race achievement.

When Historians and Anthropologists Talk

Aiwha Ong and Nancy Chen’s anthology Asian Biotech (Duke, 2010) wonderfully and incisively captures the initial results of a period of intense investment throughout much of Northeast, South and Southeast Asia in the most recent two to three decades in the emerging biosciences, grouping its collection of papers according to broad thematic clusters. Documenting a series of diverse, changing practices with respect to the use of bodies and human tissues in clinical trials, the related establishment of blood and tissue storage facilities, and even cutting-edge efforts to work with HESC technologies, the volume offers a comprehensive view of a rapidly emerging field in a part of the world that has only recently begun to appear as a major contributor to global techno-scientific activity, with state actors frequently leading the mobilization efforts. Juxtaposed against this thematic content, this review seeks to place the volume in conversation with a longer history, especially existing work in the history of the life sciences, which has until now been dominated by accounts of laboratories primarily based in the West. Rich with implications for a changing ethical practice driven by material changes in medical and scientific practice, Asian Biotech initiates any number of debates to open up a new field of inquiry.

Rethinking Philosophy of Science Today

Modern philosophy of science was, initially, an epistemology of science based on the logical analysis of the language of science. It was superseded by a “sociological epistemology,” according to which the acceptance of scientific statements and theories depends on conditioningscoming from the social context and powers, and this view has fueled anti-scientific attitudes.This happened because the sociological turn still expressed an epistemology of science. Science, however, is not only a system of knowledge, but also a complex human activity. Hence, ethical, political, social, religious issues appear legitimate if they concern “doing science.”Therefore, we must “rethink” philosophy of science, accepting in it also an axiology of science that could enable us to retain the cognitive value of science and at the same time to make techno-scientific activity compatible with the satisfaction of a great variety of values that inspire our societies.

Ethics and Nanotechnology: Views of Nanotechnology Researchers

A study was conducted of nanotechnology (NT) researchers’ views about ethics in relation to their work. By means of a purpose-built questionnaire, made available on the Internet, the study probed NT researchers’ general attitudes toward and beliefs about ethics in relation to NT, as well as their views about specific NT-related ethical issues. The questionnaire attracted 1,037 respondents from 13 U.S. university-based NT research facilities. Responses to key questionnaire items are summarized and noteworthy findings presented. For most respondents, the ethical responsibilities of NT researchers are not limited to those related to safety and integrity in the laboratory. Most believe that NT researchers also have specific ethical responsibilities to the society in which their research is done and likely to be applied. NT appears to be one of the first areas of contemporary technoscientific activity in which a long-standing belief is being seriously challenged: the belief that society is solely responsible for what happens when a researcher’s work, viewed as neutral and merely enabling, is applied in a particular social context. Survey data reveal that most respondents strongly disagree with that paradigmatic belief. Finally, an index gauging NT researcher sensitivity to ethics and ethical issues related to NT was constructed. A substantial majority of respondents exhibited medium or high levels of sensitivity to ethics in relation to NT. Although most respondents view themselves as not particularly well informed about ethics in relation to NT, a substantial majority are aware of and receptive to ethical issues related to their work, and believe that these issues merit consideration by society and study by current and future NT practitioners.

La ambivalencia ante la Ciencia y la Tecnología

This article maintains the ambivalence thesis as an essential part to constitute the social representations of science and technology. The ambivalence is based on the dual nature of technoscientific activity. Therefore, it has been present since its historical irruption as a variable capable of shaping over the society. This ambivalence has grown and made more visible while the contemporary advanced societies, as knowledge societies, are based on the technoscientific vector. The article presents several empirical evidence, from primaries and secondaries sources, and quantitative and qualitative nature, to support this interpretation.

Science, technology, and values: towards an axiological analysis of techno-scientific activity

Science, technology, and values: towards an axiological analysis of techno-scientific activity

Techno-scientific activity and war: A yearly time-series analysis, 1500–1903 A. D.

Previous research may have failed to find a general relationship between war and techno-scientific activity due to the failure (a) to treat the various types of war separately and (b) to use yearly rather than generational time series. Hence, the present study examined 404 consecutive years in European civilization from 1500 to 1903. Measures of four distinct kinds of war were defined and a log-transformed measure of techno-scientific activity was derived from a factor analysis of six histories and chronologies. The techno-science measure was regressed on the war measures plus a set of control variables. Techno-scientific activity was found to be a negative function of balance-of-power and defensive wars fought within Europe. In contrast, imperial and civil wars exerted no influence.