Like any science, archaeology relies on trust between actors involved in the production of knowledge. In the early history of archaeology, this epistemic trust was complicated by histories of Orientalism in the Middle East and colonialism more broadly. The racial and power dynamics underpinning 19th- and early 20th-century archaeology precluded the possibility of interpersonal moral trust between foreign archaeologists and locally hired labourers. In light of this, archaeologists created systems of reward, punishment, and surveillance to ensure the honest behaviour of (...) site workers. They thus invented a set of structural conditions that produced sufficient epistemic trust for archaeological research to proceed—a system that continues to shape archaeology to the present day. (shrink)

In this article I reconsider the issue of ?transfer? in education. Received views of learning transfer tend to rely upon a version of representation in which the world and the learner are held apart. The focus falls on how this gap can be closed; how learning can be transferred. A sociomaterial perspective, by contrast, puts learner and world back together, making each available to the other. Bringing the materialist sensibility of actor-network theory to bear and drawing on empirical data collected (...) as part of a small-scale qualitative study of the experience of graduate teachers when moving from education into work, it is argued that transfer, and by implication, learning, primarily concerns the practical and takes multiple forms: contingently composed of social, textual and material practices of knowledge production, learning transfer is a relational effect of the intersection of these practices. Empirical analyses point to the practice of two broad patterns of learning transfer, termed here the representational and the relational. Thinking learning transfer as performed through disparate agencies and practices challenges the self-evidences of perspectives on learning which characterize contemporary education. Here, learning is primarily seen in terms of the intrinsic capabilities of people, regardless of the object-dependent qualities of their learning and lives. This human-centricity raises significant epistemological and ethical issues which are addressed by way of a discussion of the embedded normativities and politics of the practices of representational and relational transfer. (shrink)

Much bioethical scholarship is concerned with the social, legal and philosophical implications of new and emerging science and medicine, as well as with the processes of research that under-gird these innovations. Science and technology studies (STS), and the related and interpenetrating disciplines of anthropology and sociology, have also explored what novel technoscience might imply for society, and how the social is constitutive of scientific knowledge and technological artefacts. More recently, social scientists have interrogated the emergence of ethical issues: they have (...) documented how particular matters come to be regarded as in some way to do with ‘ethics’, and how this in turn enjoins particular types of social action. In this paper, I will discuss some of this and other STS (and STS-inflected) literature and reflect on how it might complement more ‘traditional’ modes of bioethical enquiry. I argue that STS might (1) cast new light on current bioethical issues, (2) direct the gaze of bioethicists towards matters that may previously have escaped their attention, and (3) indicate the import not only of the ethical implications of biomedical innovation, but also how these innovative and other processes feature ethics as a dimension of everyday laboratory and clinical work. In sum, engagements between STS and bioethics are increasingly important in order to understand and manage the complex dynamics between science, medicine and ethics in society. (shrink)

Terrence Deacon has described three orders of emergence; Arthur Peacocke and others have suggested four levels of human systems and sciences; and Philip Clayton has postulated an additional, transcendent, level. Orders and levels describe distinct aspects of emergence, with orders characterizing topological complexity and levels characterizing theoretical knowledge and causal power. By using Deacon's orders to analyze and relate each of the four "lower" levels one can project that analysis on the transcendent level to gain insight into the teleodynamic emergence (...) of transcendent-level systems. I argue that cross-cultural interactions among human cultural-level systems results in the emergence of the "universal" transcendental norms historically characterized as the Greek Good, Beauty, and Truth. These norms require a dynamic existence that I characterize as the emergence of Spirit, using Josiah Royce's community of interpretation, and that I suggest provides a pragmatic clarification of Clayton's transcendent level. An understanding of those emergent norms clarifies ethical systems, highlights the importance of aesthetics in understanding scientific systems, and suggests the necessity of community in fruitful science-and-religion dialogue on human systems. (shrink)

In this article we investigate whether long-term radioactive waste management by means of geological disposal can be understood as a social experiment. Geological disposal is a rather particular technology in the way it deals with the analytical and ethical complexities implied by the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation, because it is presented as a technology that ultimately functions without human involvement. We argue that, even when the long term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted to (...) safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal is still a social experiment. In order to better understand this argument and explore how it could be addressed, we elaborate the idea of social experimentation with the notion of co-production and the analytical tools of delegation, prescription and network as developed by actor-network theory. In doing so we emphasize that geological disposal inherently involves relations between surface and subsurface, between humans and nonhumans, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. In other words, we argue that geological disposal concurrently is a social and a technical experiment, or better, a long-term socio-technical experiment. We end with proposing the idea of ‘actor-networking’ as a sensitizing concept for future research into what geological disposal as a socio-technical experiment could look like. (shrink)

Science policy mandates across the industrialized world insinuate more active roles for publics, their earlier participation in policy decisions, and expanded notions of science and technology governance. In response to these policies, engaged scholars in science studies have sought to design and conduct exercises aimed at better attuning science to its public contexts. As demand increases for innovative and potentially democratic forms of public engagement with science and technology, so also do the prospects for insights from science studies to contribute (...) to policy agendas and institutional capabilities. This collection brings together an international set of scholars in science, technology and society who inquire into the meaning, efficacy and responsibility of engaged science studies scholarship as a public matter. (shrink)

“Technological determinism” is predominantly employed as a critic’s term, used to dismiss certain classes of theoretical and empirical claims. Understood more productively as referring to claims that place a greater emphasis on the autonomous and social-shaping tendencies of technology, technological determinism is a valuable and prominent perspective. This article will advance our understanding of technological determinism through four contributions. First, I clarify some debates about technological determinism through an examination of the meaning of technology. Second, I parse the family of (...) claims related to technological determinism. Third, I note that constructivist and determinist insights may each be valid given particular scope conditions, the most prominent of which is the scale of analysis. Finally, I propose a theoretical microfoundation for technological determinism—military–economic adaptationism—in which economic and military competition constrain sociotechnical evolution to deterministic paths. This theory is a special case of a general theory—sociotechnical selectionism—which can be regarded as also including constructivist theories as special cases. Greater understanding of, respect for, and engagement with technological determinism will enhance the study of technology and our ability to shape our sociotechnical systems. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The introduction of new technologies in society is sometimes met with public resistance. Supported by public policy calls for “upstream engagement” and “responsible innovation,” recent years have seen a notable rise in attempts to attune research and innovation processes to societal needs, so that stakeholders’ concerns are taken into account in the design phase of technology. Both within the social sciences and in the ethics of technology, we see many interdisciplinary collaborations being initiated that aim to address tensions between various (...) normative expectations about science and engineering and the actual outcomes. However, despite pleas to integrate social science research into the ethics of technology, effective normative models for assessing technologies are still scarce. Rawls’s wide reflective equilibrium is often mentioned as a promising approach to integrate insights from the social sciences in the normative analysis of concrete cases, but an in-depth discussion of how this would work in practice is still lacking. In this article, we explore to what extent the WRE method can be used in the context of technology development. Using cases in engineering and technology development, we discuss three issues that are currently neglected in the applied ethics literature on WRE. The first issue concerns the operationalization of abstract background theories to moral principles. The second issue concerns the inclusiveness of the method and the demand for openness. The third issue is how to establish whether or not an equilibrium has been reached. These issues should be taken into account when applying the methods to real-world cases involving technological risks. Applying the WRE method in the context of engaged interdisciplinary collaboration requires sensitivity for issues of power and representativeness to properly deal with the dynamics between the technical and normative researchers involved as well as society at large. (shrink)

Bruno Latour once argued that science laboratories actively modify the wider society by displacing crucial actors outside the laboratory into the “field.” This article turns this idea on its head by using the case of geothermal energy utilization to demonstrate that in many cases it is the experimental setup outside the laboratory that is there first, with the activities normally associated with a laboratory setting only being decided upon and implemented post hoc. As soon as the actors involved perceive unknowns (...) and uncertainties, these are relocated to various kinds of closed laboratories to be dealt with in a more controlled environment. This is done, for instance, by inviting stakeholders to laboratory-like settings or by analyzing the geochemical composition of fluids in laboratories. Thus, the risk-laden production of new knowledge by means of real-world experimentation amounts to a practice of relocating the context of discovery in society to laboratories of justification sometimes defined as such post hoc. Experimental processes in society can then be conceptualized as “real” experiments and laboratory activities as merely temporarily subordinated components of the larger experiment. (shrink)

This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global (...) inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice. (shrink)

While we witness a growing belief in transparency as an ideal solution to a wide range of societal problems, we know less about the practical workings of transparency as it guides conduct in organizational and regulatory settings. This article argues that transparency efforts involve much more than the provision of information and other forms of ‘sunlight’, and are rather a matter of managing visibilities than providing insight and clarity. Building on actor-network theory and Foucauldian governmentality studies, it calls for careful (...) attention to the ways in which transparency ideals are translated into more situated practices and become associated with specific organizational and regulatory concerns. The article conceptualizes transparency as a force that shapes conduct in organizational and socio-political domains. In the second section, this conceptualization of transparency as a form of ‘ordering’ is substantiated further by using illustrations of the effects of transparency efforts in the internet domain. (shrink)

The introduction of respiratory machines in the 1950s may have saved the lives of many, but it also challenged the notion of death itself. This development endowed “machines” with the power to form a unique ontological creature: a live body with a “dead” brain. While technology may be blamed for complicating things in the first place, it is also called on to solve the resulting quandaries. Indeed, it is not the birth of the “brain-dead” that concerns us most, but rather (...) its association with a web of epistemological and ethical considerations, where technology plays a central role. The brain death debate in Israel introduces highly sophisticated religious thought and authoritative medical expertise. At focus are the religious acceptance and rejection of brain death by a technologically savvy group of rabbis whose religious doctrine––along with a particular form of religious reasoning––is used to support the truth claims made from the scientific community but challenge the ways in which they are made credible. In our case, brain death as “true” death is made religiously viable with the very use of technological apparatus and scientific rhetoric that stand at the heart of the scientific ethos. (shrink)

Information security governance has become an elusive goal and a murky concept. This paper problematizes both information security governance and the broader concept of governance. What does it mean to govern information security, or for that matter, anything? Why have information technologies proven difficult to govern? And what assurances can governance provide for the billions of people who rely on information technologies every day? Drawing together several distinct bodies of literature—including multiple strands of governance theory, actor–network theory, and scholarship on (...) sociotechnical regimes—this paper conceptualizes networked action on a spectrum from uncertain governance to governing uncertainty. I advance a twofold argument. First, I argue that networks can better govern uncertainty as they become more able not only to enroll actors in a collective agenda, but also to cut ties with those who seek to undermine that agenda. And second, I argue that the dominant conception of information security governance, which emphasizes governing uncertainty through risk management, in practice devolves to uncertain governance. This is largely because information technologies have evolved toward greater connectedness—and with it, greater vulnerability—creating a regime of insecurity. This evolution is illustrated using the history of the US government’s efforts to govern information security. (shrink)

According to the Value-Neutrality Thesis, technology is morally and politically neutral, neither good nor bad. A knife may be put to bad use to murder an innocent person or to good use to peel an apple for a starving person, but the knife itself is a mere instrument, not a proper subject for moral or political evaluation. While contemporary philosophers of technology widely reject the VNT, it remains unclear whether claims about values in technology are just a figure of speech (...) or nontrivial empirical claims with genuine factual content and real-world implications. This paper provides the missing argument. I argue that by virtue of their material properties, technological artifacts are part of the normative order rather than external to it. I illustrate how values can be empirically identified in technology. The reason why value-talk is not trivial or metaphorical is that due to the endurance and longevity of technological artifacts, values embedded in them have long-term implications that surpass their designers and builders. I further argue that taking sides in this debate has real-world implications in the form of moral constraints on the development of technology. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, (...) infrastructures, and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. We examine the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of security; their deadly and injurious effects; and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. (shrink)

In this paper, we reflect on our experience as science and technology studies researchers who were members of the working group that produced A Synthetic Biology Roadmap for the UK in 2012. We explore how this initiative sought to govern an uncertain future and describe how it was successfully used to mobilize public funds for synthetic biology from the UK government. We discuss our attempts to incorporate the insights and sensibilities of STS into the policy process and why we chose (...) to use the concept of responsible research and innovation to do so. We analyze how the roadmapping process, and the final report, narrowed and transformed our contributions to the roadmap. We show how difficult it is for STS researchers to influence policy when our ideas challenge deeply entrenched pervasive assumptions, framings, and narratives about how technological innovation necessarily leads to economic progress, about public reticence as a roadblock to that progress, and about the supposed separation between science and society. We end by reflecting on the constraints under which we were operating from the outset and on the challenges for STS in policy. (shrink)

What happens when neuroscientific knowledges move from laboratories and clinics into therapeutic settings concerned with the care of children? ‘Brain-based parenting’ is a set of discourses and practices emerging at the confluence of attachment theory, neuroscience, psychotherapy and social work. The neuroscientific knowledges involved understand affective states such as fear, anger and intimacy as dynamic patterns of coordination between brain localities, as well as flows of biochemical signals via hormones such as cortisol. Drawing on our own attempts to adopt brain-based (...) parenting, and engaging with various strands and critiques of new materialism and affect theory, we explore the ways in which the social sciences and humanities might fruitfully engage with neuroscientific concepts and affects. How does science-affected indeterminacy, with all its promises of ontological and experiential agency, help us to observe, wait, bind or hold together volatile mixtures of habit, speech and action? (shrink)

Despite the many turns that philosophy of technology has undergone in recent decades, the question of the nature and limits of technological determinism has been neglected, because it was considered as solved and overcome, and therefore not worth further discussion. This paper once again raises the problem of TD, by trying to save the opposing, but complementary elements of truth of the two main forms of TD that I shall call “nomological” and “normative”: technology is all-pervasive and has an inexorable (...) capacity for extending itself into every field of human life, and we have a capacity to counteract and orient technology, at least in some measure. In order to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent claims, the key move for my argument is a brief analysis of the notion of scientific experiment from the perspective of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. As a result, two senses of technology are distinguished, which I shall call respectively “reflective” and “methodological.” From the point of view of this distinction, the all-pervasiveness and inexorability of technology and the in principle irreducibility of human persons to technology—which nomological and normative TD assert dialectically one against the other—can be reconciled. Among other things, this requires the rejection of the widely held assumption, made both by nomological and normative TD, that technology is a cultural field whose contents can be neatly separated from the rest of human culture. This thesis should be replaced by the more qualified claim of the reflective unity and the methodological multiplicity of technology. (shrink)

Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...) We show that positivists like Cortina and Edwards offer no rigorous theoretical or empirical justifications to substantiate their claims, let alone critique ours. Following Powell, we point to how classical pragmatism understands ‘purpose’ in scientific pursuits while also providing an alternative to the dogmas of positivism and related philosophical positions. In place of dogmatic, unscientific cries about an abstract and therefore always-unobservable ‘reality,’ we invite all organizational scholars to join us in shifting the discussion about quantitative research towards empirically grounded scientific inquiry. This makes the ethics of actual people and their practices central to quantitative research, including the thoughts, discourses, and behaviors of researchers who are always in particular places doing particular things. We propose that quantitative researchers can thus start to think about their research practices as a kind of work, rather than having the status of a kind of dogma. We conclude with some implications that this has for future research and education, including the relevance of research and research methods. (shrink)

Climate change assessments rely upon scenarios of socioeconomic developments to conceptualize alternative outcomes for global greenhouse gas emissions. These are used in conjunction with climate models to make projections of future climate. Specifically, the estimations of greenhouse gas emissions based on socioeconomic scenarios constrain climate models in their outcomes of temperatures, precipitation, etc. Traditionally, the fundamental logic of the socioeconomic scenarios—that is, the logic that makes them plausible—is developed and prioritized using methods that are very subjective. This introduces a fundamental (...) challenge for climate change assessment: The veracity of projections of future climate currently rests on subjective ground. We elaborate on these subjective aspects of scenarios in climate change research. We then consider an alternative method for developing scenarios, a systems dynamics approach called ‘Cross-Impact Balance’ (CIB) analysis. We discuss notions of ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’ as criteria for distinguishing appropriate scenario methods for climate change research. We distinguish seven distinct meanings of ‘objective,’ and demonstrate that CIB analysis is more objective than traditional subjective approaches. However, we also consider criticisms concerning which of the seven meanings of ‘objective’ are appropriate for scenario work. Finally, we arrive at conclusions regarding which meanings of ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity’ are relevant for climate change research. Because scientific assessments uncover knowledge relevant to the responses of a real, independently existing climate system, this requires scenario methodologies employed in such studies to also uphold the seven meanings of ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity.’. (shrink)

The national-level scenarios project NanoFutures focuses on the social, political, economic, and ethical implications of nanotechnology, and is initiated by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (CNS-ASU). The project involves novel methods for the development of plausible visions of nanotechnology-enabled futures, elucidates public preferences for various alternatives, and, using such preferences, helps refine future visions for research and outreach. In doing so, the NanoFutures project aims to address a central question: how to deliberate the social implications (...) of an emergent technology whose outcomes are not known. The solution pursued by the NanoFutures project is twofold. First, NanoFutures limits speculation about the technology to plausible visions. This ambition introduces a host of concerns about the limits of prediction, the nature of plausibility, and how to establish plausibility. Second, it subjects these visions to democratic assessment by a range of stakeholders, thus raising methodological questions as to who are relevant stakeholders and how to activate different communities so as to engage the far future. This article makes the dilemmas posed by decisions about such methodological issues transparent and therefore articulates the role of plausibility in anticipatory governance. (shrink)

This paper explicates the philosophical and epistemological background of the MIRRORS project, which is the starting point of the various contributions in this issue. Developments in the philosophy of science will be discussed, especially the watershed work of Kuhn, in order to analyze further developments in the sociology of science, particularly starting from the Strong Programme. Finally, it will be shown how a multidisciplinary approach in Science & Technology (S&T) studies, as opposed to an interdisciplinary one, is to be preferred. (...) Specifically, the connection between this approach and the modelling and idealizational approaches to science is stressed and defended as the best available approach for the formation of a conscientious democratic knowledge-based society. (shrink)

Long presented as a universal policy-recipe for social prosperity and economic growth, the promise of innovation seems to be increasingly in question, giving way to a new vision of progress in which society is advanced as a central enabler of technoeconomic development. Frameworks such as “Responsible” or “Mission-oriented” Innovation, for example, have become commonplace parlance and practice in the governance of the innovation–society nexus. In this paper, we study the dynamics by which this “social fix” to technoscience has gained legitimacy (...) in institutions of global governance by investigating recent projects at two international organizations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission, to mainstream “Responsible Innovation” frameworks and instruments across countries. Our analysis shows how the turn to societal participation in both organizations relies on a new deficit logic—a democratic deficit of innovation—that frames a lack of societal engagement in innovation governance as a major barrier to the uptake and dissemination of new technologies. These deficit politics enable global governance institutions to present “Responsible Innovation” frameworks as the solution and to claim authority over the coproduction of particular forms of democracy and innovation as intertwined pillars of a market-liberal international order. (shrink)

Is a policy-friendly philosophy of science possible? In order to respond this question, I consider a particular instance of contemporary philosophy of science, the semantic view of scientific theories, by placing it in the broader methodological landscape of the integration of philosophy of science into STS (Science and Technology Studies) as a component of the overall contribution of the latter to science policy. In that context, I defend a multi-disciplinary methodological integration of the special discipline composing STS against a reductionist (...) interdisciplinary unification, arguing that if STS wants to contribute to policy advising by constructing narratives of science practice feasible for science policy both in terms of descriptive completeness and intelligibility, then it must avoid the explanatory reductionism tendencies of special disciplines in interdisciplinary contexts. This would favour, at the same time, a relaxation of esoteric language. On this basis, it seems that the semantic view is one right candidate among other approaches in the philosophy of science for facilitating the integration of the methodologically different contributions to STS toward policy objectives. In fact, besides offering a more realistic and descriptively complete picture of science practice with respect to its predecessor in the philosophy of science, namely the syntactic view, the semantic view is also able to capture some aspects of science practice that elude even sociological approaches to STS, thus inviting different perspective on the same subject matter. (shrink)

This article examines the communication networks within and between science and technology studies (STS) and the history of science. In particular, journal relatedness data are used to analyze some of the structural features of their disciplinary identities and relationships. The results first show that, although the history of science is more than half a century older than STS, the size of the STS network is more than twice that of the history of science network. Further, while a majority of the (...) journals in the STS network are connected by weak ties, about half of the history of science network consists of strong ties. The history of science network is thus more cohesive than the STS network. The relatively strong cohesion within the history of science network is associated with comparatively high degrees of intra-disciplinary communication, but comparatively weak ties to only a few related disciplines. The analysis also shows that very few members of the history of science cliques are situated on the shortest path between both specialties. Moreover, given the relatively impermeable nature of the history of science network, the latter partially depends on STS to reach some of the neighboring disciplines. (shrink)

This study presents situational analysis as a suitable framework for the development of qualitatively-oriented interdisciplinary research in the social sciences. The article argues that even though interdisciplinary research is considered a coveted form of research practice, it is not particularly well developed in the social sciences. This is partly due to institutional barriers, but also because the majority of disciplines lack a suitable theoretical and methodological framework capable of unifying a variety of theoretical bases and primarily methodological processes. Situational analysis, (...) which is based on the work of second generation grounded theorists, is ideal for this purpose, as it offers a frame for theoretical, epistemological, empirical and methodological interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

The paper considers the notion of Science Policy from a postcolonial perspective. It examines the theoretical implications of the recent trend to include emerging and developing countries in international Science Policies by way of the case study of Switzerland. This country’s new international science policy instruments and measures have challenged the classical distinction between international scientific cooperation and development cooperation, with consequences on standards and evaluation criteria. The analysis reveals that the underlying assumptions of the concept of Science Policy perpetuate (...) traditional asymmetries in the global political economy of science. The paper suggests that the present legacy of Science Policy institutions and practices needs to be transformed to reflect an increasingly diverse spectrum of scientific purposes and traditions. It offers a revised set of foundational assumptions on Science Policy and, more broadly, proposes a fresh point of entry for the field of Science & Technology Studies to contribute to the Science Policy discourse. (shrink)

Machine learning has become a key component of contemporary information systems. Unlike prior information systems explicitly programmed in formal languages, ML systems infer rules from data. This paper shows what this difference means for the critical analysis of socio-technical systems based on machine learning. To provide a foundation for future critical analysis of machine learning-based systems, we engage with how the term is framed and constructed in self-education resources. For this, we analyze machine learning tutorials, an important information source for (...) self-learners and a key tool for the formation of the practices of the machine learning community. Our analysis identifies canonical examples of machine learning as well as important misconceptions and problematic framings. Our results show that machine learning is presented as being universally applicable and that the application of machine learning without special expertise is actively encouraged. Explanations of machine learning algorithms are missing or strongly limited. Meanwhile, the importance of data is vastly understated. This has implications for the manifestation of social inequalities through machine learning-based systems. (shrink)

When the journal Minerva was founded in 1962, science and higher educational issues were high on the agenda, lending impetus to the interdisciplinary field of “Science Studies” qua “Science Policy Studies.” As government expenditures for promoting various branches of science increased dramatically on both sides of the East-West Cold War divide, some common issues regarding research management also emerged and with it an interest in closer academic interaction in the areas of history and policy of science. Through a close reading (...) of many early issues of Minerva but also of its later competitor journal Science Studies (now called Social Studies of Science) the paper traces the initial optimism of an academically based Science Studies dialogue across the Cold War divide and the creation in 1971 of the International Commission for Science Policy Studies as a bridging forum, one that Minerva strangely chose to ignore. In this light, attention is drawn to aspects of the often forgotten history of Science Studies in the former Soviet Union and the Eastern European block. Reviewed also are several early discussions that are still relevant today: e.g., regarding differing concepts of Big Science, science and democracy, autonomy in higher education and what conditions are necessary to sustain academic freedom and scientific integrity (some of Edward Shils’ primary concerns). Finally, it is noted how the question of quantitative methods to measure scientific productivity lay at the heart of a “Science of Science” movement of the 1960s has re-emerged in a new form integral to the notion of a “Science of Science Policy.”. (shrink)

As a worldwide social movement, skepticism aims to promote science and critical thinking. However, by analyzing texts published in the magazine of the Finnish skepticism movement between 1988 and 2017, we find that the movement carries out its mission in a way that maintains and produces gendered hierarchies. We identify six forms of gendered boundary-work in the data: science as masculine, questioning women, complementary and alternative medicine as feminine, debating the status of gender studies, gender within the skepticism movement, and (...) supporting equality. Gender is an important aspect of the boundary-work undertaken by the movement to establish boundaries between science and nonscience. The forms of gendered boundary-work contribute to the idea of “true” science as a masculine and male-dominated domain, excluding women from both science and the skepticism movement. Even when the exclusions are subtle, hidden, or humorous, they nevertheless produce gendered inequalities by excluding women, belittling women’s knowledge production, or granting women-only dismissive recognition. Indeed, our analysis indicates that there is a need to look deeply into science-based social movements: exclusive structural tactics are part and parcel of such movements’ mundane activities, as our examples from Skepsis ry’s popular magazine demonstrate. (shrink)

In this article we develop an account of justice in the distribution of knowledge. We first argue that knowledge is a fundamental interest that grounds claims of justice due to its role in individuals’ deliberations about the common good, their personal good and the pursuit thereof. Second, we identify the epistemic basic structure of a society, namely, the institutions that determine individuals’ opportunities for acquiring knowledge and discuss what justice requires of them. Our main contention is that a systematic lack (...) of opportunity to acquire knowledge one needs as an individual and a citizen because of the way the epistemic basic structure of a society is organized is an injustice. Finally, we discuss how our account relates to John Rawls’s influential theory of justice. (shrink)

For the past three decades or so, the field of Science and Technology Studies has shed light on the interrelationship between modern science and technology, on one side, and contemporary society, on the other. A majority of this knowledge and insights are situated in the context of Western societies, or more precisely, in economically and technologically advanced societies in Western Europe and North America. However, STS has much to offer to the discourse of science and technology in the Global South, (...) a territory characterized by developmental processes. Insights from different schools of thoughts in STS are arguably not only relevant but also applicable to unveil the root cause of problems that many developing societies are facing today. To make this possible, an STS-informed framework is developed to replace the Triple Helix model, which is currently a dominant perspective that prompts how science, technology, and innovation are structurally organized in the developing world. Two steps are taken in this agenda. First, limitations of the Triple Helix are exposed, and second, a new approach drawing on STS concepts is offered as an alternative model that takes into account structural, cultural, and epistemological features of technoscience. (shrink)

The environmental and social costs of consumer societies have increasingly been recognized. Achieving sustainable household consumption requires an understanding of the underlying roots of current consumption levels. Using the case study of menstrual care practices, different theoretical frameworks—or narratives—for understanding household consumption are evaluated. The author argues that theories of consumption that focus on individual choice based on assessments of convenience or cleanliness, or only on cultural imperatives need to be expanded to take account of the wider political–economic context. Using (...) commoditization theory helps explain not only why mass-produced, disposable menstrual products are dominant in free market societies but also why certain theories of consumption are more prevalent. (shrink)

The role of the individual scientist as a socialization agent is increasingly emphasized in science policy. This article analyzes offshore wind scientists’ narratives about science–technology–society relations and their role in them. It particularly focuses on the nuanced and detailed reasons that scientists give for their level of engagement with society. The analysis is based on semistructured individual and focus group interviews with thirty-five scientists. It finds a diversity of narratives related to the questions of whether socialization of technology is needed (...) and which approaches to socialization scientists should pursue. The six narratives identified are upstream engagement, design against resistance, the outreaching scientist, the difficulty of outreach, the outsourcing scientist, and disembedded development of technology. Despite the importance attributed to scientists for the socialization of science and technology, most interviewed scientists did not embrace their role as socialization agent. Based on the scientists’ narratives, this article argues that we should rethink both who should be responsible for socialization and what should be the object of sciences’ engagement with society. (shrink)

The article examines science-policy conversations mediated by social science in attempts to govern, or set up terms for, scientific research. The production of social science research accounts about science faces challenges in the domains of emerging technosciences, such as nano. Constructing notions of success and failure, participants in science actively engage in the interpretation of policy notions, such as the societal relevance of their research. Industrial engagement is one of the prominent themes both in policy renditions of governable science, and (...) in the participants’ attempts to achieve societally relevant research, often oriented into the future. How do we, as researchers, go about collecting, recording, and analyzing such future stories? I examine a series of recent interviews conducted in a number of US universities, and in particular at a university campus on the West Coast of the United States. The research engages participants through interviews, which can be understood as occasions for testing the interpretive flexibility of nano as “good” scientific practice and of what counts as societal relevance, under what circumstances and in view of what kind of audiences. (shrink)

Biotechnology's promises has been widely recognized as a major enterprise accelerating the commodification of the biological. After the 9/11 events and the subsequent anthrax letters, biotechnologies have additionally been described as contributing to the construction of biosecurity risks. This paper proposes to investigate the collaboration between the FBI and the DIYbio network as a case study illustrating the productive entanglement of biological risks and promises. To do so, the paper explores the social construction of risks and promises associated with the (...) vision of distributed biotechnologies as enacted in this collaboration. We argue that the FBI needs to police the DIYbio network in order to disseminate a specific notion of bioterrorist risk, while, in a counter-intuitive manner, the DIYbio network benefits from being policed by the FBI as it helps them disseminate their socio-technological vision. If the entanglement of technoscientific risks and promises is a well established finding of the STS literature, our case study suggests that such entanglement now additionally comprises the sphere of biosecurity and the promises of a distributed biotechnology available to everyone. (shrink)

The purpose of this descriptive and exploratory study was to measure the perceptions regarding a variety of science, technology, and society topics among a sample of Uruguay underclassmen college students. These perceptions were compared with the viewpoints of a group of professional scientists. It was found that, for some STS topics, such as the role of humans in global climate change, the perceptions of Uruguay underclassmen and scientists were statistically identical. For topics, such as the problem of human overpopulation, both (...) groups find themselves on the same side of the issue but with a statistically significant gap between them. Uruguay underclassmen and professional scientists have opposite views on STS topics such as the use of animals for scientific research. A sizable proportion of Uruguay underclassmen were not familiar with several STS topics, such as the scientific work of the International Space Station. Implications for formal and informal STEM education efforts are discussed. (shrink)

The practice of justifying scientific explanations generates argumentative patterns in which several types of arguments may play a role. This paper is aimed at identifying these patterns on the basis of an exploration of the institutional conventions regarding the nature, the shape and the quality of scientific explanations as reflected in the writings of influential philosophers of science. First, a basic pattern for justifying scientific explanations is described. Then, two types of extensions of this pattern are presented. These extensions are (...) derived from philosophical accounts of requirements for the quality of explanations and the choice of the best explanation from a number of candidate explanations respectively. The description of the second extension will make clear how pragmatic argumentation plays a role in argumentative patterns within the scientific domain. (shrink)

Collingridge’s dilemma is one of the most well-established paradigms presenting a challenge to Technology Assessment (TA). This paper aims to reconstruct the dilemma from an analytic perspective and explicates three assumptions underlying the dilemma: the temporal, knowledge and power/actor assumptions. In the light of the recent transformation of the science, technology and innovation system—in the age of technoscience —these underlying assumptions are called into question. The same result is obtained from a normative angle by Collingridge himself; he criticises the dilemma (...) and advances concepts on how to keep a technology controllable. This paper stresses the relevance of the dilemma and of Collingridge’s own ideas on how to deal with the dilemma. Today, a positive interpretation of technoscience for effective TA is possible. (shrink)

Scientists and clinicians are starting to translate genomic discoveries from research labs to the clinical setting. In the process, big data genomic technologies are both a risk to individual privacy and a benefit to personalized medicine. There is an opportunity to address the social and ethical demands of various stakeholders and shape the adoption of diagnostic genome technologies. We discuss ethical and practical issues associated with the networking of genomics by comparing how the European Union and North America understand and (...) practice notions of privacy and consent in research. An overview of international policy suggests the embedding of genomics within digital networks and the Internet creates conditions that challenge the management of privacy and consent in the age of big data. The risks of re-identification, informational harms, and data security vulnerabilities are issues that need to be better addressed in the clinical setting to reconcile the unpredictable pathway of research and practice in the networked information society. (shrink)