Abstract As Paul B. Thompson suggests in his recent seminal paper, “‘There’s an App for That’: Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means,” technical standards restructure property (and other social) relations. He concludes with the claim that the development of technical standards of commodification can serve purposes with bad effects such as “the rise of the factory system and the deskilling of work” or progressive effects such as how “technical standards for animal welfare… discipline the unwanted consequences of market forces.” (...) In this reply, we want to append several points to his argument and suggest that he rightly points out that standards can promote various goods; however, there are peculiar powers wielded by standardization processes that might profitably be unpacked more systematically than Thompson's article seems to suggest. First, the concealment of the technopolitics around standards is largely due to their peculiar ontological status as recipes for reality. Second, technical standards can and do commit violence against persons, but such violence is often suffered not in the formation of class consciousness, as Marx might have put it, but as a failure to conform to the laws of nature . Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0048-1 Authors Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 429A Berkey Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

This article is a critical examination of practices and representations that constitute international education. While international education has provided substantial contributions and benefits for nation-states and international students, we question the discourses and practices which inform the international education export industry. The ‘brand identities’ of receiving or host countries imply that they are welcoming, respectful of multiculturalism and have a well established intellectual history, in contrast to international students' embodied experiences. There is also a tendency to represent and regard international (...) students as disembodied learners. We conclude that these disjunctures between disembodied representations and embodied experiences are undermining the kinds of cosmopolitan sensibilities that international education claims to provide. (shrink)

Reflecting on a three year long exploratory research of ethics committees in the Czech Republic authors discuss the current role and identity of research ethics committees. The research of Czech ethics committees focused on both self-presentation and self-understanding of ECs members, and how other stakeholders (representatives of the pharmaceutical industry) view them. The exploratory research was based on formal and informal communication with the members of the ethics committees. Members of the research team took part at six regular voluntary meetings (...) of the ethics committees' members, organised by the Forum of Czech Ethics Committees, and at three summer schools of medical ethics. There were realised twenty-five semi-structured interviews as well as six focus group sessions and a participant observation of several regular meetings of three ethics committees. On the grounds of experience from the interviews a simple questionnaire survey was realised among the members of the ethics committees. The ethics committees comprise a community of members working voluntarily, without claims to remuneration or prestige; the unifying goal is protection of subjects of research. The principal working methods are dialogue and agreement. The members of the ethics committees thus, among other things, create an informal community, which can be to a certain extent seen as a Kantian ethical community in a weak sense. The phenomenon of ethics committees can also be described by terms of an epistemic community and a community of practice. These concepts, which are borrowed from other authors and areas, are used as a way how to think of ECs role and identity a bit differently and are meant as a contribution to the current international debate on the topic. (shrink)

Set within the socio-political context of standards-based education reform, this article explores the constitutive role of teaching standards in the production of the practice and identity of the ‘accomplished’ teacher. It contrasts two idioms for thinking about and studying these standards, the representational and the performative. Utilising the material-semiotic approach of actor-network theory, it addresses the issue of how the representational idiom of teaching standards has become so authoritative that it readily eclipses other ways to think and ‘do’ them. In (...) tracing the development of a specific set of teaching standards as part of a national research project, the argument is made that standards should be understood as performative knowledge and identity practices. And, accounting them should also be performative. Accordingly, attention is given to key locales in which this development is taking place. Teaching standards emerge as ontologically variable and it is struggles around this variability that can create conditions for a renewed practice and politics of education reform. (shrink)

Public funding institutions are able to influence what aspects researchers take into account when they consider the future impacts of their research. On the basis of a description of the evaluation systems that public research funding institutes in the Netherlands (STW and SenterNovem) use to estimate the quality of engineering science, this article shows that researchers are now predominantly required to reflect on the intellectual merit of their research and on the usability and marketability of the technology it contributes to. (...) In addition, SenterNovem also mandates reflection on sustainability. Here it is argued that these requirements do not suffice. Funding institutions should also do more to enhance reflection during the research process on the “soft impacts” of technologies, which refer to the alterations that technologies may bring about in the quality of human life. To do this it is suggested that it is helpful to engage a specifically trained ethicist to monitor the research process and create a feedback loop from the ethicist to the funding institution. (shrink)

An encyclopedia entry providing an overview of the philosophical issues entailed in the theory and practice of "identity politics." Open access and online. Regularly updated.

The paper addresses the question of whether, as Nanda claims, treating all knowledge traditions including science as local, denies the possibility of criticism. It accepts the necessity for criticism but denies that science can be the sole arbiter of truth and argues that we have to live with holding differing knowledges in tension with one another.

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative “data.” I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the voiceless, (...) the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

In “Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies”, we show how oppression can be inscribed in medical devices. We consider oximeters and spirometers, drawing heavily on the work of anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas and historian Lundy Braun. Both devices encode racial biases: oximeters because they do not correct for race, and spirometers because they do. We zoom out from these particular devices to examine a wide range of tools and technologies, and we build a theoretical framework that covers not only race (...) but other axes of oppression: gender, ability, class, etc. -/- We are inspired by the peer commentaries and the guest editorial, and we are grateful to the contributors for engaging with our work and sharing their expertise. Their responses to our target article advance our understanding in three directions. First, a set of responses contextualize our framework within the histories of medicine, bioethics, and science and technology studies. Second, a set of responses provide additional examples of oppressive medical tools and technologies: not only material artifacts like oximeters and spirometers, but also spatial environments like inpatient psychiatric units, and cognitive niches comprised of digital technologies like electronic medical records and medical data classifications. Third, a set of responses propose countermeasures: operationalizing anti-oppressive practices for device design and testing; mapping the complex causal relationships involved in real-world problems; and repairing the harms done by materialized oppression through racism-conscious praxis. We reply to these three sets of responses—respectively, the “past, present, and future” of oppressive medical objects and spaces—in what follows. (shrink)

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)

Paperwork plays a key role in a how institutions accommodate, refuse, or manage disabled people. This article develops modes for reading paperwork that build on each other, beginning with (a) recognizing the institutional pressures at work in shaping bureaucratic practices, then (b) considering how a person's relationship to disability influences how they might encounter these practices, and ultimately (c) noticing how the encounter between disabled/mad people and an institution might create something new, what the author calls archival excess. These methods (...) for reading are in conversation with disability studies, medical humanities, and document studies, and ultimately work toward a goal adapted from the principles of Disability Justice: recognizing the wholeness of disabled subjects in institutional archives. (shrink)

With the findings of microbiome studies, many artists have begun to focus on environments where microbe-human interactions take place. Beyond the sharp boundaries that separate human and microbe as distinct entities, they give an artistic expression to the complex symbiotic modes between them. Güneş-Helen Isitan’s work _Hybridities_: _Almost Other_ creates images of human-microbe symbiosis by mobilizing certain scientific tools and discourses and the possibilities of photographic medium. A “microbe-image” emerges as a result of multi-species interaction and is produced by traversing (...) multi-sites. Its apparatus contains its own production process as a problematic knot to be posed. This requires approaching the work with a certain ethnographic sensibility. As a result, manufacturing life through microbe-images becomes inseparable from technical, scientific, social, methodological, and philosophical issues that are weaved in _Hybridities_: _Almost Other_’s “biophotographic” apparatus. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the origins and subsequent reception of the paper "Ontological Gerrymandering: The anatomy of social problems explanations", published in 1985. It describes the circumstances of my turning up at McGill University as a Visiting Professor in Sociology and meeting Dorothy, then a graduate student and the TA assigned to an undergraduate course on Social Problems which I was asked to teach. The paper reflects on the twin benefits: of an interloper, from Europe and from Science and Technology (...) Studies (STS), entering the exotic and heady fray of North American social problems; and of Dorothys steady and resolute guidance in introducing me to a new field. The paper suggests some reasons for the endurance of the papers arguments, more than 35 years after its publication, drawing on some parallel developments in Social Problems and STS. It asks why has there been rather little mutual interaction between these disciplines, given their common concern with questions, among others, about values, effects and interventions in academic scholarship. The paper concludes that many more of us might have done well to pursue the path of strident agnosticism. (shrink)

Interpretation groups, which meet on a regular basis for jointly analysing qualitative data, are well-established in sociology and related disciplines. There are currently at least 71 interpretation groups in German-speaking countries, and there are more if one includes project teams, which meet on a regular basis for data sessions. Yet, there is relatively little knowledge based on empirical research about these groups and their practices. Inspired by studies on social sciences and humanities, this article examines how “good” interpretations are jointly (...) created in these groups. Prior studies underlined that social scientific methods are productive, i.e., performative. Following this lead, my study turns data analysis in qualitative research into an object of inquiry by investigating how interpretation groups work on textual data. More specifically, this article discusses how these groups negotiate different interpretative options and at the same time evaluate the quality of their results as well as the interpretation process as a whole. In this regard, the approach presented in this article also contributes to the growing literature on valuation and evaluation in science by focusing on communicative devices for valuing and evaluating interpretations. (shrink)

This book develops an integrated perspective on the practices and politics of making knowledge work in inclusive development and innovation. While debates about development and innovation commonly appeal to the authority of academic researchers, many current approaches emphasize the plurality of actors with relevant expertise for addressing livelihood challenges. Adopting an action-oriented and reflexive approach, this volume explores the variety of ways in which knowledge works, paying particular attention to dilemmas and controversies. The six parts of the book address the (...) complex interplay of knowledge and politics, starting with the need for knowledge integration in the first part and decolonial perspectives on the politics of knowledge integration in the second part. The following three parts focus on the practices of inclusive development and innovation through three major themes of transformative learning, evidence, and digitization. The final part of the book addresses the governance of knowledge and innovation in the light of political struggles about inclusivity. Exploring conceptual and practical themes through case studies from the Global North and South, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners researching and working in development studies, epistemology, innovation studies, science and technology studies and sustainability studies more broadly. (shrink)

This article inverts Donna Haraway’s proposition that ‘the ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image’ by instead exploiting everyday experience to approach the contemporary cyborg. It utilises digital tools to compile a corpus of Instagram posts that foreground corporeal hybridity, and examines this social media data through the lenses of feminist STS, affect theory and digital studies. This strategy offers a new vantage on the cyborg by connecting it (...) to concrete and ongoing user practices. To make these interventions, this project focuses specifically on a genre of post popularised by Instagram fitness (or fitstagram) influencers – diptych photographic montages that oppose imperfectly ‘real’ material bodies to unrealistically ‘perfect’ media bodies. Although they formally rely on binary logics (real v. perfect, offline v. online), the posts simultaneously deconstruct them in a number of ways. These repeated boundary transgressions reflect users’ lived experiences of hybrid online/offline corporeality and help forward a theory of cyborg embodiment that relies on quotidian practices as opposed to fixed products or identities. Moreover, close engagement with a final dataset of eighty-nine posts illuminates three particular modes of enacting the cyborg corpus on Instagram: occupation of multiple bodies, awareness of the analogue body and anxious boundary-work. This research extends the cyborg as a critical figure by situating it within a social media context, attending to its imbrication in everyday practices, and affirming female Instagram users as theorists of their cyborg selves. (shrink)

This article provides an ethnographic account of how Big Data biology is produced, interpreted, debated, and translated in a Big Data-driven cancer clinical trial, entitled “Personalized OncoGenomics,” in Vancouver, Canada. We delve into epistemological differences between clinical judgment, pathological assessment, and bioinformatic analysis of cancer. To unpack these epistemological differences, we analyze a set of gazes required to produce Big Data biology in cancer care: clinical gaze, molecular gaze, and informational gaze. We are concerned with the interactions of these bodily (...) gazes and their interdependence on each other to produce Big Data biology and translate it into clinical knowledge. To that end, our central research questions ask: How do medical practitioners and data scientists interact, contest, and collaborate to produce and translate Big Data into clinical knowledge? What counts as actionable and reliable data in cancer decision-making? How does the explicability or translatability of genomic Big Data come to redefine or contradict medical practice? The article contributes to current debates on whether Big Data engenders new questions and approaches to biology, or Big Data biology is merely an extension of early modern natural history and biology. This ethnographic account will highlight how genomic Big Data, which underpins the mechanism of personalized medicine, allows oncologists to understand and diagnose cancer in a different light, but it does not revolutionize or disrupt medical oncology on an institutional level. Rather, personalized medicine is interdependent on different styles of thought, gaze, and practice to be produced and made intelligible. (shrink)

Over the past decades, great strides have been made to professionalize and increase access to transgender medicine. As the evidence base grows and conceptualizations regarding gender dysphoria/gender incongruence evolve, so too do ideas regarding what constitutes good treatment and decision-making in transgender healthcare. Against this background, differing care models arose, including the ‘Standards of Care’ and the so-called ‘Informed Consent Model’. In these care models, ethical notions and principles such as ‘decision-making’ and ‘autonomy’ are often referred to, but left unsubstantiated. (...) This not only transpires into the consultation room where stakeholders are confronted with many different ethical challenges in decision-making, but also hampers a more explicit discussion of what good decision-making in transgender medicine should be comprised of. The aim of this paper is to make explicit the conceptual and normative assumptions regarding decision-making and client autonomy underpinning the ‘Standards of Care’ and ‘Informed Consent Model’ currently used in transgender care. Furthermore, we illustrate how this elucidation aids in better understanding stakeholders’ ethical challenges related to decision-making. Our ethical analysis lays bare how distinct normative ambiguities in both care models influence decision-making in practice and how foregrounding one normative model for decision-making is no moral panacea. We suggest that the first steps towards good decision-making in gender-affirming medical care are the acknowledgement of its inherent normative and moral dimensions and a shared, dialogical approach towards the decision-making process. (shrink)

Forensic DNA phenotyping is a genetic technology that might be used in criminal investigations. Based on DNA samples of the human body found at crime scenes, it allows to infer externally visible characteristics (such as eye, hair and skin colour) and continental-based biogeographical ancestry. By indicating the probable visible appearance of a criminal suspect, forensic DNA phenotyping allows to narrow down the focus of a criminal investigation. In this article, drawing on interviews with forensic geneticists, we explore how their narratives (...) translate contemporary focus on criminal molecularized bodies. We propose the concept of (de)materialization to approach three aspects of the forensic geneticists’ views. The first regards considering bodies as mutable entities. The second relates to socially contingent meanings attributed to bodies. The third regards to controversies surrounding data reliability. By reflecting upon the (de)materialization of criminal bodies, forensic geneticists juxtapose the defence and unsettling of forensic DNA phenotyping claims. (shrink)

Despite technological innovations, clinical expertise remains the cornerstone of psychiatry. A clinical expert does not only have general textbook knowledge, but is sensitive to what is demanded for the individual patient in a particular situation. A method that can do justice to the subjective and situation-specific nature of clinical expertise is ethnography. Effective deep brain stimulation (DBS) for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) involves an interpretive, evaluative process of optimizing stimulation parameters, which makes it an interesting case to study clinical expertise. The (...) aim of this study is to explore the role of clinical expertise through an ethnography of the particular case of DBS optimization in OCD. In line with the topic of the special issue this article is a part of, we will also use our findings to reflect on ethnography as a method to study complex phenomena like clinical expertise. This ethnography of DBS optimization is based on 18 months of participant observation and nine in-depth interviews with a team of expert clinicians who have been treating over 80 OCD patients since 2005. By repeatedly observing particular situations for an extended period of time, we found that there are recurrent patterns in the ways clinicians interact with patients. These patterns of clinical practice shape the possibilities clinicians have for making sense of DBS-induced changes in patients’ lived experience and behavior. Collective established patterns of clinical practice are dynamic and change under the influence of individual learning experiences in particular situations, opening up new possibilities and challenges. We conclude that patterns of clinical practice and particular situations are mutually constitutive. Ethnography is ideally suited to bring this relation into view thanks to its broad temporal scope and focus on the life-world. Based on our findings, we argue that clinical expertise not only implies skillful engagement with a concrete situation but also with the patterns of clinical practice that shape what is possible in this specific situation. Given this constraining and enabling role of practices, it is important to investigate them in order to find ways to improve diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities. (shrink)

Prevention of age-related disorders is increasingly in focus of health policies, and it is hoped that early intervention on processes of deterioration can promote healthier and longer lives. New opportunities to slow down the aging process are emerging with new fields such as personalized nutrition. Data-intensive research has the potential to improve the precision of existing risk factors, e.g., to replace coarse-grained markers such as blood cholesterol with more detailed multivariate biomarkers. In this paper, we follow an attempt to develop (...) a new aging biomarker. The vision among the project consortium, comprising both research and industrial partners, is that the new biomarker will be predictive of a range of age-related conditions, which may be preventable through personalized nutrition. We combine philosophical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the possibilities and challenges of managing aging through bodily signs that are not straightforwardly linked to symptomatic disease. We document how the improvement of measurement brings about new conceptual challenges of demarcating healthy and unhealthy states. Moreover, we highlight that the reframing of aging as risk has social and ethical implications, as it is generative of normative notions of what constitutes successful aging and good citizenship. (shrink)

The discussion about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on Africa is deeply divided and contains widely diverging claims about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. Building upon literature on the ‘good farmer’ that highlights that farmers identities are an important factor in explaining the success or failure of agricultural change, we argue that the identity of the farmer is an undervalued yet crucial aspect for understanding the debate about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on African farmers. In this article (...) we therefore investigate what farmers’ identities are implicated in the arguments about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. We aim to identify the main fault lines in different accounts of the African biotechnology farmer by analysing the identities ascribed to them in two prominent cases of controversy: the debates at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the discussion about the impact of biotechnology on smallholder farmers in the Makhathini flats in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Our findings demonstrate that arguments about biotechnology are informed by diverging conceptions of who the African farmer is, what is important for the African farmer, and what role the African farmer has in relation to agricultural biotechnology. These findings remain relevant for current discussions on gene editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas. Openly discussing these different views on the identity of smallholder farmers is crucial for moving forward in the biotechnology controversy and can inform future attempts to elicit the farmer’s voice. (shrink)

Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offered by a concrete situation. The concept of situated normativity has so far primarily been discussed in the context (...) of skilled unreflective action. In this paper, we aim to explore and sketch the role of the concept of situated normativity in characterising more reflective forms of normativity. The goal of the paper is two-fold: first, by showing more reflective forms of normativity to be continuous with unreflective situated normativity, we bring these reflective forms into the reach of embodied accounts of cognition; and second, by extending the concept of situated normativity, new light is thrown on questions regarding reflective forms of cognition. We show that sociomaterial aspects of situations are crucial for understanding more reflective forms of normativity. We also shed light on the important question of how explicit rules can compel people to behave in particular ways. (shrink)

In cognitive science, long-term anticipation, such as when planning to do something next year, is typically seen as a form of ‘higher’ cognition, requiring a different account than the more basic activities that can be understood in terms of responsiveness to ‘affordances,’ i.e. to possibilities for action. Starting from architects that anticipate the possibility to make an architectural installation over the course of many months, in this paper we develop a process-based account of affordances that includes long-term anticipation within its (...) scope. We present a framework in which situations and their affordances unfold, and can be thought of as continuing a history of practices into a current situational activity. In this activity affordances invite skilled participants to act further. Via these invitations one situation develops into the other; an unfolding process that sets up the conditions for its own continuation. Central to our process account of affordances is the idea that engaged individuals can be responsive to the direction of the process to which their actions contribute. Anticipation, at any temporal scale, is then part and parcel of keeping attuned to the movement of the unfolding situations to which an individual contributes. We concretize our account by returning to the example of anticipation observed in architectural practice. This account of anticipation opens the door to considering a wide array of human activities traditionally characterized as ‘higher’ cognition in terms of engaging with affordances. (shrink)

Precision Medicine is driven by the idea that the rapidly increasing range of relatively cheap and efficient self-tracking devices make it feasible to collect multiple kinds of phenotypic data. Advocates of N = 1 research emphasize the countless opportunities personal data provide for optimizing individual health. At the same time, using biomarker data for lifestyle interventions has shown to entail complex challenges. In this paper, we argue that researchers in the field of precision medicine need to address the performative dimension (...) of collecting data. We propose the fun-house mirror as a metaphor for the use of personal health data; each health data source yields a particular type of image that can be regarded as a ‘data mirror’ that is by definition specific and skewed. This requires competence on the part of individuals to adequately interpret the images thus provided. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of an aging world population increasingly affected by a diverse range of abilities and disabilities as well as the rise of ubiquitous computing and digital app cultures, this paper questions how mobile technologies mediate between heterogeneous environments and sensing beings. To approach the current technological manufacturing of the senses, two lines of thought are of importance: First, there is a need to critically reflect upon the concept of assistive technologies as artifacts providing tangible solutions for a specific (...) disability. Second, the conventional distinction between user and environment requires a differentiated consideration. This contribution will first review James Gibson’s concept of “affordances” and modify this approach by introducing theories and methods of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory. Then, we present two case studies where we explore the relations between recent “assistive” app technologies and human sensory perception. As hearing and seeing are key in this regard, we concentrate on two specific media technologies: ReSound LINX2, a hearing aid which allows for direct connect with iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and Camassia, an IOS app for sonic wayfinding for blind people. We emphasize the significance of dis-/abling practices for manufacturing novel forms of hearing and seeing and drawing on sources like promotional materials by manufacturers, ads, or user testimonials and reviews. Our analysis is interested in the reciprocal relationships between users and their socio-technical and media environments. By and large, this contribution will provide crucial insights into the contemporary entanglement of algorithm-driven technologies, daily practices, and sensing subjects: the production of techno-sensory arrangements. (shrink)

Despite a great deal of feminist work that has highlighted its social construction, menstruation seems a self-evidently “natural” bodily process. Yet, how menstruation is defined or what “counts” as menstruation is rarely questioned. Examining menstruation alongside technologies that alter it highlights these definitional questions. In this article, I examine menstrual suppression through an analysis of medical journal articles and FDA advisory committee transcripts, paired with websites used to market menstrual suppression to consumers. Across these contexts, new definitions of menstruation converged (...) on a distinction between bleeding that occurs when women are taking hormonal birth control and when they are not. The case of menstrual suppression birth control pills provides an opportunity to study the work of redefining a biological process understood as quintessentially natural and deeply significant for gendered embodiment, as well as a challenge to consider both the social and material construction of gendered bodies. (shrink)

Since the early 1980s, actor-network theory has contested the status of “context” as an explanatory resource. Expressions and concepts such as “transformations of social worlds,” “enactments,” and “ontological politics” provide resources for grasping the ways in which agents actively transform the world and add something new. This has been of immense importance and serves as a warning against reducing events and actors to a given context. But a side effect of this forward looking move is that not enough attention is (...) given to that which enables issues and situations to emerge in the first place. Moreover, the focus on that which is constantly being enacted seems to have privileged the contemporary as the object of study and ethnography as the method of inquiry. History and the study of texts—from the past—seem, increasingly, to get lost in Science and Technology Studies. The aim of this article is instead to use actor-network theory resources as a historicizing method. The article explores the tense concern for the animal in political debates at the turn of the twentieth century. The article argues that contexts should not be seen as something external, but rather integral to the relevant text and situation, thus the very issue at stake. (shrink)

How are contexts made and narrated? This article addresses the question of how to identify relevant contexts for understanding a work of natural history, in this case The First Natural History of Norway, published in two volumes in 1752 and 1753. In addition to offering a rich and complex description of Norwegian nature, this historical work serves as an important source for investigating the ways in which nature was perceived in the kingdom of Denmark-Norway in the middle of the eighteenth (...) century. Nature was manifold, serving as a source of aesthetic pleasure, economic gain, religious reverence, and political power. It is argued that to understand the different natures presented in this book, we need to relate them to more than one context. But how do we determine the relevant contexts? The approach explored in this article is to read the book closely in search of the specific audiences that are addressed. By focusing on the ways audiences are addressed, it is argued, we can make better historical accounts of how natures are conceived and change in relation to different contexts. (shrink)

This article asks how contexts are made in science as well as in social science, and how the making of contexts relates to political agency and intervention. To explore these issues, it traces contexting for foot-and-mouth disease and the strategies used to control the epidemic in the United Kingdom in 2001. It argues that to depict the world is to assemble contexts and to hold them together in a mode that may be descriptive, explanatory, or predictive. In developing this argument, (...) it explores how contexts are assembled in a series of different descriptive and explanatory narratives in epidemiology, policy, critical social science, and social studies of science. (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)

Engagement events—whether interviews, installations, or participatory encounters—can entail a range of happenings which, in one way or another, “overspill” the empirical, analytic, or political framing of those engagement events. This article looks at how we might attend to these overspills—for instance, forms of “misbehavior” on the part of lay participants—not only to provide accounts of them but also to explore ways of deploying them creatively. In particular, Stengers’ figure of the “idiot” is proposed as a device for deploying those overspills (...) to interrogate “what we are busy doing” as social science researchers in engagement events. This interrogation is furthered by considering the proactive idiocy of “Speculative Design’s” version of the public engagement with science which seems directly to engender “overspilling.” Providing examples of speculative design prototypes and practices, the article develops an ideal typical contrast between social scientific and designerly perspectives on public engagement. It is suggested that speculative design can serve as a resource for supplementing “science and technology studies” conceptualizations of, and practices toward, public, engagement, and science. (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)

Drawing on an ethnographic study of the installation and maintenance of Paris subway wayfinding system, this article attempts to discuss and specify previous claims that highlight stability and immutability as crucial aspects of material ordering processes. Though in designers’ productions, subway signs have been standardized and their consistency has been invested in to stabilize riders’ environment, they appear as fragile and transforming entities in the hands of maintenance workers. These two situated accounts are neither opposite nor paradoxical: they enact different (...) versions of subway signs, the stabilization of which goes through the acknowledgment of their vulnerability. Practices that deal with material fragility are at the center of what we propose, following Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, to term a care of things. Foregrounding such a care of things is a way to surface a largely overlooked dimension of material ordering and to renew how maintainability issues are generally tackled. (shrink)

In Arequipa, Peru’s second largest city, engineers work hard to control water flows and provide different sectors with clean and sufficient water. In 2011, only 10 percent of the totality of water used daily by Arequipa’s then close to 1 million people—in households, tourism, industry, and mining—was treated before it was returned to the river where it continues its flow downstream towards cultivated fields and, finally, into the Pacific Ocean. It takes specialized knowledge and manifold technologies to manage water and (...) sustain life in Arequipa, and engineers are central actors for making water flow. Examining the ecology of water management, this article asks to what extent we can talk of a way of knowing and enacting water that is particular to engineers. Through engineering practices, a technical domain emerges as separate from and superior to political and social domains. This production of categories can be understood as practices of purification. However, a purely technical grip on water is never possible. Unruly elements, like weather, contamination, urban dwellers, and competing interests, interfere and make processes of intervention unstable. Water is never completely cleaned, and, equally, the continuous processes of purification of categories and domains take place while other processes work to blur their boundaries. (shrink)

Seen as contributing to human enhancement, implanted technologies have recently been receiving a lot of attention. However, reflections on these technologies have taken the shape of rather speculative ethical judgments on “hyped” technological devices. On the other hand, while science and technology studies and philosophy of technology have a long tradition of analyzing how technological artifacts and tools transform and configure our lives, they tend to focus on use configurations rather than the intimate relations brought about by implanted technologies. Even (...) the cyborg has lost some of its hermeneutic power as it has been detached from its material grounds, becoming a discursive entity. In this article, I reclaim the importance of materiality and explore how people live with spinal cord stimulation, which is a type of neuromodulation technology. Implanted in bodies and seemingly out of sight, this technology does not cease to matter. Embodiment and incorporation are crucial for people to live well with SCS. Embodying the neuromodulation technology entails groping processes in which gestures are central and an increased intimacy with one’s bodily materiality. Incorporating it is highly relational and entangled with the bodies of loved and distant ones, humans and nonhumans. (shrink)

In feminist and cultural studies, there is a growing body of work concerned with how people’s lives are subjected to multiple, intersecting axes of differentiation and power. There is growing concern that we seem unable to address more than one difference at a time, thus failing to interrogate enactments of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in science, technology, and medicine. This article aims to contribute to the effort to conceptualize the making of and interactions between differences. It explores how (...) differences such as disability, gender, and class are made and unmade in sociotechnical practices. It shows that interactions between enactments of differences are complex, contradictory, unpredictable, and surprising and defy simple conclusions about effects and politics. These patterns of interference need to be investigated in situated practices, and we have to examine carefully how processes of differentiation interact to support and reinforce but also to challenge and undermine each other. (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 special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values critically explores a new stage in which the life sciences and biomedical practices have entered. This new stage is marked by postgenomic developments and an increased interest of life sciences in the everyday lives of people outside laboratories and clinical settings. Furthermore, particular attention is given to many chronic and degenerative disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or developmental disorders. These developments coincide—or have become entangled—with a new set of interests (...) that an anthropologically inclined science and technology studies is bringing to the analyses of biomedical practices. An increased interest is observed in the anthropologically inclined STS in studying phenomena on different scales and in exploring fields that are not readily dominated by technoscientific rationality in practice. The introduction to the special issue examines briefly these developments and situates them in a broader genealogy of different movements that have taken place in the anthropologically inclined subfield of STS since the late 1970s and early 1980s. (shrink)

It is often assumed that it was the alliance between patient associations and neuroscience, which originally made dementia a matter for intervention. In parallel ways, science and technology studies often attributes the power to define and act upon matters of life to biomedicine and science. The concern here is that the science centrism of STS contributes to the dominance of science and biomedicine by granting these analytical privileges. As a result, alternative modes of acting, for instance in care, are disarticulated (...) and made absent. This article mobilizes the sensibilities of anthropology to difference and draws upon excerpts of data from fieldwork in dementia care to show this and argue that there are different practices that act upon life and its limits; that these enact different versions of life and dementia; and that they matter because they shape how people are cared for and live and die with dementia. (shrink)

This exploratory paper investigates the enactment of a number of “publics” in relation to a recent, ostensibly “technical”, innovation, namely, the nanotechnology Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array-black. In particular, we show how various representations of VANTAblack—as technical artifact, as an exclusive artist’s material, as an exciting coating for a mass-produced commercial product, and as an object of science communication—implicate different “aesthetic experiences”. We discuss these aesthetic experiences in terms of the enactment of four distinct “aesthetic publics.” We then consider the possible (...) analytic value of the concept of aesthetic publics, not least in relation to the “opening up” and “closing down” of the potential debates that might attach to emerging technologies. (shrink)

The paper draws its inspiration from the provocation which Merton offered sociology both to engage with empirical data and to perform analyses adequate to guide intervention beyond the particular case. Whilst contemporary STS is very different both in its models of theory and its forms of methodology, this paper suggests Merton's concerns with engagement and adequacy provide a useful way to interrogate current approaches. Specifically, the paper explores some recent anthropological conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork that have provided potent models for (...) the study of scientific and technological cultures. These multi-sited approaches have also provided the opportunity to develop new notions of intervention and explore alternative ways of making contributions to development of theory and practice. In the process of pursuing the goals of engagement and adequacy notions of ethnography have however become stretched. This sense of detachment from methodological canons accentuates the need for methodological debate and skill-sharing in STS. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between a deconstructivist method in science and technology studies and the more recent moves towards a reconstructivist engagement with science and science policy making. Drawing on examples from the author's own research, the article identifies three forms of engagement and their relative utility and limitations. The article argues that these are typical of STS work that seeks direct engagement with science policy making and which could form the basis for a more "serviceable STS" that retains (...) its critical and independent perspective on science. The paper concludes by arguing that the analysis has important implications for the ways in which STS expertise can articulate with science policy making. (shrink)

Science studies has long been concerned with the theoretical and methodological challenge of mess—the inevitable tendency of technoscientific objects and practices to spill beyond the neat analytic categories we construct for them. Nowhere is this challenge greater than in the messy world of large-scale collaborative science projects, particularly though not exclusively in their start-up phases. This article examines the complicated life and death of the WATERS Network, an ambitious and ultimately abandoned effort at collaborative infrastructure development among hydrologists, engineers, and (...) social scientists studying water. We argue in particular against the “forensic imagination,” a particular style of accounting for failure in the messy world of large-scale network development, and against two common conceptual and empirical pitfalls that it gives rise to: defaults to formalism and defaults to the future. We argue that alternative postforensic approaches to “failures” like the WATERS Network can support forms of learning and accountability better attuned to the complexities of practice and policy in the real world of scientific collaboration and network formation. (shrink)

It is the purpose of this special issue to acknowledge the shifting definitions and uses of the conceptual and empirical in the field of Science and Technology Studies, and to explore the constructive potential of this condition. In this introductory essay we point to four formulations in STS for the relation between the conceptual and the empirical which do not figure them as binaries or opposites: the empirical as a path to the conceptual, the conceptual as practical and empirical, the (...) empirical as an instantiation of the conceptual, and a conceptual minimalism. We then point to some inspirations in contemporary thought for engaging creatively with the conceptual and empirical, and conclude by summarizing the contributions to this issue. (shrink)

How might the agency of the subaltern be conceptualized within the intersection of multiple worlds? Actor-network theory’s translation framework for understanding agency portraying this as entrepreneur and talking of a world in the making is arguably “imperialist,” “managerial,” and “monolithic.” Draws from the enactment turn of ANT and insights into the politics of representation, this article elaborates an alternative framework which focuses on displacement. By examining the case of dialysis patients, the article explores the displacing practices that follow the disruption (...) of routines in dialysis. Patients have to go through a process of problematization, distribution, hybridization, and restabilization, in order to sustain the coexistence of their alternative practices with dialysis. Unlike entrepreneurs in the translation model who transform the world by interesting others, enduring trials, and becoming spokespersons for all, those patients who manage to displace and sustain the coexistence of multiple worlds avoid interesting, still less confronting, the hegemonic actors and claiming representation for themselves. This article suggests the displacement of agency as a generic alternative. (shrink)