Mit Robotik, Digitalisierung, softwaregesteuerten Präzisionsinstrumenten und hochkomplexen Simulationsverfahren wird heute Technik zur treibenden Kraft der wissenschaftlichen Forschungspraxis. Gleichzeitig sieht sich die universitäre Forschung wachsenden gesellschaftlichen Einflüssen ausgesetzt und nähert sich selbst immer mehr der Industrieforschung an, woraus sich neue Fragen nach den Werten und der Objektivität der Wissenschaft ergeben. Derartig weitreichende Veränderungen haben zahlreiche Spekulationen darüber provoziert, ob sich in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte gegenwärtig ein Epochenbruch vollzieht. Dieser Sammelband setzt sich aus philosophischen, historischen und kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven mit den Epochenbruchthesen auseinander, bestätigt (...) und bestreitet ihn. Die Beiträge in diesem Band setzen sich mit der These vom Epochenbruch vor dem Hintergrund verschiedener Disziplinen auseinander, darunter Wissenschaftsphilosophie und -geschichte, sozialwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen über Wissenschaft sowie kultur- und medientheoretische Studien zu Wissenschaft und Technik. Die erste Gruppe der Beiträge versucht, die These von einem Epochenbruch im Ganzen zu beurteilen. Den Anfang bilden mehrere Beiträge, die die Debatte eröffnen, indem sie starke Thesen für oder gegen die Vorstellung vorlegen, dass sich das wissenschaftliche Unterfangen in den letzten Jahrzehnten völlig neu orientiert hat. Die Autoren in der zweiten Gruppe setzen sich unter einem spezifischen Gesichtspunkt mit der These auseinander. Sie stellen bestimmte Konzepte in den Mittelpunkt, greifen spezifische technische Entwicklungen heraus oder betrachten einzelne Praktiken und Anwendungskontexte. Diese spezifischen Konzepte, Technologien und Praxisbereiche dienen als Testfeld für die umfassendere These. (shrink)

Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history. -/- This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for and against (...) the epochal break thesis in light of historical antecedents. Contributors discuss topics such as: science as a continuing epistemological enterprise; the decline of the individual scientist and the rise of communities; the intertwining of scientific and technological needs; links to prior practices and ways of thinking; the alleged divide between mode-1 and mode-2 research methods; the commodification of university science; and the shift from the scientific to a technological enterprise. Additionally, they examine the epochal break thesis using specific examples, including the transition from laboratory to real world experiments; the increased reliance on computer imaging; how analog and digital technologies condition behaviors that shape the object and beholder; the cultural significance of humanoid robots; the erosion of scientific quality in experimentation; and the effect of computers on prediction at the expense of explanation. -/- Whether these events represent a historic break in scientific theory, practice, and methodology is disputed. What they do offer is an important occasion for philosophical analysis of the epistemic, institutional and moral questions affecting current and future scientific pursuits. (shrink)

The presented paper addresses the concept of technoscience and its possible implications for technology assessment. Drawing on the discourse about converging technologies, it formulates the assumption that a general shift within science from epistemic cultures to techno-epistemic cultures lies at the heart of the propagated convergence between nano-, bio-, info- and cogno-sciences and technologies. This shift is adequately captured—so the main thesis—by the technoscience label. The paper elaborates on the shared characteristics of the new technosciences, especially their hybrid character and (...) their non-linear integration of basic research, object construction and technological innovation. Recent calls for new modes of technology governance (e.g. for upstream technology assessment and public participation) are discussed against the background of these technoscience characteristics. It is concluded that an adequate model of emerging technosciences and a detailed understanding of their characteristics is of paramount importance for current practices of technology assessment. (shrink)

Cheng Hao was a Confucian thinker during the Song dynasty. He strove to restore and reconstruct classical Confucianism. Although his theses were inherited from the Confucian classic, including the Anatects, Mencius, the Classic of Changes, and the Doctrine of the Mean, his interpretations offer learners new insight and perspective in understanding Confucianism. He and his younger brother, Cheng Yi, are commonly referred to as the “Two Chengs” for their parallel efforts in laying the groundwork of Neo-Confucianism.

The concept of life plays a crucial role in the debate on synthetic biology. The first part of this chapter outlines the controversial debate on the status of the concept of life in current science and philosophy. Against this background, synthetic biology and the discourse on its scientific and societal consequences is revealed as an exception. Here, the concept of life is not only used as buzzword but also discussed theoretically and links the ethical aspects with the epistemological prerequisites and (...) the ontological consequences of synthetic biology. The second part examines this point of intersection and analyses some of the issues which are discussed in terms of the concept of life. The third part turns to the history of the concept of life. It offers an examination of scientific and philosophical discourses on life at the turn of the 20th century and suggests a surprising result: In the light of this history, synthetic biology leads to well-known debates, arguments, notions and questions. But it is concluded that the concept of life is too ambiguous and controversial to be useful for capturing the actual practice of synthetic biology. In the fourth part I argue that with regard to the ethical evaluation of synthetic biology, the ambiguity of the concept of life is not as problematic as sometimes held because other challenges are more important. The question whether the activity of synthetic biological systems should be conceived as life or not is primarily theoretical. (shrink)

The term " technoscience " gained philosophical significance in the 1970s but it aroused ambivalent views. On the one hand, several scholars have used it to shed light on specific features of recent scientific research, especially with regard to emerging technologies that blur boundaries (such as natural/artificial, machine/living being, knowing/making and so on); on the other hand, as a matter of fact " technoscience " did not prompt great interest among philosophers. In the French area, a depreciative meaning prevails: " (...) technoscience " means the contamination of science by management and capitalism. Some even argue that " technoscience " is not a concept at all, just a buzzword. In this chapter, on the contrary, we make the case for the constitution of a philosophical concept of technoscience based on the characterization of its objects in order to scrutinize their epistemological, ontological, political and ethical dimensions. (shrink)

The article examines how the epistemologies of Islam and modern science are reconciled in the writings of the contemporary Turkish Sunni Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen (b. 1938), one of the once most influential yet vastly controversial religious leaders in contemporary Turkey. Through a close reading of his texts on science, the article analyzes how Gülen defines the scientific practice as an ethical act of reading the universe with heart and mind, and as a path in which one can fully grasp (...) the magnificence of God. Framing with references to Sufism, Gülen also explains science as a domain where Islamic ethics can be practiced. The article shows that Gülen’s project of Islamization of science is not limited to the domain of knowledge, but rather comprises a comprehensive cultural transformation led by a new epistemic approach to contest the secular hegemony in the country. Therefore, Gülen’s politics of Islam at large should be understood as a project of transforming the episteme, or the hegemonic regime of knowledge, in society, from secular to Islamic. However, the article also notes, somehow paradoxically, in his harmonization of the Sufi notions with secular science, Gülen cannot escape from being captured by the very epistemology of the modern science. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of access in relation to globalization, feminism and information society. It argues that the virtual settings of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are beginning to place significant emphasis on sociospatial as well as geospatial understandings of the world and the interactions that take place within it. The article examines the extreme material and other associated inequalities of contemporary globalization, and the concentration of technological development and power in the rich economies. Historical developments related to these (...) factors are discussed, including the gendered nature of technologies and social processes shaping their production, application and use. It is argued that feminist theory and practice is relevant to broad debates about inequality of access in the information age, as well as to those concentrating specifically on gender and women. The tension between liberal/neoliberal focus on 'equality' and the 'grotesque' levels of contemporary inequality is raised. It is argued that feminism's long-standing and extensive critique of the problematic masculinist and partial nature of liberal/neoliberal theory, and its framing of agency, offers a major contribution in addressing this. Cyberfeminism works in theory and practice on horizontal networks and consciousness-raising about their potential, arguing that the era of the cybercitizen raises new and important risks of marginalization, on the basis of gender and other factors, and new forms of empowerment. (shrink)

Dominant social sciences approaches to complexity suggest that awareness of complexity in late-modern society comes from various recent scientific insights. By examining today’s plant and human genomics sciences, I question this from both ends: first suggesting that typical public culture was already aware of particular salient forms of complexity, such as limits to predictive knowledge ; second, showing how up-to-date genomics science expresses both complexity and its opposites, predictive determinism and reductionism, as coexistent representations of nature and scientific knowledge. I (...) suggest we can understand this self-authored epistemic confusion in modern science by avoiding ‘the usual suspects’ – fading simpler discourses left over from previous scientific times; media oversimplifications; or the need to ‘simplify’ to essentials, for ignorant publics – and looking instead at the silent imaginations of extra-scientific reference groups reflected and projectively performed in scientific discourses-practices themselves. Thus contradictions of complex scientific understandings are systematically created by science’s own embodiment of epistemic commitments influenced by commercial cultures, and by imagined publics who are important new constructed objects of institutional scientific concerns – over authority and trust. New dimensions of complexity thus come alive through paying attention to neglected tacit dimensions of science–society interrelations. (shrink)

Andrew Webster proposes that science and technology studies align itself more thoroughly with practical policy contexts, actors and issues, so as to become more useful, and thus more a regular actor in such worlds. This commentary raises some questions about this approach. First, I note that manifest influence in science or policy or both should not become-by default, or deliberately-a criterion of intellectual quality for STS research work. I distinguish between reflective historical work, which delineates the contingent ways in which (...) existing policy and technoscientific cultures have become entrenched as such inscribed and perhaps dysfunctional institutional habit; and, work of the kind that Webster's three case studies exemplify, that is, geared to influence policy-decision outcomes. I suggest that many of the important issues facing STS-and "policy"-are not explicit "policy-decision issues" as such, but implicit "policy syndromes" that need naming, diagnosing and open, if enforced, institutional reflection. (shrink)

: Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, I use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn to Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Haraway's reading of vampires (1997), retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Drawing on several feminist and anti-racist theorists, 1 use the trope of the vampire to unravel how whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality feed on the same set of disavowals—of the body, of the Other, of fluidity, of dependency itself. I then turn tojewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories for a counternarrative that, along with Donna Harauiay's reading of vampires, retools concepts of kinship and self that undergird racism, sexism, and heterosexism in contemporary U.S. culture.

Insects and ‘the swarm’ as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as ‘drone swarms’, which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be ‘robots’ as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised (masculine) warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist (...) analysis requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti (2002), cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the ‘terrorist’ enemy represented as swarmlike as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles (1999, p. 47) describes as a double vision that ‘looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it’. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the ‘Borg’ in Star Trek (1987–1994, 1995–2001, 1996), Alien (1979) and The Fly (1958, 1986) to more positive representations of the ‘becoming-insect’ as possible feminist Utopia in Gilman's Herland (2015 [1915]) and Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1989 [1976]). Posthuman warfare also contains the possibilities of both appropriating and rewriting antagonisms of masculine and feminine in the embodiment of the subject of war in the swarm. This piece seeks to analyse new ways of feminist theorising of the relations of power and violence in the embodiment of war as the swarm. (shrink)

This paper explores alternative approaches to the conception of scientific literacy, drawing on cultural studies and emerging practices in language arts as its framework. The paper reviews historic tensions in the understanding of scientific literacy and then draws on the multiliteracies movement in language arts to suggest a scientific multiliteracy. This is explored through analyzing the writing practices of groups other than scientists who for a variety of reasons must engage science. Specifically the paper examines zine writers who are ‘professional’ (...) human research subjects, i.e. derive a part of their annual income by signing up for psychological and medical experiments, and science fiction fans, who produce their own texts in response to the narratives they love. The paper argues that these literacy practices add to traditional notions of scientific literacy possibilities of history, fiction, critique, as well as more traditional empiricism embraced by national standards. The paper concludes by considering the ambivalence towards science in both of these popular scientific literacy communities’ writings, arguing that what multiliteracies offers is a possibility of a more nuanced, more appropriately ambivalent, and more politically and ethically engaged subject of science than offered by the current version of literacy dominating science educational discourse. (shrink)

This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized (...) database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies scholars in their construction. (shrink)

This article examines argument structures and strategies in pro and con argumentation about the possibility of human-level artificial intelligence (AI) in the near term future. It examines renewed controversy about strong AI that originated in a prominent 1999 book and continued at major conferences and in periodicals, media commentary, and Web-based discussions through 2002. It will be argued that the book made use of implicit, anticipatory refutation to reverse prevailing value hierarchies related to AI. Drawing on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's (1969) (...) study of refutational argument, this study considers points of contact between opposing arguments that emerged in opposing loci, dissociations, and casuistic reasoning. In particular, it shows how perceptions of AI were reframed and rehabilitated through metaphorical language, reversal of the philosophical pair artificial/natural, appeals to the paradigm case, and use of the loci of quantity and essence. Furthermore, examining responses to the book in subsequent arguments indicates the topoi characteristic of the rhetoric of technology advocacy. (shrink)

Research at the intersections of feminism, biology and philosophy provides dynamic starting grounds for this discussion of genetic technologies and animals. With a focus on animal bodies, I will examine moral implications of the genetic engineering of “domesticated” animals—primarily pigs and chickens—for the purposes of human consumption. Concepts of natural and artificial, contamination and purity, integrity and fragmentation and mind and body will feature in the discussion. In this respect, Margaret Atwood’s novel, Oryx and Crake, serves as a cogent medium (...) for exploring these highly contentious practices and ideas as it provides hypothetical narratives of possibility. Moreover, it is used to highlight contemporary hegemonic assumptions and values in ways that make them visible. Particular attention is paid to issues of growing human organs in pigs for xenotransplantation (resulting, for Atwood, in “pigoons”) and the ultimate end of the intensive factory farming of chickens through the genetic engineering of ‘mindless’ chicken tumours (or, as Atwood calls them, “ChickieNobs”). Integral to these philosophical considerations is the provocative question of the genetic modification of animal bodies as a means to end the suffering of domestic food animals. The ultimate implications of this question include an ongoing sensory and moral deprivation of human experience, potentially resulting in a future mechanomophosis, the extreme manifestation of an existing mechanomorphism. (shrink)

Within recent feminist theorizing the significance of social location has been overestimated, while the power of argument has been underestimated. We do not need to retreat to notions of ‘story-telling’ as the strongest claim to knowledge possible by feminist analysis. Rather, we should draw on the power of argument. This article addresses some dilemmas in debates around the projects of recognition, redistribution and transformation, and the claims to knowledge made in each. Further, it argues for the integration of the concerns (...) of equality and difference. The theoretical argument is supported by examples drawn from practical politics, including the development of democratic procedures, postcolonialism, the UNDP indicators sometimes used in development policy and suffrage movements. (shrink)

Synthetic biologists are extremely concerned with responsible research and innovation. This paper critically assesses their culture of responsibility. Their notion of responsibility has been so far focused on the identification of risks, and in their prudential attitude synthetic biologists consider that the major risks can be prevented with technological solutions. Therefore they are globally opposed to public interference or political regulations and tend to self-regulate by bringing a few social scientists or ethicists on board. This article emphasizes that ethics lies (...) beyond prudence and requires a cultural evaluation of the modes of existence of the various microorganisms designed by synthetic biologists, independently of their potential applications. (shrink)

While some scholars have addressed the common cultural tropes about trans people, the way media might sometimes legitimate violence against trans people, and even take part in forms of violence, has not been analysed. This is what this article sets out to do, through an examination of how a verbal and physical attack against black trans women, videotaped and uploaded on a platform for user-generated entertainment, was framed in a way which repeated the symbolic violence already at play in the (...) physical encounter. The article addresses the way this depiction of real violence, framed as entertainment, and coupled with identity invalidation both legitimizes physical violence and delegitimizes black trans feminine people as victims of violence. (shrink)

The paper discusses two answers to the question, How to address the harmful effects of technology? The first response proposes a complete separation of science from culture, religion, and ethics. The second response finds harm in the logic and method of science itself. The paper deploys a feminist technoscience approach to overcome these accounts of neutral or deterministic technological agency. In this technoscience perspective, agency is not an attribute of autonomous human users alone but enacted and performed in socio-material configurations (...) of people and technology and their ‘intra-actions’. This understanding of agency is proposed as an alternative that opens up for the reconfiguration of design and use for more ethical effects, such as the cultivation of cognitive justice, the equal treatment and representation of different ways of knowing the world. The implication of this approach is that design becomes an adaptive and ongoing intra-active process in which more desirable configurations of people and technology become possible. (shrink)

This article contributes to contemporary philosophy of technology by carrying out a diffractive reading of Ernst Cassirer’s “Form und Technik” (1930) and Gilbert Simondon’s Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (1958). Both thinkers, who are here brought together for the first time, stood on the brink of the defining bifurcations of twentieth-century philosophy. However, in their endeavor to come to grips with the “being” of technology, Cassirer and Simondon, each in their own way, were prompted to develop an ontology of (...) emergence that gives ontological priority to “technicity,” that is, to technology considered in its efficacy or operative functioning. By reading Cassirer’s and Simondon’s insights through one another, we aim to further develop this ontology of emergence, and, simultaneously, to demonstrate the relevance of these thinkers for present-day theorizing. As we hope to show, the insistence on the ontological force of technological apparatuses transverses received philosophical and ontological divides and revitalizes the notions of “nature” and “the human,” which are now understood as coevolving with technology. (shrink)

Medical reproductive technologies have generated two new types of patients: ‘couples’ in infertility treatment and ‘fetuses’ in prenatal medicine. Using concepts from science and technology studies, specifically Latour’s (1993) notions of hybridity, mediation and purification, this article argues that these new patients are constructed in the very process of technological intervention in women’s bodies, while at the same time their constitutive role is erased from the medico-scientific accounts of these practices. Focusing on two discursive patterns found in the scientific discourses (...) on IVF as a treatment for male infertility, and fetal surgery for various congenital problems, the article shows how conceiving of couples and fetuses as patients allows many of the actual interventions on women to be ‘deleted’ from the accounts, while simultaneously presenting these interventions as being primarily about the treatment of men and children. The article exemplifies how a (feminist) constructivist analysis of the co-constitutive relation between technology and bodies (‘nature’) can avoid essentalism while retaining a critical perspective. (shrink)

Network is a device for organizing and conceptualizing non-linear complexity. Networks defy narrative, chronology and thus also genealogy because they entail a multiplicity of traces. Networks problematize boundaries and centrality but intensify our ability to think in terms of flows and simultaneity. As a concept, network has been highly conducive to theorizing phenomena and processes such as globalization, digital media, speed, symbiosis and complexity. This in turn enables us to rethink what constitutes the foundations of intelligence, knowledge and even life (...) itself. One particularly useful application of network as a concept is the notion of the gift, which is often seen as the archetypical figure for understanding the nature of economics and social relationships. (shrink)

The paper discusses two answers to the question, How to address the harmful effects of technology? The first response proposes a complete separation of science from culture, religion, and ethics. The second response finds harm in the logic and method of science itself. The paper deploys a feminist technoscience approach to overcome these accounts of neutral or deterministic technological agency. In this technoscience perspective, agency is not an attribute of autonomous human users alone but enacted and performed in socio-material configurations (...) of people and technology and their ‘intra-actions’. This understanding of agency is proposed as an alternative that opens up for the reconfiguration of design and use for more ethical effects, such as the cultivation of cognitive justice, the equal treatment and representation of different ways of knowing the world. The implication of this approach is that design becomes an adaptive and ongoing intra-active process in which more desirable configurations of people and technology become possible. (shrink)

Las tecnologías de la inteligencia artificial (IA) hacen emerger con mayor fuerza una pregunta central para la filosofía contemporánea: ¿cómo se generan los desplazamientos éticos a través de la producción de nuevas formas de convivencia tecnológica? Saber en qué consisten estos desplazamientos y si contribuyen, o no, a determinados tipos de convivencia es más urgente que precipitarse a una producción de normativa que no se enfrenta a los cambios inherentes al nuevo entorno. Pero una de las consecuencias que apuntan en (...) este enfoque es que la programación, sometida a las lógicas de la anticipación, no puede resolver el problema simplemente. La programación tiende a la formación de nichos o esferas en los que los individuos se desenvuelven perdiendo visión de la complejidad; la delegación de los cálculos a las máquinas hace que disminuya no sólo la capacidad del cálculo aritmético sino la imaginación matemática, creando nichos epistémicos crecientemente reservados a las máquinas; la minería de datos borra las diferencias entre lo público y lo privado, afianzando modos de comportamiento que esquivan la autorreflexión y el escrutinio de nuestras acciones en relación al bien común. Pero ¿pueden los programas desenvolverse en un sentido contrario, fortaleciendo las destrezas epistémicas, haciendo visible la complejidad, la participación política y la diversificación de bienes comunes en un mundo tecnológicamente denso? O en otros términos, ¿podemos encontrar en ellos claves para una ética robusta de la convivencia tecnológica? Las contribuciones de este número desgranan las transformaciones en las nociones de autonomía, creatividad y precariedad en el contexto de la IA. (shrink)

Male-dominated and sex segregated elite professional and amateur sport1 in North America constitutes a "sport nexus" (Burstyn, 1999; Heywood & Dworkin, 2003) that combines economic and cultural influence to reinforce and perpetuate gender injustice. The sport nexus is an androcentric sex-segregated commercially powerful set of institutions that is highly visible and at the same time almost completely taken for granted to the extent that its anti-democratic impetus goes virtually unnoticed. The sport nexus’s hegemonic role in defining sporting norms (Coakley & (...) Donnelly, 2004) means that its role in shaping lower level amateur and recreational sporting institutions and cultures is highly significant. Fraser (2007) defines gender justice, and hence democracy, in terms of "participatory parity," that is, material and cultural equality for women. The sport nexus itself is characterized by highly gendered occupational segregation (Coventry, 2004). It further contributes to gender injustice, homophobia and transphobia by promoting the ideology of the two sex system (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and gendering citizenship as fundamentally male (Burstyn, 1999). Feminist strategies for sport reformation attempt to reduce or eradicate the role of the sport nexus in legitimating and perpetuating gender injustice. In this article I consider the potential of these strategies and conclude with a set of recommendations for transforming organized sport at both elite and recreational levels. (shrink)

Albert Camus’ reflection in _The Myth of Sisyphus_ presents the absurd, the intrusion of the meaningless and irrational universe into the order and future focus of modern life. Central to Camus’ reading of Sisyphus and his dammed eternal labour, was time. Camus clearly saw that modernity and modern life was predicated on tensions in time. Moderns perceived, and lived, in the timescale of past-present-future. A commitment to chronology that promised an allusion of meaning within a world of essential meaninglessness. Modern (...) law, the law forged by the structural violence of positivism and sovereignty, shared this commitment to time. However, transitions to the digital are presenting different relationships of law and time. Emergent digital legality manifests a Sisyphean closed loop of repeat, return and enclosure, past and future become a blurred undistinguished present. The modern terror of mundane life that Camus tried to recast, seems intensified and totalised in the digital. However, rather than the possibility of the joy of the absurd, there is something else. Sisyphus, Camus imaged, had weathered to look like his rock, but he never merges with it. But in the unfolding of the digital and its legality, the secure subjectivity that Camus exalted is less then certain. This might not be bad. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as (...) a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice. (shrink)

Upon which Christian theological metaphors and models is Donna Haraway's understanding of `cyborg' ontologically dependent, and how and why might it matter? This article explores the possibility that Haraway's cyborg is a saviour-figure, made partially in the image of a transcendent God. It suggests that cyborgs do have an origin story, and that their story is inseparably linked to the theological development of Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history, which is itself linked, arguably, to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution. Taking (...) Haraway at her word, or at least her Christian theological words, reveals a disturbingly indifferent cyborg-God, one perfectly at ease with apocalyptic imagery and feats, but one who does not comprehend that apocalyptic rhetoric was never meant to be taken literally. (shrink)

Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-oriented breeding initiatives, we unpack these terms using perspectives from political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies. By conceptualising the market as an ongoing, relational performance made up of discourses, practices and human and nonhuman actors, we trace (...) how the market is understood as an effective socioeconomic institution for soliciting demand, but also becomes a normative agenda. Construed as a demand variable, the relational and structural dimensions of gender are rendered less visible, which might strengthen rather than transform power relations’ status quo. On the other hand, a feminist science and technology perspective broadens the field of vision not only to the gendered dimensions of crop breeding, but also to the nonhuman actors, such as the crops and traits falling outside the market sphere of interest. By putting political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies into conversation, the article contributes to the development of a feminist political agronomy. (shrink)

This article considers the ‘creative education’ of influential Aotearoa/new Zealand art educator Elwyn Richardson, which is based on what he calls the ‘discovery method’: the ‘concentrated study of material from [students’] own surroundings’. Through a game that his students play with tyres, we explore the role that tools play in Richardson’s classroom and in the imaginary ‘worlding’ of his students’ play. By taking the ‘early world’ of the children’s development to be a product of the tools through which they describe (...) it, we reveal Richardson’s educative process to be essentially technological. His idea of the whole child who emerges through a process of experience and observation—of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, in the well-known phrase of Wordsworth cited by Richardson—conflates the nature of the child and nature of the ‘natural’ world. By this act of ‘natural settlement’ not untypical of settler narratives in Aotearoa/new Zealand, the child’s—and, by implication, other settlers’—relation to the world of nature is naturalized. Instead, we would argue that the child’s relation to nature is altogether unnatural: it is imprinted by the technological means through which she explores the world and makes it her own—and by which she is made over. The ‘tyre-child’ is no child of nature, but a child of technology, for whom creative errors—acts of ‘mis-taking’ like the ones Richardson’s children make in playing with tyres—reveal an imaginary capacity at once theoretical and unsettling. (shrink)

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

s This article examines the iconic `Beggars' trilogy by feminist science fiction writer, Nancy Kress. These novels, produced in the early to mid-1990s, take as their `thought experiment' two points of rupture and contemporary cultural contestation: the advent of human genetic engineering and sleep, or, more specifically, the prospect of a sleepless society. I shall begin by situating my analysis of the Kress trilogy in this nexus of fields. I shall consider the interest of Kress's works for the sociology of (...) sleep as well as for a cultural analysis of science. In this context, and drawing in part on the work of Haran, I will suggest the particular value of science fiction as not only a site for, but also a source of, narrativized social theory. I shall introduce the notion of popular episteme as an analytic concept that aims to link the discursive to the social — that is, to theorize the relationship of textuality to materiality. In this context, I shall refer also to the psychoanalytic concept of `phantasy' as a point of convergence for both structures of feeling and structures of knowledge. I shall then introduce the Kress works, focusing particularly on the first novel Beggars in Spain, locating it in a period in which feminist science fiction saw a marked renaissance, and in which speculative theorizations of genetics formed a distinct subgenre. The analysis will then focus on three core themes emergent in the novels that, I shall argue, have profound contemporaneous resonance. These are the questions of: embodied capital; the political economy of what I will term fast time; and paranoia and the human condition. (shrink)

Recently there have been pleas for STS to make a difference in how science policies are constructed and enacted. Much less remarked upon is the possibility that there may be troubling alignments between science studies and research policies in the form of shared conceptual, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Both have come to emphasise material outputs and visible activity, obscuring other processes, relationships and orderings involved in science work. This collection of papers focuses on these connections between STS and contemporary research (...) policies. They explore empirical material from ‘other epistemic places' to foreground and critique what is privileged and rewarded by science policies. But they also seek to make a theoretical contribution to STS itself, showing how its early focus on the hard centres of global technoscience have been constitutive of its characteristic concerns, epistemologies -and blind spots. As science studies moves out of the lab andbeyond the heartlands of the political West and global North, we argue that acknowledging some problematic affinities between science studies and science policy is both a critical necessity and an opportunity for new insights. (shrink)

This article discusses a new program for collaborative study of information technology, commercialization intellectual property and transformations of education research practives in universities. Three themes define the program. First, the authors investigate the ways that information technologies shape content, organization, and delivery of faculty work. Second, they examine the interplay of issues of intellectually property, technology, commercialization, and academic research. Third, ethical issues information raise and the values they embody are explored. The research and training undertaken brings together problems usually (...) treated by sepatate disciplines and focuses on technologies used by researchers and advanced students in various disciplines who shape and even create communications technologies. The intent is to explore these questions through research and teaching and in the process develop a new generation of scholars who are cognizant of changing patterns in the social relations of science and technology. (shrink)

This article begins with an ethnographically documented incident whereby nursing students dissected a medical human simulator model and rearranged it so that the “male” head and torso was attached to the “female” lower half. They then joked about the embodiment of the model, thus staging a scene of anti-trans ridicule. The students’ lack of ability, or purposeful refusal, to recognize morphological biodiversity in medical settings indicates a lacuna in clinical imaginaries. Even as trans-identified and gender nonconforming people increasingly access care (...) in the clinic, the lacuna of transsex—as a proxy term for non-binary embodiment—persists at the heart of clinical practice. This article concludes that we might engage in more ethical clinical practice if we recognize and affirm the trace of multiple forms of human being in the non-human simulator. (shrink)