STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. (...) Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement. (shrink)

Medicine in a Neurocentric World: About the Explanatory Power of Neuroscientific Models in Medical Research and Practice Content Type Journal Article Category Editorial Notes Pages 307-313 DOI 10.1007/s12376-009-0036-2 Authors Lara Huber, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Am Pulverturm 13 55131 Mainz Germany Lara K. Kutschenko, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz Institute for History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine Am Pulverturm 13 55131 Mainz Germany Journal (...) Medicine Studies Online ISSN 1876-4541 Print ISSN 1876-4533 Journal Volume Volume 1 Journal Issue Volume 1, Number 4. (shrink)

In order to investigate the relationship between scientific evidence and social commitments this article addresses three questions: does low dose ionizing radiation cause cancer? Is the answer to this question different in a social setting than in a scientific context? What are the consequences of the answers of 1 and 2 for the relationship between epistemology and ethics as played out in radiation protection? Conceptual analysis with basis in the philosophy of science, in particular traditional theories of causality. Whether low (...) dose ionizing radiation causes cancer deeply depends on what we mean by causality. According to traditional scientific conceptions of causality it is not warranted to say that low dose ionizing radiation causes cancer. Standard approaches in radiation protection, however, imply that there is a causal connection, which is due to the strong social commitment in the field. There is a close relationship between social and scientific conceptions of causality, posing a series of challenges: one being that scientists covertly become moral experts, another one that the general public can be misinformed. There is a difference between causality in science and in policy making. Mixing these conceptions, as sometimes is done in radiation protection, can be misleading. Whether low dose ionizing radiation causes cancer is a social and not only a scientific issue. As such those who are warranted to have a say. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses the current debates in philosophy of science that focus on the concept of values. In these debates, it is often assumed that all relevant non-epistemic influences on scientific research can be described as values and, consequently, that science carries social legitimacy if the correct values play their proper role in research. I argue that values are _not_ the only relevant non-epistemic influences on research: not unless our definition of values is so broad that it becomes unmanageable. (...) Other factors also affect the authority and social legitimacy of science. I employ political theorist Iris Marion Young’s concepts of social perspectives, opinions and interests to attempt a differentiation of contextual influences relevant to scientific research. While problems arising from these influences may overlap, they often differ in important ways too. As a consequence, I argue that contextual influences cannot be managed jointly but require distinct and complementary strategies. (shrink)

During the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic a variety of social activities migrated online, including religious ceremonies and rituals. One such instance is the case of Santo Daime, a Brazilian rainforest religion that utilizes the hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca in its rituals. During the pandemic, multiple Santo Daime rituals involving the consumption of ayahuasca took place online, mediated through Zoom and other online platforms. The phenomenon is notable since the effects of hallucinogens are defined by context and Santo Daime rituals are habitually governed (...) by punctilious regulations aimed at directing the experience of participants. The abrupt move to online space thus augurs significant implications in the context of hallucinogenic rituals. This paper looks at this development and its repercussions for entheogenic rituals, as it asks how do psychedelic rituals change when they move online? Building on the author’s previous work on set and setting in the Santo Daime religion, the paper introduces accounts from 12 semi-structured interviews with daimistas participating in online daime rituals, approached through the prism of set and setting, and the study of online religiosity. The analysis points at several key dynamics emerging in the context of virtual rituals. The migration online allowed for the continuation of Santo Daime entheogenic rituals at a time of social distancing, fostered a sense of global brotherhood and opened new possibility for religious participation and learning. Concurrently, online ritual produced an impoverished ritual experience and novel types of challenges including a higher potential for distractions, technical difficulties, and low sensory fidelity. Other novel challenges included social anxiety and an in-built tension between the social and spiritual dimensions of ritual. Finally, some participants were concerned by the cultural context of online rituals: technological mediation, consumerism, commodification, and digital divide. The limitations of digital technology appear amplified by the highly immersive, body oriented, experientially intensified context of the psychedelic experience. This paper contributes to the literature on the extra-pharmacological factors shaping experiences with psychedelics, as well as to the literature on the consequences of the adoption of digital media technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This manuscript identifies several important issues for philosophy of science at this moment in history raised in Fellows’ and Richardson’s generous comments. It also notes a couple of their assumptions that are problematic for this author, and tries to restate more clearly relevant arguments developed in Objectivity and Diversity.

The conventional proper scientific self has an ethical obligation to strive to see everywhere in the universe from no particular location in that universe: he is to produce the view from nowhere. What different conceptions of the proper scientific self are created by the distinctive assumptions and research practices of social justice movements, such as feminism, anti-racism, and post-colonialism? Three such new ideals are: the multiple and conflicted knowing self; the researcher strategically located inside her research world; and the community (...) that knows. (shrink)

In October 2015 the UK enacted legislation to permit the clinical use of two cutting edge germline-altering, IVF-based embryonic techniques: pronuclear transfer and maternal spindle transfer. The aim is to use these techniques to prevent the maternal transmission of serious mitochondrial diseases. Major claims have been made about the quality of the debates that preceded this legislation and the significance of those debates for UK decision-making on other biotechnologies, as well as for other countries considering similar legislation. In this article (...) we conduct a systematic analysis of those UK debates and suggest that claims about their quality are over-stated. We identify, and analyse in detail, ten areas where greater clarity, depth and nuance would have produced sharper understandings of the contributions, limitations and wider social impacts of these mitochondrial interventions. We explore the implications of these additional considerations for the protection of all parties involved, should the techniques transfer to clinical applications; the legitimacy of focussing on short-term gains for individuals over public health considerations, and the maintenance and improvement of public trust in medical biotechnologies. We conclude that a more measured evaluation of the content and quality of the UK debates is important and timely: such a critique provides a clearer understanding of the possible, but specific, contributions of these interventions, both in the UK and elsewhere; also, these additional insights can now inform the emerging processes of implementation, regulation and practice of mitochondrial interventions. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Don Ihde’s ‘postphenomenology’ may constitute a proper access to the question concerning sustainable technology and I do so in three steps. First, I lay bare how a modern framework that systematically separates facts and instruments from values, choices and responsibilities yields no space for engaged decisions and responsible action towards more sustainable societies. In a second step, I elaborate how postphenomenology’s ‘in-between’ perspective opens up the possibility of questioning science and technology as an inherent (...) part of our human existence. Building on this, I argue how a ‘normativity of the in-between’ may be developed around the concept of ‘topical measure’ and which is grounded in the foundationless foundation of postphenomenology’s relational ontology. In a last step, I show how such a ‘topical measure’ opens up two fields of normative action vis-à-vis the question concerning sustainable technology: one critical, the other empowering. Whereas ‘topical criticism’ focuses on bringing into the open the powerful subpolitics of science and technology, the field of ‘topical responsibility’ rather aims at actively assuming responsibility in these political circles. Besides its main interest, which lies in forging a genuine and adequate way into the issue of sustainability, this paper also constitutes an entry into Ihde’s philosophical oeuvre. The question concerning sustainable technology does not only touch upon Ihde’s relational trinity human-technology-world, it also deals with the degree of normative inquiry present in Ihde’s philosophy, an issue he has been repeatedly questioned about by his interlocutors. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the rhetoric of democratic science within the field of synthetic biology. The still emerging field of synthetic biology claims to be a new kind of science based on the promises of affordable medicines, environmental bioremediation, and democratic, do-it-yourself science practices. I argue that the formation of a more democratic, DIY portion of this field represents an intervention into ethics debates by becoming “the proper informed public.” Through an analysis of twelve DIY and community-based synthetic biology (...) organizations’ websites, I found that democratic science was presented as a novel, progressive approach to science that addresses ethical concerns and at the same time produces better scientific results. In part, these claims were made possible through a reconfiguring of the boundaries between Science and the Public where scientists lay claim to solidarity with the public at large in opposition to traditional biosciences and Big Bio. My research suggests that the superficial use of the language of rights and democracy relegitimizes the primacy of scientific discovery to solve societal problems. I further suggest that by becoming the proper informed public, ethical challenges from publics critical of genetic sciences may become delegitimized. (shrink)

In 2004, the Havasupai Tribe filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Board of Regents and Arizona State University researchers upon discovering their DNA samples, initially collected for genetic studies on type 2 diabetes, had been used in several other genetic studies. The lawsuit reached a settlement in April 2010 that included monetary compensation and return of DNA samples to the Havasupai but left no legal precedent for researchers. Through semistructured interviews, institutional review board chairs and human genetics researchers at US (...) research institutions revealed their perspectives on the Havasupai lawsuit. For interviewees, the suit drew attention to indigenous concerns over genetic studies and increased their awareness of indigenous views. However, interviewees perceived no direct impact from the Havasupai case on their work; if they did, it was the perceived need to safeguard themselves by obtaining broad consent or shying away from research with indigenous communities altogether, raising important questions of justice for indigenous and minority participants. If researchers and IRBs do not change their practices in light of this case, these populations will likely continue to be excluded from a majority of research studies and left with less access to resources and potential benefit from genetic research participation. (shrink)

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

Metaphors of mind and their elaboration into models serve a crucial explanatory role in psychology. In this article, an attempt is made to describe how biology and engineering provide the predominant metaphors for contemporary psychology. A contrast between the discursive and descriptive functions of metaphor use in theory construction serves as a platform for deliberation upon the pragmatic consequences of models derived therefrom. The conclusion contains reflections upon the possibility of an integrative interdisciplinary psychology.

Synthetic biology represents a recent and explicit attempt to make biology easier to engineer, and through this to open up the design space of genetic engineering to a wider range of practitioners. Proponents of this approach emphasize the standardization of practices as key to successful biological engineering; yet, meaningful transatlantic differences are emerging with respect to the constitution of key concerns and the governance of synthetic biology in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this article, I tease out (...) how national approaches to governing synthetic biology are being framed against different salient past experiences with recombinant DNA technology. In the US, the governance of synthetic biology is consistently articulated in relation to the early days of recombinant DNA technology and the self-governance mechanisms pioneered in response to Asilomar. In the UK, more recent experiences with genetically modified crops provide the overarching imaginary against which governance initiatives are being proposed. I suggest that these differing sociotechnical imaginaries have implications for how new “groups of concern” are being defined in relation to synthetic biology and how measures to contain perceived risks are being pursued in the US and Britain. (shrink)

Sociologists have challenged the discipline to account for and incorporate biological factors in their analyses. Heeding this call, this article asks how chimeras, a particularly puzzling biological organism, are being officially classified in the interrelated sites of endangered species preservation and the zoo. Based on a qualitative study of endeavors to clone endangered animals, I contend that biology alone cannot determine the classification of these interspecies organisms. Rather, categorizing chimeras requires metaphoric, schematic references to more familiar entities. Here culture and (...) biology are tools for classification, which has consequences for preservation practices and the materiality of endangered wildlife. Drawing on the sociology of culture, I show that positions on classification represent an intermediary space for interpreting the relationship between meaning and action in discourse elaboration. Building on the sociology of science and technology, I show the epistemological limitations of understanding the biological as an a priori factor. (shrink)

An increasing number of technology firms are implementing processes to identify and evaluate the ethical risks of their systems and products. A key part of these review processes is to foresee potential impacts of these technologies on different groups of users. In this article, we use the expression Ethical Foresight Analysis to refer to a variety of analytical strategies for anticipating or predicting the ethical issues that new technological artefacts, services, and applications may raise. This article examines several existing EFA (...) methodologies currently in use. It identifies the purposes of ethical foresight, the kinds of methods that current methodologies employ, and the strengths and weaknesses of each of these current approaches. The conclusion is that a new kind of foresight analysis on the ethics of emerging technologies is both feasible and urgently needed. (shrink)

This paper investigates the dynamic and performative construction of publics in public engagement exercises. In this investigation, we, on the one hand, analyse how public engagement settings as political machineries frame particular kinds of roles and identities for the participating publics in relation to ‘the public at large’. On the other hand, we study how the participating citizens appropriate, resist and transform these roles and identities, and how they construct themselves and the participating group in relation to wider publics. The (...) empirical basis of our argument is a discussion of four different kinds of participation events in Austria. Building on these observations we develop conclusions about the public up-take of public participation in technoscience and the role of public engagement in current techno-political cultures. (shrink)

This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic “buzzwords” and the projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project related to obesity prevention, we show how the articulation of these trends—governance by buzzwords and projectification—often leads to not unproblematic and often paradoxical outcomes. Buzzwords such as “diversity” become especially important in (...) an innovation-driven environment encouraging a promissory rhetoric. At the same time, the project form shapes and restricts how buzzwords are articulated and translated into a specific project design. In our case study of an obesity prevention program, the need to translate diversity into a “doable” project encouraged the identification of seemingly clearly delineated target groups and thus promoted a rather narrow understanding of diversity, which stands in tension with much more fluid and context-sensitive ways of performing “diversity.” We show how actors grapple with these paradoxes. This restricts the full power a buzzword such as diversity could achieve in terms of social justice. (shrink)

This article argues that Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology is useful for both science and technology studies and critical theory. The synthesis has political implications. It offers an argument for the rationality of democratic interventions by citizens into decisions concerning technology. The new framework opens a perspective on the radical transformation of technology required by ecological modernization and sustainability. In so doing, it suggests new applications of STS methods to politics as well as a reconstruction of the Frankfurt School’s “rational (...) critique of reason.”. (shrink)

The Critical Theory of the early Frankfurt School promised, in Adorno’s words, a ‘rational critique of reason’. Science and Technology Studies can play a role in the renewal of this approach. STS is based on a critique of the very same technocratic and scientistic assumptions against which Critical Theory argues. Its critique of positivism and determinism has political implications. But at its origins STS took what Wiebe Bijker called the ‘detour into the academy’ in order to institutionalize itself as a (...) social science. It adopted empirical methods, developed case histories, and limited its scope, avoiding politically controversial issues. Its latent political critique has become explicit in recent years as STS has responded to the rise of technical politics by broadening its concerns. Its wide scope converges with the equally encompassing Critical Theory. Together, STS and Critical Theory offer a new concept of politics. (shrink)

A majority of South Africans agrees that when science and religion conflict, religion is always right. Is this an indication the public is anti-science or does the question wording hide a more complex relationship? We examined the relationship between science and religion in South Africa using quantitative data from the World Values Survey and qualitative data from face-to-face interviews. As research on the potential conflict between science and religion is predominantly focused on Western countries, the present study focuses on Africa (...) and compares results with those of two Western countries. Findings show that almost 76% South Africans agree that religion is always right and religious belief, social trust and education were significant predictors of this perception. Comparing findings with data from Zimbabwe, the United States and Germany, we found that while the influence of religiosity is significant across countries, comparatively, trust seems to be more of an African issue. The qualitative interviews, however, provided an elaboration of the relationship between science and religion in South Africa, indicating that choosing either science or religion is not always an outright rejection of the other. The relationships were classified as those informed by cognitive dissonance, often expressed in hierarchical associations, and those influenced by cognitive polyphasia, a complementary and transformative coexistence. (shrink)

La respuesta a los efectos no deseados de la tecnología ha consolidado un amplio conjunto de bases legales e instrumentos análiticos ligados a la evaluación de los riesgos. Este artículo plantea que buena parte de las controversias sobre los riesgos tecnológicos más que a la ausencia de su regulación se debe paradójicamente a la generalización de las políticas basadas en la ciencia. En el origen encontramos una concepción equívoca del conocimiento científico. La ciencia como gobierno de la sociedad requiere previamente (...) una reflexión sobre las dinámicas del conocimiento y su gobierno. (shrink)

This paper argues that challenges that are grand in scope such as "lifelong health and wellbeing", "climate action", or "food security" cannot be addressed through scientific research only. Indeed scientific research could inhibit addressing such challenges if scientific analysis constrains the multiple possible understandings of these challenges into already available scientific categories and concepts without translating between these and everyday concerns. This argument builds on work in philosophy of science and race to postulate a process through which non-scientific notions become (...) part of science. My aim is to make this process available to scrutiny: what I call founding everyday ideas in science is both culturally and epistemologically conditioned. Founding transforms a common idea into one or more scientifically relevant ones, which can be articulated into descriptively thicker and evaluatively deflated terms and enable operationalisation and measurement. The risk of founding however is that it can invisibilise or exclude from realms of scientific scrutiny interpretations that are deemed irrelevant, uninteresting or nonsensical in the domain in question-but which may remain salient for addressing grand-in-scope challenges. The paper considers concepts of "wellbeing" in development economics versus in gerontology to illustrate this process. (shrink)

Ethical concerns regarding agricultural practices can be found to co-evolve with technological developments. This paper aims to create an understanding of ethics that is helpful in debating technological innovation by studying such a co-evolution process in detail: the development and adoption of the milking robot. Over the last decade an increasing number of milking robots, or automatic milking systems (AMS), has been adopted, especially in the Netherlands and a few other Western European countries. The appraisal of this new technology in (...) ethical terms has appeared to be a complicated matter. Compared to using a conventional milking parlor, the use of an AMS entails in several respects a different practice of dairy farming, the ethical implications and evaluation of which are not self-evident but are themselves part of a dynamic process. It has become clear that with its use, the entire practice of dairy farming has been reorganized around this new device. With a robot, cows must voluntarily present themselves to be milked, whereby an ethical norm of (individual) freedom for cows can be seen to emerge together with this new technology. But adopting a robot also implies changes in what is considered to be a good farmer and an appropriate relation between farmer and cow. Through interviews, attending “farmers’ network” meetings in the Netherlands, and studying professional literature and dedicated dairy farming web forums, this paper traces the way that ethical concerns are a dynamic part of this process of rearranging a variety of elements of the practice of dairy farming. (shrink)

Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human–robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and (...) feminist studies of service work. In this paper, we explore these tensions through the concepts of affective and emotional labor, and outline key insights these concepts offer for the design and evaluation of professional service robots. Taken together, an emphasis on interactionist approaches to emotions and on the demands of affective labor, leads us to argue that service employees are under-represented in existing studies in human–robot interaction. To address this, we outline how participatory design and value-sensitive design approaches can be applied as complimentary methodological frameworks that include service employees as vital stakeholders. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Artikel widmet sich der Frage, wie Spiele und spielen zur Big-Data-basierten Wissensproduktion in der Hochenergiephysik beitragen. Als Beispiel dienen Detektorkollaborationen am Large Hadron Collider der Europäischen Organisation für Kernforschung, in denen die Autorin seit 2014 kulturanthropologische Feldforschung unternommen hat. Der ludische Aspekt der Wissensproduktion wird hier in drei verschiedenen Dimensionen analysiert: der symbolischen, der ontologischen und der epistemischen. Erstere verweist auf das CERN als Ort, an dem ein kosmologisches Wahrscheinlichkeitsspiel mithilfe von Monte-Carlo-Simulationen durchgeführt wird. Die Zweite wird durch (...) kompetitive Infrastrukturen in der Arbeitspraxis verschiedener Kollaborationsgruppen sichtbar. Die dritte Dimension entfaltet sich durch ludische Plattformen, wie etwa Online Challenges und Citizen Science Games, die zur Entwicklung von machine learning algorithmen beitragen, deren Funktion notwendig ist, um die ungeheuren Mengen an Big Data verarbeiten zu können, die durch die Experimente gesammelt werden. Das CERN wird als Ort des Deep Play beschrieben, einem von Clifford Geertz entwickeltem Konzept, das dazu beiträgt, größere soziale und kulturelle Ordnungen durch die Analyse ludischer Kollektivphänomene zu begreifen. Der Artikel setzt sich darüber hinaus mit Peter Galisons Idee der Trading Zone auseinander und schlägt vor, diese in Zeiten von Big Data als Playground zu begreifen. Die Autorin hofft damit zu einer breiteren sozio-historiografischen Diskussion in den Science and Technology Studies und nicht zuletzt der Kulturanthropologie beizutragen, indem das Ludische in den Wissenschaften als zentrales Element für das Verständnis kollaborativer Wissensproduktion begriffen wird. (shrink)

Applied philosophy, ethics in particular, makes a difference in producing and eating food. The current food system, resulting from cooperation between scientific, technological and industrial approaches, disconnects producers and citizens-consumers-farmers. Some try to bridge this gap by bombarding buyers with a stream of often bewildering, unreliable and incoherent facts. Food ethics shows why this gap can only be tackled fruitfully when science, technology and industry grant a structural place to the voices, fears, values and activities of consumers.

Population ageing and increased digitalization each constitute an ongoing and profound transformation within contemporary modes of living, as growing advances in technological development mix and intermingle with the lived realities of older people as the final recipients. It is against the backdrop of this interplay that user involvement has enjoyed ever-rising advocacy to an almost normative degree. Beyond articulating methodological principles, however, the literature has remained surprisingly vague as to the practical implementation of the approach. Less appears to be known, (...) both empirically and conceptually, about how design and user involvement are done in practice and how they would matter to bring about intentional or unintentional effects. To engage with these developments, this thesis aims at taking the practices of user involvement and design to the centre of its inquiry by adopting a perspective from Science and Technology Studies. Specifically, the thesis seeks to both build on and contribute to the established body of STS on the connection between technology design and older users and ask: What is there to learn about user involvement as a method, if we focus on the practices of doing user involvement? To answer this question, the thesis studies four different aspects of the practices of user involvement and design. In particular, the thesis reviews the literature on how user involvement mattered in previous empirical projects that include older people, it examines how different configurations of participation matter in design workshops, it scrutinizes the achievement of user involvement in corporate practices and it traces the circumstantial performances of such practices. The largest empirical piece comes from a two-year ethnographic study of a small- to medium-sized enterprise, the material from which informed Paper III and Paper IV. The findings highlight how user involvement in practice is both contingent and transformative, as it selectively enrols different participants and performs multiple realities. In practice, user involvement appears to be dependent on a set of underlying premises and socio-material conditions and thus is always a dynamic and momentary achievement. Furthermore, the thesis shows how the practices of user involvement themselves may bring into existence different realities, articulating and materializing particular versions of objects and images of ageing. Accordingly, the thesis contributes theoretically by illuminating the underlying socio-material facets of user involvement, and by emphasizing ageing as a particular object/image of design. Specifically, the appended papers encompass a conceptual framework, as well as three new concepts: design multiple, shifting interstices and viscous image landscape, in order to theorize the underlying conditions for user involvement, its relationship with design and its entanglement with ageing. Practically, the thesis enunciates three main implications regarding questions of goodness, politics and ethics. (shrink)

Due to the innovative possibilities of digital technologies, the issue of increasing automation is once again on the agenda – and not only in the industry, but also in other branches and sectors of contemporary societies. Although public and scientific discussions about automation seem to raise relevant questions of the “old” debate, such as the replacement of human labor by introducing new technologies, the authors focus here on the new contextual quality of these questions. The debate should rethink the relationship (...) between technology and work with regard to quantitative and qualitative changes in work. In this article, our example will be the introduction of automation in industry, which has been reflected in the widely recognized study by Frey and Osborne in 2013. They estimated the expected impacts of future computerization on US labor market outcomes as very high, specifically regarding the number of jobs at risk. Surprisingly, this study was the starting point of an intensive international debate on the impact of technologies on the future of work and the role of technological change in working environments. Thus, according to the authors, “old” questions remain important, but they should be reinterpreted for “new” societal demands and expectations of future models of work. (shrink)

This thesis deals with the colonisation of the university by market forces. The object of inquiry is coproduction of academic knowledge between academic and non-academic actors in newly established universities and university colleges in Sweden. The development of knowledge as a main competitive advantage for commercial companies, and the shift in policies accompanying this development, provides an explanation for the introduction of market mechanisms into the governance of university research. The main contribution of the thesis, however, is the analyses of (...) three coproducing research centres – in service research, engineering and collaborative media – on the basis of epistemology, interpreted as different knowledge cultures. In most policy accounts knowledge is treated as homogeneous, which is problematic as it conceals differences in academic disciplines’ relations to the object or phenomenon of inquiry. Such differences have bearing on publication patterns, prospects of generating academic credibility and possibilities to engage external partners in coproduction relationships. Importantly, this has an impact on the prospects of attracting various sources of funding that are of significance for newly established universities and university colleges with fewer fixed resources than the old universities. It is argued that not only are we witnessing a colonisation of the entire university by market forces, but also a colonisation of social science and humanities by science - scientific perspectives and work ways and the technical knowledge interest. (shrink)

While geoengineering may counteract negative effects of anthropogenic climate change, it is clear that most geoengineering options could also have some harmful effects. Moreover, it is predicted that the benefits and harms of geoengineering will be distributed unevenly in different parts of the world and to future generations, which raises serious questions of justice. It has been suggested that a compensation scheme to redress geoengineering harms is needed for geoengineering to be ethically and politically acceptable. Discussions of compensation for geoengineering (...) harms, however, sometimes presume geoengineering has presented new and unique challenges to compensation that cannot be readily accommodated by existing compensation practices. The most explicit formulation of this view was recently presented by Toby Svoboda and Peter J. Irvine, who argued that two forms of uncertainty in geoengineering — namely, ethical uncertainty and scientific uncertainty — make it immensely difficult to devise an ethically and politically satisfactory compensation scheme for geoengineering harms. -/- In this paper, we argue against the view that geoengineering presents new and unique challenges relating to compensation. More specifically, we show that placing these challenges within the broader context of anthropogenic climate change reveals them to be less serious and less specific to geoengineering than some appear to believe. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the lack of critique of the linear model in geoengineering governance discourse, and to illustrate different considerations for a geoengineering governance framework that is not based on a linear model of technology innovation. Finally, we set to explore a particular approach to geoengineering governance based on Peter-Paul Verbeek’s notion of ‘technology accompaniment’.