Authors:Bård Torvetjønn Haugland Abstract: The review critiques Göde Both’s book Keeping Autonomous Driving Alive (2020). This book is an ethnographic exploration of a project in which roboticists and computer scientists attempt to make a technologically enhanced Volkswagen Passat drive without a human driver. Through an account grounded in actor-network theory, Both seeks to understand the actual work necessary to make the vehicle drive on its own, as well as the manner in which masculinity and futures are assembled and re-assembled around this emerging technology. The review assesses the merit of Both’s book as a self-contained account of a research project centred on self-driving vehicles, as well as the book’s contribution to the nascent social scientific literature on such vehicles. PubDate: 2022-04-06 DOI: 10.5324/njsts.v10i1.3951
Authors:Dick Kasperowski, Niclas Hagen, Frauke Rohden Abstract: The concept of boundary work (Gieryn 1983, 1999) has been developed to capture the ways in which scientists collectively defend and demarcate their intellectual territories. This article applies the concept of boundary work to the ethical realm and investigates the ethical boundary work performed by researchers in the field of citizen science (CS) through a literature review and by analysing accounts of ethics presented in CS literature. Results show that ethical boundary work in the CS literature is, to a large extent, a matter of managing ambiguities and paradoxes without any clear boundaries drawn between the unethical and ethical. Scientists are negotiating ethical positions, which might, occasionally, enhance the ethical authority of ‘non-science’ and non-scientists, as well as maintain already established research ethics. The main ethical boundary work in CS displays variations towards perceived insufficiencies of conventional research ethics to accommodate “outsiders”, addressing issues of distribution, relevance, and expulsion as science include volunteer contributors in the scientific process. PubDate: 2021-11-11 DOI: 10.5324/njsts.v10i1.4318