In recent years several approaches—philosophical, sociological, psychological—have been developed to come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world. However, notwithstanding the vast merit of each, they illuminate only certain aspects of technological mediation. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a philosophical reflection on technological mediation as such—deploying the concepts of ‘transparency’ and ‘opacity’ as heuristic instruments. Hence, we locate a ‘theory of transparency’ within several theoretical frameworks—respectively classic phenomenology, media theory, Actor Network Theory, postphenomenology, several ethnographical, psychological, and (...) sociological perspectives, and finally, the Critical Theory of Technology. Subsequently, we render a general, systematic overview of these theories, thereby conjecturing what a broad analysis of technological mediation in and of itself might look like—finding, at last, an essential contradiction between transparency of ‘use’ and transparency of social origins and effects. (shrink)

Since its appearance in 1962, Habermas' concept of Öffentlichkeit has gained and lost significant valencies. Originally a response to concerns about the state of German political culture shared by political radicals and conservatives alike, it was later incorporated into Habermas' broader concerns with the character of human communication more generally. In recent years Habermas has returned to problems that motivated the earlier work, but has sought to make sense of them using his ‘mature’ concept of Öffentlichkeit. The results of this (...) have been mixed, both analytically and politically; this is illustrated by his recent statements about religion and the public sphere. (shrink)

Science and technology plays a critical role, but not the only role, in realizing the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Not only must we observe the cultural context of scientific and technological interventions, we must respect and support the innovative capacity of those with different backgrounds. To help understand these concerns, this book puts forth the concept of generative justice in science and technology for development. This book presents community case studies concerning technological interventions in global health, the environment, agriculture, (...) and their ethics. Discusses issues around science, technology, and development in the Global South. Describes the redesign of lab-inspired prototypes after field testing with project partners. Identifies basic science/engineering principles utilized in development solutions. (shrink)

On November 28, 2009, as part of events marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, gas survivors protested the contents of the report prepared by government scientists that mocked their complaints about contamination. The survivors shifted from the scientific document to a mediated lunch invitation performance, purporting to serve the same chemicals as food that the report had categorized as having no toxic effects. I argue that the lunch spread, consisting of soil and (...) water from the pesticide plant, explicitly front-staged and highlighted the survivor’s forced intimate relationship with such chemicals, in order to reshape public perception of risks from toxins. Chemical matter like sevin tar and naphthol tar bound politicians, scientists, corporations, affected communities, and activists together, as these stakeholders debated the potential effects of toxic substances. This gave rise to an issue-based “chemical public.” Borrowing from such theoretical concepts as “ontologically heterogeneous publics” and “agential realism,” I track the existing and emerging publics related to the disaster and the campaigns led by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal advocacy group. (shrink)

Sociomaterial theories, including actor–network theory (ANT), materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to counter such a view. Drawing specifically on the work of Latour on the nature of critique and on examples of political analysis from writers such as Barad, Bennett, Braidotti, Marres and Whatmore, we suggest (...) that sociomaterialist approaches to the more-than-human open up extended understandings and productive alternative practices of politics. While recognising that this is a work in progress and not without difficulties and challenges, we argue that there is much to be gained for educational researchers from engaging with such approaches. (shrink)

This essay presents a theory of the role of technology in the distribution and exercise of social power. The paper studies how technical artefacts and systems are used to construct, maintain or strengthen power relations between agents, whether individuals or groups, and how their introduction and use in society differentially empowers and disempowers agents. The theory is developed in three steps. First, a definition of power is proposed, based on a careful discussion of opposing definitions of power, and it is (...) argued that a theory of power should have two components: a theory of power relations and a theory of empowerment. Second, an analysis of power relations is presented, in which five basic types of power relations between agents are distinguished, and this analysis is applied to technology, resulting in an account of the possible roles of technical artefacts in power relations. Third, I analyse how technology can lead to or contribute to empowerment and disempowerment, and what resistance strategies are possible against disempowerment through technological means. The theory of technology and power presented in this paper is claimed to be an essential ingredient of a critical theory of technology, which is a theory that analyses and critiques the role of technology in the distribution and exercise of power in society. In the final section of this paper, it is argued that the theoretical analysis of power and technology presented in this paper provides an adequate basis for the further development of such a critical theory of technology. I study how it may, specifically, be used to develop strategies for the democratization of technology. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call “residual realist” assumptions about participation and publics. Recent coproductionist accounts in science and technology studies offer (...) an alternative way of seeing participation as coproduced, relational, diverse, and emergent but have been somewhat reluctant to articulate what this means in practice. In this paper, we make this move by setting out a new framework of interrelating paths and associated criteria for remaking public participation with science and democracy in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways. This framework comprises four paths to: forge reflexive participatory practices that attend to their framings, emergence, uncertainties, and effects; ecologize participation through attending to the interrelations between diverse public engagements in wider systems; catalyze practices of anticipatory reflection to bring about responsible democratic innovations; and reconstitute participation as constitutive of systems of technoscience and democracy. (shrink)

Science and technology studies is famous for questioning conceptual and material boundaries by following controversies that cut across them. However, it has recently been argued that in research involving online platforms, there are also more practical boundaries to negotiate that are created by the variable availability, visibility, and structuring of data. In this paper, I highlight a potential tension between our inclination toward following controversies and “following the medium” and suggest that sometimes following controversies might involve going “against platforms” as (...) well as with them. I will illustrate this dilemma through an analysis of the controversy over the coverage of the Fukushima disaster on English language Wikipedia, which concerns boundaries between expert and lay knowledge but also the social and technical functioning of Wikipedia itself. For this reason, I show that following the controversy might mean making use of less formatted and less obvious data than Wikipedia normally provides. While this is not an argument against the use of automated digital research tools such as scrapers, I suggest that both quantitative and qualitative researchers need to be more willing to tweak their approaches based on the specificities of the case. (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 major problem with the emerging sociological literature on cosmopolitanism is that it has not adequately theorized mechanisms that mediate the presumed causal relationship between globalization and the development of cosmopolitan orientations. To solve this problem, I draw on Bruno Latour's actor- network theory to theorize the development of three key elements of cosmopolitanism: cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitics. ANT illuminates how humans and nonhumans of multiple nationalities develop attachments with one another to create network structures that sustain cosmopolitanism. (...) ANT also helps the sociology of cosmopolitanism become more reflexive and critical of its implicit normative claims. (shrink)

Making publics visible through digital traces has recently generated interest by practitioners of public engagement and scholars within the field of digital methods. This paper presents an experiment in moving such methods into critical proximity with political practice and discusses how digital visualizations of topical debates become appropriated by actors and hardwired into existing ecologies of publics and politics. Through an experiment in rendering a specific data-public visible, it shows how the interplay between diverse conceptions of the public as well (...) as the specific platforms and data invoked, resulted in a situated affordance-space that allowed specific renderings take shape, while disadvantaging others. Furthermore, it argues that several accepted tropes in the literatures of digital methods ended up being problematic guidelines in this space. Among these is the prescription to shown heterogeneity by pushing back at established media logics. (shrink)

This paper explores three cases of Do-It-Yourself, open-source technologies developed within the diverse array of topics and themes in the communities around the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. These cases focus on aerial mapping, water quality monitoring and civic science practices. The techniques discussed have in common the use of accessible, community-built technologies for acquiring data. They are also concerned with embedding collaborative and open source principles into the objects, tools, social formations and data sharing practices that emerge (...) from these inquiries. The focus is on developing processes of collaborative design and experimentation through material engagement with technology and issues of concern. Problem-solving, here, is a tactic, while the strategy is an ongoing engagement with the problem of participation in its technological, social and political dimensions especially considering the increasing centralization and specialization of scientific and technological expertise. The authors also discuss and reflect on the Public Lab’s approach to civic science in light of ideas and practices of citizen/civic veillance, or “sousveillance”, by emphasizing people before data, and by investigating the new ways of seeing and doing that this shift in perspective might provide. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss Cicero's practice of submitting his texts to others for comment, arguing that the mutual reading and correction of friends' works played an important social function. By discussing what would make a text better, Cicero and his collaborators worked to forge and maintain social ties. In addition, I pursue an important corollary: for a text to provoke this activity, it must present itself as unfinished or in progress. Cicero was aware of this corollary, and in the (...) Brutus he used images of textual incompletion to critique Atticist and Caesarian theories of style as solitary, antisocial, and implicitly autocratic. This led him to formulate an important new literary politics, which he put into practice in the years after Pompey's defeat in the civil war. (shrink)

Drugged bodies are commonly depicted as passive, suffering and abject, which makes it hard for them to be known in other ways. Wanting to get closer to these alternative bodies and their resourcefulness for living, I turned to body-mapping as an inventive method for telling different kinds of drug-using stories. Drawing on a research project with people who inject heroin and crack cocaine in London, UK, I employed body-mapping as a way of studying drugged bodies in their relation to others, (...) human and non-human, in the injecting event. I invited participants to draw their bodies in describing these otherwise hard-to-articulate experiences. Following Donna Haraway, I conceptualise body-mapping as a more-than-human mode of storytelling where different kinds of bodies can be known. Here, I look at three such bodies – sensing-bodies, temporal-bodies and environment-bodies – and argue that it is through being able to respond to such bodies that more hospitable ways of living with drugs can become possible. (shrink)

Following a controversy over the construction of a waste incinerator in the Fos-sur-Mer industrial area, residents pointed to the lack of knowledge of the industry’s cumulative impact on their health and environment. Under pressure, some of their elected representatives supported the creation of an independent scientific organization, the Ecocitizen Institute for Pollution Awareness. Its objective was to conduct localized scientific research on the effects of pollution and to lobby the administration to change its regulatory practices. This paper examines the efforts (...) made to ensure that the “undone science” gets done, by focusing on the specificities of this industrialized site. We look at a participatory biomonitoring experiment that aimed to document pollution in the Gulf of Fos where scientists working for the IECP accepted anglers’ requests and switched from an acknowledged sentinel species to another species. We tell the many stories that were shared with us about how conger qualified as a more suitable “cosmopolitical fish” in the study of pollution. Elaborating on actor–network theory and multispecies ethnographies, we discuss the appropriateness of congers as the newly appointed sentinel species. We argue that this demonstrates the importance of the “ecology of relations” in maintaining the livability of the area. (shrink)

This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. This (...) challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation. (shrink)

Responding to Guattari’s call for a ‘mutation of mentality’, the article explores unconventional horse-assisted leadership learning as promising ways of embodied learning to be affected and response-able. By drawing on and continuing the work of Guattari and posthuman feminist scholars, we aim to show that studying the affective pedagogics of opening up the senses and learning to be affected is of vital importance. We analyse a posthuman auto-ethnography of developing capabilities to live and breathe together that allow us to relate (...) in alternative ways. Experiments with affective pedagogy are conducted as they affect bodies through indeterminate and liminal contact zones and use aesthetics to evoke transformation in senses and thoughts, care and response. Since they are both domesticated and non-human, horses are promising companions in this endeavour of entrainment. However, these sensorial experiments also call for an ethics of cutting connections and, not least, of permitting refusals of refusals. (shrink)

This article is a reply to the three reviews of my book What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design in this symposium. It discusses the remarks made by the reviewers along five lines. The first is methodological and concerns the question of how to develop a philosophical approach to technology. The second line discusses the philosophical orientation of the book, and the relations between analytic and continental approaches. Third, I will discuss the metaphysical aspects of the book, (...) in particular the nature and value of the non-modernist approach it aims to set out. Fourth, I will discuss the social and political relevance of the book. Fifth, this will bring me to some concluding remarks about how the postphenomenological perspective developed in the book relates to liberalism, focusing on its suggestions to deliberately design our material environment in terms of mediation. (shrink)

This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue (...) mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital “move beyond impartiality.” I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter. (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)

Existing accounts of the early history of Alzheimer’s disease have focused on Alois Alzheimer’s (1864–1915) publications of two ‘peculiar cases’ of middle-aged patients who showed symptoms associated with senile dementia, and Emil Kraepelin’s (1856–1926) discussion of these and a few other cases under the newly introduced name of ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ in his Textbook of Psychiatry. This article questions the underpinnings of these accounts that rely mainly on publications and describe ‘presenility’ as a defining characteristic of the disease. Drawing on archival (...) research in the Munich psychiatric clinic, in which Alzheimer and Kraepelin practised, this article looks at the use of the category as a diagnostic label in practice. It argues that the first cases only got their exemplary status as key referents of Alzheimer’s disease in later readings of the original publications. In the 1900s, the published cases rather functioned as material to think about the limits of the category of senile dementia. The examination of paper technologies in the Munich psychiatric clinic reveals that the use of the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was not limited to patients of a certain age and did not exclude ‘senile’ cases. Moreover, the archival records reflect that many diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease were noted in the medical records as suspicions rather than conclusions. Against this background, the article argues that in theory and practice, Alzheimer’s disease was not treated as a well-defined disease entity in the Munich clinic, but as an exploratory category for the clinical and histopathological investigation of varieties of organic brain diseases. (shrink)

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities as (...) the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek. (shrink)

This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on (...) South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts. (shrink)

ArgumentDrawing and writing number among the most widespread scientific practices of representation. Neither photography, graphic recording apparatuses, typewriters, nor digital word- and image-processing ever completely replaced drawing and writing by hand. The interaction of hand, paper, and pen indeed involves much more than simply recording or visualizing what was previously thought, observed, or imagined. Both writing and drawing have the power to translate concepts and observations into two-dimensional, manageable, reproducible objects. They help to develop research questions and they open up (...) an interaction between the gathering of phenomena and the formation of theses. Related to the manifold studies of representational activities in the sciences and the humanities, this topical issue tries to refine our understanding of the capacities of drawing and writing as research techniques; i.e. as productive epistemic practices. In particular the contributions address three aspects: the material conditions and configurations of the “scene of drawing and writing,” the involved procedures of production, and the languages of inscription. (shrink)

This paper is about the ontology of a cancer diagnosis at high-end hospitals in Colombia. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic fieldwork study in this country, it pays attention to how dermatologists, pathologists, and oncologists looked at my partner’s skin during a routine medical checkup and enacted two seemingly contradictory diagnoses: a lethal melanoma and a benign dysplastic nevus—commonly known as mole. Because their differences under the microscope or through dermatology goggles may be subtle, physicians often disagree on what they see. (...) When medical services are not unrelated to the economic possibilities of patients to pay for them, what emerges through a microscope might be different. With neoliberal medical reforms in Colombia as background, this paper focuses on the ontological indeterminacy of cancer and its relationship to high-end hospitals and a patient who could, albeit not without effort, pay for the treatment. Thus, I argue that how physicians saw was not unrelated to what they saw and therefore to their practices of medicine in neoliberal Colombia. How do medical practices and ways of seeing in Colombia enter into composition with the bodies they study? Could the same skin tissue simultaneously be cancerous and noncancerous? (shrink)

This article traces an emergent tension in an interdisciplinary public health project called Weather Health and Air Pollution. The tension centered on two different kinds of data of air pollution: monitored and modeled data. Starting out with monitoring and modeling practices, the different ways in which they enacted air pollution are detailed. This multiplicity was problematic for the WHAP scientists, who were intent on working across disciplines, an initiative driven primarily by the epidemiologists who imbued the project with meaning and (...) value as the protagonists of “health.” To work collaboratively implies a stable, singular, and shared research object, however: one kind of data, one version of air pollution. In detailing two attempts by researchers to address the inadequacies of modeled and monitored data, this article explores the ways in which difference and multiplicity were negotiated and transformed. In doing so, this article suggests that it is the mobility and instability of data that are particularly fruitful for exploring the facilitation and enactment of new realities, while also making explicit the emergent problematics and partialities which inevitably result. (shrink)

The development of electronic personal health records by independent vendors and national health systems is understood to empower patients and create a new kind of consumerism in healthcare. With more personal health information at hand, active participation in the management of health and rational purchasing of healthcare services will be possible. Healthcare systems will also be able to contain costs and achieve sustainability. Based on a careful examination of the literature, we argue that many of the declared benefits of this (...) technology are rather unattainable. As the boundaries between the public and private healthcare sectors become blurred and as employers struggle to reduce health insurance expenses, this proclaimed ‘consumer empowerment in healthcare’ is an attempt to introduce a technology and a business model for centralising all relevant PHI to render them economic. We reflect on the consequences for the ‘empowered’ user and we suggest that this new market device has to separate and individually address sufficiently issues of privacy, confidentiality and security before it can claim a place in the digital healthcare ecosystem. (shrink)

First, this article will outline the metaphysics of `the social' that implicitly and explicitly connects the work of classical and contemporary cosmopolitan sociologists as different as Durkheim, Weber, Beck and Luhmann. In a second step, I will show that the cosmopolitan outlook of classical sociology is driven by exclusive differences. In understanding human affairs, both classical sociology and contemporary cosmopolitan sociology reflect a very modernist outlook of epistemological, conceptual, methodological and disciplinary rigour that separates the cultural sphere from the natural (...) objects of concern. I will suggest that classical sociology — in order to be cosmopolitan — is forced (1) to exclude non-social and non-human objects as part of its conceptual and methodological rigour, and (2) consequently and methodologically to rule out the non-social and the non-human. Cosmopolitan sociology imagines `the social' as a global, universal explanatory device to conceive and describe the non-social and non-human. In a third and final step the article draws upon the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde and offers a possible alternative to the modernist social and cultural other-logics of social sciences. It argues for a inclusive conception of `the social' that gives the non-social and non-human a cosmopolitan voice as well. (shrink)

During the past decades, research on ethical, legal, and social aspects of biobanks suggested and analysed various ethically and socially justifiable frameworks for collecting, storing, and distributing human biological material and bioinformation. In this article, we identify three patterns of argument that differ in terms of shared core assumptions and similar conceptual as well as normative orientations. These discursive 'orders', which are related to specific macropolitical contexts, have significantly shaped contexts for biobank policymaking. The first order was characterised by high (...) expectations of genomics and biobanking. Second order discourse partly took over the problems located in the first order, but reintroduced them into a justificatory framework that identified biobanks as public goods per se. The third order of ELSA expertise maintained a supportive attitude towards biobanking. However, regulation based on deductive reasoning became progressively complemented by ideals of participatory mechanisms and different methodologies of studying public perceptions. We conclude that this emphasis on learning processes and deliberation helps biobank communities to develop new concepts, methods and insights that will prove helpful in order to adapt to essentially undetermined futures of transnational innovation societies. (shrink)

NGOs have taken a dominant position in setting the agendas of Corporate Responsibility and Socially Responsible Investment matters, thereby skewing the efforts of corporates to limit negative externalities towards their own agendas. As the latter remain to a certain extent unpredictable, corporates must deal with an information asymmetry. This situation can be explained by the historically defensive nature of Corporate Responsibility codes established by companies under pressure of the NGOs. In this paper, I contend that only a new approach to (...) Corporate Responsibility could reverse this asymmetry: one where the social responsibility matters are articulated in a political debate between all stakeholders of a company and where conflicting interests are addressed in a deliberative process. To this end, the corporate world and the NGOs need to understand the need for a larger debate that includes all relevant stakeholders defined as the Public in the sense of Dewey. Latour and the Actor-Network theory provide us with a workable framework to structure such a dialogue, where participants have the authority and legitimacy to speak for the Public. (shrink)