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Authors:Catharina Landström, Eric Sarmiento, Sarah J Whatmore Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Stakeholder engagement has become a watchword for environmental scientists to assert the societal relevance of their projects to funding agencies. In water research based on computer simulation modelling, stakeholder engagement has attracted interest as a means to overcome low uptake of new tools for water management. An increasingly accepted view is that more and better stakeholder involvement in research projects will lead to increased adoption of the modelling tools created by scientists in water management. However, we cast doubt on this view by drawing attention to how the freedom of stakeholder organizations to adopt new scientific modelling tools in their regular practices is circumscribed by the societal context. We use a modified concept of co-production in an analysis of a case of scientific research on drought in the UK to show how relationships between actors in the drought governance space influence the uptake of scientific modelling tools. The analysis suggests an explanation of why stakeholder engagement with one scientific project led to one output (data) getting adopted by stakeholders while another output (modelling tools) attracted no discernible interest. Our main objective is to improve the understanding of the limitations to stakeholder engagement as a means of increasing societal uptake of scientific research outputs. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-09-27T12:16:23Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231199220
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Authors:Julia Swallow Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Immunotherapy is heralded as the ‘fifth pillar’ of cancer therapy, after surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and genomic medicine. It involves ‘harnessing’ patients’ own immune system T-cells to treat cancer. In this article, I draw on qualitative interviews with practitioners working in oncology and patients in the UK, to trace metaphorical and discursive framing around immunotherapy. Immunotherapy aims to restore the functioning of the immune system to detect cancer (non-self), working with the self/non-self model that pervades immunology discourse more widely. Practitioners draw on metaphors that cement this self/non-self model, and that tend to depict the relationship between cancer and the immune system as an internal battle. Yet the discursive framing around immunotherapy also involves shifts that emphasize the body’s own capacity to heal, where it is framed as ‘gentle’ or ‘tolerable’ on the body. Through this discursive shift, immunotherapy refigures the antagonism associated with the self/non-self model in the context of cancer. Analysing patients’ embodied experiences of treatment, this article attends to the material realities and tensions provoked by this shift in discursive framing. This article contributes to feminist STS analyses of immunology discourse, and extends this literature by arguing that it is critical to address the material stakes of these discursive shifts by paying attention to patients’ day-to-day experiences of treatment. The discursive framing of immunotherapy brings into being new forms of embodied patienthood in the context of cancer. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-09-27T12:12:03Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231199217
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Authors:Philippe Sormani Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. For decades, playing Go at a professional level has counted among those things that, in Dreyfus’s words, ‘computers still can’t do’. This changed dramatically in early March 2016, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, South Korea, when AlphaGo, the most sophisticated Go program at the time, beat Lee Sedol, an internationally top-ranked Go professional, by four games to one. A documentary movie has captured and crafted the unfolding drama and, since AlphaGo’s momentous win, the drama has been retold in myriad variations. Yet the exhibition match as a technology demonstration—in short, the ‘AlphaGo show’—has not received much scrutiny in STS, notwithstanding or precisely because of all the media frenzy, game commentary, and ‘AI’ expertise in its wake. This article therefore revisits the second game’s ‘move 37’, its surprise delivery by AlphaGo on stage, and the subsequent line of commentary by the attending experts, initiated by the news-receipt token ‘ooh’. Drawing upon a reflexive video analysis, the article explicates the Go move’s scenic intelligibility—its embodied delivery as part of the technology demonstration—as the contingent result of intricate ‘human/machine interfacing’. For mainstream media to report on AlphaGo’s ‘superhuman intelligence’, it both relied upon and effaced such interfacing work. In turn, the article describes and discusses how ‘object agency’ and ‘algorithmic drama’ both trade on skillfully embodied play as a pivotal interfacing practice, informing the exhibition match from within its livestream broadcast. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-09-27T11:18:03Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231191284
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Authors:Florian Jaton, Philippe Sormani Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. How can we examine so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ (‘AI’) without turning our backs on the STS tradition that questions both notions of artificiality and intelligence' This special issue attempts a step to the side: Instead of considering ‘AI’ as something that does or does not exist (and then taking a position on its benefits or harms), its ambition is to document, in an empirical and agnostic way, the performances that make, sometimes, ‘AI’ appear or disappear in situation. And it comes out, from this perspective, that 'AI' could be considered a vast commensuration undertaking. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-09-13T11:51:57Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231194591
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Authors:Emma Dahlin Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. The article explores technology-human relations in a time of artificial intelligence (AI) and in the context of long-standing problems in social theory about agency, nonhumans, and autonomy. Most theorizations of AI are grounded in dualistic thinking and traditional views of technology, oversimplifying real-world settings. This article works to unfold modes of existence at play in AI/human relations. Materials from ethnographic fieldwork are used to highlight the significance of autonomy in AI/human relations. The analysis suggests that the idea of autonomy is a double-edged sword, showing that humans not only coordinate their perception of autonomy but also switch between registers by sometimes ascribing certain autonomous features to the AI system and in other situations denying the system such features. As a result, AI/human relations prove to be not so much determined by any ostensive delegation of tasks as by the way in which AI and humans engage with each other in practice. The article suggests a theory of relationality that redirects focus away from questions of agency towards questions of what it means to be in relations. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-08-31T12:31:12Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231193947
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Authors:Florian Jaton Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. This article expands on recent studies of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithmsthat crucially depend on benchmark datasets, often called ‘ground truths.’ These ground-truth datasets gather input-data and output-targets, thereby establishing what can be retrieved computationally and evaluated statistically. I explore the case of the Tumor nEoantigen SeLection Alliance (TESLA), a consortium-based ground-truthing project in personalized cancer immunotherapy, where the ‘truth’ of the targets—immunogenic neoantigens—to be retrieved by the would-be AI algorithms depended on a broad technoscientific network whose setting up implied important organizational and material infrastructures. The study shows that instead of grounding an undisputable ‘truth’, the TESLA endeavor ended up establishing a contestable reference, the biology of neoantigens and how to measure their immunogenicity having slightly evolved alongside this four-year project. However, even if this controversy played down the scope of the TESLA ground truth, it did not discredit the whole undertaking. The magnitude of the technoscientific efforts that the TESLA project set into motion and the needs it ultimately succeeded in filling for the scientific and industrial community counterbalanced its metrological uncertainties, effectively instituting its contestable representation of ‘true’ neoantigens within the field of personalized cancer immunotherapy (at least temporarily). More generally, this case study indicates that the enforcement of ground truths, and what it leaves out, is a necessary condition to enable AI technologies in personalized medicine. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-08-31T12:25:07Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231192857
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Authors:Axel Philipps, Laura Paruschke Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members’ activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements. Meetings are a protected space to comment on conducted research, to amend experimental set-ups, to test argumentation, and to outline potentially new directions of research. By participating in these practices, researchers, become members of the team as they get acquainted with the ongoing research; its scope, problems, and limits; the solutions at hand; and the know-how within the team. In functional terms, observed internal meetings seem to (a) ensure that the research team focuses on a specific research agenda by talking about and discussing ongoing research in the lab, (b) be used to discuss and assure the quality of the team’s research output, and (c) generate and inspire new research within the team. Our findings suggest regular internal meetings, like shop talk, are constitutive of doing science by talking about ongoing research. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-08-22T11:41:57Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231188132
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Authors:Hannah Pullen-Blasnik, Gil Eyal, Amy Weissenbach Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. What happens when an algorithm is added to the work of an expert group' This study explores how algorithms pose a practical problem for experts. We study the introduction of a Probabilistic DNA Profiling (PDP) software into a forensics lab through interviews and court admissibility hearings. While meant to support experts’ decision-making, in practice it has destabilized their authority. They respond to this destabilization by producing alternating and often conflicting accounts of the agency and significance of the software. The algorithm gets constructed alternately either as merely a tool or as indispensable statistical backing; the analysts’ authority as either independent of the algorithm or reliant upon it to resolve conflict and create a final decision; and forensic expertise as resting either with the analysts or with the software. These tensions reflect the forensic ‘culture of anticipation’, specifically the experts’ anticipation of ongoing litigation that destabilizes their control over the deployment and interpretation of expertise in the courtroom. The software highlights tensions between the analysts’ supposed impartiality and their role in the courtroom, exposing legal and narrative implications of the changing nature of expertise and technology in the criminal legal system. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-08-03T05:39:07Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231186646
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Authors:Jathan Sadowski Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Calling attention to the growing intersection between the insurance and technology sectors—or ‘insurtech’—this article is intended as a bat signal for the interdisciplinary fields that have spent recent decades studying the explosion of digitization, datafication, smartification, automation, and so on. Many of the dynamics that attract people to researching technology are exemplified, often in exaggerated ways, by emerging applications in insurance, an industry that has broad material effects. Based on in-depth mixed-methods research into insurance technology, I have identified a set of interlocking logics that underly this regime of actuarial governance in society: ubiquitous intermediation, continuous interaction, total integration, hyper-personalization, actuarial discrimination, and dynamic reaction. Together these logics describe how enduring ambitions and existing capabilities are motivating the future of how insurers engage with customers, data, time, and value. This article surveys each logic, laying out a techno-political framework for how to orient critical analysis of developments in insurtech and where to direct future research on this growing industry. Ultimately, my goal is to advance our understanding how insurance—a powerful institution that is fundamental to the operations of modern society—continues to change, and what dynamics and imperatives, whose desires and interests are steering that change. The stuff of insurance is far too important to be left to the insurance industry. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-07-10T11:24:08Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231186437
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Authors:Ludovico Rella Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. This paper investigates the role of the materiality of computation in two domains: blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). Although historically designed as parallel computing accelerators for image rendering and videogames, graphics processing units (GPUs) have been instrumental in the explosion of both cryptoasset mining and machine learning models. The political economy associated with video games and Bitcoin and Ethereum mining provided a staggering growth in performance and energy efficiency and this, in turn, fostered a change in the epistemological understanding of AI: from rules-based or symbolic AI towards the matrix multiplications underpinning connectionism, machine learning and neural nets. Combining a material political economy of markets with a material epistemology of science, the article shows that there is no clear-cut division between software and hardware, between instructions and tools, and between frameworks of thought and the material and economic conditions of possibility of thought itself. As the microchip shortage and the growing geopolitical relevance of the hardware and semiconductor supply chain come to the fore, the paper invites social scientists to engage more closely with the materialities and hardware architectures of ‘virtual’ algorithms and software. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-07-10T11:20:08Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231185095
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Authors:Sander Turnhout, Willem Halffman Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Wildlife field guide books present salient features of species, from colour and form to behaviour, and give their readers a vocabulary to express what these features look like. Such structures for observation, or observational grids, allow users to identify wildlife species through what Law and Lynch have called ‘the difference that makes the difference’. In this article, we show how these grids, and the characteristics that distinguish species, change over time in response to wider concerns in the community that use and make the field guides. We use the development of Dutch field guides for dragonflies to show how the ethics of observing wildlife, the recreational value of dragonfly observation, the affordances of observational tools, and biodiversity monitoring and conservation goals all have repercussions for how dragonflies are to be identified. Ultimately, this affects not only how dragonflies are to be observed and identified, but also what is taken to be ‘out there’. The article is based on a transdisciplinary cooperation between a dragonfly enthusiast with emic knowledge and access, and an STS researcher. We hope the articulation of our approach might inspire analyses of other observational practices and communities. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-07-08T08:37:05Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231183011
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Authors:Anissa Tanweer, James Steinhoff Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. As a nascent field within the academy, the contours, attributes, and bounties of data science are still indeterminate and contested. We studied how participants in an initiative to establish data science at a large American research university defined data science and articulated their relationships to the field. We discuss two contrasting visions for data science among our research participants. One vision is a transdisciplinary view portraying data science as a phenomenon with transcendent, appropriative, and impositional qualities that sits apart from academic domains. Another view of data science—one that was far more prevalent among our research subjects—casts data science as grounded, relational, and adaptive, emerging from crosspollination of numerous academic domains. We argue that this latter formulation represents a more quotidian reality of data science and positions the field as an extradiscipline, defined as a field that exists to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, skills, tools, and methods from an indeterminate and fluctuating set of disciplinary perspectives while conserving the boundaries of those disciplines. We argue that the dueling transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary visions for data science have important implications for how the field will mature, and that the extradiscipline concept opens novel directions for studying academic knowledge production in STS, contributing additional precision to the literature on disciplinarity and its permutations. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-07-07T08:36:13Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231184443
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Authors:Ruth Falkenberg, Lisa Sigl, Maximilian Fochler Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Soil microbial ecology is a relatively young research field that became established around the middle of the 20th century and has grown considerably since then. We analyze two epistemic re-orientations in the field, asking how possibilities for creating do-able problems within current conditions of research governance and researchers’ collective sense-making about new, more desirable modes of research were intertwined in these developments. We show that a first re-orientation towards molecular omics studies was comparably straightforward to bring about, because it allowed researchers to gain resources for their work and to build careers—in other words, to create do-able problems. Yet, over time this mode of research developed into a scientific bandwagon from which researchers found it difficult to depart, even as they considered this kind of work as producing mostly descriptive studies rather than exploring interesting and important ecological questions. Researchers currently wish to re-orient their field again, towards a new mode of conducting ‘well-rounded’ interdisciplinary and ecologically-relevant studies. This re-orientation is, however, not easy to put into practice. In contrast to omics studies, this new mode of research does not easily enable the creation of do-able problems for two reasons. First, it is not as readily ‘packaged’ and hence more difficult to align with institutional and funding frameworks as well as with demands for productivity and career building. Second, while the first re-orientation was part of a broader exciting bandwagon across the life sciences and promised apparent discoveries, the current re-orientation goes along with a different sense of novelty, exploring complex environmental relations and building an understanding at the intersection of disciplines, instead of pushing a clearly circumscribed frontier. Ultimately, our analysis raises questions about whether current conditions of research governance structurally privilege particular kinds of scientific re-orientation over others. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-06-30T09:05:31Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231179700
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Authors:Sonja van Wichelen Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Increasingly, countries in the Global South—notably South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia—are introducing material transfer agreements (MTAs) into their domestic laws for the exchange of scientific material. The MTA is a contract securing the legal transfer of tangible research material between organizations such as laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, or universities. Critical commentators argue that these agreements in the Global North have come to fulfill an important role in the expansion of dominant intellectual property regimes. Taking Indonesia as a case, this article examines how MTAs are enacted and implemented differently in the context of research involving the Global South. Against the conventionally understood forms of contract that commodify and commercialize materials and knowledge, the MTA in the South can be understood as a legal technology appropriated to translate a formerly relational economy of the scientific gift to a market system of science. As a way of gaining leverage in the uneven space of the global bioeconomy, the MTA functions as a technology for ‘reverse appropriation’, a reworking of its usage and meaning as a way of countering some of the global power inequalities experienced by Global South countries. The operation of this reverse appropriation, however, is hybrid, and reveals a complex reconfiguration of scientific exchange amidst a growing push for ‘open science’. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-06-20T12:16:32Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231177455
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Authors:Erik Aarden Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. While transnational research infrastructure projects long preceded the formal integration process that created the European Union, their advancement is an increasingly central part of EU research policy and of European integration in general. This paper analyses the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure–European Research Infrastructure Consortium (BBMRI–ERIC) as a recent example of institutionalized scientific collaboration in Europe that has formally been established as part of EU science policy. BBMRI–ERIC, a network of European biobanks, is expected to contribute to both European science and European integration. Yet its achievements in these domains are interpreted differently by various actors involved. This paper draws on STS conceptualizations of infrastructures as relational, experimental, and promissory assemblages. These support the formulation of a working definition of research infrastructures that in turn helps to explore the heterogeneous meanings attributed to BBMRI–ERIC. The paper describes the creation of this distributed European research infrastructure, and divergent understandings of what it means for BBMRI–ERIC to be distributed, to be European and to be a research infrastructure. This analysis demonstrates how building a research infrastructure is also an effort to define what it means to be European—a process in which what is European about science and what science can do for Europe is continuously (re-)imagined, contested and negotiated. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-06-12T09:57:05Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231162629
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Authors:Alana Lajoie-O’Malley, Kelly Bronson, Gwendolyn Blue Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. This article unpacks the logic of the equivalence invoked by the Government of Canada between Indigenous consent and the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges in impact assessment. We situate the logic within the politics of recognition in Canada—a politics that aims to shore up national unity in the face of regular challenges to it. We use the Canadian results from a recent scoping review on conceptions of environmental justice in impact assessment to highlight the challenges of invoking recognition, and we provide a theoretical analysis of these challenges. To do this, we highlight the ways in which ‘we-making’ is ‘knowledge-making’ and ‘knowledge-making’ is ‘we-making’. In this sense, recognizing Indigenous knowledges is part of Canada’s answer to the challenge of constructing and stabilizing a political ‘we’: a community of political subjects with shared connection to a nation state via the institutional, social, and cultural apparatuses that generate the kind of publicly visible legal and technical knowledge upon which the state’s authority depends. We show how this project relies on actively obscuring the relationship between ‘we-making’ and ‘knowledge-making’ by treating ‘knowledge-making’ as neutral and un-situated, putting into practice a universalist logic. This logic shores up power because obscuring the situatedness of dominant knowledges also obscures the situatedness of the dominant political orders with which they are intertwined. We ultimately argue that Canada’s approach to recognizing Indigenous knowledges helps consolidate power by sidestepping ongoing jurisdictional struggles with Indigenous peoples. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-05-31T06:01:30Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231177311
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Authors:Anne Henriksen, Lasse Blond Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Recent policies and research articles call for turning AI into a form of IA (‘intelligence augmentation’), by envisioning systems that center on and enhance humans. Based on a field study at an AI company, this article studies how AI is performed as developers enact two predictive systems along with stakeholders in public sector accounting and public sector healthcare. Inspired by STS theories about values in design, we analyze our empirical data focusing especially on how objectives, structured performances, and divisions of labor are built into the two systems and at whose expense. Our findings reveal that the development of the two AI systems is informed by politically motivated managerial interests in cost-efficiency. This results in AI systems that are (1) designed as managerial tools meant to enable efficiency improvements and cost reductions, and (2) enforced on professionals on the ‘shop floor’ in a top-down manner. Based on our findings and a discussion drawing on literature on the original visions of human-centered systems design from the 1960s, we argue that turning AI into IA seems dubious, and ask what human-centered AI really means and whether it remains an ideal not easily realizable in practice. More work should be done to rethink human-machine relationships in the age of big data and AI, in this way making the call for ethical and responsible AI more genuine and trustworthy. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-05-08T09:44:42Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231163756
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Authors:Chiara Carboni, Rik Wehrens, Romke van der Veen, Antoinette de Bont Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are being developed to assist with increasingly complex diagnostic tasks in medicine. This produces epistemic disruption in diagnostic processes, even in the absence of AI itself, through the datafication and digitalization encouraged by the promissory discourses around AI. In this study of the digitization of an academic pathology department, we mobilize Barad’s agential realist framework to examine these epistemic disruptions. Narratives and expectations around AI-assisted diagnostics—which are inextricable from material changes—enact specific types of organizational change, and produce epistemic objects that facilitate to the emergence of some epistemic practices and subjects, but hinder others. Agential realism allows us to simultaneously study epistemic, ethical, and ontological changes enacted through digitization efforts, while keeping a close eye on the attendant organizational changes. Based on ethnographic analysis of pathologists’ changing work processes, we identify three different types of uncertainty produced by digitization: sensorial, intra-active, and fauxtomated uncertainty. Sensorial and intra-active uncertainty stem from the ontological otherness of digital objects, materialized in their affordances, and result in digital slides’ partial illegibility. Fauxtomated uncertainty stems from the quasi-automated digital slide-making, which complicates the question of responsibility for epistemic objects and related knowledge by marginalizing the human. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-05-08T01:25:56Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231167589
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Authors:Helen Zhao, Marina DiMarco, Kelsey Ichikawa, Marion Boulicault, Meg Perret, Kai Jillson, Alexandra Fair, Kai DeJesus, Sarah S. Richardson Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2013 decision to lower recommended Ambien dosing for women has been widely cited as a hallmark example of the importance of sex differences in biomedicine. Using regulatory documents, scientific publications, and media coverage, this article analyzes the making of this highly influential and mobile ‘sex-difference fact’. As we show, the FDA’s decision was a contingent outcome of the drug approval process. Attending to how a contested sex-difference fact came to anchor elite women’s health advocacy, this article excavates the role of regulatory processes, advocacy groups, and the media in producing perceptions of scientific agreement while foreclosing ongoing debate, ultimately enabling the stabilization of a binary, biological sex-difference fact and the distancing of this fact from its conditions of construction. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-05-06T11:31:51Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231168371
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Authors:Christoffer Bjerre Haase, Rola Ajjawi, Margaret Bearman, John Brandt Brodersen, Torsten Risor, Klaus Hoeyer Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. People are increasingly able to generate their own health data through new technologies such as wearables and online symptom checkers. However, generating data is one thing, interpreting them another. General practitioners (GPs) are likely to be the first to help with interpretations. Policymakers in the European Union are investing heavily in infrastructures to provide GPs access to patient measurements. But there may be a disconnect between policy ambitions and the everyday practices of GPs. To investigate this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 Danish GPs. According to the GPs, patients relatively rarely bring data to them. GPs mostly remember three types of patient-generated data that patients bring to them for interpretation: heart and sleep measurements from wearables and results from online symptom checkers. However, they also spoke extensively about data work with patient queries concerning measurements from the GPs’ own online Patient Reported Outcome system and online access to laboratory results. We juxtapose GP reflections on these five data types and between policy ambitions and everyday practices. These data require substantial recontextualization work before the GPs ascribe them evidential value and act on them. Even when they perceived as actionable, patient-provided data are not approached as measurements, as suggested by policy frameworks. Rather, GPs treat them as analogous to symptoms—that is to say, GPs treat patient-provided data as subjective evidence rather than authoritative measures. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature,we suggest that GPs must be part of the conversation with policy makers and digital entrepreneurs around when and how to integrate patient-generated data into healthcare infrastructures. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-04-25T09:58:07Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231164345
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Authors:Shin-etsu Sugawara Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. Postphenomenological studies have explored technological mediation between the human body and the world by analysing the bodily experience of the world. Applying this analytical perspective to predictive technology requires some expansions because humans cannot directly experience the future world. I conceptualize pre-spectival focus, which refers to how human attention is directed to the making-future-present process, and which features or aspects of its process are foregrounded or backgrounded. Through the concept of pre-spectival focus and actor-network theory (ANT), this article examines the case of System for the Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information (SPEEDI), a Japanese technology used to simulate the atmospheric dispersion of radionuclides released from nuclear reactors. SPEEDI provides prediction maps representing radiological consequences and was expected to support evacuation decisions during nuclear emergencies. However, this was not the case with the Fukushima disaster, which led to a socio-technical controversy regarding SPEEDI’s usage. Based on bibliographic surveys and several interviews, I encapsulate four multistable uses of SPEEDI: prediction as supporting advice, prediction as a tool for evacuation drills, prediction as self-protection, and prediction as a source of misunderstanding. Relevant actors perceive the predictions of a nuclear disaster in each stability depending on the diversity of their pre-spectival foci, which is also related to the forms of life nourished through their professional and daily lives. A distinct rivalry can be observed between the two actor-networks around nuclear emergency management in which SPEEDI is differently enrolled: the social control network and self-determination network. In the former, the residents are constituted as passive selves who obediently follow governmental instructions; in the latter, residents are included as autonomous subjects who can actively decide protective actions. Moreover, I discuss future postphenomenology–ANT studies on predictive technologies based on these analyses. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-04-07T05:19:20Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231161609
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Authors:Ildikó Zonga Plájás Abstract: Social Studies of Science, Ahead of Print. This article problematizes vision in practices of identification. It draws on the metaphor of the ‘interface’ to emphasize that vision emerges ‘in between’ eyes, faces, bodies, objects and ideas of belonging and otherness. As such, vision can be a material and political technology that enacts certain people as racial others. To attend to the materiality and politics of vision and its messy relationship with race, I bring together three European stories in which faces are drawn, seen or identified, while race hides or surfaces in intriguing ways. Through these stories we learn that race is saturated with affect and is recalled in objects and bodies. In addition, this article offers a novel methodological approach. It employs the eyes of the reader not only to read but also to watch. Vision itself becomes a technology, this time not to produce or reinforce, but to disturb and perhaps even undo ideas of racial otherness. Through the use of experimental montage, I attend to the complexities and incongruities of seeing faces and race without settling on a single narrative. I actively engage the eyes of the viewer to argue that vision is always relational and partial and therefore, it can also be harnessed to undo racial otherness by fragmenting, multiplying and affecting. Citation: Social Studies of Science PubDate: 2023-02-14T09:28:24Z DOI: 10.1177/03063127231151237
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