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Precog visions: Predicting the future with the Minority Report sociotechnical imaginary Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-08-28 Mehitabel Glenhaber, Hamsini Sridharan
The 2002 film Minority Report regularly appears in tech press articles asking whether it ‘predicted the future’. When such publications invoke the film as having ‘predicted the future’ or ‘come true’, what social and political claims are being made? How has Minority Report become a discursive tool for imagining, constructing, and criticizing sociotechnical worlds? In this paper, we evaluate the worldbuilding
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Bettie’s travels: How pigs enable new connections between human health innovations and industrial agricultural pork production in Denmark Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 Eva Vibeke Kofoed Pihl
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper unfolds the past and present uses of pigs that structured the emergence of a pig model of gut-hormone based appetite control, leading to the current scientific breakthrough in treatment of obesity. While the hyping of next generation medications for obesity and type 2 diabetes centers on the efficacy and profits attached to these drugs, I unfold how science
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The art, science and technology studies movement: An essay review Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Maja Horst
This is a review essay based primarily on the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, edited by Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone. It focuses particularly on the use of art for public engagement with science and technology and it also draws upon the following books: Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology
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Path creation as a discursive process: A study of discussion starters in the field of solar fuels Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-08-12 Eugen Octav Popa, Vincent Blok, Cornelius Schubert, Georgios Katsoukis
When a technology is seen as the right solution to a recognized problem, the development of alternative technologies comes under threat. To secure much-needed resources, proponents of alternative technologies must, in these conditions, restart societal discussion on the status quo, a process at once technological and discursive known as ‘path creation’. In this article, we investigate discussion-restarting
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Numbers and emotions in the governance of the Covid-19 datademic Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-30 Emmanuel Didier
There is a rich body of literature on numbers as tools of governance. But the attention of the corpus in question is almost entirely on the rational properties of quantification. This article shows that government by numbers is also, and inseparably, a government by feelings. The Covid-19 pandemic was also a datademic in the sense that numbers populated and spread through the public sphere. We focus
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Virtual diversity: Resolving the tension between the wider culture and the institution of science Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-30 Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Luis Reyes-Galindo
There are widespread calls for increased demographic diversity in science, often linked to the epistemic claim that including more perspectives will improve the quality of the knowledge produced. By distinguishing between demographic and epistemic diversity, we show that this is only true some of the time. There are cases where increasing demographic diversity will not bring about the necessary epistemic
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Cells and the city: The rise and fall of urban biopolitics in San Francisco, 1970–2020 Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Andy Murray, Dennis Browe, Katherine Weatherford Darling, Jenny Reardon
STS theories of biocapital conceptualize how biomedical knowledge and capital form together. Though these formations of biocapital often are located in large urban centers, few scholars have attended to how they are transforming urban spaces and places. In this paper we argue that the twinned technological development of cells and cities concentrates economic and symbolic capital and sets in motion
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Hearts and minds: The technopolitical role of affect in sociotechnical imaginaries. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-06 Stephen Hughes
Sociotechnical imaginaries (SIs) have emerged as a popular and generative concept within Science and Technology Studies (STS). This article draws out the affective component of SIs, combining a review of relevant literatures with an empirical case study of an anti-fracking imaginary in Ireland to suggest how we might theorize an affective technopolitics of SIs. The literature review identifies three
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Chicken metabolism, immobilization, and post-industrial production. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-06-02 Catherine Oliver
Chickens have become emblematic of the Anthropocene: They embody the age of acceleration, (post-) industrial value, and intensification in scientific and technological knowledge and practice. Contemporary chickens are the bearers of significant genetic and nutritional knowledge, experimented upon and 'tweaked' so much so that some have denied that contemporary commercial chickens are chickens at all
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Population curation: The construction of mutual obligation between individual and state in Danish precision medicine Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-31 Iben M Gjødsbøl, Jeanette Bresson Ladegaard Knox, Lea Skovgaard, Mette N Svendsen
How do precision medicine initiatives (re)organize relations between individuals and populations? In this article, we investigate how the curation of national genomic populations enacts communities and, in so doing, constructs mutual obligation between individuals and the state. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Danish National Genome Center (DNGC), we show how members of advisory bodies negotiated
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The stuff of memories: Planning hindsight in animal cryobanks Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-15 Veit Braun
Biobanks are becoming ubiquitous infrastructures in zoology and other non-human life sciences. They promise to store frozen research samples for the long term for future use. That use remains speculative but nevertheless needs to be anticipated. Following the establishment of a physical and digital infrastructure for frozen samples in an animal biobanking project, this article explores how the future
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Wake effects and temperature plumes: Coping with non-knowledge in the expansion of wind and geothermal energy Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Marco Sonnberger, Maria Pfeiffer, Alena Bleicher, Matthias Gross
Energy transitions are knowledge-intensive processes where a multitude of actors are trying to cope with inevitable knowledge gaps, surprises, and uncertainties. In this context, we focus on two techno-physical phenomena that are gaining practical relevance with the expansion of wind and geothermal energy extraction, and are surrounded by significant unknowns: wake effects and temperature plumes. Both
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Equivocal diagnostics: Making a ‘good’ point-of-care test for elimination in global health Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-24 Alice Street, Emma Michelle Taylor
What is a diagnostic test for? We might assume the answer to this question is straightforward. A good test would help identify what disease someone suffers from, assist health providers to determine the correct course of treatment and/or enable public health authorities to know and intervene in health at the level of the population. In this article, we show that what a specific diagnostic test is for
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Therapeutic value in the time of digital brainwaves Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-08 Megh Marathe
This article examines the value of medical technology through the case of electroencephalograms (EEGs), devices used to visualize brain activity and diagnose seizures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows that EEGs are valued differently by patients and medical practitioners. While practitioners value EEGs for their clinical utility, i.e., ability to inform clinical decisions, patients
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Digital twins and the digital logics of biodiversity Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Michelle Westerlaken
Biodiversity is a multidimensional concept that can be understood and measured in many different ways. However, the next generation of digital technologies for biodiversity monitoring currently being funded and developed fail to engage its multidimensional and relational aspects. Based on empirical data from interviews, a conference visit, online meetings, webinars, and project reports, this study
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Law’s artefacts: Personal rapid transit and public narratives of hitchhiking and crime Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Simon A Cole, Alyse Bertenthal
The West Virginia University (WVU) Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system was built between 1971 and 1975 in Morgantown, West Virginia to be a prototype transportation system of the future. Envisioned as a hybrid of public and automotive transportation, the fully automated cars deliver passengers directly to their destinations without stopping at intervening stations. The PRT concept may be familiar to
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The improvised expert: Staging authority at an OECD Nuclear Energy Agency workshop in Fukushima Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Makoto Takahashi
In recent years, concerns about a crisis of expert authority have been expressed across the globe. Japan is no exception to this trend. Scandals surrounding the (mis)management of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster severely damaged public confidence in state institutions, posing an additional challenge for those engaged in radiological protection. This article examines how claims
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Intra-mediary expertise: Trans-science and expert understanding of the public Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Hiroko Kumaki
What is the role of experts and their expertise in the context of trans-science, in which issues that are raised in scientific terms cannot be answered by science alone? This article examines the discourses and practices around safety of low-dose exposure to radiation in the ongoing aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident in Japan in 2011. Following the nuclear fallout, scientific
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Experimenting with care and cod: On document-practices, versions of care and fish as the new experimental animal Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Tone Druglitrø, Kristin Asdal
A key ambition in care studies has been to study care in practice and as practice. By turning towards practices, care studies has rendered visible and acknowledged important work that is not captured through looking at formal procedures or official and written materials, such as policy documents and medical protocols. In this literature, document materials and the written have often been seen as unable
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Bohemia at the Pacific seabed: Archiving the future of deep-sea mining with the Interoceanmetal Joint Organization Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-01-27 Jonathan M Galka
This article uses historical and ethnographic methods to examine the primarily East-Central European Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM). I ask how and why the IOM has survived as an institution since its inception in 1987, working especially with the personal archive of Vratislav Kubišta. Kubišta was a metallurgist and former Deputy Director General at IOM who after retirement sought to develop
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‘Floating things’ and methodological drift: Accounting for haunted materialities in the North Pacific Ocean Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Kim De Wolff
In this article I follow the mystery of millions of tons of materials washed out to sea by the March 2011 Japan tsunami: a massive wave of lost materials expected to reach North American shores that never seems to officially arrive. I bring Gordon’s conceptualization of haunting together with STS conversations about absence and invisibility to build on feminist approaches that do not take as given
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Enacting biosocial complexity: Stress, epigenetic biomarkers and the tools of postgenomics Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Luca Chiapperino
This article analyses attempts to enact complexity in postgenomic experimentations using the case of epigenetic research on biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Enacting complexity in this research means dissecting multiple so-called biosocial processes of health differentiation in the face of stressful experiences. To characterize enactments of biosocial complexity, the article develops the concepts
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The de-perimeterisation of information security: The Jericho Forum, zero trust, and narrativity. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Matt Spencer,Daniele Pizio
This article analyses the transformation of information security induced by the Jericho Forum, a group of security professionals who argued for a new 'de-perimeterised' security model. Having focused on defensive perimeters around networks, early 2000s information security faced a growing set of pressures: the maintainability of firewalls given increasing traffic volume and variety, the vulnerability
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The routinization of lay expertise: A diachronic account of the invention and stabilization of an open-source artificial pancreas. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-28 Clay Davis
Embodied health movements (EHMs) advance their agendas by mediating the production, circulation, and revision of biomedical knowledge. To do this, their constituents become lay experts by blending their embodied experience of illness with self-taught technical knowledge. However, it is unclear how lay expertise is routinized within EHMs, and consequently, to what extent it can be made durable in long-term
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The return of nature? Negotiating the 'renaturation' of the Isar as an envirotechnical landscape. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-19 Daniel Aditya Tjhin
How can we trace differing normative values, and especially in alternative imaginaries of environmentally sustainable futures? To address this issue, this article extends the sociotechnical imaginaries framework by providing conceptual tools to understand the underlying rationale of alternative environmental imaginaries-through an envirotechnical analysis. I analyse an urban river restoration project
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Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Hannah Hunter
If an apparently extinct bird calls in a forest, and there are people there to hear it-to record it, even-is it still extinct? The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was last 'officially' seen in the United States in 1944, but its extinction continues to be a subject of intense debate between conservation authorities, scientists, and grassroots activists. Tensions peaked around 2005, when scientists from the
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Health policy counterpublics: Enacting collective resistances to US molecular HIV surveillance and cluster detection and response programs. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Stephen Molldrem,Anthony K J Smith
Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize health policy counterpublics: temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism
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Maintaining innovation: How to make sewer robots and innovation policy work in Barcelona. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-25 Carlos Cuevas-Garcia,Federica Pepponi,Sebastian M Pfotenhauer
This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investigates the relationship between innovation and maintenance and repair. This literature argues that the
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Domesticating data: Traveling and value-making in the data economy. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-25 Clémence Pinel,Mette N Svendsen
Data are versatile objects that can travel across contexts. While data's travels have been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the sites from where and to which data flow. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in two connected data-intensive laboratories and the concept of domestication, we explore what it takes to bring data 'home' into the laboratory. As data come and dwell in the home
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The politics of face and the trouble with race: Exploring relations at the interface between the individual and the collective in forensic practice. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Amade M'charek,Irene van Oorschot
This special issue interrogates race through the lens of face. Its central faces are those in forensic settings. Promising immediate legibility and access to the individual suspect, forensic faces nevertheless mobilize a variety of collectives. We offer conceptual and methodological tools to examine the face as both an individual and a collective phenomenon, and demonstrate through detailed cases how
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Governing beyond the project: Refocusing innovation governance in emerging science and technology funding. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-16 Robert Dj Smith,Stefan Schäfer,Michael J Bernstein
This article analyses how a recent idiom of innovation governance, 'responsible innovation', is enacted in practice, how this shapes innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation are left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed
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Curious about race: Generous methods and modes of knowing in practice. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-11-02 Amade M'charek
What is race? And how does it figure in different scientific practices? To answer these questions, I suggest that we need to know race differently. Rather than defining race or looking for one conclusive answer to what it is, I propose methods that are open-ended, that allow us to follow race around, while remaining curious as to what it is. I suggest that we pursue generous methods. Drawing on empirical
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How scientists become experts-or don't: Social organization of research and engagement in scientific advice in a toxicology laboratory. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-10-28 David Demortain
Certain fields of research are deeply shaped by their proximity with policy-makers and administrations. The so-called 'regulatory sciences' and their corresponding expert communities emerge from this intermediary space between science and policy. Social studies of expertise and scientific experts show, however, that modes of engagement with policy-making vary greatly from one scientist to another.
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Trust in numbers: Serious numbers and speculative fictions in rare earth elements exploration. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Tom Özden-Schilling
In the early 2010s, a spectacular fall in prices for a class of mineral commodities called the rare earth elements (REEs) and the collapse of hundreds of new exploration companies made clear the fragility of the high-risk markets around these companies and the strategies of legitimation that supported them. New regulatory processes built around technical disclosures generated vast stores of geotechnical
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Unclearing the air: Data's unexpected limitations for environmental advocacy. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-10-14 Dawn Nafus
What makes one dataset powerful for civic advocacy, and another fall flat? Drawing from a citizen science project on environmental health, I argue that there is an underacknowledged quality of datasets-their topology-that shapes the social, cultural, and political possibilities they can sustain or subvert. Data topologies are formal qualities of a dataset that connect data collectors' intentions with
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Checking correctness in mathematical peer review. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-30 Christian Greiffenhagen
Mathematics is often treated as different from other disciplines, since arguments in the field rely on deductive proof rather than empirical evidence as in the natural sciences. A mathematical paper can therefore, at least in principle, be replicated simply by reading it. While this distinction is sometimes taken as the basis to claim that the results in mathematics are therefore certain, mathematicians
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Enrolling the body as active agent in cancer treatment: Tracing immunotherapy metaphors and materialities. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Julia Swallow
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
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Stakeholder engagement does not guarantee impact: A co-productionist perspective on model-based drought research. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Catharina Landström,Eric Sarmiento,Sarah J Whatmore
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
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Interfacing AlphaGo: Embodied play, object agency, and algorithmic drama. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-27 Philippe Sormani
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
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Enabling 'AI'? The situated production of commensurabilities. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Florian Jaton,Philippe Sormani
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
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Groundwork for AI: Enforcing a benchmark for neoantigen prediction in personalized cancer immunotherapy. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Florian Jaton
This article expands on recent studies of machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that 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)
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And say the AI responded? Dancing around 'autonomy' in AI/human encounters. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Emma Dahlin
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
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Inside regular lab meetings: The social construction of a research team and ideas in optical physics. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Axel Philipps,Laura Paruschke
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'
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'Is your accuser me, or is it the software?' Ambiguity and contested expertise in probabilistic DNA profiling. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Hannah Pullen-Blasnik,Gil Eyal,Amy Weissenbach
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
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Total life insurance: Logics of anticipatory control and actuarial governance in insurance technology. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Jathan Sadowski
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
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Close to the metal: Towards a material political economy of the epistemology of computation. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Ludovico Rella
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
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Readjusting observational grids in dragonfly field guides. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-08 Sander Turnhout,Willem Halffman
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
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Academic data science: Transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary visions. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-07-07 Anissa Tanweer,James Steinhoff
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
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From 'making lists' to conducting 'well-rounded' studies: Epistemic re-orientations in soil microbial ecology. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Ruth Falkenberg,Lisa Sigl,Maximilian Fochler
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
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After biosovereignty: The material transfer agreement as technology of relations. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Sonja van Wichelen
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
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Infrastructuring European scientific integration: Heterogeneous meanings of the European biobanking infrastructure BBMRI-ERIC. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Erik Aarden
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
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'Consent' as epistemic recognition: Indigenous knowledges, Canadian impact assessment, and the colonial liberal democratic order. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Alana Lajoie-O'Malley,Kelly Bronson,Gwendolyn Blue
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
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Eye for an AI: More-than-seeing, fauxtomation, and the enactment of uncertain data in digital pathology Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Chiara Carboni, Rik Wehrens, Romke van der Veen, Antoinette de Bont
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 abse...
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Training scenes: Taking science studies to the classroom Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Kris Decker, Christoph Hoffmann
Academic training, especially at the undergraduate level, is a marginal topic in science studies today. Scientific practices have commonly been approached through studies of research contexts—most ...
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Executive-centered AI? Designing predictive systems for the public sector Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Anne Henriksen, Lasse Blond
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 ...
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Making a ‘sex-difference fact’: Ambien dosing at the interface of policy, regulation, women’s health, and biology Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Helen Zhao, Marina DiMarco, Kelsey Ichikawa, Marion Boulicault, Meg Perret, Kai Jillson, Alexandra Fair, Kai DeJesus, Sarah S. Richardson
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 biomedic...
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Making a 'sex-difference fact': Ambien dosing at the interface of policy, regulation, women's health, and biology. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-06 Helen Zhao,Marina DiMarco,Kelsey Ichikawa,Marion Boulicault,Meg Perret,Kai Jillson,Alexandra Fair,Kai DeJesus,Sarah S Richardson
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
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Data as symptom: Doctors’ responses to patient-provided data in general practice Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Christoffer Bjerre Haase, Rola Ajjawi, Margaret Bearman, John Brandt Brodersen, Torsten Risor, Klaus Hoeyer
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 anoth...
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Data as symptom: Doctors' responses to patient-provided data in general practice. Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Christoffer Bjerre Haase,Rola Ajjawi,Margaret Bearman,John Brandt Brodersen,Torsten Risor,Klaus Hoeyer
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
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The multistability of predictive technology in nuclear disasters Social Studies of Science (IF 2.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Shin-etsu Sugawara
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 pred...