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Reading meatphors in DNA (and RNA): a bio-rhetorical view of genetic text metaphors Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Erika Szymanski
The ongoing digitization of biological life rests in part on the idea of genetic information being contained in genetic texts written in the four-letter language of DNA. Genetic text metaphors have...
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Outposts of science: placing scientific infrastructures at the margins of French (post)colonial territories Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 David Dumoulin Kervran, Jérôme Lamy, Jan Verlin
Deserts, tropical forests, high mountains, and polar areas, have shaped the history of science. They serve not only as sites for field research and expeditions but also as territories where imperia...
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Staging interactivity: platform logics at the participatory museum Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-27 John W. Elrick
In an effort to remain relevant as meaningful civic institutions under the dynamic socio-technical conditions of contemporary capitalism, participatory museums have adopted commercial technologies,...
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Strategic science performance and the illusion of consensus about Fukushima’s health effects Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Elicia Mayuri Cousins
After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, one way that government authorities sought to quell public anxiety about the health impacts of radiation exposure was through the creation of the Fukushim...
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An anticipatory regime of multiplanetary life: on SpaceX, Martian colonisation and terrestrial ruin Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 David Young, Niall Docherty
In recent years, the aerospace engineering corporation SpaceX has been a vocal – and perhaps the foremost – contributor to the recent repopularisation of a discourse proposing the colonisation of M...
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Communicating science through films: the case of the International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film (1956–1975) Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-29 Silvia Casini, Paolo Magaudda, Federico Neresini
The Rassegna Internazionale del film Scientifico-didattico (International Festival of Scientific and Educational Film [IFSEF]) was a pioneering science-based public event held at the University of ...
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Science theater on stage: Review of the play The Right Way, written by Torbjörn Lindberg, produced by Teater Sagohuset (www.sagohuset.nu), 2019-2020. Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-12 Karl Palmås
This text reviews a science play that has emerged from a collaboration between performing artists and scientists based in Lund, Sweden. It argues that the play, titled The Right Way, can productive...
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A hermeneutic dialogical understanding of data reuse across different access regimes Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-07-09 Inma Aleixos-Borrás, José Julián López
Policy and scholarly discourse emphasizing the panacea of Open (research) Data shapes expectations, and directs and legitimizes investments in data technologies and infrastructures. This is driven ...
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Ch’ixi animals in two environmental conflicts: evocations of Humboldt penguins and Huemuls Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-06-27 Gloria Baigorrotegui, Colombina Schaeffer
The agency of animals in technoscience has been much debated in science and technology studies, animal studies, and environmental collective action studies. In particular, the prominence of animals...
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Circulating knowledge through disparate practices: the global pursuit of terrorist financing by Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-06-14 Pieter Lagerwaard
Standardization and harmonization are widely studied by scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand how knowledge and things circulate across geographies, yet it often remains un...
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The undersides of multispecies relations Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-27 Jia Hui Lee
Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2024)
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Flint community science leadership: co-production of knowledge around environmental and public health action Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-05-25 Jennifer S. Carrera, Pastor Cynthia Watkins, Rev. Sarah Bailey, Pastor Ronnie Wiggins, Laura Sullivan, Melissa Mays, Kent Key
At the ten-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis, Flint residents continue to work to improve the well-being of their community and advance community leadership in science. While the water cri...
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Making explicit an Ecosystem Services indicator as a policy instrument Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-04-12 Kewan Mertens, Kato Van Ruymbeke, Liesbet Vranken
Some policy-oriented concepts such as Ecosystem Services (ESS) remain widely utilized, despite obvious difficulties in operationalizing them. How does the concept persist? In a large EU Horizon 202...
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Introduction: digital participatory biodiversity science Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-03-29 Lorna Heaton, Florian Charvolin
This introduction presents the context in which digital participatory biodiversity science has developed. After describing its basic operating model and how it is affecting scientific practice, the...
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Between the lab and the Wild: Establishing the Potential of Gene Drive Mosquitoes for Malaria Control Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Marianne Mäkelin
Malaria control has been one of the defining goals in global health. Recently, strategies that aim to control the insect-borne disease by altering mosquito biology have gained interest. One such st...
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Trajectories of the Anthropocene as a boundary concept bridging debates about climate change and ecological collapse (years 2000–2019) Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Alessio Giacometti, Paolo Giardullo
Since its first appearance, the concept of the Anthropocene has achieved remarkable success in terms of users and audiences, among both specialists and non-specialists alike. While not yet formalis...
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The ‘obligatory passage point’ in knowledge co-production: Italy’s participatory environmental monitoring platform Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Sergio Minniti, Paolo Magaudda
The process of developing of a participatory environmental monitoring network in Italy, unfolded between 2013 and 2020, is analysed in order to explore the dynamics of knowledge co-production invol...
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Environmental governance through metrics: guest introduction Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Allison Loconto, Scott Prudham, Steven Wolf
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 33, No. 1, 2024)
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Research repertoires and boundary work in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Valentina Marcheselli
The idea of scouting the sky in search of extra-terrestrial signals (SETI) was first proposed in the late 1950s; soon afterwards, its scope was formalised in the so-called Drake Equation, a probabi...
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Ontological overflows and the politics of absence: Zika, disease surveillance, and mosquitos Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Francis Lee
In STS, there has long existed an unease about the analysis of powerful actors and dominant technoscientific narratives. A core concern for the field has been how particular objects, phenomena, and...
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Swept up in the swirls of toxic uncertainties Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Melina Packer
Published in Science as Culture (Ahead of Print, 2023)
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Mistrust of the black box: the public auditing of private models in the chemicals regulatory space Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 David Demortain
Metrics foster trust in governing bodies, but their uncertainty can elicit an opposite sentiment of mistrust. In chemicals governance, most of the conversations concerning computational models revo...
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Biochar in the British print news media: an analysis of promissory discourse and the creation of expectations about carbon removal Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Brigitte Nerlich, Carol Morris, Catherine Price, Holly Harris
Biochar is amongst a growing suite of approaches developed to address the climate crisis by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; yet public awareness of biochar is low. In this situation, m...
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Correction Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-06
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 33, No. 2, 2024)
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Gendering data care: curators, care, and computers in data-centric biology Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Ane Møller Gabrielsen
The increase in molecular data and the use of computer technologies in biology have led to the emergence of professional biocurators, who populate biological databases and knowledgebases with high-...
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‘Shade trees for the next generation’: constructing the promissory publics of prospective cohort studies Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Sibille Merz, Philipp Jaehn, Christine Holmberg
Epidemiological cohort studies are a central research design in public health which appeal to, and can reinforce, specific ideas of the nation, sociality and the ‘good’ citizen. The concept of publ...
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Bioconstitutional visions in the debate on non-invasive prenatal testing in Germany Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-08-30 Ingrid Metzler
Since the summer of 2022, statutory health insurance in Germany reimburses the costs of using non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), a new technology used in prenatal testing, in ‘justified individu...
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Correction Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-08-15
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 33, No. 2, 2024)
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Between animated cells and animated cels: symbiotic turn and animation in multispecies life Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Mateja Kovacic
As media, animation entertains by creating virtual worlds with affective storytelling and compelling aesthetic. As epistemology, animation creates new conceptualisations of life both by being the t...
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‘Scaling the heights – and the depths: zooming out and in on sociality and science’ Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Shahpour Akhavi
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 33, No. 2, 2024)
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Border control technologies: introduction Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Nina Amelung, Vasilis Galis
ABSTRACT This introduction together with the whole special issue on border technologies challenges the limitations of potentially simplistic understandings of contestation, disputes, and political intervention inherent in many accounts of material politics. How do border technologies turn borders into a contested space and how do they come to matter for specific affected communities, especially migrants
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Platformization in the built environment: the political techno-economy of Building Information Modeling Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Yana Boeva, Kathrin Braun, Cordula Kropp
The digital transformation of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) is being hailed as a panacea for the sectors’ problems, with major actors in government and business promoting it as ...
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Vive La Résistance? Standard fire testing, regulation, and the performance of safety Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-27 Graham Spinardi, Angus Law, Luke Bisby
Because fire safety cannot be measured directly, building regulation uses test ratings to determine whether materials and products meet societal expectations. Fire resistance constitutes the most e...
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Provisional by design. Frontex data infrastructures and the Europeanization of migration and border control Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Silvan Pollozek, Jan-Hendrik Passoth
ABSTRACT Data infrastructures for the Frontex joint operations are often only temporary and thus in need of being built up and removed easily, adjustable to changing constellations of security actors, and adaptable to new situations. They need to work through flaws, gaps, and inconsistencies. Still, they fabricate data used for the re-identification of migrants, police investigations, situational pictures
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Security knowledges: circulation, control, and responsible research and innovation in EU border management Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Bruno Oliveira Martins
ABSTRACT The knowledge emerging from research funded by the European Union (EU) through its Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation and other funding streams is significantly shaped by different forms of epistemic control exerted by the EU itself. Through the promotion of industry-research-policy cooperation in EU-funded research, and in light of the growing importance attached to ‘impact
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Contested promises. Migrants’ material politics vis-à-vis the humanitarian border in Niger Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Laura Lambert
ABSTRACT What promises do humanitarian infrastructures make to encourage migrants to abandon their migration projects? And how do migrants contest these promises? In order to curb EU-bound migration in the transit state Niger, the two UN agencies for migrants and refugees established support and outreach infrastructures that incentivized them to enroll in this humanitarian border and abandon migration
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Kickstarting science? Crowdfunded research, public engagement, and the participatory condition Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Chris Hesselbein
Crowdfunding for science has been hailed both as an important means of funding early-career scholars and innovative research projects, and as a novel approach to communicating with and enabling par...
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Practices of radical digital care: towards autonomous queer migration Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Vasiliki Makrygianni, Vasilis Galis
ABSTRACT Digital connectivity of queer migrants on the move to Europe plays a crucial role in confronting border regimes, heteronormativity and racist oppression. ICTs at the disposal of queer migrants interrupt the material politics of silence and violence. However, digital technology also implies serious hazards. Queer migrants use digital space to empower themselves, to build networks, and to trace
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Swedish nuclear waste management as an inert controversy: using critical constructivism to understand cold technological conflict Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Hannes Lagerlöf
Science and technology studies (STS) has long studied scientific controversies as a way to identify prospects for technical democracy. Contemporary STS tends to prioritize ‘overflowing’ controversi...
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Sharing epistemic power: digitally mediated wolf monitoring in Finland Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Taru Peltola, Outi Ratamäki
ABSTRACT Although digital tools have expanded opportunities for various social groups to participate in biodiversity research, these tools typically assign citizens tasks that make them mere assistants of professional researchers, thus maintaining conventional power relations in research processes. Problems may arise if power asymmetries and participant expectations concerning data and participation
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How data governance principles influence participation in biodiversity science Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Beckett Sterner, Steve Elliott
Biodiversity science is in a pivotal period when diverse groups of actors – including researchers, businesses, national governments, and Indigenous Peoples – are negotiating wide-ranging norms for ...
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The Italian debate on the digital COVID certificate: co-producing epistemic and normative rationalities Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-19 Luca Marelli
Italy's digital Covid certificate, known nationally as the ‘Green Pass,’ was enforced through unusual restrictions for a liberal democracy, as part of the government's effort to bolster the Covid-1...
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Stereotypes, gender, and humor in representations of coders in Silicon Valley. Review of TV series Silicon Valley (HBO 2014–2019) Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-18 Hannah Little
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 32, No. 2, 2023)
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The promise of ELSI: coproducing the future of life on earth Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Tess Doezema
Scientific knowledge and authority are central to dire warnings of biodiversity loss and climate change, as well as corollary visions of pathways for environmental repair and the provision of futur...
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Thank you to Science as Culture reviewers Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-27
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)
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From evil demiurge to caring hero: images of geneticists in the movies Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Jan Domaradzki
ABSTRACT Although images of science and scientists depicted in popular culture have been criticized as an exaggeration and fear mongering, the cinema is an important resource that influences individuals’ beliefs about science. Because popular depictions of science play a crucial role in constructing the public’s ‘scientific imaginary’ they constitute an inherent dimension of the social understanding
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Metaphors of foreign strangers: antimicrobial resistance in biomedical discourses Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Alena Kamenshchikova, Petra F. G. Wolffs, Christian J. P. A. Hoebe, John Penders, Klasien Horstman
ABSTRACT Complex phenomena such as antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are often explained in biomedical sciences by using analogies and metaphors. Metaphors play a crucial role in the knowledge production processes, as well as in ensuring the continuity of scientific models of thought. Novel conceptual metaphors, such as ‘AMR is an apocalypse’ or ‘antibiotics are weapons’ are usually immediately recognised
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Negotiating Belgian identity in Wisconsin through ancestry genomics Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-15 François C. Romijn
ABSTRACT How do Wisconsin-based descendants of Belgian immigrants – living in a mid-western, largely white, and mostly rural community – connect a perceived common Belgian ancestry to a contemporary sense of belonging through genomic ancestry testing (GAT)? Members of this community negotiate GAT’s results in relation to their prior self-identification with Belgian ancestry and present-identity claims
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Teaching the normal and the pathological: educational technologies and the material reproduction of medicine Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-10 John Nott, Anna Harris
ABSTRACT That pathology and normality exist on a complex spectrum of bodily manifestation is an enduring problem at the heart of the philosophy, anthropology and history of medicine. As the primary locus for the reproduction of medicine, medical schools are important sites for cultivating knowledge of what is normal and what is not. Here students come to engage with the slippery concepts of normality
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Data-driven governance and performances of accountability: critical reflections from US agri-environmental policy Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Ritwick Ghosh
Public institutions have increasingly responded to calls for more accountability by promoting ideas of data-driven governance. As this focus on using data tools to strengthen governance intensifies...
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Curating the Widerstandsaviso: three cases of ethnographic intravention in R&D consortia Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Martina Klausner, Jörg Niewöhner, Tim Seitz
ABSTRACT Aligning technological innovation with societal needs is a key concern for knowledge economies. Integrating ethical, legal, and social inquiry into research and development consortia that drive innovation processes has thus become common practice. Ethnographic research in consortia is one such practice. Here, these cover three cases of open ethnographic engagement within R&D consortia in the
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Making kin and unmaking the individual in the Capitalocene Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-09 Christopher Blakley
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)
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‘The tool didn’t make decisions for us': metrics and the performance of accountability in environmental governance Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Eric Nost
Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to a...
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Transposing emotions to conserve nature? The positive politics of the metrics of ecosystem services Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Lucas Brunet
In contrast to terrifying extinction numbers, the metrics of Ecosystem Services (ES) highlight the positive impacts of the functioning of ecosystems for human societies. In the French national park...
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Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Katharina T. Paul, Samantha Vanderslott, Matthias Gross
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 31, No. 4, 2022)
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From data revolution to data narratives Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-09 Guilherme Cavalcante Silva
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)
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New techno-natures: the future of human reproduction in sci-art Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-04 Merete Lie
ABSTRACT In the fields of sci-art, bioart and speculative design, contemporary artists are creating experiential visions of the future based on trends within science. Two artworks with futuristic figurations of human reproduction, Pinar Yoldas’ Designer Babies and Ai Hasegawa’s I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin/I Wanna Deliver a Shark, serve as the point of departure for revisiting the eternal nature-culture
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Refused-knowledge during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Mobilising Experiential Expertise for Care and Well-being Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-27 Stefano Crabu, Ilenia Picardi, Valentina Turrini
ABSTRACT Since the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic concerned groups of people have produced knowledge refused by institutional science of how to manage public health and individual well-being in everyday pandemic life. Research in science and technology studies seeks to understand the social and cultural conditions under which contestation over scientific knowledge claims occurs. In the Italian
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What is democracy according to STS? Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Anders Blok
Published in Science as Culture (Vol. 32, No. 1, 2023)
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Ignorance and the paradoxes of evidence-based global health: the case of mortality statistics in India’s million death study Science as Culture (IF 2.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Erik Aarden
ABSTRACT Quantitative evidence and metrics play a central role in contemporary global health. Mortality statistics, for example, are considered essential for improving health in the global South. Yet, many observers lament that reliable cause of death data is not available for many low- and middle-income countries. The Million Death Study (MDS) in India forms an effort to address this issue, seeking