Authors:Redazione Tecnoscienza Abstract: Petr Válek is an experimental musician, painter, and inventor, who has released over 100 albums under different monikers. He has gained international recognition for his music created from homemade mechanical and electronic instruments or self-propelled kinetic objects, constructed from trash and found household items.
He regularly publishes “instructional” videos on Facebook and YouTube, recorded in his technologically dense studio stacked with an assemblage of objects, instruments, books, drawings, tubes of paint, along with his computer, through which he shows the results of his experiments with constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing sound technologies. Vapetron Megaloman is an analog modular synthesizer created by Válek.
Authors:Claudio Coletta, Stefano Crabu, Manuela Perrotta Abstract: This issue marks the beginning of Tecnoscienza’s fifth three-year cycle and, on the basis of the journal’s alternation policy, inaugurates a new Coordination Board. We would like to thank the two previous members of the Coordination Board, Attila Bruni and Paolo Magaudda, for their invaluable contribution to the journal since its conception. When the journal was first published, twelve years ago, it represented an example of alternative and independent scientific publishing practices, in a context where open access practices were in their early days. With the support of STS Italia and the volunteer work of a group of Italian scholars, Tecnoscienza introduced a radical platinum/diamond Open Access (OA) model, in which neither authors nor readers were required to pay any fees, to make scientific work freely available under the Creative Commons license. [...] PubDate: 2022-07-07 Issue No:Vol. 13 (2022)
Authors:Attila Bruni, Chris Hesselbein, Paolo Magaudda, Mariacristina Sciannamblo Abstract: Abstract: Like the many fortunate enough to cross his path, the STS Italia community and Tecnoscienza are particularly indebted with the sociologist of science and technology – and Moog synthesizer player – Trevor Pinch (1952-2021). Our journal gratefully remembers his human and intellectual generosity through the words of four researchers who encountered Trevor as a mentor, supervisor, colleague and source of inspiration for their life and work.
Keywords: Trevor Pinch; mentoring; The Electric Golem; sound studies; STS Italia. PubDate: 2022-07-07 Issue No:Vol. 13 (2022)
Authors:Valentina Marcheselli Abstract: Abstract: This paper describes the conceptual effort and scientific practices though which space analogues – i.e. material settings in which one or more analogies between Earth and outer space are embedded – are built, sustained and experienced. Based on my ethnographic study of astrobiologists’ and speleologists’ analogue fieldwork activities in Sardinian subsurface environments, I claim that analogues are part of the process of making astrobiology as a discipline: they do not only constitute fundamental heuristics to understand Earthly – and perhaps one day extra-terrestrial – life, but they also reframe disciplinary boundaries and imagined futures on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe.
Authors:Beatrice Del Monte Abstract: Abstract: In this article I will discuss the potential of using the assemblage thinking in multispecies ethnography, as a method for developing postanthropocentric situated accounts. It is an extremely relevant tool with which to relate to make emerge how space is co-constructed through hybrid associations of human and nonhuman actors, which exceed human intentionality. Reading entanglements through a material-semiotic approach provides interesting analyses of the exploitation of the nonhuman on a global scale, but also offers stories of possible situated multispecies relationships of care. These relations are not universal essences, but situated entanglements in which nonhuman actors play an active role. Relying on STS feminist reflections, focusing on care could have the potential of unveiling less anthropocentric more-than-human relations, showing how beings depend on each other.
Authors:Leonardo Piromalli Abstract: Abstract: The global higher education (HE) landscape is changing today, with HE systems facing similar dilemmas. Italian HE is characterised by a hybrid arrangement in which bureaucratic and neomanagerial features are coexisting. Recent scholarship has highlighted the role of digitalisation processes and interconnectivity across platforms in shaping educational practice and governance in HE. This research aims at investigating the unfolding of interconnectivity across digital entities in HE, and its effects. Two interconnective software used in an Italian university are examined through interviews, digital ethnography, and documentary analysis. The research highlights a close and threefold relationship between interoperability and standardisation processes in HE. In particular, interconnective textures may embed standards, exert standardising effects (on both local educational practice and the national HE governance), and become standards themselves. An alternative vision of interoperability in HE is finally articulated that focuses on collaboration and plasticity rather than control and closure.
Authors:Niccolò Tempini, Antonio Maturo, Elisabetta Tola Abstract: Abstract: The crossing boundaries intends to open a dialogue between Science and Technology Studies, Social studies of Health and the emerging Data Journalism perspective. It explores major issues at stake in contemporary practices of producing and sharing data, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: health data; platforms; risks; pandemic; data journalism. PubDate: 2022-07-07 Issue No:Vol. 13 (2022)
Authors:Roberta Spada Abstract: Abstract: Science and technology museums and centres are usually conceived as settings for science communication. In the STS tradition of Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST), galleries and exhibitions represent the museum side most exposed to research. However, these museums are complex organisations where artefacts are not only exhibited but also collected, stored, studied, and preserved because they make the technoscientific heritage of a place. In this Scenario, I review the literature in PCST/STS and Museum Studies to show how the PCST approach is insufficient to study science and technology museums because issues about the private side and heritage are not addressed. I argue for the need for STS to enter the private sides of science museums and study them as places of technoscientific knowledge production. The Scenario suggests an STS approach situated in sociomaterial ecologies to study museum practices which, as discussed by Museum Studies, are the sites where narratives about science and technology arise.
Keywords: science and technology museums; museum artefacts; heritage; sociomaterial ecologies; museum practices; narratives. PubDate: 2022-07-07 Issue No:Vol. 13 (2022)
Authors:Redazione Tecnoscienza Abstract: M. Airoldi Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms Cambridge, Polity Press, 2022, pp. 192 by Guilherme Cavalcante Silva
A. A. Casilli Schiavi del Clic. Perché Lavoriamo Tutti per il Nuovo Capitalismo' [Slaves of the Click. Why Do We All Work for the New Capitalism'] Milano, Feltrinelli, 2020, pp. 320 [Italian translation of En Attendant les Robots: Enquête sur le Travail du Clic, Paris, Seuil, 2019, pp. 400] by Attila Bruni
K. Crawford Atlas of AI New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2021, pp. 327 by Federico Cugurullo
M. P. Diogo, C. Luis and M. L. Sousa (eds.) Ciência, Tecnologia e Medicina na Construção de Portugal, Volume 4: Inovação e Contestação [Science Technology and Medicine in the Construction of Portugal, Volume 4: Innovation and Contestation] Lisboa, Tinta-da-China, 2021, pp. 704 by Luis Junqueira
B. Mitchell Engaging with Actor-Network Theory as a Methodology in Medical Education Research London and New York, Routledge, 2021, pp. 150 by Roberto Lusardi
I. Picardi Labirinti di Cristallo. Strutture di Genere nell’Accademia e nella Ricerca [Crystal Labyrinths. Gender Structures in Academia and Research] Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2020, pp. 124 by Letizia Zampino
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