Social scientists have drawn attention to the role of hype and optimistic visions of the future in providing momentum to biomedical innovation projects by encouraging innovation alliances. In this article, we show how less optimistic, uncertain, and modest visions of the future can also provide innovation projects with momentum. Scholars have highlighted the need for clinicians to carefully manage the expectations of their prospective patients. Using the example of a pioneering clinical team providing deep brain stimulation to children and young (...) people with movement disorders, we show how clinicians confront this requirement by drawing on their professional knowledge and clinical expertise to construct visions of the future with their prospective patients; visions which are personalized, modest, and tainted with uncertainty. We refer to this vision-constructing work as recalibration, and we argue that recalibration enables clinicians to manage the tension between the highly optimistic and hyped visions of the future that surround novel biomedical interventions, and the exigencies of delivering those interventions in a clinical setting. Drawing on work from science and technology studies, we suggest that recalibration enrolls patients in an innovation alliance by creating a shared understanding of how the “effectiveness” of an innovation shall be judged. (shrink)

Over the past decades, we have witnessed calls for greater transdisciplinary engagement between scientific and societal actors to develop more robust answers to complex societal challenges. Although there seems to be agreement that these approaches might nurture innovations of a new kind, we know little regarding the research practices, their potential, and the limitations. To fill this gap, this article investigates a funding scheme in the area of transdisciplinary sustainability research. It offers a detailed analysis of the imaginaries and expectations (...) on which the funding scheme rests and how researchers actually practice transdisciplinarity within the respective projects. Identifying three ideal typical models of science–society relations at work, attention is paid to how, where, and when societal and scientific arenas get entangled. This article discusses the tensions between classical academic values and efforts to open research to society, the prevailing power structures that make societal participation challenging, the importance of place and technopolitical cultures, and how temporal project structures impede more radical openings to new ways of knowledge production. We finally emphasize that transdisciplinary knowledge production can only become a serious option for addressing societal challenges if broader changes are made to the knowledge regimes in place. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth (...) century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery. (shrink)

Cognitive forms vary considerably as a human being detaches herself from what is closest and most personal and moves to communicate — in the broad sense of taking part in a common matter — across increasing relational distances. The article proposes to deal with the variety of cognitive formats which cannot `commonize' cognition to an equal degree, relating them to a set of regimes of engagement with the world that are identified in terms of the dependency between the human agent (...) and her environment. The good that engagement aims to guarantee orients how reality is grasped and specifies the format of what constitutes relevant information. This analysis offers new insight into the composition of communities as well as persons who have to cope with the plurality of cognitive formats and engagements from the very familiar to the most public. (shrink)

Sir Roderick Murchison's Humboldtian belief in a close linkage between the sciences of geology and physical geography finds its best illustration in his prediction of the three-dimensional structure of Africa in 1852 from explorers' reports, fossil discoveries, and a theory of crustal uplift and fracturing elaborated by the Cambridge mathematician William Hopkins. From this remarkably accurate hypothesis and other theories which he had developed concerning the occurrence of coal and gold, Murchison concluded that exploitable deposits of economic minerals which might (...) justify the foundation of a series of new British colonies could be systematically discovered around the continent's elevated rim. As the simultaneous President of the Royal Geographical Society and Director-General of the British Geological Survey, Murchison subsequently organized the dispatch of numerous scientific exploring expeditions to test his theory and reconnoitre commercial opportunities in Africa. While widening the frontier of British science, he thus schooled the imperial government in the belief that science could serve the drive for national expansion. His views on the physical, biological, and cultural conservatism of Africa also provided scientific justification for Victorian schemes of improvement, and his promotional activities helped set the stage for the British annexations in the continent during its fin de siècle partition by the European powers. (shrink)

Two contrasting theories-actor-network theory and nondecision making-are separately applied to the same case study, namely, technologies for automatically identifying road vehicles. By this process, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are highlighted: The actor-network approach is useful for understanding local processes but lacks tools for easily illuminating patterns across countries; by contrast, the concept of nondecision making is useful for explaining the general lack of implementation of technology for automatic vehicle identification but not for explaining variations between developments in (...) different countries. This study highlights the importance of attempting to compare theories by using the same case study. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of “alterity processing” to account for the simultaneous enactment of individual “Others” and emergent European orders in the context of migration management. Alterity processing refers to the data infrastructures, knowledge practices, and bureaucratic procedures through which populations unknown to European actors are translated into “European-legible” identities. By drawing on fieldwork conducted in Italy and the Hellenic Republic from 2017 to 2018, this article argues that different registration and identification procedures compete to legitimize different chains of (...) actors, data, and metadata as more authoritative than others. Competing procedures have governance implications, as well, with some actors being included and others being excluded. Furthermore, there is evidence that—despite procedural rigidities—applicants themselves propose alternative chains of actors, data, and metadata that are more meaningful to them. In this tension, it is not only the individual Other that is enacted but also specific bureaucratic orders cutting across old and new European actors and distinctive understandings of “Europe.” From a technology studies perspective, this article engages in a dialogue with the emergent debate on Hotspots, the scholarship about the infrastructural construction of Europe and political sociology. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars in science and technology studies have examined the advice that experts make for the governance of biomedicine. This STS scholarship, however, has not yet explained how the credibility of ethics expertise in public bioethics is produced from particular conditions and extended to different settings. This article describes how a bioethics commission created the ethical principle of justice and examines how the ethics expertise established public credibility on the justice principle. The findings suggest that the principle of (...) justice was first explored as the diverse concepts of “equality” with reference to the review of fetal research, redefined as “fairness” or “desert” from theoretical viewpoints, and then circulated as a standard framework in local settings. The credibility of ethics expertise, based on the coproduction of material and moral orders, was made possible by reaching common ground among different data, principles, and background theories. (shrink)

Actor-network theory has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANT’s development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity (...) to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANT’s current theoretical discontent. (shrink)

Governmental organizations funding science m several nations are creating large research centers that draw on several disciplines and that focus research on an area of immediate use to industrial concerns. I analyze eight proposals for a U.K. center devoted to human communication. I argue that the boundaries that such a center seeks to cross— between areas of knowledge, between disciplines, between academic and nonacademic research—are constructed in the proposals for strategic purposes m the immediate situations. The study supports other recent (...) work on the crucial role of texts as interme diaries in the science policy processes, and on the need to recognize the unexpected contingencies and unintended consequences of textual circulation. (shrink)

This study examines the tension between the academic evaluation system and the development of unconventional research agendas. While scholars have studied the evaluation of research that crosses disciplinary boundaries from the perspective of peer reviewers, they have paid comparatively little attention to the experiences of the performers of unconventional science. This study asks how researchers develop unconventional research agendas to address a long-standing health problem and, in the process, make sense of the actions of a site visit committee organized to (...) advise a foundation funding the project. This study develops a process narrative on the development of a specific transdisciplinary team proposing to study premature birth. The findings show that when the performers and the evaluators of unconventional science developed competing understandings of the research agenda, transdisciplinary discovery became limited as a particular research topic became taboo. Yet, the study also reveals how the performers of unconventional science challenged the power of the site visit committee by making it seem as though they followed the committee’s decisions. These findings raise questions about the role of private foundations as funders of academic research and the suitability of traditional evaluation procedures for assessing transdisciplinary discovery. (shrink)

There is a long history in science and technology studies of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying “problems” in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was (...) announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive ‘non problem’ using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the “problem,” the process of searching helps us map the terrain of the case and forces us to consider wider definitions. (shrink)

Este artigo foi composto a partir da comunicação apresentada no Ciclo de conferências "Humanos e animais: os limites da humanidade", promovido pelo IEA/USP. Já bastante modificado desde então, o texto incorpora ainda comentários de interlocutores de diferentes áreas ou perspectivas de conhecimento, de modo a explicitar tanto as dificuldades quanto o caráter promissor de tais esforços interdisciplinares. No mesmo passo, as reflexões do artigo emergem do exame de uma bibliografia heterogênea, mas que, conforme o tratamento aqui despendido, converge para a (...) urgência contemporânea de se conceber e praticar um outro pacto entre os humanos modernos e os animais, sem o qual o próprio humanismo ver-se-á ameaçado. Para outro humanismo, outra natureza insiste em pedir passagem. This article was composed from a communication presented in the cycle of conferences "Humans and animals: the limits of humanity", promoted by IEA/USP. Amply modified since then, the text incorporates commentaries of interlocutors from different areas or perspectives of knowledge, so as making explicit both the difficulties and the promising character of such interdisciplinary efforts. In the same time, the reflections of the article emerge from the use of a heterogeneous bibliography, but that, in conformity with the treatment here used, converges to the contemporary urgency of conceiving and practicing another pact between modern humans and the animals. Without this pact humanism itself will be menaced. For other humanism, another nature insists in asking its place. (shrink)

This theoretical paper takes an agency-theoretic approach to questions of corporate social responsibility (CSR). A comparison of various extant frameworks focusses on how CSR agency emerges in complex multi-agent and multi-sector stakeholder networks. The discussion considers the respective capabilities and relevance of these frameworks – culminating in an integrative CSR practice model. A short literature review of the evolution of CSR since the 1950’s provides the backdrop for understanding multi-agent cross-sectoral stakeholder coalitions as a strategic determinant of today’s organizational behavior. (...) The paper turns to Werhane’s coupling of moral imagination and systems thinking and forging stakeholder coalitions in problem contexts that were traditionally deemed intractable by for-profit organizations. However, it identifies the problem that the systems approach treats macro-agents (organizations, stakeholders) as given (“black-boxed”) and shies away from more radically re-imagining the possibilities of reassembling agency from the bottom up. Actor Network Theory (ANT) provides such a method, which strictly commits to treating organizational behavior as a product of technological, human and environmental micro-processes. ANT, however, is lacking a genuine moral deliberative stance in designing complex CSR coalitions. In an attempt to capitalize on the respective strengths of these frameworks (Systems thinking and ANT) the paper tends to a recent iterative series of “situational transactive” models that are rooted in the US pragmatist tradition and seek to capture intelligent planning processes in complex problematic contexts. The contribution proposes a new CSR practice model, which assigns specific roles to the theoretical contributions of ANT, system thinking and pragmatism in complex deliberation processes. This model can be industry-tested in a future study. (shrink)

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

Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) offers an ‘infra-language’ of the social that allows one to trace social relations very dynamically, while at the same time dissolving human agency, thus providing a flat and de-centred way into sociology. However, ANT struggles with its theoretical design that may lead us to reduce agency to causation and to conceptualize actor-networks as homogeneous ontologies of force. This article proposes to regard ANT’s inability to conceptualize reflexivity and the interrelatedness of different ontologies as the fundamental problem of the (...) theory. Drawing on Günther, it offers an ‘infra-language’ of reflexive relations while maintaining ANT’s de-centred approach. This would enable us to conceptualize actor-networks as non-homogeneous, dynamic and connecting different societal rationales while maintaining the main strengths of ANT. (shrink)

This paper explores how knowledge is exchanged between agricultural advisors and farmers in the context of sustainable farming practices in England. Specifically the paper examines the nature of the knowledge exchange at the encounters between one group of advisors, agronomists, and farmers. The promotion of best management practices, which are central to the implementation of sustainable agricultural policies in England, provide the empirical context for this study. The paper uses the notion of expert and facilitative approaches as a conceptual framework (...) for analyzing knowledge exchange encounters between agronomists and farmers. Data were derived from semi-structured interviews with 31 agronomists and 17 farmers, in the context of three initiatives promoting a range of best management practices including (a) targeted use of nitrogen (N), (b) use of nutrients within manure, and (c) management practices to improve soil structure. The interviews revealed that, although many agronomist–farmer knowledge exchange encounters are characterized by an imbalance of power, distrust, and the divergence of knowledge, other encounters provide a platform for the facilitation of farmer learning in their transition to more sustainable practices. (shrink)

In 1859, Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810–1888) published an essay of what he called “the abstract of Japan botany.” In it, he applied Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to explain why strong similarities could be found between the flora of Japan and that of eastern North America, which provoked his famous debate with Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) and initiated Gray’s efforts to secure a place for Darwinian biology in the American sciences. Notably, although the Gray–Agassiz debate has become one of the most (...) thoroughly studied scientific debates, historians of science remain unable to answer one critical question: How was Gray able to acquire specimens from Japan? Making use of previously unknown archival materials, this article scrutinizes the institutional, instrumental, financial, and military settings that enabled Gray’s collector, Charles Wright (1811–1885), to travel to Japan, as well as examine Wright’s collecting practices in Japan. I argue that it is necessary to examine Gray’s diagnosis of Japan’s flora and the subsequent debate about it from the viewpoint of field sciences. The field-centered approach not only unveils an array of historical significances that have been overshadowed by the analytical framework of the Darwinian revolution and the reception of Darwinism, but also places a seemingly domestic incident in a transnational context. (shrink)

In 2007 a social scientist and a designer created a spatial installation to communicate social science research about the regulation of emerging science and technology. The rationale behind the experiment was to improve scientific knowledge production by making the researcher sensitive to new forms of reactions and objections. Based on an account of the conceptual background to the installation and the way it was designed, the paper discusses the nature of the engagement enacted through the experiment. It is argued that (...) experimentation is a crucial way of making social science about science communication and engagement more robust. (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)

Engineering sketches and drawings are the building blocks of technological design and production. These visual representations act as the means for organizing the design to production process, hence serving as a "social glue" both between individuals and between groups. The author discusses two main capacities such visual representations serve in facilitating distributed cognition in team design work As conscription devices, they enlist and organize group participation. As boundary objects, they facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by various groups involved in (...) the design process. The introduction of computer-aided design into this visual culture of engineering restructures relationships between workers in ways that can hamper the flexibility necessary for these crucial capacities to take place. The data are drawn from a study of the daily practices of engineers engaged in redesigning a turbine engine package. The method is participant observation. (shrink)

This study draws on interviews with forty-nine members of a biomedical research community in the UK that is involved in negotiating data sharing and access. During an interview, an interviewee used the words “ethical moment” to describe a confrontation between collaborators in relation to data sharing. In this article, I use this as a lens for thinking about relations between “the conceptual and the empirical” in a way that allows both analyst and actor to challenge the status quo and consider (...) other ethical possibilities. Drawing on actor network theory, I approach “the empirical” using the concepts of controversy and ontological uncertainty as methodological tools to tackle the problem of ethics. I suggest that these concepts also provide a bridge for understanding the ontological structure of the virtual and the actual, as described in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While other science and technology studies scholars have sought to draw on Deleuze, this article addresses the integration of ethics and empirical research. It arises as a critical reaction to existing treatments of this problem as found in empirical ethics, especially in the sociology of bioethics, and indirectly in ANT texts. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a water management project in the remote Aboriginal community of Milingimbi, Northern Australia. Drawing on materials and experiences from two distinct stages of this project, we revisit a policy report and engage in ethnographic storytelling in order to highlight a series of sensing practices associated with water management. In the former, a working symmetry between Yolngu and Western water knowledges is actively sought through the practices of the project. However, in the latter, recurrent asymmetries in the (...) research work continue to appear: a bilingual diagram of water usage is displayed but produces confusion; measuring a water hole for salinity, a member of the scientific team throws in a water meter, while a Yolngu elder prefers the telling of an ancestral story; a collaborative 3-D mapping exercise invites participation from community members but struggles to develop an outcome that differs from existing maps used by scientists and government staff. Focusing on these moments as subtle points of rupture, we suggest that attending to “seeing,” “telling,” and “mapping” in both stages of this water management project offers a way to explore the political work of crafting climate futures and beginning to interrogate differing means for “doing difference” within them. (shrink)

Although there are many possible ways of understanding menopause, it is the notion of menopause as hormone deficiency that currently dominates. How is it that this account remains prevalent rather than some alternative understanding of menopause? This question is explored through the employment of a framework informed by both actor network theory and symbolic interactionist studies. The author exploits the common ground shared by these two conceptual approaches to analyze how practices generate and reify particular kinds of knowledge about menopause. (...) The analysis is situated within Australian menopause clinics and explores several key contemporary practices of these clinics to show how the particular understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency is generated and stabilized. The study stresses the knowledge/practice nexus and emphasizes that meanings are not given in advance but are generated through practices. In particular, the focus is on the interactions of the social and the material entities of menopause clinics and how through these interactions the understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency is produced. (shrink)

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests (...) that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution. (shrink)

This article proposes complementing actor-network theory (ANT) with Niklas Luhmann’s communication theory, in order to overcome one of ANT’s major shortcomings, namely, the lack of a conceptual repertoire to describe virtual processes such as sense-making. A highly problematic consequence of ANT’s actualism is that it cannot explain the differentiation of economic, legal, scientific, touristic, religious, medical, artistic, political and other qualities of actual entities, assemblages and relationships. By recasting Luhmann’s theory of functionally differentiated communication forms and sense-making as dealing with (...) different types of virtual attractors calling for actualizations in concrete assemblages, I propose a symmetrical understanding of societal differentiation processes as based on the co-production of virtual attractors and actual assemblages. (shrink)

In the existing literature on depoliticization, the increasing use of law as a medium to tackle social and political issues is deemed to be detrimental to the legitimacy of political processes. Aga...

In contested areas of environmental research and policy, all stakeholders are likely to claim that their position is scientifically grounded but disagree about the relevant scientific conclusions or the weight of the evidence. In this article, I draw on a year of participant observation and over 110 in-depth interviews, with the case study of controversial chemicals used as flame retardants in consumer products. I develop the concept of strategic science translation, the process of interpreting and communicating scientific evidence to an (...) intended audience in order to advance certain goals and interests. Engaging in selective, interpretive, or inaccurate SST allows competing stakeholders to bolster their arguments, strengthen their authority, and inspire change regarding a policy-relevant issue. Because stakeholders deploy imbalanced resources when they participate in contested environmental fields, their actions in those fields and the resulting policy outcomes often reduce not to the settling of scientific truths but to power differentials. (shrink)

ArgumentBy the mid-eighteenth century, governors of the major European states promoted the study of nature as part of natural-resource based schemes for improvement and economic self-sufficiency. Procuring beneficial knowledge about nature, however, required observers, collectors, and compilers who could produce usable and useful descriptions of nature. The ways governments promoted scientific explorations varied according to the form of government, the makeup of the civil society, the state's economic ideologies and practices, and the geographical situation. This article argues that the roots (...) of a major natural history initiative in Denmark-Norway were firmly planted in the state-church organization. Through the clergymen and their activities, a bishop, supported by the government in Copenhagen, could gather an impressive collection of natural objects, receive observations and descriptions of natural phenomena, and produce natural historical publications that described for the first time many of the species of the north. Devout naturalists were a common species in the eighteenth century, when clergymen and missionaries involved themselves in the investigation of nature in Europe and far beyond. The specific interest here is in how natural history was supported and enforced as part of clerical practice, how specimen exchange was grafted on to pre-existing institutions of gift exchange, and how this influenced the character of the knowledge produced. (shrink)

This article argues for engaging with the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. By conducting a close reading of primary source material produced by the companies IBM and Cisco over a decade of work on smart urbanism, we argue that the smart city imaginary is premised in a particular narrative about urban crises and technological salvation. This narrative serves three main purposes: it fits different ideas and initiatives into a coherent view of smart urbanism, it sells and disseminates this version (...) of smartness, and it crowds out alternative visions and corresponding arrangements of smart urbanism. Furthermore, we argue that IBM and Cisco construct smart urbanism as both a reactionary and visionary force, plotting a model of the near future, but one that largely reflects and reinforces existing sociopolitical systems. We conclude by suggesting that breaking IBM’s and Cisco’s discursive dominance over the smart city imaginary requires us to reimagine what smart urbanism means and create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs, and models. (shrink)

“Informed consent” implicitly links the transmission of information to the granting of permission on the part of patients, tissue donors, and research subjects. But what of the corollary, informed refusal? Drawing together insights from three moments of refusal, this article explores the rights and obligations of biological citizenship from the vantage point of biodefectors—those who attempt to resist technoscientific conscription. Taken together, the cases expose the limits of individual autonomy as one of the bedrocks of bioethics and suggest the need (...) for a justice-oriented approach to science, medicine, and technology that reclaims the epistemological and political value of refusal. (shrink)

Many actors mobilize the cognitive, legal and technical tool-box of data protection when they discuss and address controversial issues such as digital mass surveillance. Yet, critical approaches to the digital only barely explore the politics of data protection in relation to data-driven governance. Building on governmentality studies and Actor-Network-Theory, this article analyses the potential and limits of using data protection to critique the ‘digital age’. Using the conceptual tool of dispositifs, it sketches an analytics of data protection and the emergence (...) of its configuration as ‘data protection by design and by default’. This exploration reminds us that governing through data implies, first and foremost, governing digital data. (shrink)

ArgumentThe administration of mountain expeditions from the ground created special managerial problems. The Harvard College Observatory's Boyden Expeditions of 1887–1890 sent men and materiel to three sites: Pike's Peak, Colorado; Mount Wilson, California; and Chosica, Peru. Their goal was to test sites in order to find a suitable site for a permanent Boyden station to conduct astrophysical work in service of Harvard's preexisting projects. The logistical difficulties of living on the mountainside combined with the organizational difficulties of administrating a station (...) at a distance. The men who lived on the mountain were professionally vulnerable, and often cut off from their home observatory both by the weather conditions at their own altitude and local politics on the ground below them. Only when an unbroken line of communication could be established between the mountain station and the Harvard Observatory could the astronomers on both ends work together to create a successful expedition. (shrink)

The authors' commentary on Bruno Latour's "Technology is society made durable" provides the reader with an opportunity to become acquainted with actor-network theory.