Sociology Of Technology (Science And Technology Studies)

This article examines how 'safety case' experts working on Finland’s nuclear waste repository project at Olkiluoto summoned, conjured, or channeled memories of Seppo—a deceased colleague whose ‘specter,’ as some put it, still ‘haunts’ their scientific community. For some, Seppo’s postmortem presence manifested as gaps in knowledge left behind by an expert often reluctant to document the methodological assumptions underlying his knowledge-practices. For others, it manifested as anecdotes about Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity as well as his more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. Still others caught themselves asking ‘What Would Seppo Do?’ while troubleshooting at work. Inspired by anthropological and philosophical work on ancestors and haunting, the article unpacks how the multi-millennial time horizons of nuclear waste risk, the intergenerational time horizons of expert succession, and the everyday time horizons of a single expert life-course shared entwined fates. It focuses less on what knowledge disappeared when an expert’s body died – or how it could have been preventatively backed-up or managed – and more on what has lived on of the expert in and through surviving colleagues. Analysis of 'afterlives of expertise' like these can, it concludes, provide insights for a current moment of intergenerational transition in nuclear energy sectors in Europe, North America, and beyond.

This paper analyzes an emerging form of post-pharmaceutical health and its underlying regime of value in the global bioeconomy of regenerative stem cell-based medicine (RSCM). Animated by a vision to overcome drug-based therapies and their underlying political economies, RSCM pursues a form of regenerative health that is strikingly at odds with pharmaceutical regimes of drug research, regulation and therapy. To offer a theoretical account of these competing forms of health, the paper provides an analysis of the regimes of values that underpin pharmaceutical and regenerative health respectively. This analysis is done alongside three dimensions: the interlinkage between knowledge, technology and economic value creation; its relation to normative values and ethics; and conceptions and valuations of the biomedical subject and his/her body in biomedical research, intervention and innovation. Contrasting these two diverging regimes of health and value suggests that in RSCM the pharmaceutical logic of accumulating “surplus health” is not entirely dismissed but re-articulated in a regime based on the (re-)generation of regenerative biovalue through the extraction and ex vivo accumulation of “surplus vitality”. Finally, the article discusses “post-pharmaceutical health” as a sensitizing concept that offers new research avenues into emergent forms of health, value, and subjectivity beyond RSCM.

Yuri Takhteyev's Coding Places is an ethnographic study of software development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As such, it offers a welcome and necessary counterpoint to Gabriella Coleman's Coding Freedom, which examines the culture of free software and open source hackers, primarily in the United States. Coleman's work is an excellent look into the moral world of free software, and the pleasures of coding that motivate it. While free software is a critique of the dominant intellectual property regime of the West, it itself stems from and reinterprets a liberal ethics, one which focuses on free speech and individual creative expression.

This paper aims to show the possible and actual synergies between social robotics and sociology. The author argues that social robots are one of the best fields of inquiry to provide a bridge between the two cultures – the one represented by the social sciences and the humanities on the one hand, and the one represented by the natural sciences and engineering on the other. To achieve this result, quantitative and qualitative analyses are implemented. By using scientometric tools like Ngram Viewer, search engines such as Google Scholar, and hand calculations, the author detects the emergence of the term-and-concept ‘social robots’ in its current use, the absolute and relative frequencies of this term in the scientific literature in the period 1800-2008, the frequency distribution of publications including this term in the period 2000-2019, and the magnitude of publications in which the term ‘social robots’ is associated to the term ‘sociology’ or 'social work'. Finally, employing qualitative analysis and focusing on exemplary cases, this paper shows different ways of implementing researches that relate sociology to robotics, from a theoretical or instrumental point of view. It is argued that sociologists and engineers could work in a team to observe, analyze, and describe the interaction between humans and social robots, by using research techniques and theoretical frames provided by sociology. In turn, this knowledge can be used to build more effective and humanlike social robots.

This paper examines current issues at the intersection of the Sociology of Technology and the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies. It begins with an overview of major social constructionist, interpretive semiotic, and actor–network theoretical sociological approaches to technology as developed within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Considering the predominance of narrative visual metaphors in these approaches' treatment of socio-technical perception, it is argued that the “turn to sound” in social studies of technology, rather than simply furnishing established analytic approaches with a fresh set of empirical cases (i.e. “sound technologies”), presents an opportunity to better sensitize STS approaches to the contingent socio-technical shaping and distribution of embodied perceptual modalities in general. A critical review of recent social and historical studies of sound and technology, attending especially to debates surrounding the theoretical shift from acoustemological or soundscape-based to signal-oriented “transductive” approaches, suggests the importance for future STS and Sound Studies work of addressing how shared modes of sensory perception are produced within particular socio-technical frames.

In chapter 1, we discussed the ideological, normative, and affective aspects of the cosmology of the Cocoa developer community, in particular, its celebration of the "indie." Cocoa developers spoke in particular of the pleasure they experienced working with Cocoa technology. However, this story might have been told about a number of programming subcultures and their affective commitments to particular tools and platforms. Do the specific qualities of Cocoa technology itself matter? If so, why and how do they matter to Cocoa devotees? In this chapter, we will examine the technical arguments Cocoa developers use to articulate why they believe Cocoa is a superior technology for their needs, and possibly for programmers in general.

What happened, in the years leading up to Valentine's Day 2014, that made a canister of nuclear waste burst open and spew out fire underground at a US facility for the long-term disposal of radioactive military waste? According to one widely publicized scenario, a simple run-of-the-mill typo led to organic kitty litter mistakenly being used to soak up liquid in the drum instead of another kind of absorbent material. This ultimately led to a reaction that made heat and pressure build up in the drum, causing it to erupt. But was that "simple" clerical error symptomatic of a much deeper, system-wide problem-- involving a US Energy Department plan to rush the pace of nuclear waste disposal? What were the political, social, and financial elements involved in making Los Alamos' waste drum #68660 erupt that February night? What can be done to prevent similar accidents – which can have price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars or more – from happening again in the future? A cultural anthropologist spent 10 weeks onsite after the event, logging 43 interviews and trying to answer these questions. Here is what he found.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

Backcover endorsement by Richard Butsch, author of “The Making of American Audiences”

‘This collection is a most comprehensive book on television ratings systems. It offers a remarkable breadth of case studies of nations from North and South America, Europe, and Asia. These also include a wide variety of types of measurement practices and organizational structures. Such an array offers great opportunities for comparative analyses. Just as important, the book is theoretically, analytically and critically sophisticated. It examines the various critiques of audience measurement, such as the important distinction between substantive and procedural truths and the underlying assumptions in quantification and statistics about human behavior and social relations.’

Table of contents:

Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel. Deconstructing the Ratings Machine. An Introduction.
PART I: Inventing Measurement
1. Stefan Schwarzkopf The Politics of enjoyment.  Competing audience measurement systems in Britain, 1950-1980
2. Marc Balnaves Still the British model? The BARB versus Nielsen
3. Philip Savage & Alexandre Sévigny  Canada’s audience massage.  Audience research and TV policy development, 1980-2010
4. Jérôme Bourdon and Cécile Méadel  The monopoly that won't divide. France’s Médiamétrie
5.    Susanne Vollberg  Pioneering the peoplemeter. German public service
PART II: APPROPRIATING AUDIENCE FIGURES
6. Santanu Chakrabarti  Power games: audience measurement  as a mediation between actors in India
7.    Esther Hamburger,  Heloisa Buarque de Almeida, and Tirza Aidar  Imagining audiences in Brazil: class, “race” and gender
8. Massimo Scaglioni  From referee to scapegoat, but still referee. Auditel in Italy.
9. Mark Balnaves Domestication of Anglo-Saxon conventions and practices in Australia
10. Elena Johansson and Sergey Davydov  Market requirements and political challenges.  Russia between two worlds
PART III: CONFRONTING CHANGES
11. Ann-Marie Murray  The role of ratings in scheduling. Commercial logics in Irish public television
12. Philip Napoli  The local peoplemeter, the portable peoplemeter,  and the unsettled law and policy of audience measurement in the US
13. Katrien Berte & Tom Evens  Challenges of digital innovations.  A set-top box based approach
14. Jakob Bjur  Thickening behavioral data. New uses of ratings for social sciences.

These slides begin with thoughts about what topics an epistemologically-informed sociology of science might explore, and then turn to one in particular: fraud in science.  After looking at how to define fraud, and explaining why it's often hard to detect, Haack looks at various (possible) examples, from Mendel to Cyril Burt.

Since the 1960's, the prevalent perception in the Israeli educational system, as well as in many other countries, has been that the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) as a tool for instruction, learning and management processes in education will positively influence students and the educational system in a wide range of aspects, for example:  improve communications skills related to learning, reorganize knowledge according to the individual needs of the learner as well as overall system-wide aspects.  Thus it was hoped that use of ICT would lead to a much-needed, positive revolution in the educational system that has been in an ongoing crisis.
Use of technology as a means to improve and mend complex social systems such as the educational one is not a new hope, nor is it unique to Israel.  It is an ideology shared by educators, technological experts, politicians, governmental authorities and parents in many countries aspiring to improve the educational systems by developing advanced, progressive and innovative ICT-based educational tools.
This dissertation will show that the educational system's perception that technology is a means of mending and dealing with social and political issues complemented and matched the Zionist ethos that supported techno-science as an ideological, practical and social principle on the road to founding a strong, independent Jewish state.  This tradition formed an intrinsic and basic component of Herzl's vision of establishing a Jewish state and retained its central and intrinsic role once the State of Israel was founded, based on the ideology of the Zionist movement. With the development of ICT policy within the education system, which sought to implement the techno-scientific idea in learning and instruction processes, this belief was once again of central importance.
The dissertation explores the process in which ICT policy developed in Israel, which led to repeated attempts throughout the years to assimilate the use of technology into the educational system, even though these attempts were deemed to have been a series of repeated failures.  This research will investigate the source for the motivation and willingness to continue investing financial and human resources in the development of ICT integration in Israel, despite lack of success. The focus of this dissertation will be an investigation into the processes and apparatuses involved in the development of the policy for ICT integration into the educational system from the 1950's, before the use of computers in instruction and learning began, and until 2000.
Israel's policy of ICT integration developed as the educational system was being established and as Israel was absorbing many thousands of new-immigrant students coming from many different countries.  A chapter of this dissertation will be devoted to an historical overview of the development of Israel's educational system as the new State faced difficulties during the 1950's – '70's. These difficulties are to be viewed as the backdrop and justification for the varied attempts to use technology in the educational system, as early as the 1960's, as a means of helping deal with the social crises and with the economic, internal and national needs of the fledgling State.
The processes forming the backdrop to the development of ICT integration policy were explored as part of the main research question:  What were the causes and motives involved in the development of the policy governing ICT integration into the Israeli educational system between 1980 – 2000 and how did they influence this policy which led to continued attempts to assimilate computers and technology, despite a perceived series of repeated failures?
In order to provide answers to the research question, projects and central events in which technology was integrated in order to assist education were examined.  The focus was on the processes which led to establishment of various ICT committees as well as on milestone projects that represent the development of ICT in education policy.
The research was carried out by interviewing twenty two subjects involved in various ways in the processes of formulating and implementing ICT in education policy in Israel. In addition, hundreds of relevant documents were analyzed, research dissertations on ICT integration, technology and science, change process management, education and educational policy were studied.  These dealt with the years under discussion in this dissertation as well as with the preceding years during which the educational system was shaped and developed: 1950's – 1970's.
The research data was collected using the Grounded Theory approach.  Identifying categories from the data enabled examination of the various social and political trends associated with the formulation of ICT policy in education and which determined this policy.  A number of central themes emerged from the data which enabled a link to the relevant research literature and led to debate and discussion on these findings.  The emerging themes exposed three aspects of integrating technology into the educational system.  These expressed the hopes of the various ICT policy makers and project initiators that ICT integration into the educational system would be of use in solving complex social problems.  The first theme identified that integrating technology in education was an experiment in retaining the relevancy and up-to-datedness of the educational system.  The second theme to emerge was that use of technology in education was a tool for supporting social-educational reforms. The third identified theme was that technology in education was an experiment in providing a solution to the challenge of maintaining the social, security and economic resilience of the State of Israel as part of techno-scientific education.
Through observation of the history of ICT integration into the educational system in Israel, which spans the processes and apparatuses that led to the development and implementation of ICT policy and through a discussion of academic literature, it becomes apparent that the three focal themes identified in this research: the need to retain relevance and up-to-datedness; use of technology as a tool for supporting social-educational reforms through education  and as a response to national challenges can logically be grouped together as one central premise which is the basis for the repeated attempts to integrate technology into education.  This premise, which attempted to salvage the educational system by use of technology, is based on deep-set cultural beliefs and on a tradition supported by a techno-scientific ideology rooted in an unfolding history of more than one century.

Diverse future scenarios are presented in the expectation that the so-called " fourth industrial revolution " will come up, and one of them is a hyper-connected society where technologies such as the internet of things, big data and artificial intelligence converge. We, however, have paid little attention to meaningful signs that can be found in practice, allowing our imagination to rely mainly on future societies predicted by technology visionaries. In this vein, this study explores the settings and practices of wearable self-tracking technologies, which attempt to make humans part of complex networks of hyper-connected society. It examines how our bodies and lives are (re)shaped in an age of hyper-connectivity by analyzing the practices of self-tracking technologies, which steadily and automatically transform users' everyday lives and bodily responses into a series of data. Drawing on the theory of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article investigates how " scripts, " which were initially written to expect and define both humans' and nonhumans' actions and their relationships, have to be rewritten in different settings in which these technologies are situated. That is, the original scripts of these technologies written in well-known " Quantified Self movement " are transformed and re-inscribed in concrete settings such as digital healthcare and labor management. Consequently, in contrast to the first script which expected self-empowerment and self-improvement of users, new scripts are rewritten as a " digital nudge, " " extreme Taylorism, " and " intimate surveillance " in these settings. This article concludes that we need to sincerely ask and answer ethical questions concerning these technologies for their realized script to form the world in which we want to live. These efforts to incessantly raise and answer questions concerning decision-making authority, privacy, data ownership, security, and reliability in concrete settings will contribute to making the hyper-connected society that we want to live in.

This paper describes a 'déjà vu' experience from the first decade of the 21 st century. It shows that, 30 years apart, one can single out from history two waves of major accidents across safety-critical systems. This new series of major accidents of the 21 st century challenges the field of safety. Considering the situation, the paper first argues that models that have been prevalent or the most popular in the field need to be looked at critically and questions whether they still remain appropriate to sensitise the current situation and the trends in safety research. Secondly, based on a list of eight attributes (including the ability to provide appealing graphical representations), three popular models are selected, then analysed in terms of their strengths and weaknesses: Reason's Swiss Cheese Model, Rasmussen's migration model and socio-technical view, and Weick's (and colleagues) collective mindfulness. A fourth approach case, resilience engineering, is also reviewed as a more recent and collective endeavour. Finally, the paper argues that current models and their associated graphical representations supporting safety management practices should not only incorporate advances in managerial, social and political sciences but also in epistemological and philosophical areas in order to reflect the body of knowledge available in the field of safety today more effectively. A set of two graphical representations are then offered as alternatives, promoting anti-dualist metaphors (e.g. constructivism, complexity, networks), and their implications explored.

Les uses et pratiques liés aux technologies numériques font partie aujourd’hui des processus d’incarnation,
des devenirs des corps, de ce qui signifie avoir, acquérir et être un corps. Ces médiations technologiques particulières
contribuent doublement à inscrire les corps : d’une part leurs traces sont inscrites dans des dispositifs numériques, et
de l’autre ces médiations contribuent à la création d’habitudes, gestes, perceptions et mouvements qui donnent forme
aux corps. Ces médiations, qui font partie des processus de subjectivation et sont étroitement liées aux formes
d’affectivité, sont explorées dans le cas particulier de la pratique des autoportraits numériques et leur présence
croissante dans le web.

Considerable scholarly discussion has been given to the idea that we are moving toward a state of “posthumanism.” This essay examines some possible implications of a posthuman existence, specifically as it relates to that most basic of human needs—sexuality. I explore the spiritual aspects of sexuality to see what is lost and what is gained in technologically mediated forms of sexuality. To that end, I consider the interplay between sexual behavior and our conceptions of the sacred, how technologies are changing our views of—and realities concerning—our bodies, and the potential for a sacred posthuman sexuality.

Our current era is one of profound changes and uncertainties, and one issue is to understand their implications for high-risk systems and critical infrastructures (e.g. nuclear power plants, ships, hospitals, trains, chemical plants). Normal Accidents (NA), Perrow's classic published in 1984, is a useful guide to explore the contemporary epoch, in the third decade of the 21 st century. One reason is that this landmark book has triggered a sustained interest by scholars who have debated, challenged, rejected, refined or expanded its core thesis over almost now 40 years. With La Porte, Sagan, Vaughan and Hopkins' contributions into what can be described as the "standard NA debate" in the late 20 th century and the more recent "new controversies and debates" by Downer, Pritchard or Le Coze in the early 21 st century, the book can still resonate with current changes in the 2020s. These changes include phenomena as large, massive, intertwined, consequential and diverse as the advent of internet and of digital societies, the increase of transnational flows of diverse nature (people, data, capital, images, goods) and the ecological crisis captured by a notion such as the anthropocene. Taking stock, historicising and revisiting NA with such debates and changes in mind leads to characterise a Post NA narrative.

In this book, I argue that there is a need to revisit Perrow’s seminal contribution, Normal Accidents. I discuss conceptual and empirical changes in the past three decades and show the relevance of thinking our current situation with the help of this classic book when confronted to these changes; hence, the prefix “post”.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This dissertation is an ethnographic study, accomplished through semi-structured interviews and participant observation, of the cultural world of third party Apple software developers who use Apple’s Cocoa libraries to create apps. It answers the questions: what motivates Apple developers’ devotion to Cocoa technology, and why do they believe it is a superior programming environment? What does it mean to be a “good” Cocoa programmer, technically and morally, in the Cocoa community of practice, and how do people become one? I argue that in this culture, ideologies, normative values, identities, affects, and practices interact with each other and with Cocoa technology in a seamless web, which I call a “techno-cultural frame.” This frame includes the construction of a developer’s identity as a vocational craftsman, and a utopian vision of software being developed by millions of small-scale freelance developers, or “indies,” rather than corporations. This artisanal production is made possible by the productivity gains of Cocoa technology, which ironically makes indies dependent on Apple for tools. This contradiction is reconciled through quasi-religious narratives about Apple and Steve Jobs, which enrolls developers into seeing themselves as partners in a shared mission with Apple to empower users with technology. Although Cocoa helps make software production easier, it is not a deskilling technology but requires extensive learning, because its design heavily incorporates patterns unfamiliar to many programmers. These concepts can only be understood holistically after learning has been achieved, which means that learners must undergo a process of conversion in their mindset. This involves learning to trust that Cocoa will benefit developers before they fully understand it. Such technical and normative lessons occur at sites where Cocoa is taught, such as the training company Big Nerd Ranch. Sharing of technical knowledge and normative practices also occurs in the Cocoa community, online through blog posts, at local club meetings, and at conferences such as Apple’s WWDC, which help to enroll developers into the Cocoa techno-cultural frame. Apple’s relationship with developers is symbiotic, but asymmetrical, yet despite Apple’s coercive power, members of the Cocoa community can influence Apple’s policies.

Increasingly, a range of 'things' (e.g. infrastructure, data, knowledge, bodies, etc.) are configured and/or reconfigured as assets, or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process, which characterizes a particular form of technoscientific capitalism. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership, or the appropriation of value through ownership rights (e.g. intellectual property), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g. investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements, etc.). While rentiership and rent-seeking are often presented as negative phenomena (e.g. distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist literatures – and much in-between – it is my intention in this paper to unpack rentiership as an increasingly constitutive political-economic process underpinning technoscientific capitalism. Rather than being framed as a problematic 'side-effect' of capitalism, I argue that rentiership can help us to understand how different forms of value extraction are constituted by and come to constitute different forms of technoscience. This has significant analytical, political, and normative implications for understanding the relationship between science, innovation, and business (e.g. how do rentier rationales configure research agendas, how does innovation enable rentiership, what are the consequences for social equity, etc.).

Развитието на възобновяемите енергийни източници (ВЕИ) в световен мащаб е белязано с
изключителна динамика: ветроенергетиката успя значително да увеличи своята производителност, за да
достигне в някои страни до паритет с разходите на традиционната енергетика; при фотоволтаиката за
последните пет години цените на панелите намаляха наполовина.
В България развитието на ВЕИ е също динамично и породи редица напрежения. През последните
пет години се инсталираха над 1300 MW нови мощности, с което изискванията на ЕС за дела на ВЕИ в
електроенергийния микс бяха предварително изпълнени.
Основните предизвикателства бяха свързани с техно-икономическата страна на новите ВЕИ –
взаимодействието им с далекопреносната и разпределителна мрежи, управлявани от НЕК респ. ЕРП
изведе на преден план редица проблеми на българската електроенергийната система като цяло:
отлаганото с години отделяне на ЕСО от НЕК, с което да се даде приоритет на инвестициите в мрежата;
невъвеждането на третия либерализационен пакет на ЕС, с което да се премине към изцяло пазарен
механизъм на работа и т.н..
От друга страна се създадоха правно-регулативни условия, които приоритезират главно големи и
средни проекти, оставяйки сравнително малко поле за автентично местно предприемачество, а и на
практика не се подкрепи възможността за инвестиции в инсталации за домакинства. Политико-
икономически обвързаности и непрозрачност белязаха голяма част от инвестиционните проекти.
По парадоксален начин в България сред най-яростните противници на ВЕИ се оказаха екологичните
организации, което е в разрез на това, което обикновено се случва в Западна Европа, а именно че от тези
среди да са и първите предприемачи и инвеститори в зелена енергия.
Ключови думи: Зелена енергия, ветроенергетика, фотоволтаика, теория за дееца-мрежа,
зависимост от пътя, НЕК, ЕРП, корупция

This paper analyzes creation museums that explain the biblical creation story as an authoritative “scientific fact,” a certain type of museum that has become popular since the 1980s in the United States. Based on the perspectives gained from museum studies and from my analysis of exhibits during my fieldworks in August 2010 and January 2011 at the Creation Museum (2007-) in Petersburg, Kentucky, I argue that the museum problematizes the concept of “science museum” through its identity politics of scientific knowledge.

In the context of creation-evolution controversy since the 19th century, creationists after the 1970s have emphasized the validity of creationism by using scientific explanations, or so-called “creation science.” However, evolutionists have harshly criticized it and have argued that the controversy does not serve as a ground for “scientific debate.” Meanwhile, creationists have taken another strategy for justifying the creation science. With the change in the role of museum education particularly since the 1980s, scientifically authorized objects at exhibitions often have been replaced by replicas of authorized objects or audio-visual materials. As the visitors do not pay much attention to whether objects at science museums are scientifically authentic or not, the Creation Museum has come to use many scientifically unauthorized materials as their scientific “evidence.” From my analysis of its exhibitions, I demonstrate that this strategy enables the museum to succeed in avoiding the evolutionists’ counterarguments on the exhibited objects by appropriating traits of typical science museums.

[*An English version will be published soon.]

TECHNOSCIENCE & SOCIETY BOOK SERIES

Series Editor: Kean Birch

Objectives

Our futures are highly uncertain in large part because of the changing relationship between technoscience and society: artificial intelligence holds enormous technoscientific promise, yet raises significant social and ethical questions with its development; personal data is supposed to be the ‘oil’ of the future, yet it’s exploitation threatens our privacy and identity; genomics, proteomics, and other omic sciences could contribute massively to improving healthcare, but their benefit depends on how they are deployed; and low-carbon technologies like electric cars are essential to solving climate change, although they also threaten to embed us further into problematic socio-technical systems. All these and much more underpin this new book series with its aims to do the following:

• Disseminate scholarly research on the relationship between technoscience and society;
• Focus on contemporary challenges arising from the changing relationship between technoscience and society;
• Attract new and emerging scholars using interdisciplinary approaches at the cutting edge of social scientific and humanistic studies of science, technology, and innovation;
• Reach new audiences for scholarly research on technoscience and society by producing accessible, though still rigorous, scholarly books.

El objetivo de este capítulo consiste en describir los procesos de institucionalización de la prospectiva CTI en los países seleccionados (Argentina, Colombia, México y Perú), analizando de qué manera la interacción entre los especialistas en prospectiva tecnológica y los actores involucrados en la definición de la PCTI en Argentina, Colombia, México y Perú, permite comprender el proceso y nivel de introducción de la prospectiva tecnológica como un componente de la planeación de las políticas en este ramo.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the way that the videogame industry has evolved as a complex sociotechnological system and how the discourse surrounding the industry, as well as videogames as a medium of expression, has shaped that development. This shift in the nature of videogame creation from individual authors and small studios to the monolithic entity known as "the Industry" was accompanied by the creation of an ideology that defines the identity of a community and places constraints on videogames as a medium. This is the ideology of the "hardcore" gamer. In order to understand this ideology, its impact and its significance, I will focus on the discourse surrounding the videogame industry and particularly on the limits of this discourse. One such area of discourse where antagonisms arise is in the growing community of independent game developers.

The key objectives of the GCSA’s report are to raise awareness of risk and innovation concepts, to share issues of common concern
and interest, and to promote learning across borders. A parallel set of objectives informed a recent Durham University project, GMFuturos1, which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.The project set out to use novel risk and innovation concepts to
examine the adequacy of current models of risk and regulation of genetically modified (GM) crops, and to propose alternatives.

This thesis explores the ways in which Facebook is created as a space and how this space is produced through the presentation of the self and the friendships that Facebook contains. The focus of the thesis is on understanding the interplay between the constraints of Facebook’s framework, and how users act within it. To address this focus, this research takes a critical realist approach. To embody a critical realist approach in the social sciences is to use a combination of methods in order to elucidate the phenomena at hand. As such, this research takes a case study approach to Facebook which combines a variety of methods in order to approach the object of study. These methods include a structured questionnaire, semi-structured interviewing and observation.
From the results generated by these methods, I argue that Facebook, while new in many ways, is not inherently more disruptive to friendship than other forms of mediation that
have preceded it and should be understood as part of a continuum of changes that have shaped the expression of friendship. In fact, Facebook removes some of the temporal aspects of friendship, being no longer location or place specific as it relocates some of these characteristics to Facebook. The architecture of Facebook means that friendships become simultaneously dynamic and static, as they can be maintained with little effort, while remaining current. Using Facebook as a hub through which to manage friendships means that users must present at least a portion of their selves to be presented for consumption and comment. Not doing so tacitly resists the pressure that Facebook puts on users to be part of its social hum. Deciding on the ‘right’ way to present the self requires accounting for the space one is acting in, similar to face-to-face interaction. The sharing of the self helps to facilitate impromptu socialising regardless of corporeal presence.Building on these results, I argue Facebook can be best understood as a parochial space that contains known, although not necessarily intimate others. Facebook is a place and a space – an abstract space rather than an organic space created by capital for its own purposes. Even so, abstract space can be resisted and re-shaped. People demonstrate agency in reshaping both in how space is used to ‘get around’, but also in how social relations are formed, maintained, ordered and sustained. The popularity of Facebook has helped foster a reconfigured parochial sphere that be framed as a return to gemeinschaft,and the ‘village square’. There is little of the public realm or the stranger about Facebook.

Although Facebook potentially gives the comfort of Tönnies’ gemeinschaft village square it does have some important differences. Rather than bestowed through birth and kinship,this village is intentionally created and ‘curated’ by the user to meet varied social and relational needs and obligations. Relationships are formed, ordered and sustained
reflexively according to the dictates of Facebook’s architecture and the reflexive preferences of the user.
This research extends the current literature by critically re-examining how Facebook can be understood as a space beyond dichotomies of public and private. This thesis argues that re-contextualising Facebook as a parochial space means that the implications of this space for the presentation of the self and the friendships represented within this space must also be examined. In critically examining these aspects, this thesis concludes that
users can and do exert agency to use Facebook in a way that best suits their needs. However, social obligations, technical structures, and corporate interests, mean the village is not fully within our control.

The dominant modalities of treatment for alcoholism in Russia are suggestion-based methods developed by narcology—the subspecialty of Russian psychiatry which deals with addiction. A particularly popular method is the use of disulfiram—an alcohol antagonist—for which narcologists commonly substitute neutral substances. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork at narcological clinics in St. Petersburg, this article examines the epistemological and institutional conditions which facilitate this practice of “placebo therapy.” I argue that narcologists’ embrace of such treatments has been shaped by a clinical style of reasoning specific to a Soviet and post-Soviet psychiatry, itself the product of contested Soviet politics over the knowledge of the mind and brain. This style of reasoning has facilitated narcologists’ understanding of disulfiram as a behavioral, rather than a pharmacological, treatment and has disposed them to amplify patients’ responses through attention to the performative aspects of the clinical encounter and through management of the treatment’s broader reputation as an effective therapy. Moreover, such therapies have generally depended upon, and helped to reinforce, clinical encounters premised on a steeply hierarchical physician–patient relationship.

In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not only a technology of politics, produced and managed by municipal water engineers and their subjects. Leakages, and the ignorances of leakages, are also enabled by the vital materiality of the city’s infrastructure. As engineers work hard to improvise resolutions to the leakages they can fix, and ignore the thousands of others they cannot, the processes of leakage always exceed the control of the city’s government. As such, the uncertain appearances of leakage in Mumbai not only provide the grounds for the work of the state. Leakages also constantly disrupt governmental projects in ways that make the water department vulnerable both to the claims of marginalized subjects and to new reform projects in the city.

Los modelos de transición hacia la sociedad del conocimiento suponen la existencia de emprendedores que no solo resuelven los secretos del nuevo paradigma tecno-económico sino que tienen un lugar de privilegio en la consideración social. No sucede tal cosa en los países emergentes, en los cuales las asimetrías económicas se superponen a modelos culturales piramidales de tradición paternalista (Castells and Himanen 2014). Nuestra investigación explora las fuentes de la transformación informacional de empresas pioneras de la economía basada en el conocimiento en el mundo en desarrollo, en contextos indiferentes u hostiles al nuevo desarrollo. Para responder estas preguntas realizamos un análisis de casos individuales y comparativo de cuatro empresas competitivas globales surgidas en diferentes sectores del medio de innovación en el área metropolitana de Buenos Aires entre 1980 y 2014. Cada caso será analizado mediante el método de mapeo de ensamblajes propuesto por la teoría del actor-red, considerando tanto a los actores relevantes como a los sistemas tecnológicos heredados de la era industrial (Latour 1998, Callon 1987, Hughes 1987, Heeks 2007).

The article provides an anthropological analysis of the different social worlds that make up electrical energy infrastructures. Using the lens of the anthropology of infrastructures, we reflect on the role of meteorological information artifacts in the constitution of the infrastructure of the electrical energy system in Brazil. Based on fieldwork, we show how meteorological artifacts play a performative role as boundary objects in the sociomaterial dynamics of the hydropower infrastructure. The article describes how social worlds are entangled with the circulation of weather and climate knowledge in the electrical energy infrastructures, which is increasingly important in the current context of climate change.

Neste artigo dirigimos nossa atenção para alguns casos empíricos brasileiros, destacando as formas de participação e colaboração entre cientistas e não-cientistas implicadas nesses modos de conhecer, bem como os desafios decorrentes da mediação digital no processo investigativo. Mais especificamente, no capítulo discute-se como algumas experiências de ciência cidadã são desafiadas a colocar a  prática científica na fronteira do ativismo político e  nformacional. Indiretamente, pretendemos indagar as  possibilidades e os limites para a produção de conhecimento no campo das ciências humanas através das tecnologias  digitais: como delinear a tênue fronteira entre as humanidades digitais, a engenharia social, o capitalismo
cognitivo e a formação da sociedade de controle?

This paper first aims to draw attention to, and diagnose, the failure of IR's 'sociological turn' to extend the domain of sociological reason into the philosophical turf of epistemology and thereby fulfill the full promises of the 'post-positivist turn'. Its second purpose is to revive and deploy the radical version of the sociology of knowledge that can achieve an autonomous reconstruction of epistemology suited to a reflexive, post-Kantian consciousness. The diagnosis begins by tracing the erasure of the radical sociological position in the connected evolutions of Sociology and IR. It shows that the derailing of the 'sociological revolution' was paradoxically mediated by the consolidation of social constructionism and science studies, reproduced in IR through their counterparts in the 'sociological turn': Constructivism and the sociology of IR. In these otherwise reflexive developments the progression of sociological reason was halted by a self-imposed limitation on the extension of sociological analysis to all domains of thought, and the endorsement of an idealist and institutionalist ontology of 'the social'. A reformulation of the forgotten, radical sociological position clarifies the implications for IR of a transition to a post-philosophical theory of knowledge, and delineates an empirical research agenda for such a reconstruction of epistemology driven by a sociology of knowledge of a 'revolutionary' persuasion. Exploring the centrality of social practice in the social determination of knowledge, the paper argues that, and shows how, a properly reflexive reconstruction of epistemology is best achieved by deploying the sociology of knowledge in two complementary materialist directions: a sociology of everyday social practices that illuminates our epistemic immersion in the 'carpentered environments' of the socio-natural order, and a sociology of craft that objectivates the social constitution of the skholè as a mode of existential boundedness by addressing scholarly thought as differentiated social labor.