Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Program Chair: Wenda Bauchspies, Penn State STS Program Design and Layout: Steven A. Walton, Penn State STS
SESSIONS LETTER SUFFIX CORRESPONDS TO THE ROOM IN WHICH THAT SESSION IS HELD
Lobby Level
A Crystal ballroom East B Crystal Ballroom West C Pavilion 1 D Pavilion 2 E Pavilion 3 F Pavilion 4 G False Creek 1
Lower Level
H False Creek 2 I Burrard Inlet J English Bay K Coal Harbour 1 L Coal Harbour 2 M Coal Harbour 3
Program at a Glance
WEDNESDAY
1:00-3:00pm Publications Committee 3:00-6:00pm Council 2:00-5:30pm Registration (foyer by the Pavilion and Ballrooms) 6:00 8:15PM 1976 and All That... 8:30-10:00pm Junior-Senior Mingling 10 10 10 10 10
THURSDAY 10:15-11:45AM
1.2A New regimes of evidence in biomedicine: staging proofs, managing data 1.2B Feminisms, Affects, and Displaced Ways of Knowing in Science 1.2C Neo-Liberalism: The Hidden Politics of Science Studies? 1.2D The Sensory Extensions of NASA Science: Hardware and the Human 1.2E NSF Funding Opportunities 1.2F Law: Above and Below Science 1.2G Revealing the local: environmental knowledges, institutions, and imaginaries 1.2H Controversies Left and Right [working session] 1.2I Visualizing Hidden Processes: Human-Animal Worlds on Camera [new media] 1.2J Assessment, Change and Trust 1.2K Sounds, Technology, and Voices 1.2L Policy: Health and Energy 1.2M Nano Uncertainties: Risk, Recursion And Liminality In Near-Future Nanotechnologies 31 34 35 35 36 37 38 40 41 42 43 45 47
THURSDAY 8:30-10:00AM
1.1A Producing Facts from Cases Studying Others, Observing Ourselves 11 1.1B The Encounter of Reproductive Technoscience and Local Bodies in East Asia 12 1.1C Engineering Studies III 15 1.1D Computer Silence 16 1.1E How Central Are Ethical Values in Scientic Reasoning? 19 1.1F Challenges of Public Engagement in the Ages of Genomics 20 1.1G Towards the new governance of biobanks 22 1.1H How science deals with policy questions: on science-based expertise for policymaking, case studies from the lowlands 23 1.1I Technologies of Terror, Military Surveillance, and War [new media] 24 1.1K Brave New Technology - The Quiet Move Toward Human Enhancement 26 1.1L Risk Perceptions and Social Responses to Emerging Nanotechnologies 28 1.1M Detailing and Disciplining: Producing the material elements of natural and social orders 30
THURSDAY LUNCH
Roundtable: STS Careers Inside and Outside of Academia 48 Roundtable: The International Nanotechnology in Society Network (INSN) 48 Roundtable: Heterogeneity and heritability: Responses from sociology, philosophy, and history of science [working session] 48
THURSDAY 1:30-3:15PM
1.3A Putting the Hwang Controversy into Context 49 1.3B Engineering Studies I 52 1.3C Messy shapes of knowledge I: STS Concepts, the internet and the future of the humanities and social sciences 53 1.3D Genetics and Stem Cells 55 1.3E Science, Technology and Society Research in Action: The Challenges of Bringing STS Research to Action in Health Care and Corporate Settings 56 1.3F Science Studies, Infectious Disease and Emergent Formations and Formulations of Security 58 1.3G Its Only a Game: What Can Social Science Learn from the Study of Video and Computer Games? 59 1.3H Probing East Asia: Science and Medicine in Transnational/ Post-Colonial Contexts [working session] 62 1.3I Race/gender/ethnicity/age in technologies of popular culture [new media] 63 1.3J Silence and the Citizen: Public Voices and Expert Views 65 1.3K Biased experts versus plain facts 66 1.3L Models and Simulations: Vehicles for Travelling Facts 69 1.3M The Silent Treatment How patients, parents and practitioners are selectively silenced in mental health encounters 71
1.4C Messy shapes of knowledge II: e-science, the knowledge economy and new research practices in the humanities and social sciences 75 1.4D Military, Nuclear, Space 77 1.4E Interconnections of STS and Surveillance Studies 80 1.4F Universities, Grants and Research82 1.4G New Ethnographies of Nanotechnology 84 1.4H Technological Regulation and Subversion: Opposing structures and visions of use in the intellectual property debates [working session] 85 1.4I Sociality and Selves [new media] 88 1.4J Medicine and the Real World 89 1.4K The Will of Science and Technology in States of Decay 91 1.4M Gender Across the Board 92
THURSDAY EVENING
7:00-8:30pm Reception with HSS&PSA at the Hyatt Regency 95
FRIDAY 8:30-10:00AM
2.1A Silence in the Digital Library: Why Are the Users So Quiet? 95 2.1B Author Meets Critics: Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics by Jenny Reardon (Princeton, 2004) 98 2.1C Silence and Secrecy: Rhetorical Perspectives on Things Science Cant Say 98 2.1D STS Interventions into Scientic and Technical Practice 99 2.1E STS Engaged: Personal Narratives of STS in Everyday Life 101 2.1F Boundary Work 102 2.1G Optimizing Performance in the Face of Nature: Soldiers,
THURSDAY 3:30-5:30PM
1.4A Putting the Hwang Controversy into Context (continued) 74 1.4B Engineering Studies II 74
Civilians and Productivity 2.2K Public Understanding of Science129 Culture 104 2.2L Author Meets Critics: Picturing 2.1H Stem Cells, Between Banking Personhood: Brain Scans and and Circulation [working session]105 Biomedical Identity by Joe 2.1I Technologies of Citizen Activism Dumit (Princeton, 2004) 131 and Democracy [new media] 106 2.2M A More Social Epistemology: 2.1J Experiments in Interdisciplinarity Decision Vectors, Epistemic and Humanitarian Engineering 108 Fairness, and Consensus in 2.1K Contested Illnesses: Ambivalence Solomons Social Empiricism 131 and Advocacy in the Age of Technology 108 FRIDAY LUNCH 2.1L Cloning Truth Claims: 6S Annual Business Meeting Imaginative Investment in (Student Section of 4S) 133 Narratives of Technoscience 110 Roundtable: STS in Canada 133 2.1M The Discourse and Practice Roundtable: What Can STS Tell Us of Waste: the silencing and About the Hwang Controversy? 133 suppression of the human and non-human 111
FRIDAY 1:30-3:15PM
FRIDAY 10:15-11:45AM
2.2A Accounting for Suffering: Representing and Managing Cancer Treatment in the 20thCentury US and UK 113 2.2B Matters of Place: Geography, Travel, and the (Post)colonial in Technoscience 114 2.2C Rhetorical Uses of Silence in Health and Medical Settings 116 2.2D STS Interventions into Scientic and Technical Practice 118 2.2E The Sciences of Emotions 120 2.2F Silences: Absent and Present 121 2.2G State Ideology and Computerized Modernity: International Comparisons, 1950-1970 122 2.2H New Media and Old Tasks [working session] 124 2.2I Music [new media] 125 2.2J Between Past and Present: Technologies of population engineering and the politics of restorative justice 127
2.3A Music and the Technologies of Remixing 134 2.3B Author Meets Critic: A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: PostPositivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour By John H. Zammito (Chicago, 2004) 135 2.3C Farming Like a State: Agriculture and the Politics of Expertise 136 2.3D Questioning Relevance: Exploring the Boundary Between STS and STP 138 2.3E Causality: Others and Difference 141 2.3F Anthropology, Epistemology, and Science 143 2.3G Interdisciplinarity and STS engagement with real life problems 145 2.3H Unheard Voices [working session] 147 2.3I Discipline and Punish: The Game [new media] 148
2.3J Interrogating Transparency; Communicating Science 2.3K Health On (the) line? Conditions of Silence for Marginalized Groups 2.3L NanoTechnology II 2.3M Pharmaceutical Publics: Politics, Sovereignties, and Suffering
FRIDAY EVENING
6:00 7:00pm 4S Business Meeting 188 6:00 7:00pm Reception (Cash Bar) 188 7:00 9:00pm Banquet (ticketed event) 188
SATURDAY
7:15-8:15am SSS Editorial Board Meeting 188
FRIDAY 3:30-5:30PM
2.4A Between Constitution and Empire: Producing Science and Citizens in Global Institutions 156 2.4B Whats to be done with undone science? 159 2.4C Technology: Power, Truth and Culture 162 2.4D Biotechnology, Pharmaceuticals and Development 165 2.4E The Silences around Government and Science 168 2.4F Consent, Silence, Privacy and Secrecy 170 2.4G Critiquing the Critics 172 2.4H STS and the City - Cities as Technical Artifacts and Competing Interpretations of the Technological City 174 2.4I Silenced pasts: Archaeological practice and the politics of manifestation [new media] 177 2.4J Public Health 178 2.4K Markets, Consumers and Commodities 180 2.4L Black-Boxed Security? Disclosing Cold War Technologies and Reframing Technologies Since 9/11 183 2.4M Degrees of Freedom: Infrastructure After Control 185
SATURDAY 8:30-10:00AM
3.1E Food, Biopolitics, and Regional Identity 188 3.1F Science and the Subdued Voice 189 3.1G STS Perspectives on Justice and Sustainability 190 3.1H Organizations and Networks [working session] 191 3.1I Doing Research about ICTs and Health Information 193 3.1J The Secret History of Open Source 195 3.1K Shifting Gear: What do changes in automotive infrastructures reveal? 197 3.1L Invoking Difference: Silencing Race and the Talking Gene 199 3.1M Author Meets Critics Arthor Meets Critics: The Effortless Economy of Science by Philip Mirowski (Duke, 2004) 200
SATURDAY 10:15-11:45AM
3.2E Technologies of (Anti-) Aging: Promises and Predictions 3.2F Transgene Transgressions: Controversies over transgenic maize in Mexico 3.2G Scientic Conferences: Knowledge, Community, Activism 3.2H Labor and the Contradictions of Science [working session] 200 201 203 204
3.2I Artists investigating and employing interspecies collaboration [new media] 205 3.2J What Should the Humanities Offer to Science and Technology Policy? [working session] 207 3.2K Fact(ory)/Labor(atory) 208 3.2L What do they know? And how do they know it? Amateurs, Hobbyists, and Rethinking the Nature of Expertise 209 3.2M Patients and Medicine: Emergence, Visibility and Transformation 211
229
SATURDAY 3:30-5:30PM
3.4E Deleuzian Intersections in STS and anthropology 231 3.4F Expertise, Experts, Risk and Trust 234 3.4G Exploring Calculative Agency in Human-Machine Assemblages236 3.4H Genetics, Race, and Identity [working session] 238 3.4I Video Ethnography [new media]239 3.4J Measuring Health II 240 3.4K Intersections and Dialogues Across Postcolonial, Feminist, and Laboratory Studies of Science 243 3.4L Information Technology 245 3.4M Representing the Locals: How International Organizations Make Science 247
SATURDAY LUNCH
Roundtable: Sts Engaged: A Conversation on the Future of STS Expertise and the Participatory Turn co-sponsored by 6S 213 NSF Funding Opportunities 213
SATURDAY 1:30-3:15PM
3.3E Wicked, Noisy, and Denitely Not Normal 214 3.3F Liberating the Circuits and the Source Code: Toward a Democratic Praxis of Technology217 3.3G The Boundaries of Science in Africa: Mistrust, Survival, Appropriation 219 3.3H Local Environments and Nonlocal Problems [working session]221 3.3I The Uses of Mobile Wireless Technologies: Different Perspectives on New Media Studies [new media] 222 3.3J Evidence-Based Medicine 224 3.3K Capital and Aggregate Forms of Life 225 3.3L In The Academy/ Interdisciplinary 227
SATURDAY EVENING
7:00-8:00pm Reception 249 8:00-10:00pm Presidential Plenary: Silence, Suffering and Survival249 10-00-12:00pm 6S (Student Section of 4S) Annual Party 249
SUNDAY 9:00-10:30AM
4.1C Secrecy, Silence and Control of Informal Knowledge 249 4.1D Technology, Expert Knowledge, and Markets 250 4.1E Capitalizing Race in a Genomic Age: Reections on Commerce, Equity and Reication in Biotechnology 251 4.1G Biomedicine, Gender & Sexuality: The Politics & Production of Silence 253
4.1H Patients, Subjects, Power, and Ethics [working session] 254 4.1K Re/producing and Endangering Species: Questions of Survival in the Remakings of Kin and Kind 255 3.4K Intersections and Dialogues Across Postcolonial, Feminist, and Laboratory Studies of Science, Part II 257 4.1M Expertise, Lay Knowledge, and Local Activisms: Revisiting Certainty, Risk, Neutrality in Law and Policy Reform 259
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Wednesday
1:00-3:00PM PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE (PAVILION 3 [E]) 3:00-6:00PM COUNCIL (PAVILION 3 [E]) 2:00-5:30PM REGISTRATION (FOYER BY THE PAVILION AND BALLROOM S) 6:00 8:15PM 1976 AND ALL THAT... (PAVILION ROOMS)
Organizer: Sal Restivo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Chair: Susan Cozzens, Georgia Tech
Introduction
Susan Cozzens, Georgia Tech
The Elusive Sociological Imagination and the Pursuit of the Hard Case
Sal Restivo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Postsocial
Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago
Discussants: Trevor Pinch, Cornell University; Susan Cozzens, Georgia Tech; and Alondra Nelson, Yale University 8:30-10:00PM JUNIOR-SENIOR MINGLING (PAVILLION ROOM )
Organizers: Gwen Ottinger, UVA; Jane Summerton, Linkping University and VTI; Jason Delborne, student rep for 6S (Student Section of 4S); Matt Harsh, student rep for 6S (Student Section of 4S)
This will be the rst of two designated times to connect with your mentor/mentee for the pilot mentoring program organized by 6S (Student Section of 4S). Please note that those who have not signed up for the mentor program are still welcome to attend this opportunity for informal conversation and connections.
Thursday 8:30-10:00am
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SESSION ABSTRACT: Case based reasoning and evidence are widely used in a number of sciences (biology, geology), social sciences (anthropology) and humanities (law, history). In particular, they are employed both by the scientists whom STS scholars observe and by the latter who predominantly draw on case studies in their empirical investigations. Accounts as to how cases work, and what roles they play in their disciplinary homes, suggest that each discipline regards cases somewhat differently. Contrast, for example, the micro-histories of Carlo Ginzburg and the ubiquitous role of cases in management sciences. In some environments, cases appear to play a critical role in the transfer of arguments across domains. In others, cases seem to provide an unproblematic way for facts to travel within disciplines. A case study has the advantage that it is full of detail, and not yet tted into a theory, leaving the investigator free to choose which facts are pertinent. Yet, how facts emerge/are drawn out from cases is far from straightforward and can lead to highly controversial evaluations of a case studys worth. To our surprise, the more general question of the relation of cases to facts has not received much attention within the science and technology studies eld. To open up this topic for exploration we propose to juxtapose, on the one hand, investigations into the observed communities work with cases and, on the other hand, reections on our own reasoning with and from cases. Two contributions each will address the topic in these two perspectives.
Cases as a Means for Comparing and Transporting Facts Across Domains: Reasoning in Model Organism Research
Rachel Ankeny, University of Sydney
ABSTRACT: Model organism research provides a locus for the examination of the movement of several types of facts, which in turn permit productive comparisons that would be difcult without the use of model organisms. First, it allows researchers who focus on different types of techniques or work within different elds (e.g., developmental versus molecular biology) to produce data that can be synthesized; second, it permits various pieces of data to be compared across organismal groups in order to make arguments about fundamental mechanisms or evolutionarily-conserved processes. This paper argues that the reasoning used in model organism research can occur not only because of the basic biological or natural attributes of the organisms themselves, but also because of the complex processes inherent in choice and standardization which convert natural organisms to model organisms.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts (schooling or working networks, neighborhoods, medical institutions). Studying a case means interviewing an Elderly, at home or in a nursing-home, and his-her relatives but also the unpaid and paid care-workers who intervene in his-her daily life. A case is a sequence of kin congurations (household of care and descent lines of transmission), each conguration tied to a set of economic constraints (resources in money and time). Meanwhile we have outlined a microeconomic analysis of care and nancial transfers, based on the rst stories we were able to draw. In a second time we have systematically collected data on a larger scale to test our statistical model. We try now to simplify the mode of collecting data in order to construct statistical facts which could be used by other scientists and have an impact in the public debate. The paper will examine each of these steps comparing methodological costs and intelligibility gains: the making of an ethnographic case, the use of cases in outlining a rst microeconomic analysis, the collecting of statistical data and its simplication.
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Probing a Multi-Case Studies Approach: How to Produce Facts from Comparison in STS
Martina Merz, University of Lausanne and EMPA St. Gallen
ABSTRACT: While the notion of a disunity of science is shared throughout the STS community, systematic investigations into the differences between scientic cultures or practices are (still) infrequent. This paper argues for the productivity of a multi-case studies approach to draw out the specics of knowledge production throughout scientic cultures. It puts forward comparison as an epistemic strategy employed to reach this goal. The underlying assumption is that different forms of comparison assume specic functions in STS and, more generally, in qualitative social science research. One example is the comparison between cases of minimal and maximum contrast that serves as a key strategy of theory-building in the grounded theory approach. In contrast, this paper will focus on heuristic comparison, a form of comparison aimed at uncovering epistemic, organizational, and cultural features of a scientic culture by employing unconventional comparative categories generated from related case studies. Based on coordinated case studies of architecture, botany, meteorology and pharmaceutical science with respect to their knowledge cultures, we show how STS can produce facts from different types of comparison.
Silencing patients: the subtle reconstruction of patienthood in primary health care practice
Kath Checkland, Ruth McDonald, Stephen Harrison, Martin Marshall and Stephen Campbell, Manchester University
ABSTRACT: In 2004 family physicians in the UK (GPs) signed up to a new payment contract. Under the new arrangements, payment for the volume of patients registered with practices is replaced by a global sum which is augmented by payment for achieving a number of quality targets. The latter are wide ranging and include, for example, payment for achieving a certain level of blood pressure control in patients with high blood pressure, and payment for reaching specied blood test levels in patients with diabetes. Meeting these targets involves both increased surveillance of patients and new technological solutions, with data capture assuming an ever greater importance in practice life. The new data collection instruments (templates) that are being designed and used in this process are generally seen as value-neutral, recording what we do already rather than shaping practice. However, embodying ideas both of medicalisation and of population-level care, they in fact represent a shift in the nature of general practice away from an ideal of individualised care that takes account of social and psychological issues as well as of medical ones. Patients are reconstructed as passive objects of medical concern, with those who decline increased treatment labelled as exceptions. Using ideas from actor-network theory, this presentation will explore the meaning of these changes, drawing on data from ethnographic case studies in two English General Practices to illustrate the subtle reconstruction of what it means to be a patient in the modern UK National Health Service.
1.1B THE ENCOUNTER OF REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOSCIENCE AND LOCAL BODIES IN EAST ASIA
Organizers: Chia-Ling Wu, National Taiwan University and Daiwie Fu, National Tsing-Hua University Chair: Adele Clark, University of California at San Francisco
SESSION ABSTRACT: While East Asia has often been portrayed as societies striving fast and strong for science, technology and modernization among the non-Western world, East Asian local bodies are things
4 S Final Program with Abstracts that are not so easily been reformed and modernized in a predetermined way. While East Asian cultures have long been reformed and reproduced very carefully according to the Western and hence modern or postmodern images, our local bodies are things that are not so easily been reproduced in ideal ways by our reproductive technoscience. This panel aims to broadly explore and critically examine the encounter, the moments of crossing of reproductive technoscience and local bodies. Through ve coordinated case studies-- menopause in Taiwan, prenatal diagnosis in Japan, IVF in Korea, Cesarean Sections in China, and articial insemination in Taiwan this panel demonstrates how the East Asian social and cultural contexts shape the development of these technologies, and how social relationship and gender identities have transformed through such technoscientic development. Instead of taking for granted the thesis of domination of Western technoscience, or the alternative thesis of autonomous East Asian cultures, we focus on the various encounters of Western discourses, East Asian techno-medical professions, local histories, gender systems, and local bodies, docile or unruly. We argue that only through examining the encounters, the pattern of collisions, and the resulting negotiations, can we trace the lasting and even structuring effects on East Asian societies.
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The Menopause Medicalized and Modernized in East Asia: the case of Taiwan
Daiwie Fu, National Tsing-Hua University
ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on some special historical junctures in post WWII Taiwan, when Taiwans colonial and proto-modern culture of menopause encountered the coming of American trends of modernization, especially in the form of estrogen therapy, feminine forever yearnings, and other allied modernization discourses. That was a time when Taiwans womens health movement was still in its infancy but Taiwans obstetrics-gynecology(obgy) profession had already become mature in its conventional sense. In these historical junctures or moments, what sort of encounters, compromise, and negotiations were going on among i) US medical modernization and related yearnings, ii) Taiwans menopause culture (women, family, folk medicine plus TCM), and iii) Taiwans obgy profession, a profession with mixed traditions of Japanese colonial medicine and post-war US medical Aid? Finally, Does the formation of these junctures in turn structure the development and construction of Taiwans new menopause women in the end of last century during the high tides of HRT and its recent crisis?
The Social Control of IVF technology and the Social Denition of Reproduction in Korea
Jung Ok Ha, Seoul National University
ABSTRACT: In this study, I trace the concrete processes of IVF development in Korea from the 1970s to contemporary times using the concept of a socio-technological system whose constituting factors are not only technology itself as a physical object in a narrow sense, but also actors, institutions, and discourse. From a broader historical perspective, I found that the social problematization of IVF technology in Korea has shifted from reproductive technology to bioengineering. This suggests that the current prominence of Korean bioengineering is based on the expansion of reproductive technology in the 1990s. Actors who led the 1990s development of reproductive technologies in the laboratories of infertility clinics now play crucial roles in the 2000s development of bioengineering. The long absence of social controls on reproductive technology in Korea can be traced not only to the lack of any restrictive regulations, but rather, has also
4 S Final Program with Abstracts been conditioned by the social denition of reproduction in Korea. Western feminists have argued that the marginalization of women in the new reproductive technologies is a product of patriarchal appropriation of reproduction. In Korea, the appropriation thesis has limited explanatory power; women have likewise been invisible, but without the dispossession process of becoming so. Reproduction in itself has never been a visible, public responsibility within a welfare state system, and accordingly, women, who bear the sole responsibility for reproduction in Korea, have also remained invisible. The need for social control over IVF technology has never been raised by any of the actors involved: neither government, nor scientists, nor clients. Thus, the lack of social regulation over biomedical technology must be read within a larger sociotechnological system circumscribed by how reproduction is understood.
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Looking Beyond a Scar: Constructing Modernity and Nature through Childbirth in Contemporary China
Jiang-Fang Zhu, University of Minnesota
ABSTRACT: How comes that the scar left on the surface of a womens body after Cesarean section is paradoxically interpreted both as a sign of modernity and as one of backwardness in contemporary China? How cesarean section could be regarded simultaneously as a promising technology serves the different purposes of human reproduction and as a mark signals the symptom of deferral modernity? Partly due to tremendous pressure as well as benet brought to medical institutions by the Chinese states market-oriented economic reform, C-section, once used only under an emergent life-threatening situation during childbirth, now becomes one of the most commonly practiced operations in obstetric clinics. In parallel to the increase of C-section use, there lies another trend of calling for natural birth. Ironically, both camps claim their position represents the most scientic, modern, and advanced way of childbirth. In this paper, I will rst trace the emergence of the discourse, i.e. risk of childbirth, in order to shed light on how both C-section and natural birth are made culturally acceptable and nancially affordable to pregnant women and their family. A special attention will be given to how obstetricians translate or mediate the information of risk to their patient to advocate or to discourage the C-section use. Approaching both C-section and natural birth as institutional and embodied practices, this paper seeks to examine the conjunction of biomedical knowledge and childbirth with consumptions.
Conguring the Gender Identities of Users in the Development and Decline of Donor Insemination in Taiwan
Chia-Ling Wu, National Taiwan University
ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the changing medical discourses and practices of donor insemination (DI) in Taiwan. In this paper, I follow some feminists recent call to turn the gaze to male body through this case of male infertility treatments. DI started to work in Taiwan in 1950s, reached its highest popularity in 1980s, and has declined rapidly in 1990s. How do we explain the rise and fall of DI in Taiwan? Instead of using the availabilities of competing technologies as the dominant reasoning, I argue that medical doctors in different historical stages have been actively conguring the gender identities of users to match their technological preference. In the beginning stage, in order to create the new historical subjects willing to enter in the new social relationship that separate physical and social reproduction from mode of procreation, doctors had to protect the masculinities of infertile men by addressing the social concerns of DI at that time -- the association with adultery, the absence of husbands genetic linking, and the embarrassment caused by masturbation. Doctors downplayed the importance of genetic linkage of parenthood and emphasized the ideas of positive eugenics since donors were mainly medical students, in 1980s to recruit more users. However, the use of DI declined after ICSI began to become the dominating ART to treat male infertility. Doctors started to emphasize that blood is important to legitimate the preference of ICSI over DI. Thus, I argue in this paper the importance of conguring gender identities of users both in the technology development as well as its decline.
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Is It Science or Is It Engineering?: Struggles over Identity and Education in the Making of the New Discipline of Ecological Engineering
Sarah Hunt, University of Georgia
ABSTRACT: not available
Dening Academic Quality: The Gendered Effects of Admissions Criteria in Doctoral CS and CE Programs
Holly Lord, University of Virginia J. McGrath Cohoon, University of Virginia
ABSTRACT: The male-dominated eld of computer science and computer engineering (CSE) is the context for our examination of admission practices that affect womens representation. Data are analyzed from a survey of 48 graduate CSE departments in the United States, as well as from ve sex-segregated focus groups. We develop a model based on our quantitative ndings about variation in womens share of departmental enrollment. Using qualitative data to interpret the model, we nd that ambiguous non-academic criteria play an important role in the admissions process and in womens representation, despite widespread importance placed on formalized, merit-based criteria. The most inuential factors differentiating departments appear to be the value faculty put on diversity and faculty beliefs about characteristics of successful students. We discuss how these ndings suggest that formalizing processes of evaluation in male-dominated elds of science will not sufce to improve womens representation.
Reaching for the stars? - a critical survey of approaches to systems design in engineering and their limitations
Ulrik Jrgensen, Technical University of Denmark
ABSTRACT: In periods of engineering design history approaches to the design of technological systems have been presented as the true and genuine contributions from engineering science going beyond the boundaries of the natural sciences and demonstrating engineering as a seperate scientic endeavour. Especially in the 1960s cybernetics, operations research and systems theory presented such ambitions, later articial intelligence and robottics have contributed to the visions, and lately a revival in both the area of systems engineering as represented in the systems design initiative at MIT and the growing interest in risk analysis and other boundary seeking methods shows a new wave of interest in the attempt to create theories of the working and design of technological systems. Building on some of the historical accounts of systems approaches in engineering the paper will explore some of the limitations to the systems approach as ways of extending analytical engineering methodologies. This will lead to a discussion of an alternative approach recognizing the hybrid and heterogenious character of working technological systems. Which will emphasise the internal tentions and complexities as the core and coherence creating mechanisms instead of searching for a singular explaining structure or logic. Following this path of analysis, the idea of technological systems having similar features that can be studied by analogy will vanish on the specic level of analysis though not disappear completely.
Drawing the line: how engineering faculty describe what counts as engineering
Alice Pawley, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: Contemporary engineering programs acknowledge that the underrepresentation of women in university student and faculty populations is a problem. Many of their solutions are based on understanding this underrepresentation through the pipeline metaphor (the engineering education system is a pipeline where the output consists of professional engineers; if the output is not large enough, it is either because
4 S Final Program with Abstracts not enough girls and women entered the pipeline, or they have leaked out along the way) or the chilly climate metaphor (the working environment in engineering is so inhospitable that women decide to leave it; solutions consist of developing social support for women so they can better withstand this chilly climate, or educating those who create the chilly climate on raising the temperature). However, little attention in engineering has been focused on the gendering of the discipline itself. Scholars suggest that the de facto denition of engineering that focused on (historical) contexts of mens work has functioned to prevent women from participating in more acknowledged engineering projects. Others note the historical boundaries of different engineering disciplines were set to exclude both the technological needs of domestic-oriented work (directed instead to home economists), and the cheaper labor provided by women. This paper extends this research to contemporary engineering education (universities currently train the majority of professional engineers). Data from interviews with engineering faculty outline the boundaries of engineering and how boundary decisions are made, and preliminary analysis suggests the gendered character of these disciplinary boundaries.
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Gender in engineering design: Continuities and Transformations in the conceptions of mechanical engineering
Tanja Paulitz,Technical University of Berlin
ABSTRACT: My contribution is theoretically and methodologically located in feminist technology studies as well as in the sociology of knowledge and work. It focuses on the gendered categories in engineering design theories and practices of mechanical engineering. As feminist technology studies have shown social constructions of gender are closely related to the eld of technology, not only with respect to the presence of men and women in technology, but also regarding the concepts and guiding ideas. The approach as a critical analysis concept can particularly be applied to the examination of the (silent) power relations and hierarchies involved in the knowledge and practices of engineering and other elds of technology design and use (see above all Wajcman 1995 and 2002; Faulkner 2001; Cockburn/Ormrod 1993). However the main lines of argument of the existing studies are rather product than process related. On the one hand, they aim at the evidence of contingency and thus the social dependence of the artifact, on the other hand at the description of the factors being responsible for its coming about. Usually, further focus is on the analysis of activities with the machine but not on the desgin of the machine. In her research program for feminist technology studies Wendy Faulkner mentions among other aspects the gendering of knowledge and work styles in the technological line of work. Nonetheless, the question is virtually neglected and not explicitly examined, whether the process, the activity of designing technology itself is gendered, and what ideas of gender are assigned to it. Thus, I consider engineering design a gender-coded human productivity. This view of the research problem refers to the opinion that neither gender nor the conceptions of engineering design could be seen as ahistorical entities but should be considered historical documents themselves from a constructivist science critique angle. It is most likely that gender-coded technical and non-technical patterns of (re-)productivity in the technological civilization are co-constructed. Taking that problem as a starting point, I will argue for a detailed examination of the social construction of engineering design as a gendered activity. There is some noticeable indication that the modern idea of engineering design (of the industrial age) had become subject to change by the end of the 20th century. Accordingly, further research will be focused on a critical perspective regarding possible transformations in the concepts of todays engineering design.
Scientic Communities in Chile in the Internet Age: Dependency and Global Science
Rick Duque, Louisiana State University Wes Shrum, Louisiana State University Omar Barriga, Universidad de Concepcion Guillermo Henriquez, Universidad de Concepcion
ABSTRACT: This is a study of the under-researched Chilean scientic community within the context of transnational techno-science and global development. It addresses theoretical issues in science and
4 S Final Program with Abstracts technology studies (STS) such as the social construction of science, the institutionalization of global science and cross-cultural technology diffusion. The study also incorporates an emerging developmental perspective, re-agency, while taking into account the changing network constraints resulting from the adoption of new communication and information technologies. The core research questions of the project are: 1) what social forces have shaped Internet diffusion and current use within Chiles scientic community? And 2) how is the Internet shaping Chilean scientists local and global networks? To answer these questions, the project employed an extensive quantitative survey administered in the spring of 2005 to 300 scientists in both research institutes and academic departments. The instrument covered professional background, ties, activities, and outcomes, organizational networks and Internet access and use. Preliminary ndings from quantitative analyses are discussed.
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How Not to Suffer in Silence over Assaults on Speech in the Academy: Internet Activism
Deborah Gordon, Wichita State University
ABSTRACT: This paper examines a controversy over an art exhibit at my university in 2005 and the role cyberspace activism played in a political campaign for freedom of artistic expression on campus. It documents the management and suppression of Palestinian artistic expression on campus in conjunction with an offcampus group of Concerned Citizens of Wichita. I document how local politics of secrecy and dissimulation led to the predictable trail of rumor, confession and scandal. I target why and how the university drew a racial, national, and political circle around itself, attempting to keep out the artist and the Palestinian community from decision making. I look at how racial and national notions of citizenship and artistry underlined an administrative fantasy that behind-the-scenes dialogue with external political actors could remain secret. I examine how race and nation mattered in an alliance between administrators that aimed to hide that there were anti-Palestinian forces on and off campus. I look at the politics of that alliance that led to a decision to balance the exhibit that it took a virtual community of artists to reverse. I show how email and organizing on the art blogosophere allowed the artist to break up campus/community information incest. By forgetting cyberspace, the administrators forget the importance of virtual social relations, which permitted the artist to make her case to other artists online who then intervened to save the university from itself.
Digital Life Lines: Exploring the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in regenerating isolated coastal communities
Singleton Carrie, University of Teesside Eileen Green, University of Teesside
ABSTRACT: Community-based ICT initiatives are viewed in UK government policy as lifelines for isolated individuals and communities, connecting them to key services and facilitating processes of social inclusion. ICTs are also perceived as integral to community regeneration, with for example, websites opening up spaces for community presence, social interaction and economic activity. The emergence of such initiatives counters claims about the internet creating a homogeneous global culture and destabilising community networks, local identities and traditions (Liff, 2005). This paper critically explores the theme of digitised community survival strategies or lifelines, with specic reference to their intersection with wider social, material and spatial relations and alternative technological artefacts. The paper draws upon qualitative data from a research project based in two isolated coastal communities in the UK, both of which have ICT regeneration initiatives (community broadband and website). The locations are economically diverse with one community experiencing high levels of deprivation. We investigate issues of access to and participation in ICT initiatives, exploring the extent to which ICTs can facilitate processes of community networking and social inclusion. We also examine the ways in which people think about the material and social communities in which they live and how this is related to the virtual communities created online, unpacking social identities of gender, age, class, and ethnicity in virtual and physical community formation and maintenance. Our nal theme explores online vocality and virtual silence or noiselessness, critically engaging with ideas about self-imposed and involuntary silence and alternative means of making the self heard.
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Valuing Biomedical Sciences: The Need for Scientists to Engage in Ethical Reasoning
Inmaculada de Melo-Martn, Cornell College of Medicine
ABSTRACT: Discussions in philosophy of science have begun to argue that not only are value judgments and methodological issues inextricably entwined, but that they ought to be so. One reason for this is that if science is to work for the public good, then scientists must make ethical judgments about the goals and not only the means of scientic research. Another reason is that applying science responsibly requires not only that people have knowledge of the social context but also that they judge whether and how particular research applications reinforce or undermine certain social and political commitments. Using a case study from genetic research, I show the need to place value judgments at the front of our analyses. Two difculties in this research are relevant to an analysis of value judgments. The rst one is related to using resources for projects that attempt to nd genes that confer susceptibility to complex diseases. A second difculty stems from the lack of evidence that this kind of genetic knowledge could be put to use, even if it is found. If this analysis is correct, then it would be inappropriate to exempt scientists from critically engaging in ethical reasoning about their research.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts objectivity, using resources from a model-theoretic account of science and standpoint theory. Modeling requires selecting only the relevant properties of the complex objects and circumstances in the world. But what is relevant depends on interests, values, and background knowledge. Activism may reveal relevant evidence by allowing the researcher to achieve the dual vision of insider/outsider that allows access to the standpoint to the lives of those studied. To illustrate this point, I use Nancy Scheper-Hughess account of high infant mortality in a shantytown in Brazil. Her research coupled with her activist involvement leads her to replace a model of mothering as a natural relationship with a model in which the bond between mother and child depends on social, cultural, and political circumstances. Her dual role as an activist/anthropologist provides the standpoint from which she constructs the new model. I argue that the greater success of the new model supports that it is objective in the sense of model-based objectivity. The activism that plays a role in determining which properties are relevant does not undermine objectivity, but rather makes it possible.
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Silent Morality and Routinised Action. On the Routines of Animal Experimentation in Immunological Research
Daniel Bischur, University of Salzburg
ABSTRACT: In-vivo-assays in immunological research are unavoidable. Furthermore, the work of immunologists entails the pathologization of animals. They, for example, gain insights of the process of the immune response by producing animals with the lack of a certain function (knock-out-mice). For the scientists in action these experimental systems are but another work routine. On the basis of data, collected in an ethnographic study about an immunology work group, the paper will describe the silent morality of the scientists in dealing with such topics. Their personalized ethical concerns are usually concealed behind their laboratory work routines. Although they are gettin used to such practices, ethics remains as a latent topic in form of inhibitions (they dont lile doing it) and self-restrictions (they would not, or would not like to do anything).
4 S Final Program with Abstracts to the ethical analysis of genomics problems? When and why should stakeholder voices matter? What institutional arrangements help to ensure that diverse voices are heard and what are the limits of such arrangements? These are some of the challenges raised by the earlier generation of public engagement approaches which this panel will discuss.
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Dethroning ethics and social experts? Representation and legitimacy in public engagement
Michael Burgess, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: The notion of public interest motivating policy is often not representative, leading to many different approaches to enhance representation. Some approaches identify stakeholders and the interests of civil society to diversify public interests. Deliberative democratic approaches conceptualize public engagement as having the political and moral authority to establish social policy in the public interest. Although social and ethical experts may be removed from positions of authority where they may have replaced or joined science advisors, the approach presents considerable challenges in the design of appropriate information and representation for public engagement.
Genetics on stage: stimulating and assessing public engagement in the development of health policy on preimplantation genetic diagnosis
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, University of British Columbia Jeff Nisker, University of Western Ontario Susan Cox, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: This paper critically examines the use of live theatre and post-performance discussion as a novel method of stimulating and assessing public engagement. Drawing upon our experiences with the play Orchids (performed across Canada in Fall 2005), we focus on the challenges of using theatre to elicit participatory, critical, and empathic engagement in the development of health policy on preimplantation genetic diagnosis. We also compare our methodological approach with other policy and research-related uses of theatre, inviting dialogue about the role of theatre in qualitative inquiry, public engagement and the development of health policy.
Structure versus agency: institutional arrangements for public engagement and their limits
Edna Einsiedel, University of Calgary
ABSTRACT: Calls for public participation on genomic and other controversial life science technologies have been increasingly part of the policy landscape. One can then pose the question: are such public engagement practices being institutionalized? If so, in what forms? What are the strengths and limitations of institutional mechanisms? Where or how do other voices social, environmental groups, patient organizations, disadvantaged communities -- t in with institutionalized practices? This presentation will focus on the mixed-models approach employed in Canadian policy-making and will analyze the strengths and shortcomings of institutionalized public engagement.
The thing about politics: notes toward a theory of citizenship for technological society
Darin Barney, McGill University
ABSTRACT: Recent scholarship in science and technology studies exhibits a public turn that explicitly calls for a drawing of scientic and technological things into the realm of democratic contest. In this, constructivist accounts of science and technology gesture in the direction of those critical democratic theories of technology that have often been dismissed as excessively modern in their assumptions and preoccupations. This paper investigates whether the recent turn toward making things public (to borrow Latours already prominent phrase) provides an adequate theory of citizenship to accompany its theory of science and technology. It suggests that a critical politics of science and technology cannot be conned to moral claims concerning the bearing of scientic and technological action on matters of justice, but must also entail public judgment concerning the ethical stakes in this action (i.e., the relationship of science and technology to competing claims about the substance of the good life). For a variety of reasons (including
4 S Final Program with Abstracts the occupation of this terrain by the fundamentalist right) neither contemporary critical-democratic theories of science and technology nor their constructivist critics equip us theoretically to confront this challenge. This paper attempts to sketch a path toward a theory of citizenship in technological societies oriented to this end.
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Organizers: Klaus Hoeyer, University of Copenhagen and Herbert Gottweis, University of Vienna Chair: Klaus Hoeyer
SESSION ABSTRACT: The past decade has brought a signicant change in regulatory attitudes to stored human tissue and collected genetic data.. From having been embedded in various clinical routines and relatively uncontroversial research practices, biobanks have become subject to intense innovation of governance initiatives. Not all types of governance have received the same scholarly attention, however, and various notions of ethics seem often to have deterred attention from regulatory mechanisms with a perhaps more profound impact on biobank activities. This session will identify different types of regulatory mechanisms and their interplay focusing on ethics and legal governance, technical standards, and economic infrastructures. In this way, we explore the conguration of complex governance arrangements making biobanks institutionally possible. Taking as a point of departure case studies, the session will explores different types of biobanks in different national contexts with the aim of stimulating new types of crosscutting comparisons and reections on the interconnectedness of regulatory mechanisms.
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1.1H HOW SCIENCE DEALS WITH POLICY QUESTIONS: ON SCIENCE-BASED EXPERTISE FOR POLICYMAKING, CASE STUDIES FROM THE LOWLANDS
Organizer: Stans van Egmond, Erasmus University Rotterdam Chair: Annick de Vries, University of Twente
SESSION ABSTRACT: Although the interaction between expertise and policy, and between scientists and policy-makers, has been studied within STS by scientists such as Abbott, Gieryn, Jasanoff, Kuhn, and others and has lead to theoretical perspectives on science-based expertise, these efforts have contributed little to policy sciences where more straightforward ideas of science for policy still exist. Examples of existing ideas are the image of policy makers on top and scientists on tap, or scientists speaking truth to power. This session discusses empirical studies that have been carried out in the Netherlands in order to investigate the interaction between science and policy-making, integrating STS perspectives with Policy Sciences perspectives. In contrast to other countries where the relation between science and policy has been studied, in the Netherlands science-based expert organizations have a powerful position in framing policy problems, providing a smooth consensus platform for policy-making and policy proposals, while at the same time excluding other forms of expertise. We discuss questions and issues such as; what are the
4 S Final Program with Abstracts boundaries that are drawn between scientic experts and policy-makers? And how are they drawn? What are the implications of this situation for the policy in question? How can the relation between the experts and the policy-makers be characterized? And how do experts deal with uncertainty in knowledge and with different sources of knowledge? What lessons can be drawn from the specic organization of science-based expertise for policy-making in the Netherlands?
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How uncertainties are dealt with in policy advices: differences and similarities in Dutch expert institutes
Annick de Vries, School of Business, Administration and Technology, University of Twente, the Netherlands
ABSTRACT: not available
Caught between Economics and Epidemiology, on boundaries between science and policy in Dutch public health
Stans van Egmond, Institute for Health Policy and Management, EMC, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT: In this study I compare the way two science-based expert organizations in the Netherlands organze their work as expert and advice institute for the government addressing public health policy issues, and I do so with the use of the concept of boundary work. Although the organizations both have an authoritative position in the Dutch policy eld, the CPB for economic policy making and the RIVM for public health related issues, they nevertheless deal differently with their special position between science and policy, and with the interaction between science and policy. The monopoly position both organizations have in science-based expertise and advice for the government, constituting a signicant political role for both in policy making, is often called into question but is never extensively scrutinized. Although both organizations show boundary work on similar issues such as the use of knowledge claims, the use of experts from outside the organizations and the amount of uncertainty that is allowed in the claims they both make, in this paper I show that both institutions deal differently with their monopoly position in terms of in- and exclusion of scientic experts and knowledge, the level of uncertainty in expert claims and the interaction with the policy makers in the related Ministries, deriving from a status difference between economic science and epidemiology. And these differences dramatically inuence the way political and societal problems are constructed in economic and public health terms.
Scientic Ammunition to Fire at Congress: Intelligence, Reparations, and the U.S. Army Air Forces, 1944-1947
Petrina Stephen, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: Secrets by the Thousands! Nazi Science Secrets! A Technological Treasure Hunt! All the war secrets, as released, are completely in the public domain. Military intelligence was not quite as accessible as it seemed to journalists in late 1946 and early 1947. This particular bounty of intelligence derived from extensive exploitation strategies hatched by American and British forces in the closing months of World War II (WWII). These efforts anticipated the Potsdam Conference and Agreement of July and
4 S Final Program with Abstracts August 1945, where Germany and the Nazi economy were carved up for postwar occupation and reparations. The largest was Operation LUSTY (LUftwaffe Secret TechnologY), launched by the United States (U.S.) Army Air Forces (AAF) in 1944. This paper synthesizes histories of LUSTY, the AAFs Scientic Advisory Group (SAG), and Project PAPERCLIP (recruitment of Nazi R&D experts into the U.S. military), and follows the SAG into Germanys R&D installations, the concentration camp Dora at Mittelwerk, allied interrogation facilities, Japan and the atom bomb and nally into the U.S. Congress, 1945. The history of the SAGs intelligence and reparations efforts from 1944 to 1947 reveals the intensity with which the AAF and its consultants in the aeronautical sciences pursued Nazi R&D. The fact that an exploitation of Nazi R&D congured into the postwar policies of the AAF and USAF is accepted by historians. This paper explains how this was done by describing the coordination of LUSTY, PAPERCLIP, and the SAG in the AAFs exploitation of intelligence and reparations for postwar policies and politics. The presentation is rich in documentary photographs, drawings and lm.
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The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery and Battlespace Awareness in Imagery Intelligence
Chad Harris, University of California, San Diego
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the role of aerial and satellite imagery in the US militarys command, control, and intelligence (C4I) systems, with an historical focus on the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Using satellite imagery for military intelligence and warfare is part of an ongoing effort in the US Department of Defense to make all cartographic and topographic space, and the objects in it, totally visible and transparent, what the US military calls total battlespace awareness. It is where imagery production is attached to concrete and purposive action in battlespace, an example of how the mundane and the monstrously violent intersect around the production of visual data and artifacts. Borrowing a metaphor from Paul Edwards, I suggest that satellite imagery can not only open up the world (making it transparent), but can also close down geographical space under a regime of surveillance and violent military control. The discursive power of aerial and satellite imagery is derived from its position as an objectifying transcendent gaze, above and beyond subjectivity (Donna Haraways God Trick), and when these images are disseminated in the mass media as testaments to military prowess, they become visual representations of geographical domination (as in Denis Cosgroves Apollonian Eye). In this sense, satellite imagery, photo reconnaissance, and imagery interpretation are rich sites and artifacts for exploring how power and national sovereignty turn on the visual.
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1.1K BRAVE NEW TECHNOLOGY - THE QUIET MOVE TOWARD HUMAN ENHANCEMENT
Organizer: Ullica Segerstrale, Illinois Institute of Technology Chair: Ullica Segerstrale
SESSION ABSTRACT: Currently a science ction-like scenario is opening up around emerging technologies: biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, cognitive science and technology, robotics, and others. The potential of these new technologies is typically connected to the promises of nano-level engineering. In regard to humans, the knowledge acquired can potentially be used for curing disease and helping the disabled, as well as enhancing healthy individuals, and making future humans smarter, stronger, faster, and longer-lived. Already now existing developments intended for treatments can be readily extended. What will these enhanced humans be like, and how will they relate to the non-enhanced rest, especially if they are cognitively superior? How will social/cultural, economic and political systems respond and adapt to address the challenges of unequal distribution and access to enhancement and life extension technologies? Various scenarios can be considered. And what does the general public say about all this? How does the typical pattern of positive and negative hype around new technologies play out in the current case? Finally, what are the limits to the extension of human abilities promised by the Brave New Technology, both from a biological and moral/political perspective?
The human person in transition: Anticipating the impact of emerging technologies in medicine
Debra Bennett-Woods, Regis University
ABSTRACT: Medicine has long struggled with dening the human person from a moral and legal viewpoint. Medical science and technology have magnied the difculty as advanced life support, assisted reproduction, the sequencing of DNA, and other technological advancements have created unprecedented moral and practical dilemmas, and raised questions about the boundaries, if any, that should be imposed on medical intervention. Today newly emerging technologies, with the potential to go beyond restoring health to radically enhancing human functional potential and lifespan, pose a whole new layer of questions that will fundamentally alter the face of medicine, the denition of human health and the perceived role of medical science and technology in society. Critical assumptions about human health and its interface with medical science and technology are challenged
From Silent Ugly Duckling to Svelte Techno-Swan: Weight Loss Surgery and Compulsory Biomedicalized Aesthetics
Kathryn Morgan, University of Toronto
ABSTRACT: When I walk in and they look at me, they cannot hear what I have to say. -- the poignant, painful, and resigned lament of an extraordinarily competent and qualied woman upon leaving an employment interview. The `morbidly obese esh `speaks while the person is silenced. To be embodied as `fat in America means painful experiences of exclusion and ostracism in childhood, excruciating peer-catalysed self-annihilation in adolescence, and an adult life lived in discursive and material spaces of `legitimate target of fat hatred, `obesity epidemic contaminator, and, most recently. `unpatriotic domestic terrorist [See the Surgeon Generals remarks, March 1st, 2006 `Obesity is the internal terror.] The increasingly obligatory solution: radical weight loss surgery involving gastric bypass. (WLS) Today bariatric surgeons promote WLS as a form of liberation for the latent thin TechnoSwans living in but suppressed by the unruly appetitive behavior and disgestive tracts of the fat, appropriately-silenced, American ugly ducklings. Each week, commodied and media-exploited, self-identied `ugly failures enter into the domain of cultural/biomedical consciousness and surveillance. Each week, we are invited to join in their self-loathing and celebrate their technology-mediated new embodiment as TechnoSwans. Now they are entitled to speak. Today WLS is driven by multiple techno/cultural innovations: consumer-targed virtual-imaging computer software where fat and ugly individuals are invited to repudiate their abject existing esh and to identify with their beautiful, svelte, potential-but-realizable body; micro-surgical technologies such as bre optics which make widely-advertised laparoscopic surgery possible; and digital multi-media technologies which `speak the images of the new happy TechnoSwans to the world.
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Genius as a commodity: cognitive enhancement technology and scenarios of its social effects
Anders Sandberg, Oxford University.
ABSTRACT: Technological enhancement of cognitive capacity is increasingly realistic, from software agents to memory enhancing drugs. This makes cognition shift from a xed innate ability to a trait that can be improved with the right means and budget. More than any other form of human enhancement technology cognition enhancement has raised narratives of how it will cause widening social gulfs between haves and have-nots, sometimes going so far as to suggest that it will lead to speciation. Taking into account estimates of economy, technological development paths and societal responses, it is possible to sketch a wider range of scenarios than the simplistic have-have-not scenario. In particular, dimensions of culture and international development disparities may produce complex, disruptive outcomes that do not t into any utopian or dystopian scheme.
Human nature is not what it used to be: Scientic and Moral/Political views on Human Engineering
Ullica Segerstrale, Illinois Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: A central theme in current discussions about emerging technologies for human enhancement is: What Does It Mean to Be Human? Many see this metaphysical issue as having important social and political consequences for the future. In fact, the question of the nature of human nature has been uneasily contained for a long time, coming to the surface again and again in heated controversies about original man, IQ, sociobiology, and the like. Beyond the scientic arguments in these debates are recurring moral/ political concerns about such things as free will, moral responsibility, equality, and democratic decisionmaking. These controversies show some persistent thinking habits among scientists and the general public alike. There is a tendency to interpret factual statements as value statements, connect the perceived moral/ political attractiveness of theories to their scientic validity, and assume that moral/political arguments need grounding in science. A source of special confusion has been the notion of human equality. Meanwhile, it is becoming harder today to classify the various standpoints in clearly political terms. To improve public discourse about enhancement technologies, it would be important to uncouple biological from legal and moral aspects of human nature, and to distinguish between practical reason (desirable social values and norms) and means-ends rationality (technical problem-solving).
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Organizers: Barbara Herr Harthorn, UC Santa Barbara and Tee Rogers-Hayden, Cardiff University Co-Chairs: Barbara Herr Harthorn and Tee Rogers-Hayden
SESSION ABSTRACT: There has been growing attention in social studies of science and technology on risks of emerging issues such as nanotechnologies. Part of the attention is due to the perceived urgency amongst the policy and science communities to address future risks and uncertainties, and this includes a desire to deliberate potential societal and ethical questions upstream rather than later on in the R&D cycle and in contrast to the way previous techno-scientic controversies, such as GM agriculture, were approached. We bring together specialists from the US, Canada and the UK from several disciplines (anthropology, communication and media studies, environmental studies, political science, social psychology, STS) to offer a multidisciplinary session addressing different facets of the risk issues surrounding nanotechnologies. The session will be organised in conjunction with the newly formed NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California at Santa Barbara and its national network partners. The sessions will debate: risk and nanotechnologies; public risk perceptions, nanoscientists and engineers understandings of the public; upstream public deliberation processes on nanotechnology risks; and media responses and coverage of risks related to nanotechnology in the U.S. and U.K. A further aim of the session will be to map out potential interdisciplinary connections, and future research opportunities, for innovative research on nanotechnologies and risk.
Risk and Responsibility: How Nanoscientists and Engineers View the Nano-enterprise
Barbara Herr Harthorn, UC-Santa Barbara Hillary Haldane, UC-Santa Barbara Karl Bryant, UC-Santa Barbara
ABSTRACT: Expert judgments about technological risks have often been typied in the risk perception literature and sharply contrasted with lay persons judgments. Like public perceptions, experts views about technological risk have most often been characterized as single party, uniform, and relatively narrow but deepfor example, based on single sources of risk, relatively few intervening factors, and limited exposure pathways. While portraying expert agreement as high may be comforting to many, differences among experts may be of key importance in the emerging debate about nanotechnologies in society and in developing public participation efforts. This study by CNS-UCSB researchers explores preliminary interview data on nanoscientists conceptions of nanoscience and nanotechnologies and the varied risks and
4 S Final Program with Abstracts benets associated with their development, production, dissemination, and waste disposal. In particular, we analyze differences and commonalities among nanoscientists across a range of disciplines and other factors in how they view the nanomaterials they work with, when and how they anticipate that nanotechnologies will emerge from this work, and how they consider their work in relation to societal and ethical issues.
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Expert Judgments of Public Perceptions: How Well Do They Know their Audience?
Terre Sattereld, Univ. of British Columbia Milind Kandlikar, Univ. of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: Recent trends in risk communication and public participation have introduced an era of upstreaming whereby scientists are expected to include public stakeholders in a dialogue about the acceptability of new technologies at the earliest stages of development. Nanotechnology is a signal case in point as market-ready applications are as yet few and public knowledge of such technologies is at best nascent. While tackling such issues before they have purchase in the public imagination has its benets, (it might abate controversy before it occurs) it also creates difculties some of which are the product of the expert communitys misunderstandings of patterns of human behaviour in the face of new and unknown technologies. This paper reports on an interview-based study conducted with nano-scientists and toxicologists through the University of Californias Center for Nanotechnology and Society. Expert perceptions of public response to risks are explored so as to examine (a) the viability of the assumption that a baseline level of literacy on the subject nanotechnology is a primary goal of risk communication; (b) when, where, and why confusion persists with regard to problems of public technical literacy versus those of ethics; and (c) the status of expert knowledge of key social science ndings on patterns and histories of human behaviour in response to new technologies (including studies of judgment, perception, trust, and the distribution of power and decision making in social life). The paper will discuss both early ndings, study design, and any implications for risk communication and upstreaming more broadly.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts we detail our investigation into such interactions in which we have tracked how different risk terms have emerged on the Google News web site. We then conclude by detailing how we will examine the links between activists on the web and the frames that are transmitted as a result. In doing so, we have begun to illuminate the emerging risk frames that have thus far been elusive.
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Organizers: Janet Vertesi, Cornell University and Michael Lynch, Cornell University Chair: Janet Vertesi
SESSION ABSTRACT: This session presents papers that critically examine observing, representing and measuring in science as material activities that simultaneously organize and stabilize natural and social orders. Through the artful production and disciplinary handling of elementary details - pixels, data points, marks, or markers - the properties of objects are composed and congured, resulting in identity, integrity and intelligibility. Grounded in studies of scientic and artistic activities, these empirical and historical case studies explore site-specic laboratory and eld practices of drawing, counting, and calibrating, then move beyond situated problems to challenge fundamental concepts of observation, representation and measurement in the sciences.
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Discussant: Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge COFFEE BREAK: FOR THOSE PARTICIPATING IN THE MENTOR PROGRAM, PLEASE COME TO THIS COFFEE BREAK TO CONNECT WITH YOUR MENTOR /MENTEE IN PERSON.
Thursday 10:15-1 1:45am
4 S Final Program with Abstracts or international standardization of biomedical activities. In this session we examine some of these new collective congurations of biomedical work, focusing on the intricate web of (textual, discursive, virtual, material, etc.) entities they generate and circulate, the forms of regulation they devise and enact, and the procedures used to produce and manage evidence.
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Scientists and policymakers at work: Examining the governance of epistemic conversations and productions in a genetics network
P. Lehoux, University of Montreal J-L. Denis, University of Montreal G. Daudelin, University of Montreal
ABSTRACT: Biomedical research is undergoing signicant changes, including deliberate strategies and incentives aiming to support close and recurrent collaboration among scientists and policymakers. Not only is knowledge seen as a valuable resource in itself, but also as a resource that should be shared and put to use. More particularly, the creation and management of networks wherein researchers and policymakers can work together and learn from each other is seen as a sound strategy for increasing both the relevance of evidence and its use in policymaking. The objectives of this paper are to examine how and why deliberate and more frequent interactions within such networks inuence, over time, the epistemic cultures and respective practices of scientists and policymakers active in the area of genetics in Quebec and the Maritimes (Canada). Genetics is a highly heterogeneous eld, where basic scientists, clinical researchers (prenatal services, chronic diseases, occupational health) and social scientists often disagree about how genetic technologies should be used and regulated. However, because of the perceived need to make it work and to deploy an egalitarian and democratic governance of the network, several tacit ways in which more weight is given to certain evidentiary claims and epistemic products surface.
Staging proofs in biomedicine: comparing two bioclinical collectives in oncogenetics and psychiatry genetics
Pascale Bourret, Universit de la Mditerrane Vololona Rabeharisoa, coles des Mines
ABSTRACT: The development of biomedicine translates into the production and circulation of entities whose distinctive feature is to be bio-pathological. In this communication, we will address the following question: how are these entities generated and qualied to t into clinical judgment and decision? We will draw onto a comparison between two biomedical settings. The rst setting is an extend network of medical consultations and expertise, gathering biologists and clinicians from different backgrounds around the issue of genetic susceptibility to cancers (notably breast and colon cancers). The second setting is an experimental series of medical consultations and staffs. It associates paediatricians-geneticists, child psychiatrists, and more recently, neurologists, whose objective is to gure out whether adolescents and young adults who had been diagnosed with autism or psychosis in their childhood, are suffering from genetic diseases. In spite of their differences, these two settings engage bioclinical collectives into the staging of proofs, and the regulation of practices that might serve as a basis for diagnosis and care. Our communication aims at characterizing this work on proofs. We will show that: 1) This work consists in intersecting highly heterogeneous elements that are not completely given in advance. Those elements might be: cases published in the literature, epidemiological data, clinical narratives, recent and still to be validated discoveries on genes or mutations. 2) This work aims at generating and qualifying, in the same move, entities onto which clinics will rely. In other words, entities that are relevant for clinics, and those which deserve further laboratory work, are differentiated in the making. 3) Thereof, regulation is at the core of this work. This work on proofs is co-substantial to the regulation of practices that will permit the collection and the management of data, and the distribution of entities between clinics and research. To conclude, we will reect on the form of objectivity that this work on proofs in biomedicine actually shapes. We will discuss the differences between biomedicine, evidence-based medicine and clinical tradition in this respect. Finally, we will provide a few thoughts on the transformations that this work on proofs in biomedicine induces for classical objects and subjects of medical work, namely pathologies and patients.
Whos Minding the Data? Data Managers and Data Monitoring Committees in Clinical Trials
Peter Keating, University of Quebec Alberto Cambrosio, McGill University
ABSTRACT: Modern biomedicine is based on a number of novel institutions and practices running the sociotechnical gamut from third-part payers to molecular biology. In order to function, all of these institutions and practices require some degree of formal and informal regulation that themselves run the regulatory gamut from tacit conventions to explicit rules mandated by law. The present paper contributes to the ongoing investigation of these institutions and the forms of objectivity they generate by examining the emergence, development and deployment of Data Monitoring Committees (DMC) in the eld of clinical cancer trials. Although a relatively recent institution, the idea of a DMC had originally been raised in the clinical trial methodology literature in the 1970s in order to solve the problem of the management of interim trial data. With knowledge of interim results that could be interpreted as good or bad, clinicians and researchers would become increasingly reluctant to enter patients on to trial: the trial would then ounder and the enterprise abandoned faute de combattants. Consequently, many leading clinical trial statisticians proposed that interim data and analyses be restricted to members of a small group of investigators known as the data monitoring committee. Since the late 1980s, DMCs have become mandatory and constitute an essential part of clinical cancer trial methodology and practice. They have furthermore evolved considerably in a constant search for ethical neutrality and objectivity through the use of sophisticated statistical techniques and novel organizational strategies. They have also been beset by a fundamental tension as to who or what should count as objective in such an undertaking. This paper will examine the evolution of this peculiar institution both in terms of the techniques brought to bear on the ethical and scientic issues that they are expected to solve and in terms of the organizational forms through which DMCs have evolved and the ideals of objectivity that these forms embody.
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Tibets Science of Healing: Between the Defense and Transformation of a Traditional Praxis
Sienna Craig, Dartmouth College
ABSTRACT: Tibets science of healing is a dynamic system that has been reformed, contested, and creatively re-imagined, both historically and against the backdrop of modern South and East Asias political economy, as well as through global networks of exchange invested in Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the natural products industries. This paper emerges from two years (2002-2004) of Tibetan medicinerelated research in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) of China, and more than a decade of engagement with practitioners of Tibetan medicine in Nepal. In this paper, I examine what becomes of Tibetan medical theory and method its unique disease etiology, its philosophy of health, and its complex pharmacology, its approach to diagnosis when its formulas are made to perform according to the logic of biomedicine, and when commoditization is coupled with a de-valuation of practitioner expertise. Specically, I discuss: 1) The implementation of biomedically-derived Good Manufacturing Practices on Tibetan medicine production; and 2) The application of Randomized Clinical Trial methodologies to the evaluation of Tibetan formulas. As such, this paper illustrates some of the socio-economic, ethical, ecological, and epistemological challenges inherent in transforming so-called traditional medicine for mass markets, as well as possibilities for creative turns and unexpected outcomes through this metamorphosis. This study also critiques and reinterprets a taken-for-granted notion embedded within biomedicine namely, efcacy. I consider how efcacy is situated within discourses of science, how it is dened, regulated and used in the interstices of western biomedicine and its Others, and how it is illustrative of what has been called a double standard that exists between biomedicine and non-biomedical praxes.
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Organizers: Natasha Myers, MIT, Mara Puig de la Bellacasa, Universit Libre de Bruxelles/University of California, Santa Cruz and Mary Weaver, University of California, Santa Cruz Chair: Natasha Myers
SESSION ABSTRACT: Feminist science studies have regured debates on epistemology, practice, and the politics and performativity of scientic knowledge. This panel draws on such analyses to foreground the role of affect in the formation, propagation and embodiment of scientic knowledge. We examine the often-overlooked sensibilities, dispositions, and intimacies that shape relations between scientists and the substances they study, and the affects embodied by those whose lives intersect with scientic and medical knowledge. These papers develop methodologies attuned to the transduction of affects through the subjects, objects and machineries of science, while at the same time recognizing the affective entanglement of the analyst within her eld of study. Inspired by the work of Haraway, Barad, and Stengers, each paper diffracts feminist analyses of affect within different sites and on different scales. Mara Puig de la Bellacasa looks at the connections between political and scientic interests among feminist scientists to explore a politics of care as a gure of the displaced entanglements between politics, affects and the practices of scientists. Natasha Myers explores the pedagogical performances of structural biologists who animate their protein models with articulate gestures and affects, betraying a liveliness within life science that regures mechanistic models of living substances. In the nal paper, feminist science studies theories of affect are applied beyond the laboratory. Mary Weaver writes about affective materialities endemic to particular transgender/transsexual writings and theories, reecting upon hormones and medical interactions as they diffract these emergent embodiments. Rebecca Herzig will discuss the papers.
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Discussant: Rebecca Herzig, Bates College 1.2C NEO-LIBERALISM: THE HIDDEN POLITICS OF SCIENCE STUDIES?
Organizer: Steve Fuller, University of Warwick Chair: Steve Fuller
SESSION ABSTRACT: Mirowski and Fuller provide complementary critical histories of neo-liberalism as a reactionary modernist metatheory of science. Mirowski traces the origins of neo-liberalisms basic tenet, which nowadays nds considerable favour in science studies, especially actor-network theory: namely, the market as a generalised model of social life, including the social life of scientists. The gure of Friedrich Hayek looms large here. Fuller picks up the story from the post-Cold War period, especially the rise of Reagonomics and its chief populariser, George Gilder who at the end of the 1980s introduced quantum economics a precursor of todays nanotechnology boom. Gilder went on the found the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which simultaneously promotes capitalist and spiritualist values. The third speaker, Remedios, will take up the problems that both philosophy of science and science studies have had in coming to terms with the normative implications of neo-liberalism, especially the idea of science as a deeply commercial enterprise.
From the Spirit of Capitalism to the Capital of Spiritualism: The Discovery Institute as a Neo-Liberal Institute for Our Times
Steve Fuller, University of Warwick
ABSTRACT: not available
1.2D THE SENSORY EXTENSIONS OF NASA SCIENCE: HARDWARE AND THE HUMAN
Organizer: Cynthia Schairer, University of California, San Diego Chair: Cynthia Schairer
SESSION ABSTRACT: The extra-terrestrial space of the moon and solar system have served as a backdrop for some of the United States most ambitious technical endeavors, but much of the science studies scholarship on scientic technologies has remained earth-bound. Space exploration presents new challenges and
4 S Final Program with Abstracts new possibilities for human-machine contact, thereby opening up new questions about the relationship between experts and the technologies they use. This panel will explore the extension of the body and the senses through technology into the remote locales of NASAs space. Matthew Shindell will examine the simultaneous construction of the astronaut and the space suit. Cynthia Schairer will consider the anatomy of the Mars rovers as embodiments of earthly human scientists reaching out to the red planet. Emma Johnson will present research about sounds, sights, and smells in space: the collection and translation of data gathered by unmanned spacecraft. Together, these papers will focus on how experiences of space are rendered accessible to experts and the public here on Earth. Are these technologies of space exploration cyborgs, robots, or prostheses? Do they pave the way for us to travel bodily to space, do they help us to imagine we can transcend our earthly bodies, or do they bring the truly exotic down to earth?
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Data Curation, Metadata Creation, and Saving us from Ourselves: Ecology and Conservation Science in the Information Age
Emma Johnson, University of California, San Diego
ABSTRACT: Ecologists, conservation scientists, information managers and policymakers are eager to put to work the copious descriptive biological and physical data that has been produced, and continues to be produced. Extensive and exhaustive shared database resources hold out the promise of making this information useful and accessible both for answering scientic questions and making decisions and predictions for conservation purposes. However, there is a serious disconnect between what seems possible with new data sharing and data archiving, and what actually happens. Drawing on eldwork with data managers and ecologists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography as well as from the Science Studies literature on informatics and databases I examine several biological data resources at various points in their development. This data ranges in spatial and temporal scales from the minute to the truly global. What are the strategies in design and implementation that seek to overcome these obstacles to making possible different research with biodiversity databases than without? I am particularly interested in metadata standards and coordination. Another related concern is with how data curation practices are developed, disseminated, and even now required in the research community. What are scientists hoping to achieve with these new information tools, and what has already changed as a result of these new resources? How is information stored in old (and local) ways being incorporated into these new systems?
SESSION ABSTRACT: Science and Society considers proposals that examine questions that arise in the interactions of engineering, science, technology, and society. There are four components: Ethics and Values in Science, Engineering and Technology (EVS) History and Philosophy of Science, Engineering and Technology (HPS) Social Studies of Science, Engineering and Technology (SSS) Studies of Policy, Science, Engineering and Technology (SPS)
4 S Final Program with Abstracts The components overlap, but are distinguished by the different scientic and scholarly orientations they take to the subject matter, as well as by different focuses within the subject area. For complete details, see the S&S Program Solicitation (NSF 05-588) at: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_ key=nsf05588 This program solicitation covers the following modes of support: Standard Research Grants and Grants for Collaborative Research proposals for research, infrastructure or education projects; not require full-time investigator support; may involve Co-PIs, post doc researchers, or grad/undergrad students. Maximum award, excluding indirect costs, is $300,000 for two or three years. Scholars Awards full-time support normally for only one year, up to $70,000 for total direct costs. Postdoctoral Fellowships to enhance the methodological skills and research competence of researchers; must have both a training and a research component; site must be different from where received PhD. Stipends range from $36,000-$42,000 a year for maximum of 2 years. Professional Development Fellowships to improve and expand skills in areas different from that of PhD; must contain both a training and research component. Range from $36,000 to $60,000 plus $3,000 for travel and research expenses. Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants to provide funds for dissertation research expenses not normally available through the students university and in settings away from campus. Up to $8,000 for research in North America and $12,000 for international research. Small Grants for Training and Research (SGTR) (August submission only) to provide sustained research opportunities for graduate students and post-docs. Maximum of $100,000 per year for one post doc and up to three graduate students a year; generally for three years. Conference and Workshop Awards to develop, evaluate, and share new research ndings; need cosponsor from national association or organization. Limit of $25,000. Proposal Due Dates: August 1 and February 1 Contact: Frederick Kronz fkronz@nsf.gov (703) 292-7283 (HPS & SSS) Priscilla Regan pregan@nsf.gov (703) 292-7318 (EVS & SPS) John P. Perhonis jperhoni@nsf.gov (703) 292-7279 (Dissertations) Website: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5324&org=SES&from=home
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Science in the lawyers ofce: Reconsidering lawyer-expert relations in the preparation of expert reports
Gary Edmond, The University of New South Wales
ABSTRACT: In recent years senior judges in a variety of adversarial jurisdictions have commented on the participation of lawyers in the preparation of expert reports for litigation. Much of this commentary has been critical of the roles played by lawyers. A highpoint was the suggestion by the US Supreme Court that scientists should do their work in laboratories rather than lawyers ofces. More recently, several senior courts in other jurisdictions have expressed views on the production of expert reports which recognise a role for lawyers; albeit limited to the organisation and form of the expert report. Content it would seem remains the province of the experts. This paper examines the preparation of an expert report used in recent litigation in Australia. It suggests that many of the judicial expectations (and a raft of recent reforms) seem to be predicated upon unrealistic images of expertise. These expectations and associated procedural reforms have the potential to compromise (or conceal) meaningful, and perhaps necessary, interactions between experts and the lawyers who engage them.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts exclude evidence by making impossible demands on scientic experts. The purpose of my paper is to reect further on the analogy between expertise in the policy context and in the courtroom. Specically, I consider whether impossible standards such as (i)scientically supported evidence in Medicare reimbursement guidelines, (ii)sound science in environmental protection regulatory debates, and (iii)scientically-based research in the No Child Left Behind legislation, have their equivalents in the standards for admissibility in the courtroom--for example, when judges idealize science. I also consider whether the manufacturers of uncertainty, in policy debates or in litigation, borrow or benet from science studies, and whether such appropriations are an unintended consequence of sociological studies of science.
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Toxic Tort Litigations and its absents: Virtual Victims of Agent Orange
Tak Wesgi, McGill University
ABSTRACT: The scientic evidences presented in mass toxic tort litigations often exclude the participation of healthy individuals who have been exposed to the contamination. In writing about Vietnam Veterans Agent Orange Trial, Peter Schuck claimed that toxic tort litigations have two purposes: 1) to seek redress for the past injuries, and 2) to regulate the future risks. This dual nature of litigations demands two kinds of scientic evidences: the general risk assessments and the retroactive demonstration of the causation of particular toxic injury. This, however, leaves aside the social ramications of Agent Orange contaminations on the individuals whose symptoms has as yet manifested. In the context of two Agent Orange trials involving the Vietnam Veterans (1980s) and the Vietnamese (2004-present), this presentation asks how the two Agent Orange trials have attempted to address the as yet manifested risks to the class of individuals who shares the experience of the exposure to the toxins.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts activism, digital forms of mapping, new remote sensing technologies, changing legal frameworks, and other elements. This panel will contain three papers based on research in Oregon, China, and the Arctic region. These three diverse geographical and cultural areas are currently being enrolled in various stages of environmental engagement and awareness and accompanying global and domestic scientic, technological, and legal frameworks. As such, the panel will directly engage the theme of the conference focusing on how individuals are adapting to and surviving amidst the rapid environmental changes occurring as a result of development, new technologies, and institutional and cultural shifts.
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Becoming Scientic Experts: American Indians, Farmers, and Environmental Conict in Oregon
Nicholas Buchanan, MIT
ABSTRACT: This paper examines two water conicts in Oregons Klamath Basin, one in the 1975 and another in 2001. In both conicts, farmers clashed with American Indian tribes over the allocation of water in the Klamath River. At issue in 1975 was whether tribal rights to water superceded those held by white farmers and ranchers. In 2001, tribes and agriculturalists (as well as other groups) disputed whether river water should be used for irrigation or for the protection of several endangered sh species. In both conicts, scientic expertise played a central role, and groups marshaled environmental experts to testify to the scientic validity of their environmental claims. But in the period between the two conicts, an important change occurred. In 1975, American Indians were prevented from testifying as expert witnesses. By 2001, however, the tribes, for the most part, spoke for themselves with the authority of scientic expertise. In this paper, I argue that changing legal frameworks and the establishment of resource management ofces within tribal governments played major roles in this important shift. This change had benets and consequences. By phrasing their claims in scientic terms, the tribes were able to participate more equally in environmental disputes and to more effectively protect their sovereignties. However, scientic discourses rarely captured the tribes full valuations of the environment. By adjusting their language to match institutional environmental discourses, the tribes diminished the importance of their own indigenous ways of knowing the environment.
Media platforms: spinning the Arctic and putting a face on climate change
Candis Callison, MIT
ABSTRACT: This paper investigates the processes by which scientic, political, and environmental concerns related to climate change are being deployed through various forms of media in an effort to engage a broad American public. Specically, it seeks to provide context for understanding the many facets of the recent human rights case brought by the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Earthjustice against the US government for its inaction on greenhouse gas reduction and other climate change-related issues. The working hypotheses is that as climate change has increasingly become seen as a political and non-expert issue, the key actors scientists, policy makers, activists, and people living in the Arctic have come to see this issue as one of spin, framing, and public relations. In comparison and contrast with Cambrosio and Keatings idea of a biomedical platform, this paper will offer conclusions regarding the evolving nature of media platforms -- the often volatile and always in-motion interconnection between scientic research and observed environmental changes, the organizational processes and technologies necessary for the production, visualization, and circulation of this material evidence, and the overlapping framing and re-framing of the issue by journalists, scientists, environmentalists, politicians, and indigenous activists experiencing climate change.
Greening the Dragon: environmental imaginaries at work in Chinas contemporary science, technology, and governance Erich Schienke, Pennsylvania State University
ABSTRACT: In this study I expand upon Peet and Watts articulation of environmental imaginaries to look at how each of the three cases (eco-cities, giant panda habitats, and ecosystem networks) exhibit instantiations of the higher-order imaginaries at work. The concept of an environmental imaginary focuses the ability to describe how environmental issues of ethical concern (Giant Panda habitat, for example, or a Green Olympics in Beijing) are conceptualized in broader contexts of the Chinas contemporary construction of nature-society. Chinese environmental imaginaries are at work in the environmental rhetoric of the state, in the relationships between science advisors and decision makers, in reports by the media, and across a variety of other cultural contexts. Based on 16 months of participant observation and interviews within the Chinese
4 S Final Program with Abstracts Academy of Sciences, namely the State Key Lab of Systems Ecology, this study used ethnographic methods to examine how environmental imaginaries understood through individual narratives of working within Chinas scientic, technological, and governing mentalities play into the nations local, regional, and national capacity to analyze and address ecological and environmental problems.
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Discussant: Michael M. J. Fischer, MIT 1.2H CONTROVERSIES LEFT AND RIGHT [WORKING SESSION]
Chair: Chikako Takeshita, University of California, Riverside
The Making and Unmaking of Dissent in Economics: Radical Political Economics, 1968-1978
Tiago Mata, University College London
ABSTRACT: The Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) was founded in the summer of 1968. It was initially intended to be a contact group for radical graduate students in Economics, but soon it acquired a new mandate. In the period of 1969 to 1971, URPE organized a score of protests targeting the economics profession and sought to design a paradigm of conict as an alternative to the economics orthodoxy. As a result, radicals, despite their impressive academic credentials, were increasingly marginalized from their profession in the course of the 1970s. In response and as the turmoil in the campuses ebbed, URPE refocused its activities away from academe and towards outreach work: publishing pamphlets, a current events newsletter, and organizing teach-outs. By 1975-6 these efforts had already ran their course, leading to discord within the radical community over the politics of their outreach work. URPE by the late 1970s was a collection of largely independent radical groupings that refused to communicate and coalesce as they had done in the late 1960s. The radical community was in ruins. To discuss the formation of the radical community in the late 1960s and its unmaking in the mid-1970s, I draw on the concept of boundary work proposed by Thomas Gieryn. I argue that in their battle with the professional elite, radicals successfully negotiated an identity, but that same identity was ineffectual to guide radicals in their outreach work. I conclude that boundary work accomplished for the landscape of science, is unlikely to function as a guide to wider landscapes.
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Sciencing Human Rights: Agent Orange toxic tort litigation and Michael Ondaatjes Anils Ghost
Chikako Takeshita, University of California, Riverside
ABSTRACT: What are the ramications of linking Human Rights to Science? The protagonist of Michael Ondaatjes novel, Anils Ghost, is a forensic anthropologist determined to nd evidences of state terror in Sri Lanka. But throughout her journey, she nds that there is a certain gap between the presence of the past injustice in the lives of the people and her attempt to retroactively reconstruct the past through scientic gaze. The current Agent Orange trial (Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin vs. Dow Chemical &Co) is also about such reconstruction and remediation of past injustice and human rights violation. Through its particular reliance on scientic evidences to prove the effects of the chemical toxins, toxic tort litigations, in a sense, provide a space in which meanings of the pasts are fought over. Wading through human rights literature, the present Agent Orange trial and Ondaatjes novel, I will explore the entanglement of human rights and scientic rationality.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts (2) Constructive TA activities in the Dutch TA NanoNed program. Both approaches emphasize a process perspective of TA, meaning that the activities are organized to fully support the actors in the eld according to their needs. In this way, actors can anticipate the future on all relevant aspects and are enabled to do better. The paper briey explores the historical trajectories that led to these approaches, important not only to understand the basic differences, but also to understand how both are positioned in their present-day, main stream approaches. Second, the paper compares the two methods, focusing on bridges between them: Third, the paper constructs a hypothetical joint approach for early stage technologies that improves their anticipatory prospects.
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Political Ecology on Inland Knowledge about the Vale do Au and the Northeast Semiarid/Brazil
Fatima Teresa Branquinho, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro Maria Aparecida Nogueira, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
ABSTRACT: Newspapers reports, interviews, videos and academic studies led in the Desertication and Semiarid Nucleus (NUT Seca), of the Rio Grande do Norte University/ Brazil, register that for about fty years humans and not humans from northeast backwoods fought against the construction of the Armando Ribeiro Gonalves dam on behalf of another technical project: the construction of small water reservoirs, more suitable to the survival of carnauba forest, to the production and commercialization of fruits, to the maintenance of mineral reserve, of rupestral gures, of the local fauna and the maintenance of S. Rafael town council, after all, submerse by the dams waters and recreated. This study is about the attainment of the dams construction project and the society of Vale do Au associated to it. The study attempts to answer some questions, based on the assumption that states that epistemological issues are not distinct from the social body organization: how many of us are there in the Vale and who we are. What common world we build with this technical project achievement? What common world can we still build considering current propositions and verifying its articulations? What have dened and denes, after all, the public life in the Vale if we extend democracy to knowledge (Technical-Scientic or not) with the aim to reread and understand the patrimony of NUT - SECA? This study may contribute to the process of Brazilian public policies formulation concerning desertication and semiarid.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts UKas in some other countriesthe majority of profoundly deaf children will have a cochlear implant: the public intent of restoring missing function to any child who is considered impaired, is proving historically robust. Deaf communities and deaf voluntary organisations around the world continue to object to early cochlear implantation, pointing to natural sign languages used in deaf communities, sign-bilingual options in education, and the supposed value of cultural and linguistic diversity in modern societies, in hope of deep social reform. New technologies, including new techniques for the diagnosis of hearing loss, preoperative assessments, standardisation of long-term post-operative testing regimes, sharing of datasets, and innovations in research methods and reporting of ndings, are mobilised in search of demonstrable benets in language development, education, and quality of life. This paper will explore the role of new technologies in the management of knowledge in medicine, education, and deaf communities.
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Can you hear my heart beat? Rethinking invisibility in the context of telemedicine
Nelly Oudshoorn, University Twente
ABSTRACT: In this paper I will use some examples of changing practices of health care related to the introduction of telemedicine to explore and rethink the theme of invisibility. Taking Star and Strauss seminal paper on invisibility as point of departure, I will explore the different ways in which the notion of invisibility can be useful to understand changing practices of health care related to the introduction of telemedical technologies (Strauss 1985; Star and Strauss 1998). Based on my research on telemonitoring technologies for heart patients, an example of telemedicine that is currently on the rise in several countries in the EU and the US, I will show how the concept of invisibility as interpreted by Strauss and Star provides a useful tool to understand the dynamics and novelties of telemedicine. A focus on invisible work enables me to criticize dominant discourses of telemedicine which suggest that computers will replace human work. This representation of telemedicine is problematic because it makes invisible all the work involved in operating these technologies. My analysis of patient telemonitoring technologies shows how, although part of the work is done indeed by the telemedical device, the machine itself produces new tasks that are delegated to human actors, most notably patients, and to new medical organizations: the telemedical centres. The notion of invisibility thus seems to be very adequate to understand processes of silencing specic work practices and human actors. However, in my paper I will argue that we have to extend the concept of invisibility beyond work and human actors and include the artefact as well if we want to make sense of emerging technoscientic medical practices. My analysis of patient telemonitoring technologies indicates the need for two new interpretations of the notion of invisibility if we want to account for the role of the artefact in shaping medical practices. First, invisibility emerges as a prerequisite to safeguard patients privacy. The beeping sounds of many telemonitoring devices, originally designed as feedback signals to users, turn the artefact into a disruptive actor because it makes patients heart problems visible ( or better, audible) to others when they use it in public space. A focus on the (in)visibility of artefacts thus seems to be an important theme to understand how new technologies redene boundaries between the public and the private. A second way in which invisibility can be related to artefacts is the lack of transparency of how technologies work. The fact that the exchange of medical data between patients and health care professionals (and among health care professionals) is medicated by ICTs makes this process invisible to users. The invisible work of the artefact raises new questions about how people build trust in telemedical technologies.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts in their environment and in relation to other organisms, and the second bears on how we access in situ the biological processes that occur on the interiors of bodies and cells, and hence how we understand bodies and cells in time. I suggest that to listen to a cell while knowing that its sounds index biological processes is to be made aware of its material conditions and interior processesthat is, its milieu and its temporality.
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The Power Production Paradox: What is Stopping the Use of Alternative Energy Technologies?
Benjamin Sovacool, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
ABSTRACT: Dramatic improvements in renewable energy and small-scale distributed generation (DG) technologies have been made in the last twenty years. Nevertheless, they remain underutilized in the American electric utility system. Despite the immense environmental, technical, and nancial promise of renewable energy systems and DG technologies, such generators still constitute a very small percentage of electricity generation capacity in the United States. This relative neglect occurs despite remarkable gains in their technical performance and reductions in their cost of producing powerthe result (in part) of dramatic government support for several decades. Moreover, the technologies often demonstrate great environmental benets that appeal to policy makers and consumers. At the same time, they offer ways to enhance strained distribution and transmission networks. This project attempts to answer the paradoxical question: why do new energy technologies that offer such impressive benets also nd the least use? The dissertation emphasizes how the history and culture of the community of electricity producers and users helps explain why the new technologies have seen little use. Going beyond technical explanations (of alleged low efciencies, capacity factors, etc.), it focuses on the social nature of decision making among participants in the electric utility system. The approach not only helps us understand the glossing over of renewable energy and distributed generation technologies, but also suggests ways of overcoming the barriers faced by their advocates.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts implementation confronted health physicists with accusations of negligence to public health from one side and wasteful overprotection from the other. Radiation safety, which was the health physicists professional objective, became a contradiction in terms. Initially, ALARA created new professional opportunities for health physicists. Over time, however, ALARA brought uncertainty in the health-physics profession and decelerated its pace of growth. The interplay of ALARA and health physics sheds light on science and human values, the professionalization of science, and the interrelationship between science and public policy. It brings to the fore how science shapes the regulatory process and how in turn the regulatory process shapes science.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts ignoring risks, critical discussions on distinct structural problems of risk governance in local society will also be focused on. In particular, the author aims to deeply analyze technocracy-monopolized technological and risk policy decision-making since long ago. It is because there has been a lack of powerful supervision on newly-developed food risk disputes from environmental and consumer groups; even though related risk regulations are developing gradually internationally, national risk communication and regulatory policy (risk assessment) still remain delayed and hidden. In case studies, the author proposes the phenomenon of delaying regulatory policy, concealing risk information, and delaying public risk communication encountered blasts and challenges from the public and has formed a set of distinct risk governance logic and culture. In other words, cries for risk governance paradigms and asks for risk culture reconstruction hence extended from reexivity of local society. Based on the perspective of glocalizational risk governance and risk culture, the articles undergoes discussions on specic societies. However, it also attempts to point out development logics and contexts in different societies and therefore addressing some special and worth-concerning governance models or structures that are possible to emerge. Particularly, as we are entering into the era of globalizational food risk, it is essential to examine the possible tight relations among actual social, institutional, cultural and political contexts when establishing new risk governance paradigms.
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Risk and Recursion: Characterizing Self-organization Patterns Across IT, BT and NT for Social Analysis
Ron Eglash, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: not available
Thursday Lunch
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ROUNDTABLE: FACULTY PANEL SPONSORED BY 6S (STUDENT SECTION OF 4S): STS CAREERS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA ROUNDTABLE: THE INTERNATIONAL NANOTECHNOLOGY IN SOCIETY NETWORK (INSN) (PAVILION 1 [C])
Organiser: Dr Tee Rogers-Hayden, Cardiff University
SESSION ABSTRACT: The International Nanotechnology in Society Network (INSN) consists of researchers exploring the connections between society and the possible upcoming changes provided by nanotechnology research. The inaugural meeting of the INSN took place in January 2005 at Arizona State University and since then there have been several meetings of this newly formed and evolving group. It currently consists of members representing 37 institutions from 11 countries. The round-table discussion will provide an opportunity for members of the network to share and discuss the vision of the network and the groups developing collaboration priorities. Members, new members/potential members and interested persons all welcome. For further details on the network see: http://www.nanoandsociety.com/index.htm
ROUNDTABLE: HETEROGENEITY AND HERITABILITY: RESPONSES FROM SOCIOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, AND HISTORY OF SCIENCE (FALSE CREEK 1 [H]) [WORKING SESSION]
Organizer: Peter Taylor, U Mass, Boston
SESSION ABSTRACT: There is long and politically charged history of scientic and policy debates about the heritability of IQ test scores and genetic explanations of the differences between the mean scores for racial groups. In a pair of papers, Heterogeneity and heritability (to appear in the new science studies journal, Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution and Cognition), Peter Taylor argues that, despite the attention given to these debates by researchers and other critical commentators, including science studies scholars, signicant conceptual and methodological issues in quantitative and behavioral genetics have been overlooked or not well appreciated. In particular, when similar responses of different genetically dened types are observed, it should not be assumed that similar conjunctions of genetic or environmental factors have been involved in producing those responses. Allowing the homogeneity of factors to be questioned opens up many issues for the different elds in science studies, such as: * What happened historically when the methods quantitative genetics were being transferred from the context of agricultural and laboratory breeding to analysis of human variation which allowed the restrictive conditions that hold in the former context not to be seen as a signicant problem? * What role has a racialized imaginary, in particular, the treatment based on group membership of people who vary greatly within groups, played in the discounting of heterogeneity in quantitative analysis of traits, especially in explanations of differences among means of groups? * How can different meanings of heterogeneity be distinguished and their conceptual and methodological signicance be claried? * How have genes and IQ controversies been framed in relation to assumptions of homogeneity and questions of heterogeneity?
Revisiting scientic and social debates about heritability in light of the underrecognized implications of heterogeneity
Peter Taylor, UMass Boston
ABSTRACT: not available
Thursday 1:30-3:15pm
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Building a Better Animal: Dr. John P. Arnold and the Seoul National Universitys School of Veterinary Medicine, 1954-1962
John DiMoia, Princeton University
ABSTRACT: In an attempt to situate the work of Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk within the larger context of recent Korean history, this paper looks at the School of Veterinary Medicine at Seoul National University, Dr. Hwangs home institution, where the majority of his research was conducted. Specically, the paper examines the relationship between the team of American advisers operating under the auspices of the ICA (International Cooperation Agency) and their Korean counterparts in the aftermath of the Korean War. The paper looks at this period through the work of John P. Arnold the American adviser on faculty leave from the University of Minnesota who wrote the nal summary report for the Vet School, and who has also written extensively about the legacy of Animal Husbandry and related Agricultural work in the state of Minnesota. The paper examines (1) the setting and context for the Minnesota team; (2) the work performed in attempting to transform what had been a Japanese imperial site; (3) and its implications for the work that would follow in subsequent decades. In particular, the paper attempts to highlight as well as interrogate the use of national categories in narrating this story. Moreover, in building this context for the pre-history of Dr. Hwangs lab, it is worth noting that Dr. Hwang was known in Korea prior to his stem cell results primarily for his work with cloned cows; and that the University of Minnesota was proud of this legacy, noting it during the 50th anniversary celebration of the SNU-Minnesota relationship, held in Minneapolis in November 2004.
Farming against Farmers: The State and New Agricultural Technologies in South Korea, 1962-1980
Tae-Ho Kim, Seoul National University
ABSTRACT: In the late 1960s, Korean agronomists working in the IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) in the Philippines developed a new variety Tong-il [reunication], a high-yield hybrid of Indica and Japonica varieties. The government expected Tong-il to be the miracle rice, representing a breakthrough in food policy, and even to serve as a stepping-stone to victory in the competition with North Korea. Yet, Tong-il rice was welcomed neither by rural farmers nor by urban consumers. The new seed revealed itself as vulnerable to plague, and required farmers extensive care with new techniques. Moreover, the taste of Indica-originated rice was unsatisfactory to Koreans, who had long been accustomed to glutinous
4 S Final Program with Abstracts Japonica rice. As farmers were reluctant to cultivate Tong-il, the Agrarian Development Ofce mobilized its entire manpower, either by appeasing farmers with incentives, or by offering them violent guidance. As a result, Tong-il and its derivatives became dominant by the late 1970s, and South Koreas rice yield increased by 30% in only ten years. However, Tong-il was devastated by new blast pathogen races in 1978; and, with the unexpected end of dictatorship in 1979, quickly disappeared from elds. The rise and fall of Tong-il rice illustrates several characteristics of the role of technologies in Korea: how the state mobilizes technologies as resources to achieve its political goals, why the users criticism on immature technologies is sometimes ignored, and what happens if latent hazards of new bio-technologies are underestimated for political considerations.
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Discussant: Suzanne Moon, Colorado School of Mines and Harvey Mudd College
2:50 4:05 pm, Thursday, November 2, 2006: Putting the Hwang Controversy into Context (2) < Biomedical Knowledges, Practices and Discourses in South Korea >
Transformative Scientic Practice in Korea: Slow Virus, Prion, and BSEresistant Cow
Kiheung Kim, University College London
ABSTRACT: The so-called TSE or prion diseases, including scrapie, BSE, CJD, and Kuru, have been the focus of intense controversy among scientists and the public alike. While it is acknowledged that the nature of these diseases has not been fully understood, many scientists believe that they are quite different biological entities from conventional viruses or bacterial pathogens. The infectious agent, prion, is thought be composed of an abnormal form of a protein that does not contain informational molecules such as nucleic acids. The present study poses the question of what would happen when the knowledge of a disease such as this is transferred from one local context to another. More specically, this paper closely looks into the scientic practices of South Koreas leading TSE/prion research laboratory, and argues that, while the basic tenets of the currently dominant prion hypothesis are accepted, its relationship with counter knowledge claims has been reformulated at the level of laboratory practices, producing a hybrid form of prion knowledge. The paper also examines how the reception and dissemination of the prion theory in Korea have been inuenced by the hype and expectations surrounding Dr. Hwang Woo-Suks claim that he successfully created a prion-resistant cow.
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Representation of Korean Womens Bodies in Biomedical Technologies: From Birth Control to Stem Cell Research
Yeonbo Jeong, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
ABSTRACT: This study explores the representation of womens bodies in Korean biomedical discourses in particular, with regard to birth control technologies and human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. During the 1960s and 1970s, the South Korean government actively promoted family planning and birth control, drastically reducing the total fertility rate from 6.0 in 1960 to 2.7 in 1980. However, the issues of womens right to control their own bodies and of the potential health risks of birth control technologies were rarely discussed at the time. Controlling the population was seen as vital in achieving the most important national goal, that is, economic growth, and other concerns were effectively marginalized. Similarly, while hESC research requires many women to undergo hormonal treatment and surgery for egg extraction, Korean policies and debates about hESC research in the 2000s have largely sidestepped issues related to womens bodies and health. More attention has been paid to the fact that the development of stem cell therapy was chosen by the government as one of the core R&D areas for the next-generation growth engine industries. Even critics of hESC research have tended to focus on the moral status of human embryos, often disregarding the safety and rights of women who provide eggs for research. These two cases show that, in Korean policy and popular discourses around biomedical technologies, womens bodies have been represented either as a means of national policy or as resources for national economic competitiveness (or in some cases, for scientic experiments).
Policy Discourses and Stem Cell Research: Comparing German and Korean Debates
Kwang-Jin Jung, University of Bielefeld, Germany
ABSTRACT: Since the late 1990s, breakthroughs in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research have caused intense, and sustained, political controversies around the world. As well documented in previous studies, these controversies have led to divergent regulatory outcomes among European countries and the United States. In this paper, I provide a comparative analysis of the German and Korean legislative debates on hESC research. In January 2002, the German Bundestag voted 340 to 265 to severely restrict the importation of hESCs. The Stem Cell Law (Stammzellgesetz), enacted four months later, did not ban hESC imports outright, but allowed them only under very strict conditions. With the existing Embryo Protection Law intact, this meant that hESC research would essentially be forbidden in Germany. By contrast, the Korean government and National Assembly adopted a more supportive stance towards hESC research. For instance,
4 S Final Program with Abstracts in December 2003, the Korean National Assembly passed the Bioethics and Biosafety Act, which would permit the production and use of hESCs, by a substantial majority (133-35). This paper attempts to account for the two countries different responses to hESC research by analyzing the formation of competing discourse coalitions, their frames of problem denition, legitimizing arguments and discursive strategies, and the wider political and institutional contexts in which they were located.
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Selecting for Geeks: Science Education and the Creation of the Engineering Nerd Stereotype
Mark Clark, Oregon Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: not available
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1.3C MESSY SHAPES OF KNOWLEDGE I: STS CONCEPTS, THE INTERNET AND THE
FUTURE OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Lab studies and e-science: a challenge to existing practices and traditions in STS?
Anne Beaulieu, Virtual Knowledge Studio
ABSTRACT: A core concept in STS, and in laboratory studies in particular, is the notion of scientic knowledge as the outcome of work, including but not reducible to representation (Knorr-Cetina 1995). If scientic and scholarly work looks quite different in e-science, how are these knowledge-making practices to be (made) visible to the sts scholar? The strategy of lab studies to make practices visible by following the actors around (Latour and Woolgar 1986) has been very productive, but is it being challenged in settings where icts predominate as tools and context of work? If so, what are the signs of such a challenge? This paper reects on laboratory studies as a strategy that relies on (1) a specic understanding of space which allows co-presence of the observer/analyst and the scientists, and (2) a fairly stable sense of how agency and infrastructure can be identied and distinguished, and (3) specic strategies of meta-alternation that sustain the ethnographic production of an object of study. When settings of knowledge production are increasingly mediated and networked, co-presence is challenged as the main strategy for following the actors around. This implies giving up on the primacy of face to face interactions as the basis for participant observation, and thinking up new forms of engagement, where unfolding action can be witnessed. In some ways, this is the extension and intensication of the problem articulated by Lynch (Lynch 1991). This paper argues that arrangements of discourse, persons and things remain important in e-science, but the ways of apprehending them and their constitution rely to a more limited extent on co-presence, and it becomes increasingly imperative to understand the role of infrastructures (Bowker and Star 1999; Star 1999). New strategies, like virtual ethnography, or approaches based on the analysis of traces in a digitized setting, may be productive additions to approaches in traditional laboratory studies.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts the inevitable impact of technological evolution on media art, databases, web sites, and other interactive digital works. Computer-aided heremeutics (CAH) is a proposal to revisit the traditional archival distinction between preservation and access, whereby the former is understood as the business of protecting the physical integrity of an artifact, and the latter, as the business of making that artifact available (whether through reading rooms or information systems) to some audience. Rather, CAH proceeds from the understanding that preservation and access are the twin means by which artifacts are transmitted through time: preservation deals with the problem of transmitting physical objects through time, while access deals with the problem of transmitting the cultural competence necessary to read the physical objects so that they remain intelligible. This paper outlines two project that have been developed for the preservation of complex media (electro-acoustic music from the IRCAM and videogames) in the framework of CAH. It contrasts those to some of the solutions that have been developed so far in the digital preservation community migration, emulation, and scoring and how each approach has attempted to re-conceptualize authenticity in the context of new media.
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Discussant: Wiebe Bijker, Maastricht University 1.3D GENETICS AND STEM CELLS
Chair: Elizabeth P. Shea, Northeastern University
The mass mobilization in science: the case of Korean stem cell research scandal
Bang-Ook Jun, Kangnung National University Manjae Kim, Kangnung National University
ABSTRACT: Hwang Woo-suk became world-renowned in the eld of embryonic stem cell research after he published two articles in Science. Because he was perceived as a national hero, his fabrication of scientic data revealed in November 2005 tremendously shocked the whole Korean society. The scientic fraud is nothing new in the history of science. However, it is rare to nd any comparable case with the Hwang Woosuk scandal in its impacts that a single scientic misconduct can create. It is well known that media and the Korean government as well as the scientist himself were all responsible for this scandal. Mefdia received Hwangs claims without any substantial data, and mythied him as a gure to conquer incurable diseases and bring South Korea immeasurable economic prospect from his promising research. The Roh Moo-hyun government suffering from the lack of popular support promoted an exemplary policy success by backing up Hwang. Until the very last moment, president Roh afrmed his uninching support for Hwang. This paper claims that the cooperation among three actors including Hwang, media and the Korean government resulted in mobilizing the public to believe the rosy future by appealing to the Korean peoples emotions and nationalism rather than to scientic rationality. As a result, even when the evidences of deception revealed, the public resisted to believe scientic facts. Some frantic followers still demonstrate to defend Hwang.
The biopolitics of college-level virtual research collectives : the case of stem cell research
Renee Fountain, University Laval
ABSTRACT: Technoscientic research - and calls for literacies therein - are increasingly depicted as collective endeavours. Collectives across worlds, over time and in virtual space - purportedly allowing for wider, diversied team work- are said to invite multiple perspectives, induce higher developmental skills, increase participation, and enable innovative practice. Multiple and often disparate actors deliberate, negotiate, exchange and compete across geographical distances and cultural differences. Controversies exist and persist. But how do controversies consist? While our larger study examined ve contemporary technoscientic controversies (stem cell research, triploid sh farming practices, toxic waste disposal measures, cellular telephone use and marijuana legalization) this analysis looks solely at collective work around the issue of stem cell research. This presentation examines the biopolitics - discourse pertaining to the constitution, growth, accumulation and improvement of human capital - as evidenced in college-level virtual research collectives (formed across two geographically separate biology classes over a 15 week period). Queries pertain to : 1) how these collectivities-of-the-similar (collectives relatively homogeneous in constitution) both enable and disable forms of human capital; and 2) how these smaller-scale research collectives do - and do not - capitalise upon discourse within larger-scale research collectives. In particular, the session highlights some of the unspoken assumptions, implications and consequences regarding (scientic and medical) normative appeals to transparency (research practices which are ethically reviewed), accountability (legal and professional responsibility) and legitimacy (research conducted using primarily gifted materials, that is, obtained via informed consent) in the name of alleviating human suffering and enabling human survival.
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1.3E SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY RESEARCH IN ACTION: THE CHALLENGES OF BRINGING STS R ESEARCH TO ACTION IN HEALTH CARE AND CORPORATE SETTINGS
Organizer: Ellen Balka, Simon Fraser University Chair: Ellen Balka
SESSION ABSTRACT: For many, part of the appeal of STS research lies in the possibility of using theoretical insights often gained through empirical engagement with varied scientic environmentsto bear on real world activities. Areas such as technology assessment and risk assessment, and the entry of ethnographers into the arena of technology design and implementation are but a few examples of arenas that STS researchers have entered in hopes of inuencing real-world outcomes. Engagement with practice and policy environments brings with it many challenges. For example, opportunities to conduct eld work may have to be negotiated in the context of protection of corporate condentiality, and protection of corporate interests may conict with an academic researchers interest in making information available to the public, and with career demands of publication. This panel brings together researcher-practitioners who have wrestled with the challenges associated with undertaking research in close collaboration with corporate partners. Topics
4 S Final Program with Abstracts to be addressed will include: ? the researcher-practitioner divide: research quality and research utility ? issues arising in negotiating research agreements with corporate and non-prot partners, including rights to publish ndings; ? straddling worlds with often competing demands; ? lessons learned from failures and successes.
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Making a difference with STS? The trials and tribulations of trying to make change through corporate engagement.
Ellen Balka, Simon Fraser University & Vancouver Coastal Health
ABSTRACT: Many engaged in STS research have a desire to make a differenceby improving the quality of life for underprivileged populations, by insuring that technology is used for public good rather than prot, and by exposing and documenting problems associated with the use of technology in society in hopes of ameliorating them. In efforts to extend the impact of STS research I was undertaking in the health sector, I began working closely with the corporate sectorand more specically with a non-prot public health agency in Canada. Although I can claim to have made a difference with STS research in some (but by no means all) instances, I have also encountered several challenges along the way. In this presentation I discuss some of the challenges associated with research partnerships, including issues that have arisen in my work about research quality, data ownership and unrestricted publication of results, and negotiating the often divergent worlds of academia and the public sector.
Research, corporate power and gender: An example from corporate IST research
Ina Wagner, Vienna University of Technology Hilda Tellioglu, Vienna University of Technology
ABSTRACT: This contribution addresses some of the challenges of a technology-driven research project, in which university-based researchers cooperated with several companies. One of the research teams introduced the perspective of ethnography, participatory design, collaboration support, and system congurability into the project. The story how this perspective was met by the different stakeholders in the project reveals some of the strategies of constructing and maintaining power relations. It also sheds some light on the role of gender in such environments. Examples will be given of how eldwork was limited and its results put to use, how concepts were appropriated, and how styles of representation enforced to achieve integration of project activities and results on a formal level. Topics that will addressed are: negotiation of research agreements, research quality, and usefulness of the research for users in the partner organizations.
1.3F SCIENCE STUDIES, INFECTIOUS DISEASE AND EMERGENT FORMATIONS AND FORMULATIONS OF SECURITY
Organizer: Dale Rose, University of California, San Francisco Chair: Andrew Lakoff, University of California, San Diego
SESSION ABSTRACT: This timely session engages with infectious diseases, which are considered today to be a major challenge to both public health and national security across various biomedical, policy and security domains. The focus of this session is critical intellectual work engaging with contemporary problematizations of infectious diseases in terms of security, with a particular emphasis on empirical and conceptual presentations that explore a particular set of truth discourses, strategies of intervention, and modes of subjectication. The aim is to generate intellectual momentum in this area, with an orientation towards identifying and exploring the ways in which technoscientic forms are being assembled in novel ways, and the implications of such emergences for political and social life. Some pertinent questions guiding the session include: In what ways are technoscientic practices being incorporated under the rubric of national security and public health, and how are traditional elements and logics being (re)congured in the process? What new forms are emerging, what do they afford, and what are their limits? What kinds of critical approaches are there (or can there be) which take up contemporary issues of security in the domain of infectious diseases, and what are the implications of these engagements for both intellectual communities and for experts doing the work of security? Areas of exploration include smallpox vaccination, the specter of an avian inuenza pandemic, emergent techniques of syndromic surveillance, and other early warning interventions for infectious disease.
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Reections on Smallpox and the Smallpox Vaccination Program of 20022003: How the US Organized Around a Problem That Did and Did Not Exist
Dale A. Rose, University of California, San Francisco
ABSTRACT: This presentation examines US efforts to prepare the country for a possible smallpox attack in 2002-2003 under the rubric of the ill-fated Smallpox Vaccination Program. The aim is to shed light on smallpox and smallpox vaccination as elements of an emergent preparedness apparatus. The presentation will center on the difculties public health ofcials and experts had in formulating vaccination recommendations, by virtue of the fact that the usual information considered for recommendation purposes was largely absent namely, disease incidence and probability. In other words, because the virus existed (in known and possibly unknown locations) but the disease did not, public health ofcials had difculties in thinking through smallpox (and vaccination) as a problem. The program to emerge became a messy congeries of conicting rationales and divergent logics; how it unfolded might therefore be considered not only from the standpoint of a typical program evaluation, but precisely as an emergent assemblage of elements that articulated (vis--vis one another) with some difculty.
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Discussants: Nicolas B. King, Case Western Reserve University and Stephen J. Collier, The New School 1.3G ITS ONLY A GAME: WHAT CAN SOCIAL SCIENCE LEARN FROM THE STUDY OF VIDEO AND COMPUTER GAMES?
Organizers: Rebecca Carlson, Temple University and Patricia G. Lange, San Jos State University Chair: Rebecca Carlson
SESSION ABSTRACT: Merging creative and technological innovation over the last three decades, video and computer games at the beginning of the 21st Century have become a prominent global media form with audiences spanning a wide range of age, class, race, gender, and national origin. Often overlooked as antisocial childrens entertainment, contemporary video game practices extend far beyond such antiquated oversimplication. This session intends to explore the ongoing contributions of social science research to the study of electronic entertainment as a social phenomenon. In addition to discussing new insights that are emerging from social science approaches to the study of video and computer games, this panel will explore how the study of games can contribute to ongoing discourses of globalization, localization, transnationalism, identity and modernity. Session papers will address such topics as the role of games in a global marketplace, game-play and the interrogation of virtual communities, the relationship between game development hardware and the structuring of game play, the construction of techno-social capital and hierarchies through gaming, and the increasing relevance of games as a medium of representation.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts adopt myriad personae in freeing, egalitarian ways. In addition, many people express concern that such socially ambiguous fantasy outlets represent inauthentic and distancing social experiences. This paper explores why games struggle to nd acceptance as valid sites of social and cultural study, and provides examples of insights that scholars can glean by studying games. For example, scholars can learn how participants use games to socialize one another into technical communities and how they mentor one another about choosing appropriate technologies for home and work. One explanation for why scholars dismiss games as valid research sites lies in the so-called research framework that scholars unproblematically use when characterizing online interaction. Terms such as virtual versus real life interaction supposedly distinguish between online and ofine interaction. Yet characterizing gaming as unreal obscures critical social insight and contradicts empirical ndings which show the tangible, real-world effects gaming has on participants. Research in anthropology, sociology, and linguistics shows that computer-based games provide a rich environment for understanding complex social dynamics such as informal mentoring, identity construction, and the negotiation of techno-social hierarchies. Based on a two-year anthropological research project on two online games, this paper discusses real-life insights that scholars can learn by studying computer game-based interactions. It analyzes how games teach participants to construct technical identities, to identify moral technologies, and to nd acceptance in techno-social groups.
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They are Nubians from the Nub Islands in the United States of Nub: Feigning Knowledge in the World of Warcraft
Michele Stander, Temple University
ABSTRACT: This paper is an examination of norms and social capital within the community interactions of the online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that operates on a personal computer. Released in November of 2004 in North America, Oceana, Europe and Asia, the game has gained a subscription total of over 6.5 million players, making it far and away the most popular MMORPG in the world. With such a large subscription base, WoW is an ideal setting for an examination of community in an online environment. My research will explore the WoW community through game play, game messaging, online forums and through the role-playing game and anime club at Drexel University, which has a number of WoW players within its membership. Online games and communities are often imagined as though they are without social rules and community regulation. Online exchanges are thought to exist in total anonymity, promoting only immediate gratication among users. Through examining interactions within the many environments of WoW, I will discuss the regulation of norms and the development social capital within the game. In doing so, I will not only be looking at how norms are reinforced by the gaming community, but how those norms also reect life and interactions which exist outside of WoW itself. Here we will see that gaming communities exist within the places of on and ofine and are bound and reinforced by a communal understanding of gaming norms which regulate behavior through the accruement of social capital and player recognition among gamers.
Turning Japanese: Video Game Fandom, Transnationalism, and the Production of Expertise
Rebecca Carlson, Temple University
ABSTRACT: This paper begins with the idea that the consumption of global commodities encourages and subsequently shapes particular forms of transnationalismthen continues with a discussion of how transnationals construct, maintain and navigate an emergent realm of expertise that is unique to their experience. Looking in particular at how the consumption and reception of Japanese video games by Americans has inspired an interest in Japanese culture and Japanas well as a burgeoning U.S. market for Japanese popular culture commoditiesI argue that a new form of transnationalism has emerged in the creation of a lively, cosmopolitan and yet uid community of American video game fans living in Japan. Situating the transnational movement of people as an essential node on the global commodity chain that encompasses the entire production-consumption cycle, this paper explores the historical and social contexts out of which this form of transnationalism emerges. Additionally, as many of these transnationals become involved in the video game industry in Japanworking as game programmers and designers for development companies, as translators for localization vendors, or as Japanese correspondents for American print and online journalismI argue that a fundamental portion of this form of transnationalism involves the navigation of a unique realm of expertise which emerges in conjunction with their work in the game industry as well as their history as video game fans and their status as transnationals. Often, the production and maintenance of this authority and expertise occurs in the online media spaces that these transnationals daily inhabit.
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Not Just a Game: The Development of Americas Army as an Entertainment Medium and Recruitment Tool
Robertson L Allen, University of Washington
ABSTRACT: Released on July 4, 2002 by the U.S. Army, the free online video game Americas Army now boasts a fairly large and rapidly expanding community of fans and players. Over 7 million people worldwide have registered to play on over 2,000 servers, and over 4 million of them have played the game enough to pass the initial introductory phase of the game called basic training. While the stated goals of Americas Army are to educate the American public about the U.S. Army and its career opportunities, high tech involvement, values, and teamwork, the game does far more than this. Army recruiters use the game to introduce teenagers to the Army through an entertainment medium that has seen rapid growth in recent years, and the game follows a broad self-branding and marketing push in the Army. Many players use the game solely for entertainment purposes. At the same time, the Army has started to use modications of the game for the training of enlisted soldiers and cost-effective modeling of weapons systems. In this paper, I explore some of these many faces of Americas Army and how certain individualsArmy recruiters, Army ofcers, civilian designers, and playersall add their particular voices to what Americas Army is.
Localizing Play
Jonathan Corliss, Columbia University
ABSTRACT: With videogames emerging as a sizeable constituent of the global entertainment industry, game producers are concentrating increased resources on localizationthe practice of customizing an international commodity for a specic local market. Localization practices used to include little more than booklet and in-game text translation, but now the altering of characters, animation, titles, symbols, box art, sound, even button-mapping and gameplay mechanics are common, and ideas of culturalization are becoming an implicit facet of game localization. This presentation examines the complex, often contradictory role of localization in the production and consumption of globally circulating media. At once, the production of localized commodities naturalizes difference demarcated by the imposed boundaries of nation-states, reinscribing cultural divides by constructing the local as xed and natural, and disregarding the impact of localization on local and global ideas of culture and difference. Simultaneously, localization practices may challenge naturalized differences, circumvent imposed boundaries of the nation-state, or call into question the local as xed or natural.
1.3H PROBING EAST ASIA: SCIENCE AND MEDICINE IN TRANSNATIONAL/POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXTS [WORKING SESSION]
Organizers: EunJeong Ma, Cornell University, Kuo, Wen-Hua, Visiting scholar, S&TS, MIT Chair: EunJeong Ma, Cornell University
SESSION ABSTRACT: Echoing recent STS scholarship on science and medicine in non-Western regions, this panel brings together papers that aim to capture East Asia in transition. Paying particular attention to their various experiences of being the colonizer, semi-colonized, and colonized, we expect to examine the underlying political tensions, cultural frictions, social distinctions, and economic dynamics among East Asian nations that seemed to have attained a supercial harmony between modernity and globalization. Through case studies of the Human Genome Project, psychiatry, medical controversies, and clinical trials situated in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, our goal is to investigate various representations and practices of technoscience beyond any specic national contexts. Aiming to do more than serve as an informative session that presents detailed narratives grounded on empirical studies, we hope to engage theoretical and methodological questions that can contribute to existing STS scholarship or bridge the gap between arguably EuroAmerica-centric STS scholarship and emerging scholarship in others regions. We also expect to articulate East Asias unique position in decoding how globalization and its attending tension are operated, negotiated, produced and reproduced; and, in the process, to examine particular forms of scientic knowledge that are suppressed or promoted and whose voice is muted or represented.
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Discussant: Warwick Anderson, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1.3I R ACE/GENDER /ETHNICITY/AGE IN TECHNOLOGIES OF POPULAR CULTURE [NEW MEDIA]
Chair: Catharina Landstrom, Gteborg University
4 S Final Program with Abstracts over the life span? For many years international statistics have shown that television viewing increases over the adult life span. Most research has largely focused on TV content preferences and televised portrayals of the elderly. The basic understanding has been that TV viewing increase because old people spend more time at home excluded from the world outside and that they watch television because they have the time and opportunity to do so. Swedish studies on the importance of watching television in old peoples everyday life show that television plays an important role for old people. It is not simply a substitute for doing other things but plays a role in helping individuals maintain a social relation to society. It also helps create a space for contemplation. Older persons use television to increase the space of negotiating meanings in old age. This process of interaction between ageing and technology changes over time. Using the concept of subjective age, there is evidence that television viewing marks the transition from the third to the fourth age.
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Making Tracks in Pursuit of the Wild: Technology and Resistance on a (Com)modied African Savanna
Wairimu Njambi, Florida Atlantic University William OBrien, Florida Atlantic University
ABSTRACT: From television documentaries and other media, the word safari conjures images of both serenity and possible danger in wildest Africa. For some, it also presents a promise of exclusive tourist experience, albeit one tinged with a residue of colonial history. Less immediately apparent is that the safari experience is also mediated by technology such as photographic equipment and plane travel, but also by road vehicles and communications devices. Emphasizing the nexus of race and class, we focus on tensions in the safari experience brought about particularly by minivans and CB radios. These technologies work to facilitate access to an imagined wild landscape, but they also destabilize the idealized safari through their inscriptions on the savanna, while at the same time providing a means of everyday resistance for tour guides. Illustrating our points using video from Kenyas Masai Mara, we suggest that such technologies help rewrite safari experience as ambivalent in that it cannot live up to the expected stories on a landscape modied in the globalized pursuit of tourism revenue. Spurred by the mediascapes that conjure the alluring safari, these technological mediators of the African savanna paradoxically undermine the imagined world to which they provide access.
The Silent S of the Spanish Option: Cultural Illiteracy in Language Technology Design and Implementation
Ramn Solrzano Jr., University of Massachusetts, Amherst
ABSTRACT: Hispanic minorities in the United States, long muted by language barriers, cultural incongruities, exploitation, and racism, and now rmly caught by the Post 911 linkage of terrorism, borders, and immigration, have gained the attention of industry as a hot new underserved market. Information technologies that deliver services with a Spanish language component, which I collectively name Spanish Option technologies (e.g. machine translation into Spanish, Spanish ATM interfaces, Spanish voice recognition, computer-assisted Spanish learning software) for the rst time have afforded a language other than English an accessibility which begins to challenge the dominance of English as the assumed language of immigrant assimilation. The increased demographic presence of Hispanics brings with it intercultural tensions, challenges, and opportunities, and Spanish Option technologies (among others) mediate this encounter, marked by digital inscriptions of the Spanish language, the Spanish speaker, and culturally tailored customer service. This paper explores how a few selected Spanish language technologies meet, or fail to meet, the challenge of recognizing both the vernacular language and local concerns of Hispanic users of Spanish Option technologies. Based on a multi-sited project that includes interview and ethnographic data from both producers of these language related technologies and users, it will address the embedded assumptions and aspirations of software developers, the under-investigated impressions and selections of Hispanic users, the way these two groups talk past each other, and the unanticipated, clandestine uses of both these technologies, and electronic waste or e-waste, in activist projects aimed at articulating local concerns.
The Veneer of Authenticity: Science Consultants and the Logic of Science in Hollywood Cinema
David Kirby, University of Manchester
ABSTRACT: The overwhelming nancial success of lms such as Jurassic Park (1993) and Twister (1995) has led lmmakers to believe that scientic realism is a necessary component in producing a modern science-based blockbuster. In this paper I analyze how a belief that scientic verisimilitude translates into box ofce success has led to lmmakers ever increasing reliance on science consultants. Scientic realism in lm, however, does not actually require scientic accuracy. Cinematic deception depends much more on plausibility and for Hollywood lms plausibility comes from logic. Filmmakers equate logic with science and, therefore, they hire science consultants to integrate logic into their lms. Yet, logic is not a straight forward concept in the context of lmmaking. Based on interviews with science consultants and lmmakers I found that lmmakers ask scientists to contribute three kinds of logic: scientic logic, visual logic, and lm logic. I discuss scientists contributions to each of these categories of logic in lms including Outbreak (1995), Minority Report (2001) and Hulk (2003). I explore how logic provides lmmakers with constraints, the role of science in the construction of visual effects, and how science is used to create the logic of illogical situations. In addition, I argue that a science consultants value to lmmakers comes not only from their actual advice but also from their PR value. Ultimately, I argue that science advisors are publicity investments in which Hollywood constructs science as a promotional strategy.
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1.3J SILENCE AND THE CITIZEN: PUBLIC VOICES AND EXPERT VIEWS
Organizer: Robert Evans, Cardiff School of Social Sciences Chair: Robert Evans
SESSION ABSTRACT: A panel on public participation might seem odd in a conference emphasising silence and exclusion. It is not, however. For all the noise about participation much remains unclear and unsaid. This panel will address these concerns by examining how exercises in public participation and consultation are orchestrated, conducted and evaluated. Drawing on research projects run by the presenters, the panel will examine who gets to speak at such forums, how they can represent those who do not speak and the extent to which the rhetoric and practice of participation conceals more traditional forms of hierarchy and expertise. The papers take a range of theoretical perspectives and of empirical material. They range in focus from large scale public engagement exercises to specialised social science projects emphasising methodology to the practical problems of taking decisions within a specic community. Taken as a whole, the papers in the panel will reect critically on both strengths and weaknesses of participation and consider the implications of this for the forums in which citizens and experts interact.
Involvement and inuence: publics and experts in dialogue about the lifesciences
Sarah Cunningham-Burley, University of Edinburgh
ABSTRACT: not available
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The ironic voices of the public who were silent and mobilized: The public understanding of science as viewed through the Hwang Scandal in Korea
Sungwoo Ahn, Virginia Tech
ABSTRACT: This paper is aimed at examining the voices of the public in the Hwang scandal in Korea. Surely, the scientic misconduct and the unethical practice of his group shocked not only embryonic stem cell researchers but also the whole scientic society. However, it raised another unexpected issue: the ironic attitudes of the public to the scientic misconduct. At an early stage of this controversy, the most Koreans were the absolute supporter of Hwang. The public still seemed to think that Hwang was only a victim of the struggle to seize the initiative on stem cell research, even after being dug up the misconducts of Hwangs team who wasted a large quantity of public fund. The public was frequently criticized for their irrational and blind patriotism. However, this article shows that the public was not homogenous but heterogeneous group, and their voices were also various, even though they were interpreted as one voice during this controversy. The discourses of the public are divided into several categories: economism; patriotism; scientic progressivism; hero worship. The voices of the public to scientic eld were often ignored, and the public was regarded as the mobilized object. But this case shows how engagement of the public can be passionate and how cyberspace can exist as public sphere for communication to convey various voices. Ironically, the voices of the public were based on the discourse of the former times the mobilized days. This article also analyzes what is legacy and what is not.
How people understand the mechanism and effects of the climate change?
Midori Aoyagi-Usui National Institute for Environmental Studies
ABSTRACT: According to our Group Interview Survey about the public understanding of the climate change issue during mid-February, 2006, we found that people understand the climate change issue as a result of destruction of the ozone layer, and also a result of exhausted hot air from air conditioners. Those explanations were very popular in all groups of our interview. More importantly, this misunderstanding is disincentives for taking actions for the climate change, such as saving energy in everyday life, or purchasing energy efcient appliances. This phenomenon has been already reported by Kempton and others in early 1990s but still true in ten years after their report. We hypothesized peoples logics of understanding of climate change and everyday observations.
Organizers: Marcel Boumans, University of Amsterdam, Mary S. Morgan, London School Economics, UK Chair: Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles
SESSION ABSTRACT: With the rise of the evidence-based policy movement, scientic authorization is increasingly regarded as the kings roadway to settle political disputes by putting policy on a rmer scientic footing, that is, on facts. The last decade in science studies has directed our attention to a particular class of social-scientic facts, namely statistical numbers (cf. Porter 1995, Morgan 1990). Statistical expertise functions as means to overcome mistrust in expert-judgment and to establish social-scientic facts in the policy arena by providing people with numbers as markers of external credibility that do not depend on the internal standards of particular communities. However, it can be observed that numbers or statistical facts often do not travel very well outside communities. Instead, the mobility of traveling facts is essentially dependent on social institutions and mechanisms reconciling two potentially conicting requirements of scientic authorization: On the one hand we require expertise and experience, only to be achieved by many years of involvement, and on the other hand we require objectivity, implying impartiality, unbiasedness, and independence. Though this tension is often harmless within academia, it leads to controversies in the policy and public domains. Three cases where this tension is particularly visible will be discussed: (1)
4 S Final Program with Abstracts peer review procedures for scientic advice in regulatory agencies where leading scientists have nancial or political engagements; (2) the involvement of outside expertise to correct economic measurements of ination; and (3) where expert medical judgments and statistical interpretations of test results point to different conclusions.
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Evidence and Expert Bias: Regulatory Peer Review Procedures Under Conicting Interests
Justus Lentsch, Institute for Science & Technology Studies (IWT), Bielefeld University
ABSTRACT: How can we evaluate scientic claims when there is dissent amongst experts themselves? For a long time peer review has been regarded as the silver bullet to ensure the quality, integrity and utility not only of academic science but also to warrant objectivity in regulatory science and, thus, in policy formation. However, as more than one decade in science studies scholarship has shown, controlling and assuring the quality of scientic advice for public policy making is neither a uniform nor even a well-dened procedure. The inherent tension between formalised measures of quality control on the one hand and experienced expert judgement on the other became apparent in the public controversy about the American OMBs claim for ulitimate control over review processes in federal regulatory agencies. Inevitably one has to deal with conicting interests in the design of regulatory peer review processes. Bias in expert judgement is particularly endemic in areas characterised by high uncertainty and high stakes involved such as toxicological risk assessment or pharmaceutical research. But how can one ensure good expertise when there is bias in expert judgement? In this paper, I will, rstly, explore the challenge bias in expert judgement poses to the practice of regulatory peer review; secondly, distinguishing between perspectives and interests, I will discuss recent proposals for designing peer review procedures in regulatory agencies under conicting interests.
The Role of Expert Judgement in Evidence-Based Policy: Analysing the CPI Controversy
Julian Reiss, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain
ABSTRACT: The major reason behind the Nixon administrations decision to index Social Security payments to the CPI was to remove the system from politics and to provide certainty where there used to be, at best, hope. This revision can be regarded as part of the more general tendency in democracies to mistrust experts, which was wonderfully portrayed in Ted Porters Trust in Numbers. Democratic societies tend to substitute rules for judgement; numbers for experience; objectivity for expertise. Viewed in this light, some of the recommendations made by the Boskin Commission (aka the Advisory Commission To Study The Consumer Price Index) in their Final Report to the Senate Finance Committee (submitted in December, 1996) seemed odd, if not reactionary. Among other things, the Commission recommended the Congress establish a permanent mechanism for bringing in outside expertise for new research results and advice for the interpretation of statistics. Background for this proposal is the widespread belief among economists (a belief shared by the Boskin Commission) that the CPI overstates ination by about 1 percentage point annually, which, if true, has dramatic policy consequences. In this paper I attempt to delineate the role of expert judgement in policy making more generally on the basis of lessons drawn from the CPI controversy. In particular, I derive ve principles that describe and limit the bona de use of expertise vis--vis more mechanical evidence-gathering procedures and democratic legitimisation.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts A base rate fallacy is considered to be a bias, in the sense of a violation of the axioms of probability, a misperception of probabilities. It is an error that anyone would want to correct if the matter were brought to his/her attention. A lot of experiments have shown that reasoning with uncertainty is tough even to experts and that training can be worthwhile. Today this kind of training in medicine is presented as Evidence-Based Medicine. This normative statistical perspective on scientic reasoning is compared with an expert perspective, in which a test is only meaningful when the evidence is not clear yet, and is recommended not to apply in extreme cases, as was actually the case in the above Harvard Medical School test. From this perspective, clinical judgments are unbiased when tests are used appropriately.
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Movement in and between the Layers of Credibility: Case of Infectious Disease Models
Erika Mattila, London School of Economics
ABSTRACT: Infectious disease models, built during a long-term multidisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists, mathematicians and epidemiologists challenge the inevitable question: Why do we rely on them in decision-making processes? The focus of this presentation is to study the emergence and construction of credibility by studying the human-artefact interaction. That is, I will analyse how the mutual dependence and trust among the modellers, on the one hand, and the reliability of models on the other are articulated. To conceptualise this interaction between modellers and the objects of their research, I will pay a special attention to the movements, transitions and travelling in and between the layers of credibility. These layers reect the different degrees of credibility in relation to different phases of model construction. I
4 S Final Program with Abstracts will identify and describe the layers, within which the emergence of dependence, construction of reliability, stabilisation and nally stratication of credibility under the pressure of applicability of models will take place. This presentation is based on a longitudinal empirical case study of infectious disease models at the National Public Health Institute, Helsinki, Finland.
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Model Geographies: the US military-industrial-academic complex takes over the world (1940-1960)
Trevor Barnes, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: During the Second World War, formal modelling was used for the rst time by the US both in the natural sciences and social sciences to achieve military strategic ends. With the increasing importance of the computer, this trend continued with even more vigour into the Cold War period. Created was what Andrew Pickering describes as a cyborg entity in which different kinds of performances, ideas, and even inanimate objects enfold one into another within a modelling complex such that it is difcult to separate them. The purpose of the paper is to examine practices of modelling, and its various entanglements, within the context of the US military-industrial-academic complex of the 1950s. Specically, I am interested in how those practices move from their original military context to the discipline of geography. Three examples are provided: Waldo Toblers work on automation and cartography for SAGE, the RAND project to develop an early warning system for nuclear attack; William Garrisons work on civil defence, and tied to his later modelling of transportation systems; and the work of Arthur Strahler on terrain analysis with a view to model undersea topographic characteristics for improving coastal defence.
1.3M THE SILENT TREATMENT HOW PATIENTS, PARENTS AND PRACTITIONERS ARE
SELECTIVELY SILENCED IN MENTAL HEALTH ENCOUNTERS
4 S Final Program with Abstracts do parents go silent and let doctors be experts on their children? Each paper approaches silencing from the perspective of a different participant in a particular mental health encounter. Through narrative analysis, in-depth interviews and historical research, we will seek the origins of silence, the social tools that create it and the purposes it serves.
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Forget what you remember: Life coaching and new discourses on memory, repression and psychopathology
Esra Ozkan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: Life coaching is a new professional service providing clients with action-based guidance in their daily lives and work. Former psychotherapists comprise the largest group within the life coaching profession. Coaches make several distinctions between coaching and psychotherapy. They dene coaching as a service suited for higher functioning people with no diagnosable mental disorder and leave out pathologies and pathological populations. On the other hand, they take some of these pathological states, such as Attention Decit and Hyperactivity Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and redene them as organizational problems that affect functionality and productivity. For psychotherapists who make the shift to coaching, the most important distinction involves the extent and kind of attention paid to their clients past. Focusing on action and pragmatic adaptation rather than self-reection, coaches reject talking about their clients past and tell them that they will not go there. Here, memory is suppressed rather than analyzed. Based on ethnographic eldwork and interviews with mental health practitioners, coaches and coaching clients, this paper will trace the shift from psychotherapy to coaching as it is dened by absence of pathology, stigma and memory. By situating this shift in the larger professional, cultural and economic contexts it will explore the changing notions of mental health and psychopathology in America.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts self-restoration. At another level, this engagement with antidepressant technology is treated as an activity that splits the self into elements that are me (the real self) and not me (behaviours and feelings attributed to biological pathology). In effect, an entire realm of self-understanding (including memory of the past and its relation to present and future) is replaced by a technology that allows people to maintain silence over inexplicable and incomprehensible aspects of their lives. This move preserves the integrity of self, despite the evaporation of relational contexts in which such self-knowledge could unfold. In this respect, the antidepressant is understood as a technology that responds to, yet covers over, the relational and cultural ruptures that characterize late-modern societies.
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1.4A PUTTING THE HWANG CONTROVERSY INTO CONTEXT (CONTINUED) see session 1.3A 1.4B ENGINEERING STUDIES II
Organizers: Gary Downey, Virginia Tech and Knut Srensen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (afliated with the International Network for Engineering Studies) Chair: Gary Downey
Quantity versus Quality: Ideologies of Home-Work Balance among Software Specialists in Malaysia and Norway
Birgit Nestvold, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
ABSTRACT: not available
Educational Simulation and Pedagogies of Engagement: Encouraging the Academic Transition of First Year Engineering Students
Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Pamela Theroux, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: not available
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1.4C MESSY SHAPES OF KNOWLEDGE II: E-SCIENCE, THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY AND
NEW RESEARCH PRACTICES IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
4 S Final Program with Abstracts identify relevant sites and the practice of linking is also an object of interest in its own right. A preliminary study of a US election concluded that link creation was not yet recognised sufciently to be put on a formal footing in the sense of developing accepted codes of practice. Nevertheless, there was some convergence in their use, particularly in terms of the tendency to link to like-minded sites rather than differing opinions on a topic of interest (Foot, Schneider, Dougherty, Xenos, & Larsen, 2003). We believe that there is a far wider potential for link metrics to be used in social sciences and humanities research. In such a diffusion of research methodology a critical attitude towards the interpretation of quantitative persistent patterns in terms of a social science theory is needed (Scharnhorst et al. 2006). Link analysis reveals hidden structures of collective behaviour of individuals including the shaping by organizational, institutional and media constraints. A specic research methodology has been developed for social sciences link analysis, based upon analysing sets of interlinking web sites, seeking patterns (Thelwall, 2006). We also believe that information scientists can play a pivotal role, analysing new internet based potential data sources to identify potential research uses in social sciences and humanities (Thelwall & Wouters, 2005), perhaps also supporting social science and humanities researchers in the use of technologies for effectively exploiting the new information.
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The Rise of Search, and its Implications for Research and Education
Josh Greenberg, George Mason University
ABSTRACT: Over the past decade, the increasing cultural prominence of search as a mechanism for sorting and nding information has posed profound opportunties and difculties for traditional scholarly practices. As the tools we use are increasingly built to emphasize piling over ling, what does it mean to be a researcher or educator in a world where any and all information is (perceived to be) available at the click of a button, and where nding the right materials is increasingly dependent on the formulation of a query?
Messin with Knowledge Economies: The Open Access Movement and STS
John Willinsky, UBC
ABSTRACT: This presentation will discuss the efforts of the Public Knowledge Project to contribute to the creation of an alternative economy for the distribution of research and scholarship by using the Internet to establish open and public access to academic knowledge systems, with implications for (a) global participation in these systems by developing countries, (b) public access to this knowledge, and (c) related initiatives with open data, blogs, wikis, etc. This projects intervention has led to the creation of open source software to support open access publishing, as well as research studies on public access, copyright, and publishing history, driven by a not-too-hidden agenda, and speaks not only to but to changes afoot in the sciences, but to how those who study STS handle their own work.
Knots in the Web: Silent spaces in the architecture of the Information Society
Charles van den Heuvel Virtual Knowledge Studio
ABSTRACT: One of the overlooked spaces in science, technology and STS is the history of networks to disseminate knowledge on a global level. Most historical studies of World Wide Web start off with the American roots of the Internet in ARPANET or follow a historiographical line of post war information revolutionaries, from Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Doug Engelbart, and Ted Nelson. This paper explores the organization, visualization and dissemination of knowledge on a global level, seen from a European perspective. Various European scholars, like Patrick Geddes, Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, at the end of the 19th and the rst decades of the 20th Century tried to nd new ways to unite the sciences and arts of the world. They were considered to be essential steps towards world peace and a civilized society. These views, rooted in 19th century positivism and 20th century Modernism, were expressed in buildings and in architectural metaphors. While their models of dissemination of knowledge were centralized and hierarchical, theorists of the World Wide Web, like Berners-Lee, proclaim to remove centralized concepts of absolute truth. By comparing unpublished sketches of these European scholars (older ways of knowing) with visualizations of the World Wide Web we will show that also the design of the Grid and The Semantic Web contain silent hierarchical elements. These hidden messy shapes of knowledge organization and dissemination might jeopardize the construction of the Information society.
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Discussants: Nancy van House, UC Berkeley and Sally Wyatt, Virtual Knowledge Studio 1.4D MILITARY, NUCLEAR, SPACE
Chair: Steven A. Walton, Pennsylvania State University
Repairing the Nuclear Stockpile: Aging Technology, Tacit Knowledge, and the Future of the Nuclear Weapons Complex
Benjamin Sims, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Christopher Henke, Colgate University
ABSTRACT: As technologies age, they can become problematic, as their functionality degrades or the surrounding sociotechnical context changes. People often respond to problematic technology by engaging in sociotechnical repair activities, such as maintenance, troubleshooting, or redesign. Since the end of the Cold War, these activities have taken a central role in the U.S. nuclear weapons program, as stockpiled weapons are no longer continually replaced with new designs. We take repair to be a fundamental category of sociotechnical activity that modies technological artifacts, practices, and social settings to maintain order in sociotechnical systems. This usage of the term draws on its common technological meaning as well as its usage in ethnomethodology to describe methods for maintaining order in social interactions. There are currently two competing strategies for repair of the aging nuclear stockpile. Under the Life Extension Program, engineers take the lead in weapons maintenance by continually replacing parts with exact duplicates, leaving weapons designers to maintain and exercise their tacit knowledge with sophisticated computer simulations. In contrast, the Reliable Replacement Warhead concept proposes that designers take the lead in redesigning weapon components to optimize them for long-term stability in storage, reducing the need for engineering expertise by designing stability into the weapons themselves. Each strategy rests on contested assumptions about the nature and quality of the tacit knowledge of engineers and designers. These alternate visions for the stockpile will have signicant political implications as decisions are made about the future direction and size of the nuclear weapons complex.
The Death of Air: Silence, Suffering, and the American Strategic Bombing Campaign in World War II
David Smith, Pennsylvania State University
ABSTRACT: Dust inbreathed was a house The walls, the wainscot and the mouse, The death of hope and despair, This is the death of air. -- T. S. Eliot (on the Blitz), 1942 The American strategic bombing campaign has been criticized on grounds varying from military ineffectiveness (the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey) to moral reprehensibility (historians from Howard Zinn to A. C. Grayling). It has also been considered in terms of technological evolution, military necessity, and the use of technology to support racial hegemony. This essay examines the role nationalism, great power competition, and the conception of, and claims for, advanced technology played in silencing dissent against bombing. I rely primarily on excellent secondary studies, but plan to also research in the mainstream, Quaker, and dissident press. After 1918, planners embraced the airplanes promised liberation from the stagnation of modern warfare, with its god-like capabilities of wreaking destruction with re from the sky. As Americans felt national pride in the exploits of Lindbergh or Earhart, military prophets envisioned eets of bombers destroying cities. The only perceived solution to the bomber was a bigger bomber. Still, technology was supposed to ensure pinpoint destruction - a modern bombsight was supposed to drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. Instead, the bomber illustrated technologys perils and promise. The promise was that it could penetrate deep behind enemy lines; the limitation was, once there, it could only hit targets rather indiscriminately. Soon civilians became the explicit target of the death of air.
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Upon Peering into the Closed World and Finding it Messy: Science, Technology and the Military Reform Movement, 1976-1986
Sean Lawson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: With the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the failed attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran, and revelations of widespread waste, fraud, and mismanagement within the U.S. defense community, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw the rise of a group of current and retired military ofcers, contractors, journalists, and politicians (both Republican and Democrat) calling for serious reforms of the U.S. military. The intellectual leader of the Military Reform Movement, a relatively unknown and eccentric retired Air Force Colonel named John Boyd, was developing a theory of warfare called the Observation-OrientationDecision-Action (OODA) Loop. It was essentially a cybernetic feedback loop, and Boyd drew concepts and metaphors from physics, mathematics, and biology in an effort to support his theory. This paper examines the science-technology-military relationship through the lens of the Military Reform Movement and the
4 S Final Program with Abstracts thinking of John Boyd. It is an attempt to address three limitations in the current literature on the sciencetechnology-military relationship in the post-WWII period. First, the existing literature focuses very little on how science and technology have impacted the military beyond the development and use of new weapons systems. Second, it is mainly concerned with issues related to nuclear weapons. Third, the story of science, technology, and the military in the post-WWII period typically ends with Vietnam, with the 1980s reduced to the Reagan build-up and the Star Wars initiative. In contrast, this paper uses the Military Reform Movement and the thinking of John Boyd to demonstrate 1) that, beyond the development of new weapons systems, concepts and metaphors drawn from emerging science have had a profound impact on the way the U.S. military comes to know and plan for the world it inhabits; 2) that many of the most profound changes within the U.S. military over the last three decades have come in conventional, rather than nuclear, warfare; and 3) that the
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Coordinating and Adjusting Astronomical Practices: The Carte du Ciel Undertaking at the Turn of the 20th Century
Lamy Jrme, Observatoire de Paris
ABSTRACT: Launched in 1887, the Carte du Ciel was an international project aiming at photographing the entirety of the celestial vault. Tasks required for this huge undertaking were divided among 18 observatories around the globe. Instruments were standardized and a series of international conferences established operating modes and prescribed norms to be followed everywhere. In each observatory, however, the drive toward uniformity ran into a variety of minor technical and practical problems. In this paper, we examine the strategies mobilized by observers to tinker with stated rules and adapt them to their own experience as astronomers. To underscore the tension between normative prescriptions and individual practices, we consider the <i>Bulletin du Comit International permanent de la Carte du ciel</i> as an informal forum where various queries raised and arrangements adopted were shared among the scientic community.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts the particular response of personalizing organizational infrastructural breakdowns as an individual rather than a structural issue. My aim is to locate some of the preconditions to invisible work among members of an expert community, located within an organization that serves as international exemplar of technological and organizational expertise.
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Organizers: Jason Pridmore, Queens University and Martin French, Queens University Chair: Jason Pridmore
SESSION ABSTRACT: The past two decades, and the last ten years in particular, have witnessed the emergence and increasing popularity of the multidisciplinary eld of Surveillance Studies alongside Science & Technology Studies. Yet there has been relatively little crossover between the two elds. Arguably, the larger objectives of Surveillance Studies have been about revelation a revelation of the people, technology, processes and (potential) consequences of a given surveillance practice. It can similarly be said that Science & Technology Studies has focused on exposing black boxes revealing the hidden processes of scientic and technological practices. This panel operates at the intersection of Surveillance Studies and Science & Technology Studies by conceptualizing how contemporary surveillance practices may be understood in light of the tools and frameworks of STS.
Surveillance and Consumption: Adaptations of New Consumer technologies and patterns of consumption as social praxis - A historical view
Nils Zurawski, University of Hamburg
ABSTRACT: Consumption is a basic social practice in our societies. Its structures have changes dramatically over the past 150 years, when a modern consumer society was emerging as part of the industrial revolution. Part of this consumer culture were also the possibilities of bargains or sales discounts. Various systems have emerged since then - some of which do play a role until today. Depending on the social and cultural environment it was and to some extent still is possible to buy on credit and pay for it later - e.g.. in a village store or else. There were also systems, where you would get credit points with every item you would buy - and get something of another product for a specic amount of those points. Depending on the social context, these practices could also be part of a wider system of social control, but are denitely a deeply embedded part of our consumer culture. These practices are not dead, but re-emerged in form of electronic bonus cards that seem to be omnipresent artefacts of todays shopping culture. The cards with their inbuilt technology built on knowledge and practices of consumption, which is possibly why they are so successful. But, they also did take consumer control a step further. Through the cards it has become possible not only to give credit points for shopped items, but also to prole a customers shopping habits and depending on the technology used - mobility proles as well. I will present some thoughts on how this relation ts into the general assumption of a surveillant assemblage - and why it is rarely seen as a tool of surveillance,
4 S Final Program with Abstracts supervision or control by the customers themselves. Most interesting in such a research are the strategies, adaptations and use of these technologies in everyday life and its meaning for the customers. In this regard the research is trying to follow control regimes from the bottom up, to see why they can be so effective and are still not seen as part of what in other contexts would be heavily opposed.
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Silent Technique: Surveillance and the Manufacturing of Conformance at the Sungei Buloh Leper Settlement in British Malaya
Choon-Lee Chai, University of Saskatchewan
ABSTRACT: The Sungei Buloh Leper Settlement in British Malaya was established in 1930. It served the purposes of housing, controlling and curing lepers. In this paper, the modus operandi of the leper settlement
4 S Final Program with Abstracts is analyzed and Foucaults thesis of disciplinary power is employed to examine the settlements techniques of leper surveillance and control. The main argument of the paper is that medical technique, unlike other coercive technologies of control, solicited conformance and participation of lepers through consent. The control of lepers in the Sungei Buloh Leper Settlement was accomplished in such a way that inmates felt perfectly at home in the settlement, which was organized so as to provide a natural and fair atmosphere. The crux of the technique was to have patients exercise self-restraint, and the economics of control was to make patients forget their condition of being conned, but to live a perfectly normal life in an articial environment.
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Silencing in the Grant Approval Process at the Swiss National Science Foundation. Part I
Martin Reinhart, and Daniel Sirtes, University of Basel
ABSTRACT: Silence in the form of condentiality agreements between reviewers and editors or funding bodies is seen as normal and ensuring unbiased decisions. However, the secrecy surrounding science funding decisions appears to be at odds with the acclaimed norm of communalism and is in need of further explanation. Our aim is to uncover different silencing phenomena in the grant approval process and to assess their role in complexity reduction in the pursuit of a robust funding decision. We are currently analyzing the decision making process of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), which is the main federal funding institution for scientic research in Switzerland, on the basis of the complete les of all the biological and medical applications submitted to the SNF in 1998. As in other funding institutions the decision making process is complex. The complexity stems from 1. the diverse criteria of peer review (e.g. originality of the project, reputation of the scientist etc.) and their computation into a single decision, and 2. the structural organization of the decision process and the numerous actors involved (applicants, reviewers, expert advisor, research council). In part I we focus on silencing due to social organization. Besides the controversially discussed effects of condentiality agreements, we highlight silencing by selective dissemination of information through the different actors. A qualitative analysis of our data shows that in every step of the decision process from the external reviews to the research council information is lost systematically in a way that suggests bias against opposing views.
Silencing in the Grant Approval Process at the Swiss National Science Foundation. Part II
Daniel Sirtes, and Martin Reinhart, University of Basel,
ABSTRACT: Silence in the form of condentiality agreements between reviewers and editors or funding bodies is seen as normal and ensuring unbiased decisions. However, the secrecy surrounding science funding decisions appears to be at odds with the acclaimed norm of communalism and is in need of further explanation.
Research Centers in the Contemporary Academic Landscape: Leadership, Collaboration, Interdisciplinarity and Productivity of a Fluid Institutional Form
Juan Rogers, Georgia Tech
ABSTRACT: The number of research centers on university campuses has grown dramatically over the past two decades. They are important due not only to their sheer number but also because they reect deeper undercurrents on what is happening in universities. In this paper we discuss the ndings of several years of work on research centers in the US using both case study and survey data. Among them, there is a striking pattern of strong individual leadership that embodies most of their vision and content interests. For all the statements of interdisciplinary pursuit that they are created for, we found a remarkable pattern by which they rarely transcend the multiplicity of interests of a single star individual. Centers do not show differences in productivity when compared to the productivity of other researchers in the same or related elds. However, collaboration patterns are interesting in that the institutional form relies on the contacts of the main leader. Especially, non-intellectual, social capital sorts of contacts are a good indicator of stability and longevity of the research centers. In this regard, many research centers are short lived and either disappear after the rst cycle of funding or change their identity when the they shift focus due to new sources of funding. The paper also discusses their place in their elds of research using bibliometric techniques and characterizes the population of center afliated researchers compared to non-center afliated researchers based on survey data of 5000 researchers in 150 universities and 13 academic elds.
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Mixed Messages and Missing Women: Graduate Attrition in Science and Engineering
Mary Wyer, North Carolina State University
ABSTRACT: A common explanation for the under-representation of women in faculty appointments in science and engineering elds is that women drop out of graduate school without completing their degrees and thus are under-represented among those qualied for faculty appointments. This presentation explores both the empirical validity and textual sources for this explanation. An analysis of enrollment and graduate records for 15 cohorts entering graduate school at North Carolina State University from 1985-1999 for ten departments casts doubt on the notion that there are gender differences in completion rates (N = approx. 2,400 students). Close scrutiny of the literature often cited in support of claims about womens attrition reveals that such claims are not based on contemporary research ndings even while they appear so. The study at the heart of this presentation provides evidence that graduate attrition may no longer be key to understanding the relative invisibility of women among scientists and engineers. Better explanations may come from understanding how (1) a later stage of training, the postdoctoral position, presents a new structural barrier to womens career advancement, and (2) a persisting cultural narrative about womens (in)competence marks those who do advance as exceptions that prove the rule.
Economics and social studies of scientic research and organizations: nature and origins
Mario Coccia, National Research Council of Italy & Max-Planck Institute of Economics
ABSTRACT: Interest in the role that science and scientic research play in economics and other social sciences has exploded in the last fty years. This attention undoubtedly reects the increased importance that scientic research is contributing more and more to increase employment and economic growth, as well as the comparative advantage of countries. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature and origins of the social studies which focus scientic research and organization (such as economics of science, sociology of science, philosophy of science, managerial economics of research organizations, political economy of science, etc.). The paper shows as, afterwards the pioneering works of Bacon and Galileo, the origins of the studies on social aspects of scientic research and research organizations are the contributions of Huxley, Bernal, Bush, Peirce and Freedman and the success of the Manhattan and Rand projects (1930s1950s) that symbolised the power of big science projects involving governments, scientists, industrialists and universities. Nowadays the studies on these elds of research are more and more numerous, so much so that there are several journals that deal with these issues.
Where Does Professional Knowledge Come From? Inference, DecisionMaking, and Rationalization in University Licensing.
Jason Owen-Smith, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT: This paper draws upon 18 months of ethnographic eld work in a private university technology licensing ofce to examine the sources of new professional knowledge. Technology licensing work takes place at the interstices of multiple established professional jurisdiction. Problem cases are described and discussed in overlapping legal, business, academic, technical, and relational languages in routine organizational meetings. Challenging cases are resolved as technology licensing ofcers develop a pidgin language that is appropriate to their organizational and institutional contexts and sensitive to their efforts to construct a professional jurisdiction. Contingent and negotiated resolutions to particular problems are often rationalized into abstract rules of thumb and standardized contractual language. The process of rationalization as it occurs on the ground links research on the social construction of scientic knowledge with contemporary sociological approaches to organizational theory and professions.
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Organizers: David Guston, Arizona State University and Vivian Weil, Illinois Institute of Technology Chair: David Guston
SESSION ABSTRACT: As an emerging area of science and engineering, a great deal of the distinctiveness of nanotechnology rests in laboratory practices that are most accessible through participant-observation and other close, ethnographic work. Such research on nanotechnology, however, is important not only for characterizing those practices but also for understanding what they mean for larger issues of science and policy, including the sponsorship of interdisciplinary work, the regulation of unknown risks in the laboratory, the interaction between academic researchers and commercial rms, etc. In these paired sessions, we highlight the work of junior scholars, all of whom have been conducting such embedded studies of nanotechnology. We match them with discussants to elucidate, on the one hand, methodological and practical issues in conducting such ethnographic work and, on the other, the societal and ethical issues that can emerge through such a study.
Technoscience for the Citizen: A Nanoscience Laboratory and the British State
Rob Doubleday, Cambridge University
ABSTRACT: not available
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Images and the National Cancer Institutes quest to end suffering and death from cancer by 2015 using nanotechnologies
Kathryn Vignone, Cornell University
ABSTRACT: The National Cancer Institute has pledged to end suffering and death from cancer by 2015 using nanotechnologies. Approaching a research objective with such signicant implications makes the tools the agency uses to present and communicate those goals key to their success. The NCIs website (nano.cancer.gov) is an information hub for their funding awards, research publications, implications of new nano-treatments, and project research developments. In contradistinction to other cancer-research communication tools that are not nano-associated (websites, pamphlets), here the NCI uses imagery as a primary tool to portray the collaborative efforts of policy organizers and nanotechnologists. Given this, examining the degree to which the NCI makes them accessible, intelligible, or present can help one to understand how those choices inuence policy and identity in cancer research. Images have become data on which multidisciplinary collaborations between scientists depend, as well as communicative tools used in establishing governmental policies and plans. This duality of purposes requires self-ware decisions in the use of visual, nanoscopic data or schematics. The impact of the NCI using images now, assuming visual explanations could perhaps bring more attention to such a hopeful proposal, unconscientiously gives this solution greater meaning and emphasis. When presented, if used deliberately (or not), the scientic imagery consciously (and unconsciously) shapes the success of communication and can potentially enable the NCI to communicate to a broader audience. This can avoid the possibility of skewing their perspectives of the probabilities for their cancer future.
Discussants: Rosalyn Berne, University of Virginia; Vivian Weil, Illinois Institute of Technology; and David Guston, Arizona State University 1.4H TECHNOLOGICAL REGULATION AND SUBVERSION: OPPOSING STRUCTURES AND VISIONS OF USE IN THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY DEBATES [WORKING SESSION]
Organizer: Hector Postigo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Chair: Hector Postigo
SESSION ABSTRACT: For the past decade intellectual property owners have increasingly used digital technologies to regulate access to and use of content (e.g., digital rights management (DRM) systems, technological protection measures, watermarks). These technologies, designed to regulate the relations between consumers, content owners, and content, not only limit what content users can do, but also limit user agency, how users come to know what is technically possible, and how the very category of user is constructed. This panel begins by understanding such technologies as structures that shape the relationship
4 S Final Program with Abstracts users have to content and technology. It will consider instances where users have challenged attempts at technical regulation and enforcement in both institutional and social movement contexts -- including technically enforced licensing structures and digital rights management technology on library materials, hacks against the DRM technology of the popular iTunes music service and the DVD copy protection system. And it will consider legal efforts to resist such technical and social resistance. The panel will contribute to understanding the implications of the political and economic arrangements that seek to deploy technical regulation, and how actual users respond through institutional social movement activities, extrainstitutional (technological) tactics, or consumer activism.
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User Modication of, or Resistance to Technological Protection Measures: Comparing DVDs and Library Resources
Kristin R. Eschenfelder, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: The past decade has seen changes in technology that increase intellectual property (IP) owners control over how users can access or make use of digital IP and legal changes that forbid the use or distribution of tools to bypass TPM and avoid these restrictions. These new developments in technology and law can be seen as a part of a larger negotiation between IP owners and users about the acceptable uses of IP. Although the IP owners side of the negotiation has been well documented, the literature currently contains little systematically generated knowledge about the IP users side of the negotiation. Users are not passive recipients of new technologies like TPM; they participate in the co-construction of technologies through their use of, modication of, or resistance to them. How are IP users reacting to the imposition of TPM or related changes in the law? Drawing on Akrich and Latours idea of antiprograms, or programs of action that conict with the program of technologies designers, Eschenfelder analyzes how different groups of digital media users react to, modify or resist TPM. First, she describes the cases of users who post DeCSS on the Web. (DeCSS is a circumvention tool that allows users to bypass the TPM placed on DVDs.) She then compares DeCSS posters to strategies employed by the academic library community to modify or resist TPM deployment on licensed digital materials such as e-books, and full text databases. Academic libraries are an interesting comparison case because they are both users of TPM protected material and creators of IP that may be protected by TPM. On one hand, academic libraries license many digital works (e.g., e-books) that contain TPM restrictions that may interfere with learning teaching and scholarship. On the other hand, libraries may create unique digital cultural resource collections and seek to protect them with TPM in order to either conform to the wishes of their original owners, or to generate revenue.
The Subversion of Digital Copyright Through Technological Means: The Case of iTunes
H. R. Postigo, Dept. Communication, University of Utah
ABSTRACT: not available
4 S Final Program with Abstracts pieces of legislation that have made criminal remedies germane to the legal regime of copyright: (1) the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act; (2) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); and (3) the pending INDUCE Act. The rst of these trends, evident in the NET Act, has reduced the standard for criminal intent for infringement such that it now extends criminal liability to even the most common of Internet users with P2P software and a modest collection of songs what was once reserved as punishment for organized mobs of commercial piracy. Second, the ban on devices in violation of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been applied by judges with mere demonstration of the devices capacity for circumvention without actual proof of infringement. This isolation of technology from its use and the circular reasoning of intent to commit a prohibited act, is particularly problematic for theories of criminal behavior. Finally, the new standard of inducement introduced in the MGM v. Grokster Supreme Court decision extends the problem deep into the design phase of innovation. When interpreted narrowly, it could force technology developers to anticipate and prevent the misuse of their products even when not intended for that purpose.
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Practices to stop silence through artefacts: The co-construction of MP3 technologies and their users
Paolo Magaudda, University of Padova (Italy)
ABSTRACT: Music is a technology of the self and, therefore, sound, silence and noise have to be considered social tools people use to perform their identity and experience social life. However, the use of music is mediated by the socio-technical systems and devices which contribute to construct both listeners and listening practices. Indeed, technologies are the result of a mutual process in which users and technologies are co-constructed in a technical, symbolic, and social context. In this paper I will show how the concrete use of mp3 related technologies, such as le sharing software, computer and portable players could be understood focusing on the relation between users, practices and technologies. People use technologies following patterns of practices that they incorporated during their life experiences. The introduction of a new technology such as the mp3 appears as an interesting stage to understand how people assume, negotiate or contest new technological devices in everyday life. Specically, I will focus on three aspects of the coconstruction of users, technologies and practices. Firstly, I will show how concrete practices involved in the use of music listening technologies could represent a stabilizing factor in the relation between users and technologies: structured practices, indeed, drive users in the appropriation of mp3 technologies. Secondly, I focus on how the concrete use of new technologies represents a generative process in where users produce new kinds of practices. In so doing, features of new technologies lead the user to create new kinds of
4 S Final Program with Abstracts practices. And, nally, I also argue that the adoption of new technologies also lead to the reconstruction of symbolic meanings attached to older technologies. While mp3 technologies produce new uses of music, they also lead to a different understanding of past devices like the cd, the vinyl LP, and, we will show, to the construction of a deeper cultural value around the act of purchasing of music in traditional formats. The data used, which come from a broader research on users of musical listening technologies, consist of 20 in-depth interviews with users of mp3 related technologies.
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Psychiatrys Wayward Members: Did Prefrontal Leucotomy Cause the Writing of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-I, 1952)?
Christopher Canning, Queens University
ABSTRACT: Leucotomy has been a heavily contested procedure since its development as a cure for mental illness by Egas Moniz in 1935. Even though scientic evidence justifying psychosurgery was inconclusive and leucotomy procedures were known to be irreversible, this medical technique was advanced in North America by Walter Freeman in the 1940s and continued well into the 1970s. Many historians have previously examined the controversial history of prefrontal leucotomy as a treatment for mental illness (Breggin, 1977;
4 S Final Program with Abstracts Valenstein, 1987; Braslow, 1997; Pressman, 1998; Kotowicz, 2005, 2006). Few researchers, however, have addressed the political convergence between leucotomy, the 1949 Nobel Prize granted to Moniz, and the writing of the DSM-I in 1952. The main objective of the paper is to discuss how the 1949 Nobel Prize and leucotomy as a medical procedure inuenced or caused the writing of the DSM-I. My intention is not to prove that leucotomy was the sole catalyst for the DSM-I, but to explore the following questions: was the DSM-I written as an apologetic solution to the harmful effects of leucotomy? Was Leucotomy formally justied because the DSM-I was considered a more reliable diagnostic tool than Monizs lack of clarity in psychiatric diagnosis? At the very least, the more modern nosology represented by DSM-I was not autonomous to the moral and political dimensions of psychiatric practices in the 1940s and 1950s.
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Pragmatism and Popular Genetics: Re-Excavating Foundations of Historical and Social Studies of Science, 1920s-1930s
Doug Russell, Curtin University of Technology
ABSTRACT: The 1920s and 1930s, a revolutionary time for genetics, was also a foundational period for historical and social studies of science. Scholars have foregrounded the signicance for science studies of the varied Marxist approaches developed in this period. Politically engaged scientists popularized these in best-selling books, including the British statistical geneticist J. B. S. Haldanes Heredity and Politics (1938). Against that background, my paper draws attention to the inuence of the early 20th-century pragmatist, or new realist, approach to the history of science popularized by American experimental geneticist H. S. Jennings in The Biological Basis of Human Nature (1930). Its signicance is illustrated by stark similarities between Jenningss outline of discontinuous theory change and that put forward by Kuhn three decades later in The Structure of Scientic Revolutions. The separate development of the two kinds of critique was due in part to the intra-disciplinary contest between experimental (Jennings) and statistical (Haldane) approaches to genetics during that perioda contest central to the internal and external politics of genetics today. The Marxist and the pragmatist traditions did not proceed entirely separately in this period, however. Of particular interest is British experimental geneticist Lancelot Hogbens bridging of the two in advancing
4 S Final Program with Abstracts an anti-realist publicist standpoint in debates about mechanism, vitalism, and holism, in The Nature of Living Matter (1930). There, and in other popular texts, Hogben draws together his pragmatism and his socialism to sketch the outline of a new theoretical model for the analysis of the social implications of the sciences.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts preservation have given us access to the frozen voices of those who do not know yet, but they also reinforce the hegemony of those who know by fueling their fantasies of perfect memory. Our ever-growing archives of cultural achievements threaten to overshadow contemporary works rather than providing the mulch in which they could be cultivated. What new energies might be released through the decomposition of our accumulated knowledge? Perhaps it is time to embrace forgetting and develop technologies of decay.
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Decaying into the Global: Construction, Decay and Re-conguration of Brazilian Computer Industry
Yuri Takhteyev, University of California, Berkeley
ABSTRACT: In early 1970s Brazilian government introduced a series of measures to promote the creation of a local computer industry, including a market reserve policy that limited import of foreign computers. The policy led to a number of technical and institutional successes, including a full implementation of a UNIX operating system and creation of several companies alive to this day. It ran into a number of problems, however, and was eventually abandoned in early 1990s under the banner of economic liberalization. The construction of Brazilian Informatics Policy has been described in Actor-Network Theory terms by Ivan da Costa Marques (2000, 2003, 2005). This paper rst uses the same framework to look at the erosion of the policy - the gradual un-enrollment of the actors (some of them products of the policy, as stressed by Marques) that eventually lead to its demise. I then tell another story: the extension into Brazil of a larger, global network of computer industry. I argue that the decay of the Informatics Policy and the growth of the global network are in fact the same process and that the local alliances fell apart largely due to the lure of the global. I look at how parts of the old network has been since re-congured into the modern Brazilian software industry, which no longer seeks autarky, but rather aims to draw on the economic and symbolic power of the global software world. The paper thus explores the ambiguity of decay and construction in the conict between local and global actor-networks and provides a framework for looking at other local congurations that are currently decaying into the global.
Critical Engagement with Science-Related Texts in a Breastfeeding Information, Support, and Advocacy Community of Practice
Pamela Lottero-Perdue, Towson University
ABSTRACT: Breastfeedings relationship with science and technology/medicine in the U.S. has been tumultuous. Regarded as womens work, breastfeeding was the means of infant-feeding/survival in early 20th century. A downward trend in breastfeeding (~1950) was largely due to the upward trend of scientically endorsed, technologically produced iron-fortied formulas. Late 20th-century science/
4 S Final Program with Abstracts medicine has supported breastfeeding on scientic grounds, yet formulas are still heavily marketed and popular. Given this context, this study examined a breastfeeding information, support, and advocacy (BISA) community of practice (founded: 1965) using qualitative methods (e.g., 81 interview transcripts; eld notes; document data). Research questions were: How do BISA participants determine if the science they read or hear about (hereafter: science-related texts) is valid? In what ways do participants articulate how science-related texts position subjects/reality (e.g., mothers), include particular interests (e.g., of formula manufacturers), or silence particular voices (e.g., their own)? Participants assessed validity given: 1) their scientic knowledge, breastfeeding experiences, and practical, often older knowledge about breastfeeding; and 2) whether texts were considered trustworthy by community experts. BISA participants articulated issues of text positioning, interests, and missing voices in multiple ways. Individual and communityrelated motivations (i.e., for inquirys sake; for oppositional solidarity; to protect community membership) inuenced critical engagement, which also varied across participants, participant subgroups, and texts. This study provides an example of how everyday folks -- at times silenced by science/medicine, suffering as they breastfed with mixed scientic/medical support, and breastfeeding for the survival/health of both children and beliefs - critically engage with science and technology.
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Feminist by Design?
Kate Boyer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the process by which breast pump design has changed over the years. Through interviews with designers as well as users, I explore the way changes in breast pump design has marked not only record of technological advances; but also a record of changing understandings of the social legitimacy of breast pumping as an activity. Using disciplinary lenses of Science and Technology Studies, Cultural Geography and Womens Studies; I query what breast pump design reveals about the extent that we have embraced the technological mediation of such an intimate and culturally-invested activity as breastfeeding. I submit that while breast pump design reects increased attention to users concerns and desires, it also reects a continued ambivalence both about breast feeding and the devises intended to facilitate it.
Creating Space, Creating Futures: Womens Identity Production through Bidirectional Community Radio
Revi Sterling, University of Colorado at Boulder John K. Bennett, University of Colorado at Boulder
ABSTRACT: Women of the global south live in overlooked spaces, have overlooked voices, and are often overlooked by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) campaigns. While excluded from accessing new technology, most have access to radio and community radio programming in regions like Sub-Saharan Africa. Community radio purports to give voice to the people it serves, but its inherent unidirectionality limits who gets to speak, further limiting the agency of the subaltern. This paper explores the potential role of truly participatory community radio as an intervention against the continued subordination of women. First, the paper examines the literature about womens agency, resistance, and voice in development (Spivak 1988, Scott 1992, Kandiyoti 1998). Then, it offers a review of womens community radio initiatives in practice, describing how womens identity and place is constructed in the airwaves. These explorations ground my case for two-way radio technology where women can break their silence and broadcast their own experiences, creating a space of resistance in radio. The paper then discusses my initial eld experiences that I am using to inform the design of the two-way radio system I am developing. These observations explore the conditions under which women are willing to talk out as a form of resistance and development, as well as the topics they would discuss if they safely could. I will close with a review of the cultural and technical challenges I am encountering in navigating the margins between womens silence/suffering and womens development, as well as next steps in deployment and evaluation.
Theorizing the Fungal Body: Gender, Sexuality, and the Diagnosis and Treatment of Candida Overgrowth
Kelly Joyce, College of William and Mary Shashwat Pandhi, Virginia Commonwealth University
ABSTRACT: Statistics suggest that approximately 75% of women in the United States will get a genital Candida (yeast) infection during their lifetime. Statistics on mens incidence rates are not readily available,
4 S Final Program with Abstracts but the literature creates the idea that gay men and uncircumcised men are more likely to get these infections than other men. This paper analyzes how gender, sexuality, and medical knowledge produce both invisibility and visibility around Candida overgrowth. For example, men are invisible in medical diagnostic and treatment practices. Physicians may only have the category Balanitis a general term for genital irritationon diagnostic forms, and men diagnosed with Candida may encounter the words for vaginal yeast infections on the medication insert. In contrast, women are highly visible in treatment practices but the illness is considered a low priority in research and diagnostic work. That is, the categories used to distinguish between the frequency and type of infections are undeveloped and helpful technologies such as yeast cultures and sensitivity studies are typically unknown and unused by most physicians. This paper argues that the lack of research and rigorous medical training in Candida overgrowth stems in part from the status of the people it is perceived to affect. Gay men, uncircumcised men, and women all occupy marginal positions in the knowledge making priorities of American medicine. Theorizing the fungal body also points to the limitations of the epistemologies of contemporary medicine, which typically ignore nutrition, views of the body as a symbiotic balance of microorganisms, and the body as tissue systems.
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With the Internet, Everybody Is a Setter: Male Computer Programmers Narratives about Sitting and Pain
Michele White, Tulane University
ABSTRACT: Narratives about Internet settings tend to displace the seated positions and sedentary aspects of computer engagements and render empowered and extremely able-bodied users. For instance, AOLs yellow icon depicts the Internet user as a vigorously walking individual. Such representations equate the individuals employment of the Internet to walking and standing and help to privilege people who can physically duplicate these embodied positions even though most desktop and laptop computer use occurs while individuals are sitting or otherwise reclining. Textual and theoretical analysis (including disability, gender, and media studies approaches) of such sites as Slashdot and Ars Technica can offer an alternative to narratives about active users. In these settings, male computer programmers and other information technology workers describe their seated, static, painful, and eshy bodies, including the intentionally ironic indication that by eliminating solid food, and using a catheter, I never have to leave the warm comfy cradle of my recliner. While most computer programmers and other information technology workers do not identify as disabled, the self-described aspects of their lifestyle, body type, and experiences with repetitive strain injuries and other forms of pain connect them to cultural conceptions of disability and even code them as disabled. Their descriptions of the pleasures of being static, solidly embodied, and unapologetically fat and concerns about their typical seated position offer ways to rethink imaginarily active Internet users, what narratives about walking Internet users elide, and the conceptions of embodiment that accompany literature about the Internet, new media, and people with disabilities.
If There are No Batterers, Where Does All the Abuse Come From? Gender Ideology, Domestic Violence, and the Web
Anna Martinson, Indiana University
ABSTRACT: In an information society, it is important to recognize the connections between information and ideology, and this is true also for resources available on the World Wide Web. Critical discourse analysts make the case that ideology is evident through verbal discourse and visual representations. This study is part of a larger research project employing methods adapted from Fairclough (1992) and Herring (2004) to identify ways in which verbal, visual, and hypertextual cues convey information and attitudes towards gender. Specically, this study reports on the analysis of 15 websites about domestic violence. Preliminary results indicate three main categories of ndings: 1) the identication of differing gender ideologies (e.g., there is evidence of three, possibly overlapping, American masculinities observed in these websites: conservative, feminist, and gay); 2) regardless of underlying gender ideology, many of these websites use similar strategies to support their perspective such as the selective deployment of an evaluative lexicon or only linking to websites that share the same perspective; and 3) there is a surprising silence about the source(s) of domestic violence. Some of the websites go to great lengths to avoid identifying the perpetrators responsible for domestic violence. I interpret these ndings in light of changing gender ideologies and the enhancement of critical literacy for web users in an information society.
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Thursday Evening
2.1A SILENCE IN THE DIGITAL LIBRARY: WHY ARE THE USERS SO QUIET?
Organizer: Charlotte Linde, NASA Chair: Charlotte Linde
SESSION ABSTRACT: Scientic research is increasingly moving from individual and small group work to the creation and use of large-scale digital libraries and archives. Many of these libraries and archives are distributed nodes in a network of distributed information technologies that promises to connect scientists, databases, and audiences effortlessly. Although much attention is paid to the creation of such tools, little is known about how they are used. Some studies suggest that scientic elds differ in how data is shared and re-used, and that personal networks are used for data sharing far more than data-sharing tools are. This session presents research on the use of digital archives in a range of domains: use of dense sensor networks for habitat ecology; a distributed project developing educational digital libraries for teaching science, technology and mathematics; the nature of data sets across scientic disciplines and their use for storytelling; the establishment of an archive for oral histories tracing the development of an umbrella organization for 18 national scientic laboratories in Japan; and the memory work in NASAs efforts to build a spacecraft to return to the moon after a 30 year absence. These papers discuss silences in the practices of developing archives, such as absences in interchange between designers and potential users, as well as silences in our understanding of archives, such as tacit assumptions embedded in data storage, retrieval and sharing strategies. All these can confound the rhetorical promise of distributed technologies to deliver transparent and instantaneous connections.
Archive Stories
Geoffrey Bowker, Santa Clara University
ABSTRACT: New forms of scientic data are continuing to densify the data structures of many sciences: we are moving from a regime of small groups of scientists sharing data tfully within a discipline to the
4 S Final Program with Abstracts generation of vast datasets, interpreted through computer models, being shared globally between many different disciplines. In this paper, I explore the kinds of data that we are collecting and the limits we are setting on the kinds of stories that we tell. The object of study is the issue of Science for December 23, 2005. I analyze several papers therein in terms of the variable time as it is deployed in the data structures which subtend them and as it emerges in the stories which are told.
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Capturing habitat ecology in reusable forms: A case study with embedded networked sensor technology
Christine L. Borgman, UCLA; and Jillian Wallis, UCLA
ABSTRACT: The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) was established in 2002 as an NSF Science and Technology Center to conduct collaborative research among scientists, technologists, and educators on wireless sensor networks. CENS scientists are investigating fundamental properties of these systems, designing and deploying new technologies, and exploring novel scientic and educational applications. Habitat ecologists, computer scientists, engineers, and statisticians are collaborating on deployments of dense sensor networks in eld locations to study plant growth, bird behavior, water quality, micrometeorological variations, and other ecological factors. This research community needs consistent, generalizable, scalable tools to manage and share data. As information scientists, we are studying the practices by which they design experiments, select and deploy sensor technology, and use the resulting data and ndings. Early results of interviews indicate that very little reuse of sensor data is taking place between teams or investigators. Data usually are collected with a specic research report in mind. Scientists may keep their own data for future use, but rarely do others request to use them. Only a few of the scientists obtain data from others. As the volume of sensor network data grows, scientists wish to capture the data for their own reuse. Most are willing to share their data with others, although conditions of sharing vary. Habitat ecologists tend to be familiar with extant metadata models and structures, although few use them. The engineers, statisticians, and computer scientists are much less familiar with the data structures for scientic records. Only in the fourth year of the Center has a common database structure begun to emerge. The scientic and technical team is focused on construction and deployment of sensors, rather than on science questions. The scientists are focused on their research questions, but need to know much about the technology to calibrate sensors and interpret the resulting data. Our interviews of scientists, engineers, and computer scientists are identifying important differences in what each group views as data from the sensors and in how they use those data. Their criteria for what data to release, to whom, when, and in what form also vary widely. Results of our interviews will contribute to the design of tools and services and to policies for releasing data.
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2.1B AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS: R ACE TO THE FINISH: IDENTITY AND GOVERNANCE IN AN AGE OF GENOMICS BY JENNY REARDON (PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004)
Organizer: Kelly Moore, University of Cincinnati
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Discussants: Steven Epstein, University of California-San Diego; Duana Fullwiley, Harvard University; Donna Haraway, University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz; Kimberly Tallbear, Arizona State University 2.1C SILENCE AND SECRECY: RHETORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THINGS SCIENCE CANT SAY
Organizers: Joan Leach, University of Queensland; Greg Wilson. Rhetorician Chair: Joan Leach, University of Queensland
4 S Final Program with Abstracts paradigm, authoritatively restricted the potential evolutionary signicance of non-coding DNA and hence silenced some of the researchers who pursued this line of investigation. In extending Richard Dawkins notion of the selsh gene to potentially all of non protein-encoding DNA (approximately 98% of human DNA), the authors of the two original review essays (Doolittle and Sapeinza; Orgel and Crick) used a variant of Ockhams razor that is true to the nominalist origins of modern science, but unfortunately based on an argument that begs the question. If, as some the best recent studies have shown, a cybernetic metaphor effectively grounded the successful production of the experimental world of the discipline of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s, I show here that the entrenchment of the same metaphor in this controversy actually amounted to a rhetorical closure of the disciplinary discourse, thereby attempting to prevent further studies that could potentially put the phenotype paradigm in danger. Thus my central point is: the problem is not with the metaphor per se, but rather with its use, i.e. with what the metaphor does.
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Organizers: Matthew Francisco, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Selma Sabanovic, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Chair: Selma Sabanovic
SESSION ABSTRACT: The actions taken by STS scholars to make the situations they study better are most often described as activism or intervention. The majority of work in STS, however, does not directly discuss prescriptions and thus does not elucidate the many ways that the researcher is engaged in changing the practices of scientists and engineers. While one of the strengths of STS has been to make everyday technical and scientic practices intelligible to different domains of knowledgemost notably public knowledgethe process by which STS scholars go from observer to participant, getting their hands dirty by contributing to the techno-scientic disciplines they study, is less developed. This panel is meant to continue the recent work on theorizing and formalizing methods of intervention into scientic and technical practice. Furthermore, it seeks out the different ways that STS is made useful to individuals who must negotiate the multiple relevant knowledge boundaries of the 21st century. These are some of the questions we see as worth pursuing: What are the current practices of STS intervention into science? In what ways are STS concepts translated so that they can become comprehensible and useful to practitioners of science? How are notions of better science and better scientic practices established in a community? What does STS have to gain from an interventionist perspective? What effect will more cross-scientic dialogue have on the language and methods of STS?
Where the rubber meets the road: Data system validation as STS intervention
Ryan Miller, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc
ABSTRACT: not available
Turning science inside out: STS as a resource for scientists practicing biotechnology
Lisa Weasel, Portland State University
ABSTRACT: Using examples from molecular biology and biotechnology, this paper will describe how scientists can use methods and theories from STS to take an insider outside approach to identifying and grappling with key social and ethical issues in their eld. Drawing on history, philosophy, and feminist critiques of science, STS allows practicing scientists to gain a new light on their subjects of study and the applied implications of their work. [this is based on my own experience as a scientist using STS approaches to look at my work and my eld...]
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Reconguring Oncology Care; Interventions in a national quality collaborative and the creation of a Dutch healthcare market
Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, University Medical Center Rotterdam
ABSTRACT: Many STS researchers experience that intervention is not only an unavoidable and integral part of their research activities, but also a fruitful issue to conceptualize, unpack and experiment with. One of the possible gains of interventionist research is the direct and explicit engagement with the shaping of inherently normative practices. This would allow STS researchers to overcome the situation of having a strong normative sensitivity while being hardly involved in the active (re-)conguration of those practices. This potential gain is to be balanced by an empirical analysis of the partly uncontrollable process of intervening to see which others are created in re-created orders. This paper deals with an interventionist research project that is part of a Dutch national quality collaborative for hospital care. The collaborative, called Better Faster, has the aim of creating process driven and learning organizations in the 24 hospitals involved. The process redesign project is largely inspired by STS research on standardization (Berg 1997; Timmermans and Mauck 2004; Zuiderent-Jerak 2005) and some of its results can be said to be good: throughput time for the diagnostics and treatment of cancer patients is reduced by 70% which means patients spend less time waiting and get their treatment in a much more coordinated way. Though the desirability of some of the results is hard to disagree with, the changes are occurring at the same time when the Dutch healthcare system is undergoing crucial changes in its funding structure, a further privatized insurance system and a stronger role for the Dutch healthcare inspectorate to audit clinical practice. In this setting the contentdriven and STS inspired interventions to create better oncology care is about to lead to a new indicator for the Dutch healthcare inspectorate on the throughput time for patients with colon carcinoma. Once this norm is set, it is far from obvious that other hospitals will have the same content driven approach for meeting this target. Though appreciating the de-dramatization of the STS interventionist project, this paper therefore deals with the somewhat less optimistic side of the complexity of interventions in (healthcare) practices, their tricky nature, and the difculties in explicating the consequences and created others.
Discussant: TBA
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Organizers: Wyatt Galusky, SUNY-Morrisville and Benjamin R. Cohen, University of Virginia Chair: Wyatt Galusky
SESSION ABSTRACT: This session is part of the STS Engaged series, which foregrounds questions of interdisciplinary STS expertise and of audience. Spinning reexivity in an atypical sort of way, the presentations in this session involve short, informal narratives that reect on how STS theory and awareness have infected personal experience in a variety of ways. This use of personal reection borrows from an established tradition of narrating how one chose to pursue an STS research program outside in. We seek to go inside out, starting from a kind of entrenchment in STS and working back toward our personal experience. Thus, on the one hand, the presenters seek to reproduce instances where being versed in STS has mediated (for better, for worse) personal encounters with some ubiquitous scientic and technological practices. On the other hand, the presenters hope to engage the audience in dialogue about how personal narratives such as these may help to communicate and disseminate STS theory in a variety of settings: pedagogical, political, public. By pulling abstract theoretical concepts into the daily experiences of individuals, these rst-person narratives may help to show how STS speaks to personal practice, with a hope of modifying that practice.
Accidental Activists: Information, Objectivity and the Struggle for Civic Credibility
Dana Walker, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT: In 2004, a group of citizens in a suburban township organized to oppose the construction of a Wal-Mart. Within a triad of political players - activists, local bureaucrats, and corporate representatives - a struggle ensued about who had the right to speak about the township. Not originally taken as credible decision-makers in township business, the citizen activists had to produce that credibility in the process of their opposition campaign. It is argued here that in a civic setting credibility was produced using what, on the surface, seemed to be contradictory claims. On the one hand, they made claims to objectivity, using data and information to attempt to prove that the store was not in the best interest of the community. At the same time, they were clear about their own deep, personal investment in the outcome of the Wal-Mart decision, appealing to personal judgment and identity while questioning the experts technical data and legal claims as being too narrowly understood. While it is not unusual for grassroots groups to mix subjective claims with objective arguments, I argue that in a civic setting credibility relies on both. For the activists, the production of credibility could never only be based in facts, information, expertise or authority; they also relied on personal experience, opinion and knowledge as a way to gain support, media attention, and political capital in the community.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts problematic. Our study does however throw fresh light on subject-researcher relationships and identies some limits to active participation by volunteers. Such localised restrictions set boundaries to the apparently boundless exibility in the use and understanding of the term collaboration in particular contexts. The empirical study of research subjects as potential collaborators was built on another collaboration between social scientists and the physicists running the clinical tests. We present a parallel analysis of the development and changing dynamic of this latter relationship as the project matured - to the point of whether it should still be considered a collaboration at all. This forms a reexive counterpoint to the analysis of researcher-subject relations, and a frame of reference that helps point up some common factors critical to the construction of a collaborator.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts offshore. In this study an Actor Network Theory approach is beeing used inspired by Bruno Latour (1987, 1994) as one of the sentral producers of Technoscience. The OPS-rooms are seen as an chain of network between different physical rooms, different ICT-solutions, different organisational and managerial models. This actant-network is supposed to support and create new ways of working based on realtime data, online communication and across geographically distance. This opens up for a transparancy in solutions e.g. to open up frozen borders between different departments, different disiplins, technologies and ideas of what a room is to be in the efforts of establishing new ways of working. The variety and processes of practice was studied by interviewing more than 40 persons working in or outside these rooms both on and offshore, in addition to participative observation in all ve rooms. This study shows the differetn struggles and translations it is to establish new ways of working practice.
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2.1G OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE IN THE FACE OF NATURE: SOLDIERS, CIVILIANS AND PRODUCTIVITY CULTURE
Organizers: Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Linda F. Hogle, University of WisconsinMadison Chair: Gregg Mittman
SESSION ABSTRACT: After the Second World War, in an age of synthetic chemicals, wonder drugs, and an expanding economy, the culture of performance and productivity inltrated all walks of American life, none more so than the military. Nature, in the peculiarities of human bodies, or in seasonal cycles that brought on illnesses from seasickness to malaria, was a signicant obstacle to be overcome. Flexing biomedical research muscles, the military and governmental agencies sought to engineer the body through drugs and technologies that would alter the relations of humans and Nature. Postwar military research to improve performance and survival has ranged from drugs now common in daily civilian life (antihistamines and psychopharmaceuticals), to experimental cognitive and physical augmentations in DARPAs current Enhanced Human Performance Program, which may also have applications beyond the battleeld. In the name of national security, as well as heightened demand for increased productivity, the need for quick reactions, superior sensing capabilities, and physical and mental endurance unfettered by natural bodily and environmental constraints may trump normal ways of intervening in human biological processes. This panel presents both historical and contemporary cases to illustrate ways that past and emerging technologies not only change armed conict, but in the context of performance culture in North America, transform civilian work and social life as well.
The Drug that Makes Soldiers Good Sailors Will Soon Be Working for You! Antihistamines and the Culture of Performance in Cold War America
Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: In the twenty-rst century, more than 50 million allergic Americans turn to modern biotechnology to free them from natures constraints. Drugs, by changing the ecology of the world inside the body, offer allergy sufferers the promise of insulating themselves from the ecology of the outside world in which they live. After the Second World War, in an age of synthetic chemicals, wonder drugs, and an expanding economy, when allergy had inltrated all walks of American life, engineering the body in ways that would overcome the peculiarities of place and environmental changeseasonal pollens, dust mite explosions, smog alerts, to name a few--became a consumer and corporate dream. By the 1950s, antihistamines became the third-most commonly prescribed class of drugs in the United States. This talk explores how antihistamines, one of the rst miracle drugs in allergy treatment, became common in the bloodstream of Americans and vital to the circulation and accumulation of capital in the drug industry. It is a story intimately connected to military and industrial concerns regarding worker productivity and performance in the Cold War era, when the U.S. strategy for postwar economic growth focused on two key principles: keep American workers producing and keep consumers buying
Preventing Humans from Becoming the Weakest Link in the Military: Regenerative Medicine and the Warghter
Linda F. Hogle, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: The Enhanced Human Performance Program is aimed at preventing humans from becoming the weakest link in the U.S. military. The goal is to exploit life sciences to make the individual warghter
4 S Final Program with Abstracts stronger, more alert, more endurant and better able to heal. This statement from the DARPA Strategic Plan indicates where the military must improve its performance in the bodies of its soldiers. Like other kinds of labor, war work requires tools, but external tools for protection and inicting damage to the enemy are no longer enough. Rather, transformations are being made in soldiers bodies to improve performance specically under extreme and extraordinary circumstances of contemporary war. Metabolic changes, immune system boosting and the ability to self-repair battle wounds are the hoped-for outcomes of current projects. The high cost of training special forces also calls for recapture of the investment in their training and expertise, hence extraordinary measures to return these warghters to the eld. These innovations are meant to overcome natural failings and frailties of the human body, while going far beyond repair and replacement. Instead, they are designed for particular kinds of performance in specialized contexts.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts of donors for patients, and families start saving them for future therapies. One of the solutions to this tension is the preservation, growing and circulation of stem cells. Yet, these three modalities can conict. The contributions to this panel will explore the technologies of banking and circulation of these goods and show their resonance onto the politics of research and medicine.
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Organisational Survival, Immortal Cell Lines: Embodiment, Space and Representation in the UK Stem Cell Bank
Neil Stephens, ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), Cardiff University School of Social Sciences
ABSTRACT: The UK Stem Cell Bank is the worlds rst publicly funded and regulated Stem Cell Bank. It has been established to provide high quality and ethically sourced Stem Cell Lines to accredited public and private researchers across the globe. The highly controversial nature of Stem Cell science has led to a range of competing international regulatory structures. The UK has adopted an approach that is liberal in the activities it permits, but strict in how they are regulated and scrutinised. This paper explores how the governance structures framing Stem Cell science in the UK are embodied by the physical space and sources of representation and surveillance in the UK Stem Cell Bank itself. Drawing upon over a years ethnographic study at the Bank, the paper makes explicit the localised negotiation and reproduction of wider regulatory structures and their importance for the Banks organisational survival. By focusing upon the physical embodiment of external constraints in the spatial and technological provisions available to the Bank, and their mediation by the Banks staff, the paper offers a novel and important contribution to the understanding of the in situ application of governance structures in bioscience.
Impure Bioethics: The Discursive Politics of American Bioethicists in the Human Embryo and Stem Cell Debate
Eun-sung Kim, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: This paper paves the way for a new Science and Technology Studies approach to bioethics. This paper develops a meta-ethics model of what I call impure bioethics to explore the scientic, technological, and political contexts of American bioethics. Impure bioethics is characterized by multilateral credibility struggles among heterogeneous assemblages of bioethics, technoscience, and politics. As for a case study, this paper analyzes the pre-embryo debate, the medical potential debate between embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells, and the Presidents Council on Bioethics debate among bioethicists. A controversy among bioethicists is not merely that of pure moral theories, but instead includes scientic, technological, and political debates. Scientism in ethical reasoning is a driving force to transform the ethical debate into scientic and technological debates. Firstly, both liberal and conservative bioethicists create scientic fact claims with either embryology or developmental biology about the term pre-embryo in order to defend their ethical claims. Secondly, to support their ethical claims, both bioethicists also make technological justication by downplaying or aunting the medical potential of human embryonic or adult stem cells. Lastly, both bioethicists engage themselves deeply with congressional politics between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. I conclude that bioethicists should consider a social constructionist model that integrates bioethics, science, technology, and politics.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts organisms, natural elements and ows, human bodies and infrastructure systems. This focus on visualization has located the power to see in the hands of those who govern and less on those rendered governed or governable. This article attempts to expand our notions of visualization by discussing the normative stakes around image production within environmental politics. The paper investigates the ways in which lay vision, including culturally specic perceptions of aesthetics, are being incorporated into deliberative democracy. Drawing on a series of cases, including the European Unions VISULANDS project on forestry, Arizona State Universitys Decision Theater for water planning, and the US Army Corps of Engineers viewshed impact assessments for siting wind energy farms, the paper interrogates the visual methodologies being employed by public institutions to involve citizens in making reasoned choices about balancing aesthetic values with the demands of global environmental governance.
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Performing the future of Ubiquitous computing as a grammar of design: silences, constraints, and unintended consequences
Lonny J Brooks, California State University, East Bay
ABSTRACT: Critics of futurology (Agre: 1997; Grint & Woolgar: 1997; Hine: 2000) raise important questions about the lack of context in futurological prediction and the need for skepticism with regard to futurist claims of radical discontinuities in new media creation. Scholars such as Christine Hine suggest that predictions for new media fail because they do not take into account how people actually use media and call for an ethnographic study of present use of the Internet as a method for defusing futurist hype. Scholarly criticism of futurology however fails to notice how futurist think tanks, and new media designers have developed a performance tradition based on ethnographic research (Brooks: 2002; Hagstrom: 2002; Laurel: 2001). The silence of theorizing about performance in science and technology is palpable. The question then transforms into how can organizational researchers effectively study new media forecasters who use ethnographic and performance research as the basis for their predictions? And what happens when these forecasters, in their zeal to cater to clients, adopt postmodern critiques by using performance studies methodologies to transform their ethnographic ndings into self-reexive theatrical skits, and plays? Augusto Boals Theater of the Oppressed provides some insight into the potential of theater to liberate its audiences and transform them into co-actors in designing their own political freedom. New media designers have used Boal as a rallying theme for creating so called liberating computing devices and/or platforms. Representations of future uses of computing through performance narratives form an interaction design framework by creating a grammar of future images that work to perform, enable, and constrain behavior for the next envisioned platform for ubiquitous computing and Internet II innovation. This grammar continues to grow while entering into our imaginations with silent persistence and shallow theorizing.
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Organizers: Nancy Tuana Pennsylvania State University; Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines; and Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas Chair: Carl Mitcham Colorado School of Mines
Discussants: Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas; Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines; Dean Nieusma, University of Virginia; and Dennis B. Warner, Catholic Relief Services 2.1K CONTESTED ILLNESSES: AMBIVALENCE AND ADVOCACY IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY
Organizers: Gabriella Coleman, University of Alberta; Chloe Silverman, Penn State; Alex Choby, UCSF/ Berkeley, Chair: Kathy Teghtsoonian, University of Victoria
SESSION ABSTRACT: This panel address the ways in which a range of bodily experiences and behaviors reach the status of contested illness, either within the medical establishment, patient groups, or in the borderlands between the two. Autism spectrum disorders, chronic lyme disease, anxiety disorder, and chronic fatigue syndrome are a small sample of a class of chronic illnesses that are marked by various degrees of social ambivalence and contestation. For some patients, the mainstream medical establishment has not done enough to diagnose, characterize, and thus legitimate these illnesses. There is, in other words, a desire to bring these more rmly within the medical paradigm: these are the illnesses you have to ght to get (Dumit, 2005). For others actors, such as psychiatric survivors, these diagnoses are not only medically unfounded but are shaped by social forces, such as advertising, that they see as corrupting of medical science we might call these diagnoses that you must ght to lose. Forms of social suffering are often marked by ambivalence over the desire for competence in medical terminology versus wariness and suspicion directed at dominant medical paradigms. Finally, sometimes it is not the status of the category as legitimate that is at stake, rather controversy emerges around questions of diagnosis. Here, social and technological constraints inherent in producing diagnostic information create classicatory ambiguities for doctors that have real implications for patients. Patient activism focused on contested illness categories has a long history, but new technologies, notably the Internet, have played an essential role in constituting the networks of communication under which the construction of illnesses, their boundaries, and contestation presently unfold. Papers in this panel explore the ways that contested illness categories make visible what is otherwise hidden in biomedical practices, be it abuses which lead to unnecessary suffering, hidden forms of caring labor, or underlying assumptions about the nature of rationality, competence, and independence that enable the formations that serve to legitimate diagnoses.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts making, despite the popular representation of the mentally ill as unlikely co-participants in their treatment. In the presentation I give special attention to how the poetics of their political action performs a message about their capability to actively participate in treatment decisions and the broader science of psychiatry. Through the process of launching a sophisticated political programme that includes protests, hunger strikes, newsletters, conferences, book-writing, and organization building, they perform their rationality that is otherwise questioned by conventional medical discourse.
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Managing Contestation in the Clinic: The Politics of Diagnosing NonEpileptic Seizures (NES)
Alexandra Choby, UCSF and UC Berkeley,
ABSTRACT: This paper takes diagnosis of suspected seizure disorders as a case for examining the politics of disease identity driving allocation of legitimacy to patients in the clinic. Patients seeking diagnosis for suspected seizure disorders may spend years, and see a succession of doctors, in pursuit of a name for a condition characterized by transient loss of consciousness, or, simply, odd behavior. At the tertiary level, diagnosing a seizure disorder demands a 7 day hospital stay of patients, for continual monitoring with Video-electroencephalography (VET), to (imperfectly) capture and record what are otherwise transient events. For doctors, producing diagnoses via VET requires careful, retrospective interpretation of VET images. Often, the status of these images, which are hypothesized to map brain physiology, is in question. This inherent interpretive ambiguity is complicated by the fact that the main differential diagnosis is the functional, and hence, stigmatized, condition, NES. Physicians at the tertiary level of care posit that up to 40% of patient seeking diagnosis for a suspected seizure disorder have NES. They see NES patients as demanding resources that would be better used to help people with epilepsy, and sometimes frame patients long health care trajectories as doctor shopping, a liberal consumerist critique of a stigmatized diagnosis. This paper examines debates among doctors intending to re-fashion NES at the level of causation, in order to end perceived contestation manifest as doctor-shopping.
Discussant: Pamela Moss, University of Victoria 2.1L CLONING TRUTH CLAIMS: IMAGINATIVE INVESTMENT IN NARRATIVES OF TECHNOSCIENCE
Organizer: Joan Haran, Cardiff University Chair: Joan Haran
SESSION ABSTRACT: This panel explores the ways in which different media forms and genres have been deployed to make particular truth claims about human reproductive and therapeutic cloning since the year 2000. In doing so, we pose questions about the boundaries between fact and ction and the means by which readers / viewers can adjudicate the truth status of particular claims. The rhetorical and visual strategies adopted by the producers of truth claims on websites, in public lectures and in press releases will be compared to explore differences and similarities in the modes of generating facts and ctions in these different sites. The panel will examine specic empirical examples drawing on insights from STS and Cultural Studies. These examples will include: Hwang-gate; claims of human reproductive cloning attempts / successes; and the recent admission by Ian Wilmut that he was only 33% responsible for the creation of Dolly the sheep. The analysis will explore the permeability of the fact/ction distinction and the stakes in these demarcations around scientic claims. In foregrounding media analysis this panel will examine the silence of much of STS regarding the making of science in and through the media. Feminist studies of the visual and media cultures of technoscience will be our key resource for both our empirical analyses and this assessment of STS silences.
Human Reproductive Cloning in the Real World: Panos Zavos, Clonaid and Online Marketing of Technscientic Fraud
Joan Haran, Cardiff University
ABSTRACT: not available
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Human Reproductive Cloning at the Godsend Institute: Circulating narratives, scientic literacy, and truth claims
Kate ORiordan, Lancaster University and University of Sussex
ABSTRACT: not available
2.1M THE DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE OF WASTE: THE SILENCING AND SUPPRESSION OF THE HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN
Chair: Darrin Durant, York University
Risk as a Silencing Technique: the Effects of Nuclear Discourse on Aboriginal Peoples in Canada
Anna Stanley, University of Guelph
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to explore one of the ways in which knowledge produced by the nuclear industry in Canada about the effects of nuclear fuel waste (NFW) and its management (particularly as it relates to notions of danger and safety) gains primacy over alternative knowledges. I identify a discourse of modern risk (Green 2000) as instrumental to pursuing and maintaining industry control over knowledge production. Drawing on Foucaults (1976) dual concept of subjugated knowledges I argue that modern risk in the Canadian NFW management policy debate is a silencing technique. It simultaneously conceals the contingencies and partial perspectives (Haraway 1989) which underwrite the production of the nuclear industrys knowledge about NFW, and silences the implication of Aboriginal Peoples in the landscape of the nuclear fuel chain and their experiences of its effects. The operation of the discourse of modern risk as a silencing tool will be illustrated using examples from the work of the Nuclear Waste Management Organization and from oral histories of Serpent River Fist Nation (SRFN) about the nuclear fuel chain. I conclude that this discourse effect is not accidental; the historical experiences of the SRFN (and other Aboriginal Peoples) of the nuclear fuel chain troubles the narratives of the nuclear industry about the safety and acceptability of NFW, its effects and its management, and threatens to expose some of its constitutive disavowals.
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The Political Ecology of Radioactive Waste: the Suppression of People and Particles in Canadas Disposal Program
Darrin Durant, York University
ABSTRACT: In the Politics of Nature (2004) Bruno Latour outlined an STS-informed philosophical foundation for political ecology. Latour has taken some old tricks of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), such as the abolition of tired old dichotomies like fact/value, nature/politics, and human/non-human, and applied them to a new object political ecology. Focusing on the practice of political ecology, Latour rejects the (old) bicameralism of (old) political ecology (which traded on the dichotomies) and replaces it with a new bicameralism. This new bicameralism operates to transform debates about entities into institutions; indeed, institutions that work. Given the paucity of empirical esh on the political ecology model as presented, this paper adds some empirical material to the account. I sketch an empirical case study in terms of Latours new bicameralism and its associated seven tasks. The case to be considered is Canadian proposals for the disposal of radioactive waste. I follow several chains of associations in order to show the suppression of, and constraints around, a number of actants, which the old bicameralism would simply have referred to as people and particles (radionucleides). For instance, what power relations are illuminated by linking geological and engineering barriers to issues of democratic representation? If political ecology wipe[s] the slate clean and pardons the modern experience (p. 194), as Latour argues, then from where must waste disposal programs begin? I show how a political inversion results, with an unexpected underdog emerging, and reach some conclusions which ANT theorists may nd surprising.
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2.2A ACCOUNTING FOR SUFFERING: REPRESENTING AND MANAGING CANCER TREATMENT IN THE 20TH-CENTURY US AND UK
SESSION ABSTRACT: This session examines how modes of knowledge production, forms of institutional organization, and questions of professional identity shape the representation and management of cancer patients suffering. How, when, and where do those who research, treat, and care for cancer acknowledge the patients experience? How do they reckon with patients suffering, and with their own frequently unsuccessful attempts to manage it? Toon examines the linguistic, visual, and statistical strategies used by British surgeons and radiotherapists to make sense of therapeutic outcomes. Clinician-researchers represented their results in multiple ways, from case reports and photographs to statistical tables and graphs. How did these strategies create coherent narratives about what had happened to patients/subjects? Kutcher also discusses questions about representation, through a case study of a prominent American researchers work. As this researchers representational strategies (and those of his professional community) evolved, they privileged survival over side-effects, and replaced individual accounts of suffering with population rates of toxicity. What was lost, and what gained? Krueger assesses the work of American health professionals who sought to defuse what they saw as a mismanagement of suffering. A 1970s research project, Home Care for the Dying Child, criticized the silence surrounding dying in pediatric cancer treatment. How could a cure-focused, technologically-oriented pediatric oncology reconcile itself to futility? Timmermann asks what clinicians do when they think that nothing can be done. In the late 1960s, thoracic surgeons treating lung cancer patients faced an unmitigated gloom, as they worried about an apparent end to improvement in techniques or therapies. How, then, to recreate the momentum of progress central to the self-understanding of modern biomedical disciplines?
Organizers: Elizabeth Toon, University of Manchester and Carsten Timmermann, University of Manchester Chair: Susan Lindee, University of Pennsylvania
Striking, Remarkable, and Occasionally Gratifying: Representing the Results of Breast Cancer Treatment
Elizabeth Toon, University of Manchester
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the linguistic, visual, and statistical strategies used by British surgeons and radiotherapists to make sense of therapeutic results, for themselves and for each other. At a time when these medics argued among themselves over which treatment or combination of treatment would attain the best ultimate result among the most patients, they employed multiple modes of representation, often in combination: case reports, statistical tables, graphs, and photographs. In the case of therapies for advanced breast cancer in particular, this multiplicity grew out of a shared confusion about how medics could assess the value of endocrine surgery and administration when the results of such therapies were notoriously transitory and capricious.
Why Dont We Let Them Die at Home?: Silence, Suffering, and End-ofLife Care for Children with Cancer
Gretchen Krueger, Johns Hopkins University
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses a federally funded research project titled Home Care for the Dying Child that was launched in the mid-1970s by Ida Martinson, a nurse at the University of Minnesota. Her multi-phase project was designed to meet three goals: to determine what services were available for parents interested in providing end-of-life care for their children at home, to evaluate nurses and physicians attitudes toward child death, and to build a cooperative framework in which children in the terminal stages of illness could move freely between the hospital and home under the close supervision of their parents and an on-call team of health care providers. Like the organizers and participants in the nascent hospice movement, parents participating in Martinsons project criticized the silence that surrounded death and dying at a time when pediatric cancer treatment was increasingly technologically oriented, based on a clinical trial structure, and cure focused. This approach prevented families and the caregivers they relied upon from considering alternatives to active treatment, despite grim prognoses. Thus, the special physical and psychological needs of children for whom cure was no longer a realistic expectation garnered little attention. Though the Home Care for the Dying Child, Martinson exposed the high cost of hospital care and the futility of continuing aggressive cancer treatment during the terminal stages of illness. Her proposal was the rst in the United States to advocate for a holistic model of care to be provided in the childs home by his/her parents. Nurses helped parents with symptom management and pain control during the remainder of the childs life and provided bereavement care for family members after the death. Martinsons project ourished at the University of Minnesota, attracting patient referrals from institutional, local, and regional physicians and, despite several obstacles that hindered the evaluation and reproducibility of the home care program, it had an impact on the dominant model of death and dyingspurring similar pediatric programs at several sites across the nation.
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Surgery, Selection and Survival: Improving Outcomes in the Treatment of Lung Cancer
Carsten Timmermann, University of Manchester
ABSTRACT: Vincent-Antonin Lepinay In this paper I will use the example of lung cancer surgery to explore what surgeons do when they think that nothing can be done. In the late 1960s, history seemed to be at an end for thoracic surgeons treating lung cancer patients. To most thoracic surgeons it appeared as if the depressingly low survival rates of patients diagnosed with this disease, the most common form of cancer since the Second World War, could no longer be improved by modifying operating techniques. Radiotherapy and chemotherapy did not work very well either; the outcomes of clinical trials were extremely disappointing; and no miracle cure in sight. Surgery was routine, but outcomes were depressing. At the same time, the increasingly widely accepted link with smoking suggested that this was a disease which called for prevention, not improved cures. Most career minded surgeons no longer spoke or wrote about lung cancer surgery; they turned to the more prestigious eld of heart surgery instead. In this situation of unmitigated gloom, as a participant in a symposium in 1966 put it, what could be done to create the momentum of progress that is so important for the self understanding of modern biomedical disciplines? In fact, as I will demonstrate, the outcomes of surgery have improved since the 1970s, but, paradoxically, this does not mean that the chances of survival for a patient diagnosed with lung cancer are much better. I will explore how this was a product of improved diagnostic technologies, new classication strategies and staging techniques, a redenition of endpoints, and rigorous selection of the patients for whom surgery was recommended.
Disscusant: Susan Lindee, University of Pennsylvania 2.2B MATTERS OF PLACE: GEOGRAPHY, TRAVEL, AND THE (POST)COLONIAL IN TECHNOSCIENCE
Organizer: Gabrielle Hecht, University of Michigan Chair: Gabrielle Hecht
SESSION ABSTRACT: For a eld that prides itself on situating knowledge, matters of geographical, territorial, and (post)colonial place carry a remarkably low prole in STS conference programs and journal contents. How do such matters of place shape the making of technoscience, the stories we tell about
4 S Final Program with Abstracts technoscience, and the ontological categories that attend both this making and our narratives? The papers in this panel explore this question in historical and theoretical ways, attending to the making of categories such as the state, the colonial, health, and the nuclear. Patrick Carroll will situate the ordnance survey in the place of colonial Ireland and explore how it served the material engineering of the colonial state. Warwick Anderson will discuss territoriality, contestation and moral outrage among traveling scientists in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Hans Pols will examine how exposure to Western universalist ideologies (including socialism, anti-imperialism, and Marxism) in the Netherlands helped to transform Jakartan medical students into nationalists who articulated a vision of the health of the nation in their ght for Indonesian independence. Gabrielle Hecht will situate a few African places (South Africa, Namibia, and Gabon) in geographical and historical denitions of nuclear materials, and explore the implications of these denitions for global, place-based tensions between safeguarding and marketing uranium.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts to educate a small cadre of indigenous physicians who could provide assistance to colonial doctors. They expected them to blend seamlessly in Indonesian society. Instead, these physicians became active in the nationalist movement which had an independent Indonesia as its aim. Did they, as the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer suggest, make the health of the nation become their primary concern?
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Uranium and its Travels: African Geographies in the Making, Marketing, and Flow of Nuclear Materials
Gabrielle Hecht, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT: In 2003 uranium from Africa served to justify the US invasion of Iraq; in 2006 and its being invoked in the nuclear stand-off with Iran. In this phrase, uranium is as underspecied technologically as Africa is underspecied geographically: it was precisely the vagueness of place and technology that gave the phrase its political utility. As such, the phrase draws attention to the ambiguities of the nuclear state, and to the state of being nuclear. What exactly is a nuclear state, and how do we know? Are the criteria scientic, technical, political, systemic? The ambiguities underlying uranium from Africa cannot merely be dismissed as Bush administration doublespeak. On the contrary: they lie at the heart of todays global nuclear order or dis-order, as the case may be. I argue that the nuclearity of a nation, a program, a technology, or a material that is, the degree to which any of these things counts as nuclear can never be dened in simple, clear-cut, scientic terms. Nuclearity is place-based and time-specic: it is a historical and geographical condition, as well as a scientic and technological one. And nuclearity, in turn, has signicant consequences for politics, culture, and health. Degrees of nuclearity structure global control over the ow of radioactive materials; they constitute the conceptual bedrock of anti-nuclear movements; they affect regulatory frameworks for occupational health and compensation for work-related illnesses. I illustrate these points with stories about uranium ore from South Africa, Namibia, and Gabon.
Making Mothers: Maternal Health Campaigns and Scientic Motherhood in Colonial Korea
Jin-kyung Park, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ABSTRACT: This paper examines annual maternal health campaigns in 1920s and 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule. After colonizing Korea in 1910, the Japanese imperial regime sought to expand its colonial holdings farther into South and East Asia. The regime identied Koreans as valuable human resources, especially as part of the vitally-needed industrial and military labor power and strove to develop strategies for numerically multiplying the Korean population. Maternal health, as part of these efforts, became the object of close state surveillance because it directly affected pregnancy and childbirth. Under these historical circumstances, the annual maternal health campaigns sponsored by the Government General of Korea were carried out to produce the healthy maternal body. In particular, these campaigns sought to put scientic motherhood into practice in the domestic sphere. This new concept was designed to manage the maternal body scientically and thus to systematically increase fertility. By analyzing discourses and practices of scientic motherhood, my essay investigates how it was linked to colonial discipline and the construction of motherhood in colonial Korea.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts where stories of individual survival routinely eclipse other possible cancer stories--for example, stories about environmental carcinogens? Finally, problems of the said and the unsaid are taken up for pregnancy and childbirth. Presenter 5 notes the trope of the counter-narrative in midwifery (pregnancy and childbirth are normal, natural), but then she queries the increasing cooperation of professional midwifery with a medico-scientic discourse of risk.
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Systemic Silences: Genre and the Limits of Knowledge and Evidence in Medical Research
Colleen Derkcatch, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: This paper takes up the conference themes of silence, boundaries, and quantication in relation to the medical literature on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Researchers on CAM appear to occupy an ambivalent position in their research: attentive to the whole person in accordance with the rhetoric of CAM (recognising the value of both qualitative and quantitative evidence) but inattentive to the whole person when installing CAM into the discourse of biomedicine (relying solely on quantitative evidence). The paper argues that this silencing of certain kinds of proof within research contexts is systemic, with researchers constrained by the genres of their own practice (especially the genre of the scientic report), and that the boundary between biomedicine and CAM is a useful site for querying the relationship in medicine generally between what physician-researchers know about patients needs and how they account (or fail to) for those needs within practice-dening research contexts.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts are STS concepts translated so that they can become comprehensible and useful to practitioners of science? How are notions of better science and better scientic practices established in a community? What does STS have to gain from an interventionist perspective? What effect will more cross-scientic dialogue have on the language and methods of STS?
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There and Back Again: Traversing the boundaries between science studies and social robotics
Selma Sabanovic, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: In this paper, the author analyzes her experiences of interpreting among disciplines while doing participant observation in social robotics laboratories in Japan and the US. During this process, the researcher stands in the midst of tensions between the different imaginaries (shared worldviews) and knowledge practices of critical STS and social robotics. As an STS researcher taking part in the production of knowledge of another community, she discusses her dialogic engagement with the communitys language, its epistemic cultures, as well as the various external constraints on scientic practice posed by funding sources, technologies used, and institutional prerogatives. The point of view taken by the author is not merely that of looking at another discipline from the outside, but working with everyday practitioners of social robotics to have the authority to speak to and be heard by people from within the discipline. She discusses how to affect change in the practice and imaginary of science from within by showing alternatives to the way problems are formulated, proposing new areas of research, and expressing STS ideas in ways that are related to the practice of social robotics. Finally, the author reects on lessons to be learned within STS that can come from engaging in the everyday practices of and conversations with a different discipline.
Values & pragmatic action: The challenges of engagement with technical design communities
Michael Zimmer, New York University
ABSTRACT: This paper will discuss the pragmatic challenges of engaging in value- sensitive design, focusing on the authors experience of attempting to engage pragmatically with the design community of vehicle safety communication technologies to work towards the privacy-protecting design of such systems. The paper will argue for the integration of critical technical practice (see Boehner, David, Kaye and Sengers) into such interventions to increase awareness among designers of the valuative externalities of networked vehicle information systems and web search engines, and help provide the technical design communities with the necessary conceptual tools to foster critical reection on the hidden assumptions, ideologies and values underlying their design decisions.
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SESSION ABSTRACT: The study of the sciences of emotions has been a silenced topic that has only recently begun to be developed by the humanities and the social sciences. However, emotions are a fundamental aspect of human suffering as much as welfare is. Although it is difcult to fully understand the complex reasons for this lack of interest on the topic, it can be conjectured that emotions are still a resilient locus of naturalisation. This panel will welcome any paper contributing to an analysis of the historicity of emotions and the contributions of technosciences to it. It will particularly welcome papers focusing on different cultural knowledges that produce a self perception of the emotional being / papers exploring the interface between popular culture and culture of expertise / papers exploring the role played by the technosciences of emotions in dening boundaries between the masculine/feminine and its contestation.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts reected and represented in a number of highly visible multi-episode series on the brain that aired on American Public Television or cable networks between 1984 and 2002. I will offer a comparative analysis of these programs and programs that aired during the same time periode in France. A comparative analysis clearly shows that the normative messages formulated by scientists, rephrased by science journalists, and circulated through the public media are not only generated in a specic socio-cultural context but their reception furthermore depends upon the social concerns in a society at a given time. While the subject matter of science is international, the national contexts of research clearly matter and should be factored in the historical analysis.
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Languages of silence, languages of voice: Scientic and other discourses and the construction of disability
Ursula Naue, University of Vienna
ABSTRACT: One of the objectives of Disability Studies is to point out how scientic discourses and languages construct disability and thus silence large parts of society, namely disabled people. This has enormous consequences on the socio-political treatment of disabled people, as the scientically formulated constructions of disability inuence policies and their implementation. During the last years disabled people kept emphasizing this situation and tried to give voice to the disabled community in political as well as in scientic discourses. The question arises, who exactly can be regarded as an expert in the eld of disability and whose knowledge is relevant for formulating policies as well as scientic expertise on disability issues. Who is dened as an expert depends largely on the viewpoint on the subject of disability. At the same time these specic attitudes determines which languages are used silencing ones or ones which give voices to disabled people. As the prevailing perception of disability nowadays tends to shift from a medical discourse towards a societal discourse on disability, the possibility for a changing construction of disability is vital. Slowly, changes with regard to the validity of knowledge between experts and non-experts emerge. The proposed paper therefore focuses on the context of these currently discernable tendencies concerning the discourses on disability. And it discusses the arguments used in the debate on who can be brought into play as an expert, how the relevant knowledge in this eld is dened and what implications on the life of disabled people this has.
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Computers for the Masses: Edmund Berkeley and Social Responsibilities of Computer Development
Bernadette Longo, University of Minnesota
ABSTRACT: Edmund Berkeley began his career as an insurance actuary in the early 1930s, having graduated from Harvard in mathematics. His work in logic and Boolean algebra led him to recognize the implications for improved human reasoning inherent in digital calculating machines, which were well suited for logic chains of true-false questions. He envisioned a world in which these machines would help people make better decisions and put his ideas to work in Aikens Mark II lab during WWII. At the wars end, Berkeley was at the center of efforts to transfer computer technology from military to business uses and to integrate these digital calculating machines into popular culture. With others, Berkeley sought to shape a computing infrastructure in the model of a public utility for the common good. Working through the National Bureau of Standards, these advocates of social responsibility in computer development began establishing networks for sharing technology know-how across industries and private organizations. This social ideology did not prevail as the 1940s turned into the 1950s, but in the late 1940s it was still a possible model for integrating computers into civilian life. Berkeley continued to insist that computer developers had important social
4 S Final Program with Abstracts responsibilities and worked through committees of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) * which he helped to establish in 1947 * to put forward that social agenda. Ultimately, business perspectives prevailed in the ACM as well and Berkeleys larger social goals were sidelined. He continued advocating this position until the end of his life in 1988.
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Generation Mesh: Mobile Professionals and the Use of Mobile and Wireless Technologies
Laura Forlano, Columbia University
ABSTRACT: This paper will draw on six months of ethnographic eldwork on the ways in which mobile professionals and freelance workers in the media and information technology industries in New York use new technologies to perform their work from a variety of different work sites, with a specic interest in their use of mobile and wireless technologies. The emergence of freelance workers over the past ten years is of interest because it coincides with the emergence of the Internet and portable computing and the widespread use of mobile and wireless technologies. Mobile and wireless technologies are particularly relevant in enabling connectivity in rural and underserved areas as well as in developing countries yet, to date, relatively little is known about the socio-economic implications of the use of such technologies. Cities have begun to explore and build municipal wireless networks to blanket their downtown areas, primarily for the purposes of economic development. Similarly, since 2001, local community wireless groups around the
4 S Final Program with Abstracts work have begun building free, public wireless networks in cafes, parks, atria and other public spaces. This paper will be informed by literature from science and technology studies (actor-network theory, technology affordance theory), economic sociology (mobility theory) and organizational behavior. In particular, this paper will explore spaces that have been overlooked in science and technology studies including Internet cafes, wireless parks, airport lounges and collaborative ofce spaces and advance thinking about architecture and public space as a technology that deserves critical analysis by the STS eld.
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Internet politics: A comparative analysis of U.S. and South Korea presidential campaigns
Noriko Hara, Youngmin Jo, Indiana University
ABSTRACT: As the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has become indispensable in the United States (Hoffman, Novak, Venkatesh, 2004) and other countries, it is becoming prevalent for the general public to use the Internet for civic engagement and for overcoming silence in political issues. For instance, the Internet has begun to make signicant impacts on politics, e.g., the U.S. presidential election in 2000 (Bimber & Davis, 2003). In 2004, political parties, candidates, and other organizations used the Internet to effectively mobilize voters and to promote candidates visions (Jacobs, 2005). In the 2002 Korean presidential election, many claims that the victory of a disadvantaged presidential candidate had owned much to an online newspaper and the Internet campaign tactics (French, 2003). It is inevitable that various socio-political factors are inuencing Internet use for political purposes, but previous studies have not included cross-country comparison. In this study, the central question investigated is: what effects did the Internet have on the recent presidential elections in two countries? We use a qualitative case study method to compare and contrast the Internet use for recent presidential campaigns in the U.S. and Korea. To investigate the role of ICTs in political campaigns, we will particularly discuss the three areas of inuence (fundraising, civic participation, and emergence of new social movements) and identify similarities and differences between the U.S. and Korea by using the theoretical framework, social construction of technology (Bijker et al., 1987). These results will shed lights on social and organizational practices to use ICTs for political activities in two different countries.
Silencing Sounds: How the science of sound made musicians speechless by the end of the nineteenth century
Matthias Rieger, University of Hannover
ABSTRACT: How the science of sound made musicians speechless by the end of the nineteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, music was uprooted from tradition and sensual experience and founded on laboratory experiments and mathematical calculations. Consequently, musical common sense lost its authoritative character and was discriminated against as lay knowledge by scientists. This silencing effect of musical acoustics on musicians has been widely overlooked in the literature on the history of musical acoustics. Historians of science examine the instruments and mindsets of acousticians whereas musicologists celebrate early acoustics as a discipline that provided a scientic foundation for the understanding of music. Also in the eld of sound studies, authors focus their research primarily on the technological aspects of acoustics. All three disciplines have so far overlooked the silencing effect of musical acoustics on musicians. I illustrate this fundamental uprooting of musical knowledge through an examination of such sources as letters, musical dictionaries and writings on music theory between 1850 and 1910. I will show how acousticians colonized common musical expressions such as consonance, dissonance, sound and tone and redened them as scientic constructs. Musical common sense was thereby subjected to scientic knowledge. Musicians became literally speechless and had to be instructed by acousticians how to think and speak properly about music.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts felt that blacks were silenced in the process of its creation. It will then show how the use and expression of technology by these artists created new cultural metaphors that were situated within the racial politics and identities associated with the Diaspora, civil rights movement, and black-nationalism of the 1950s-1970s. In the process, space, cyborgs and information became cultural tools through which new racial identities and bodies could be constructed to practice politics and contest social and economic power while reclaiming black history and identity as a means to command a future and imagine new forms of collectivity. This paper concludes by arguing that a re-signication of technologies occurred as they circulated outside of the communities that had access to the science itself.
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Organizers: Kathrin Braun, Univeristy of Washington, Seattle; Angelika von Wahl, San Francisco State University Chair: Kathrin Braun
SESSION ABSTRACT: The dream of improving the human race and/or optimizing the population of the state in order to make it healthier, stronger, and more intelligent can be traced back to the origins of the Enlightenment. In many twentieth-century countries, however, this dream turned into the nightmarish reality of large scale human rights violations such as enforced sterilisations exercised mostly in the name of science and rationality. In recent times, survivors or advocacy groups in some countries have raised claims to reparations and restorative justice. Such claims, however, are frequently impeded by the lingering concepts and practices of eugenics and by the silencing and marginalizing of these victim and survivor groups. In this session, we will explore the programmes, policies, practices, and technologies of population engineering in past and present, the struggles for restorative justice in this eld, the conditions and factors that impact the success of such struggles, the intersection of past and current ideas about and practices of populations engineering.
Breaking the Silence. Eugenics, Restorative Justice and the Politics of Pause
Kathrin Braun, University of Washington,
ABSTRACT: Our society is future-oriented. It is obsessed with ideas like future, progress, or innovation. Yet, we also observe an increasing interest in historic injustices and the intersection between past and present. This phenomenon can be seen in the context of a growing problematization of time which, as I will argue, can be linked to the crisis of classical modernist temporality. In this paper, I will argue that eugenics forms a nodal point of conicting temporalities. Breaking the public silence on past human rights violations that have been committed in the name of rationality, as in the case of eugenics, can be understood as a struggle for a politics of pause against a politics of progress. By politics of pause I mean the effort to interrupt the ongoing economic, scientic, and technological dynamic in order to nd time to think and perhaps time for change whereas politics of progress denotes the idea that a collective subject (humanity, the population of a state, a race) undergoes an automatic, directed, irreversible process of improvement that rationally thinking actors will foster and accelerate. Referring to the work of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and PierreAndr Taguieff, the paper will present a conceptual outline for exploring and comparing the intersection of past and present eugenics and the struggles for breaking the silence on crimes committed in the name of rationality as a struggle not only for justice but also as a struggle between competing temporalities.
Making Claims: Social Mobilization for Symbolic and Material Reparations and Forced Sterilizations in the USA
Angelika von Wahl, San Francisco State University
ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on the politics of eugenics in the United States from the early to the mid20th century. It is particularly interested in the study of government policies regarding the issue of forced sterilization of women and the recent attempts to provide material and symbolic rectication in cases of severe human rights abuse. While many states have participated at some time or another in the iniction
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of injustice and in atrocitiesbe it during war with neighboring states, colonization of other countries or acts within their own territoryit seems that relatively few cases of human rights abuse have produced reparations. This paper is part of a larger comparative project analyzing the interplay between democratic governments and social movements that push for symbolic recognition and/or material reparations for severe human rights abuses. The theoretical framework is provided by nationally diverse political opportunity structures on the one hand, and the organizational capacities, resources, and identities of victims/claimants and social groups on the other. First results show that national political opportunity structures are more or less hospitable to different claimants relating partly to their status as either representing an individual (only) or a community. Ultimately, the analysis broaches the critical question of the ability of victims of eugenics and forced sterilization to making claims in democracies.
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Eugenics and the Making of Universal Citizenship in Sweden. The Social Democratic State revisited
Teresa Kulawik, Centre for Baltic and East European Studies
ABSTRACT: This paper will examine the puzzle that the allegedly inclusive and universalistic Swedish welfare state has exercised large scale eugenic measures such as selection, internment, and sterilization over a long period of time. These measures were based on the classication of certain groups of people as inferior and presented as the solution to social problems. According to a prevailing interpretation, the Swedish Social Democrats in the 1930s merely used the socalled population question in order to implement social reforms. This argument, however, overlooks the fact that the Social Democrats innovation of a prophylactic social policy was in fact based on the concept of quality of human material, a concept derived from population policy. While the founding period of the Swedish welfare state before WW I had been oriented toward alleviating social risks, a new concept is added in the inter-war period: the concept of preventing social problems. Within the ensuing programs against alcoholism or venereal disease there is a strong inclination to press people to become healthier, if necessary through compulsion. I will demonstrate that in the inter-war period a radicalization of eugenics occurred through the merging of hitherto separate discourses, such as the pedagogical, the medical-hygienic-psychiatric discourse, the new social science discourse, and the economic discourse. This convergence created a new perception of social problems as both collective and individualized in some new way. Poverty became more differentiated, in that people were classied according to new categories such as incorrigible, capable, inferior, productive, work-shy, or feeble-minded.
The Stake and The Chip: Constructing deviance and difference through scientic metaphors
Marina Levina, University of Illinois
ABSTRACT: Metaphors about bodies and their management help us better understand the assimilation of scientic paradigms into popular culture. At the same time, they underline the value of popular language and imagery as a way of appropriating science into a popular imagination. This study investigates key metaphors associated with two 20th century scientic systems for studying, identifying, classifying, and managing human differences: blood and genes. Translated through metaphor into popular culture, the science of blood and the science of genetics have contributed equally compelling constructions of the body, both systems using scientic evidence as the primary source for understanding and classifying organisms and bodies. Yet the two systems are radically differentthey require different professional training and laboratory practices, draw on different sets of metaphors, take place in different sociohistorical contexts, and produce different consequences for human bodies in everyday life. Using various popular culture texts this presentation will argue that the shift in classicatory prominence from blood (and with it the elds of virology and immunology) to genes (and with it genomic science and biotechnology) has had profound consequences for the construction, demarcation, and management of difference and deviance between and within bodies. In other words, two different systems, deeply embedded in history and culture of their times, have dictated changing notions of the normal, the abnormal, the freakish, and the monstrous.
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The Politics of Bioprospection: Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK) and Public Engagement in Science & Technology
Camila Carneiro Dias, and Maria Conceio da Costa, State University of Campinas (UNICAMP)
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the role of public involvement in biotechnology assessment in developing countries. The specic context is the latin-american experience of fostering public dialogue between science and society in relation to the protection of TEK Traditional Environmental Knowledge. In recent years, the number of bioprospection partnerships and patents using traditional knowledge has signicantly increased, with the growing power of life-science companies and the spread of intellectual property rights regimes. According to the most part of indigenous and local communities, the basic problem of bioprospection is the increasing alienation or bio-piracy of TEK and biogenetic resources and the lack of effective mechanisms to protect their rights over these resources. For those actors, the existing legal property instruments are unsuitable for protecting traditional knowledge. In order to ll this gap, the negotiation of ABS (Access and Benet-Sharing) regimes and the building of a sui generis system for the regulation of TEK are key recommendations of the last COP (Conference of the Parties of the CBD Convention on Biological Diversity), which took place in march, 2006. The implementation of these guidelines demands the promotion of different initiatives of public participation in biotechnology and of participatory research with local communities, which are discussed in this paper. The analytical framework come from the articulation of concepts derived from the Sociology of Science and the Political Theory. The rst addresses the socially constructed character of knowledge while the second presents the background for the analysis of public engagement.
Truths Superb Surprise: Science Studies, NeoDarwinism and Theories of Social Relating
Myra Hird, Queens University
ABSTRACT: This paper is concerned with a critical theorization of three central tenets of neoDarwinism as they pertain to scholarly theories and public understandings of the structure of social relations: (1) humans evolved to be distinct from (by both degree and kind) all other living organisms; (2) social relations are largely structured through competition and individualism; and, (3) social relations are structured by sexual difference such that while gender relations may be uid and changeable, sex differences are an immutable fact. The implications of these tenets are profound: they place real limits on the ways in which social class, political, ethnic, generation and gender relations are conceptualized and practiced. For this reason, social scientists are particularly critical of the ways in which neoDarwinian assumptions underpin public debates about such vital issues as the character of humanity, the constitution of identity and the nature of relations between women and men, as well as more applied issues such as reproductive technologies, cloning and xenotransplantation. Recent advances in both empirical and more theoretical scientic studies in biology, chemistry and physics contest many of the long-standing assumptions maintained by neoDarwinism. At the same time, researchers in science studies are making important theoretical, empirical and ethical contributions to our understanding of human (and non-human) relations. This paper will encourage the ow of evidence and ideas between these hitherto largely separate explorations through an analysis of biological research on symbiogenesis and prokaryotology.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts be interesting to analyse those practises that try to shape, mobilize and work through the choices, desires, needs, and lifestyles of individuals, exploring how climate science in a governmentality perspective is used as a disciplining power; e.g. in what way is it possible to see climate science as a way of directing human conduct through moral obligation? In what way is it governing and disciplining the media and the public? In this paper I try to combine these two models - the domestication model and the discipline model in order to understand how the public constructs its understanding of climate science. The analysis suggests that climate change is symbolically domesticated as a major, but somewhat distant environmental threat. Cognitively it is appropriated as juxtaposition to any pollution problem that is difcult to deal with in practise. Climate science may further on be viewed as an unsuccessful attempt to disciplining the public, due to weak political translations and unruly mediators like the newspapers.
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Scientically Literate Citizenship in the United States in the 1980s: Challenges to the Decit Model of Public Understanding of Science
Jane L. Lehr, Virginia Tech
ABSTRACT: Efforts to increase the public understanding of science (PUS) provide a lens through which to understand the tacit democratic theory of both science and the state (Jasanoff 2005). It has been welldocumented that PUS efforts in the UK throughout the 1980s and 1990s relied upon an assumption of public ignorance. This decit model equates scientic literacy with scientic content. Many researchers in the area of science(s) and the public(s) now seem to take for granted that the decit model adequately describes other national efforts to increase the public understanding of science during this time period. However, drawing from research on the emergence of scientic illiteracy as an internal threat to the US nation in the 1980s, I show that the idealized relationship between scientic literacy and citizenship in the US emphasized, instead, the importance of training non-scientist citizens to think like scientists in their personal and public decision-making practices. Scientic literacy was thus equated with process rather than content from the 1980s onward in the US context (an emphasis only now apparent in the UK with efforts to increase public engagement with science and technology). This divergence in emphasis during the 1980s stems from differences in civic epistemologies (Jasanoff 2005) that is, how trust, credibility, accountability, and expertise are established in different cultural contexts. While of historical interest, this paper also emphasizes the necessity of grappling with the local and national contexts that provide the background for our work at the intersection of science(s) and public(s).
2.2L AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS: PICTURING PERSONHOOD: BRAIN SCANS AND BIOMEDICAL IDENTITY BY JOE DUMIT (PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004)
Organizer: Anne-Jorunn Berg, Bod Univeristy College
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Discussants: Sally Wyatt, Virtual Knowledge Studio; Knut Srensen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Marianne de Laet, Harvey Mudd College 2.2M A MORE SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY: DECISION VECTORS, EPISTEMIC FAIRNESS, AND CONSENSUS IN SOLOMONS SOCIAL EMPIRICISM
Organizer: Alison Wylie, Univesrity of Washington Chair: Alison Wylie
SESSION ABSTRACT: This session engages the details of a framework for socially naturalized analysis of the dynamics of scientic inquiry proposed by Miriam Solomon in Social Empiricism (MIT 2001). The impetus for her distinctive model of the interplay between decision vectors comes from sociological and historical critiques of Enlightenment epistemology which establish that scientic rationality is contingent, disunied, and socially emergent, and that scientic progress is often fostered by factors traditionally regarded as compromising sources of bias. While elements of Solomons social empiricism are widely shared, she intends it to be more resolutely social, more thoroughly naturalizing, and more ambitiously normative than other contextualizing epistemologies currently on offer. Contributors to this session bring diverse areas of expertise to bear on four focal issues raised by and about social empiricism: the viability of Solomons characterization of empirical success as a goal of science (Clough); her distinction between empirical and non-empirical decision vectors and the viability of the multivariate analysis she proposes for assessing epistemic fairness in their distribution (Clough; Richardson); the plausibility of her thesis that normatively appropriate consensus is a (rare) limiting case rather than an intrinsically desirable outcome of inquiry (Oreskes; Richardson); and her conviction that a socially naturalized analysis of science can ground norms of scientic rationality (Longino; Oreskes). This is an important juncture and an ideal context in which to explore the emerging community of ideas articulated in Social Empiricism that Solomon identies at the interface between philosophical and socio-historical science studies.
Solomons Science Without Conscience: Can There be Inquiry Without Ideal Agreement?
Alan Richardson, University of British Colulmbia
ABSTRACT: Peirce claimed, famously, that the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion (Peirce [1877] 1982, p. 67). This claim led Peirce to his characteristic and controversial account of truth. But the truth theory in Peirce seems more controversial than the account of inquiry it is based upon. Recently, Michael Friedman (2001) has used Peircean language to argue that agreement at the end of inquiry is a demand of reason, which Friedman understands on the model of the Kantian regulative a priori. The Peircean account of inquiry has, recently, been called into question by various current pluralisms in philosophy of science. Helen Longinos (2002) pluralistic philosophy of science leaves open the possibility that there will always be partial and mutually inconsistent models in science. Richardson (forthcoming) has used the Kantian regulative ideal to ask whether Longinos pluralism can serve as a source of methodological advice to scientists. Longinos pluralism stems, ultimately, from a claim about the objects of scientic theorizing; a different and more strikingly anti-Peircean line is taken by Miriam Solomon who argues directly that
4 S Final Program with Abstracts consensus is not a telos of science that should shape either normative or descriptive accounts (Solomon 2001, p. 115). On the face of it, it seems puzzling that a process that does not posit ultimate agreement in matters of belief would be properly called inquiry, however. This essay will use presuppositions about inquiry in the work of Peirce and Dewey (1938) to interrogate claims about scientic inquiry made by recently by Solomon. The results of this examination of the implicit model of inquiry in Solomon will then be used to evaluate Solomons own account of the role of diversity in the scientic community and the relationship she nds between her own views and standpoint epistemologies such as that offered by Harding (1991).
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The Devil is in the (Historical) Details: Continental Drift as a Case of Normatively Appropriate Consensus
Naomi Oreskes, University of California at San Diego
ABSTRACT: Miriam Solomon presents her social empiricism as a new social account of scientic rationality emerging from the antagonism between the traditional philosophical thesis of individual-based rationality and the SSK anti-thesis of social constructivism. But in doing so she largely ignores two decades of historical scholarship that has tracked the path she now advocates, and misreads some of the scholarship with which she does engage. I identify several examples of historical research that pursue lines of analysis that Solomon claims have been neglected (e.g., the distinction between pure and applied science), and that argue for points Solomon takes to be distinctive of her position; historians of science now routinely accept that one cannot understand scientists epistemic judgments without understanding the social fabric in which those judgments were grounded, and focus on understanding the diverse methods and forms of social engagement by which communities of investigators bring about the stabilization of empirical facts about the natural world. I also consider the implications of a misreading of the history of continental drift and plate tectonics. Solomon treats this case as an example of normatively appropriate scientic consensus on grounds that plate tectonics had all the available empirical successes, and she identies me as agreeing with Frankels assessment (in the 1980s) that the debate that resulted in consensus had no signicant politicalor social aspects. Despite all it did, there was much that plate tectonics failed to explain: spherical harmonics, intraplate tectonics disturbances, the persistence of certain continental features over geological eons, and, most famously, the Hawaiian Islands. If the consensus over plate tectonics was appropriate (and I believe it was), it was not because it had all the successes. In my own analysis of the case I argue that the processes by which scientists judged the evidence for theories of continental drift were thoroughly social and cultural: their divergent conclusions reected what I called epistemological afnities but, ...while these afnities expressed themselves epistemologicallyin terms if differential weightings of evidencetheir sources were largely social. (Oreskes, 1999, p. 53). As an historian, I would argue that Solomons requirements for appropriate consensus constitute a standard no scientic theory has met; there are always anomalies, and there have always been dissenters. Solomon needs a better normative justication for consensus, or her position degrades to a rejection of consensus tout court, and in that case a rejection of science as it has been practiced for at least three centuries, thereby collapsing any claim to naturalism.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts the decision matrix itself needs to be reconceptualized because the distinction Solomon is after in her prescription for scientic research effort is not that between empirical vs. non-empirical decision vectors, but between relevant vs. irrelevant decision vectors. Whether particular value judgments are relevant or not is an empirical question, to be decided, as with empirical questions generally, on a case-by-case basis.
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Friday Lunch
Discussants: Alan Richardson, UBC; Bernie Lightman, York University; Edna Einsiedel, University of Calgary; Sergio Sismondo, Queens University; Yves Gingras, UQAM ROUNDTABLE: WHAT CAN STS TELL US ABOUT THE HWANG CONTROVERSY? (FALSE CREEK 2 [H])
Organizer: Sang-Hyun Kim, Harvard University
Discussants: Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University; Brian Wynne, Lancaster University; Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Herbert Gottweis, University of Vienna; and Shinik Kang, Inje University
Friday 1:30-3:15pm
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Organizers: Tarleton Gillespie, Cornell University and Trevor Pinch, Cornell University Chair: Tarleton Gillespie
SESSION ABSTRACT: This panel gathers scholars interested in the social, legal, cultural, and technological implications of the phenomenon of remixing. Spurred by the digitization of music production and distribution and the embrace of the cut-and-paste logic of Net culture, the remix has emerged as a popular musical form. The mashup, a new genre that involves merging two songs into one, has quickly outgrown informal trading networks online to reach the stages of the most traditional of pop music events, the Grammys. Remix competitions are regularly held on rapidly expanding online music spaces -- sites that host both the music, the tools it requires, and the communities of users who form around them. Long-standing controversies about copyright have shaped the development of these techniques, even provoking online protests like Grey Tuesday defending the right to remix. This panel will consider the historical antecedents of the remix, the technologies necessary for their production and distribution, the sociocultural practices developing around them, and the legal and economic constraints shaping their place in online music culture. In doing so, it will consider how current techniques of cultural production is an important site for S&TS research.
Reconsidering the Historical Origins of the Remix: Motion Picture Projectionists in America, 1927-1930
Emily Thompson, Princeton University
ABSTRACT: For a brief period of time at the end of the 1920s, some motion picture projectionists in the United States used turntables, faders, microphones, and commercial records to create soundtracks to accompany the showing of silent motion pictures. By selecting various pieces of music and sound effects from assorted records, by cueing these excepts at the appropriate times, and by fading from one turntables output to anothers, projectionists created remixes of records that constituted musical scores to accompany silent lms. These live turntable performances were, however, conned to the projectionists booth. Invisible to theatre patrons, the work was unappreciated and theatre-goers may not have even realized they were listening to a live performance. While projectionists sound work was structurally identical to that performed later in the century by hip hop DJs, there is no evidence of historical continuity between these two sound practices, indeed the projectionists sound work was abandoned by 1930 and quickly forgotten. By considering why this technique was developed and then abandoned, this paper will provide historical context that may help explain the success of the more recent return to the remix.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts sophisticated software packages. These tools were put at the disposal of professional and amateur musicians alike, promising a democratization of music production. More recently, however, a different kind of democratization has been at work: following the innovative work of a new generation of DJs, remixers, and popular music enthusiasts, software designers have developed tools that facilitate the combination and processing of prerecorded material from diverse sources, confounding anew production and consumption. This paper will explore the development of analog and digital technologies for the production of music and their complex relationship to musical practices, styles and genres. The role of copyright in inhibiting or facilitating new forms of musica practica (Chanan) will also be addressed.
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Online Music: Who are the Users and What is the Use?
Trevor Pinch, Cornell University
ABSTRACT: Initial results are presented from a study of the on-line music site ACIdplanet.com. This site differs from most on-line sites in that the content is provided mainly by users, who post their own music and review each others work. Where content comes from mainstream artists these works are remixed and mashed-up in weekly competitions run by the site (now owned by Sony). The study involves interviews with users of the site, exploring how they use it, how they build identity and ultimately what such sites offer in terms of new forms of musicking.
Discussant: Jonathan Sterne, McGill University 2.3B AUTHOR MEETS CRITIC: A NICE DERANGEMENT OF EPISTEMES: POST-POSITIVISM IN THE STUDY OF SCIENCE FROM QUINE TO LATOUR BY JOHN H. ZAMMITO (CHICAGO, 2004)
Organizer: Miriam Soloman, Temple University
SESSION ABSTRACT: John H. Zammitos A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Study of Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago, 2004) is a scholarly history of science studies from Quine and Kuhn to the present. It critically engages a range of positions, starting with the Edinburgh Strong Program and moving on to micro-sociological studies, discourse analysis, actor-network theories, feminist critiques, reexivity and various kinds of social constructivism. It is a wonderful resource for those seeking a better understanding of STSs theoretical approaches, but (like any account) has a particular perspective. We propose an Author Meets Critics session, in which John Zammito would discuss his account with some of the major players and commentators in Science Studies. The purpose is not only to assess the soundness of Zammitos account, but also to identify promising directions for future work.
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That stupid prejudice against scientic agriculture: political economy, mechanism, and the rhetoric of state science in nineteenth-century America
Benjamin R. Cohen, University of Virginia
ABSTRACT: The rhetoric of agricultural improvement in America was longstanding and complex, as other papers in this session demonstrate. By the mid-nineteenth century, the association of scientic agriculture with agricultural policy had become culturally and politically legitimate. By then, states both North and South employed state chemists dedicated to analyzing fertilizers and other land specimens, educational curricula began more direct attempts to incorporate the science of agriculture into the fold, and improvers in the rural press argued that opposition to scientic agriculture was no more than stupid. But what conditions helped enable that utility of agricultural science for state policy? How was it so apparent that science was useful for state making? What broader social settings help explain how this success story came about? In this paper, I place the rise of scientically based state agriculture policy into two contexts: one, the shifting philosophies of nature evident in new mechanistic agriculture sciences of the mid-1800s; and two, the role of non-scientic agents in promoting the value of that science. With a nod to the idea of metis forwarded in James Scotts work, I discuss how the practical experience of American agrarians rst led them to introduce and nd merit in the science of agriculture. And with attention to the rhetoric evident in the rural press and state policy circles, I address how debates about political economy were framed by reference to newer concepts of soil identity. My point of interest is this: that the mid-1800s rise of a professional class of experts who could promote a state science-based agricultural policy was enabled by the conjunction of the new prominence of mechanistic agriculture science and the experience of ordinary agrarians in nding that science (chemistry, mostly) practical for their own purposes. So it is that we can learn a lot from people who supposedly dont know so much.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts sponsored agricultural science has served as a mechanism of repair, and I use the case of Californias vegetable industry to illustrate how science and agriculture have cooperatedand struggledover how to solve problems associated with a complex built environment for producing food on an industrial scale. The paper draws on several years of ethnographic eldwork with a group of UC agricultural scientists stationed in Californias Salinas Valley.
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Organizational Change and the Role of Expert Knowledge in the Romanian Post-Socialist Agrarian Transformation
Georgeta Vidican, MIT
ABSTRACT: Few social arrangements have affected so many people for so long in mans history as the law and custom governing the ownership and use of land. Aggravated further by the nationalization of housing and industry, the abolition of private property had affected a vast number of people under the centrally planned economic system. Therefore, after 1989 the successors of this regime found property (primarily in land) as an excellent vehicle for signaling to both their own populations and to the wider (capitalist) world that times had changed. Within this context, land reform became the rst priority on the national reform agenda, thriving to achieve the Western family farms organization model. After many years of social injustices and control of land by the state, restitution was the most politically appealing, and socially satisfactory option. However, incomplete and sluggish land reform led to the realignment of property relations seeking more productive uses, within an overall macroeconomic environment characterized by institutional instability and economic downturns. As a result, a variety of hybrid organizational forms were endogenously created. Subsistence family farms unable to make the magic leap forward to capitalist practices coexist with a variety of corporate structures. This talk will focus on the role of expert knowledge, of engineers, in shaping these new organizational forms created after dismantling the communist farming structures (i.e. collective farms, state farms). I argue that the role of the state in supporting the re-adjustment of these specialists to the new market-based economic system of production, and in advancing agricultural research, has been minimal. However, political afliations, power, and networks have been critical. The outcome has been a bi-modal agricultural structure, at odds with the EU family farms model. Moreover, differences across regions will be analyzed in light of the historical role played by the state.
The Whole Country are Bad Farmers: Empire and the Rhetoric of Improvement in the 18th-century British North Atlantic
Anya Zilberstein, MIT
ABSTRACT: As William Marshall, an eighteenth century British reformer who established an agricultural institute to unite theory and practice on a large scale, acknowledged: It is true, an illiterate rustic, who never entered a college of agriculture, can farm: and so he can converse. But Marshall believed that professional men were superior because, like the scientic navigator compared to the sherman, an educated farmer could apply his knowledge round the world, with condence and moral certainty; though he has no other pilot than science to direct him. The repetition and wide circulation of this opposition between enlightened and rustic farmers throughout the British Empire in personal letters, land surveys, local newspapers, and the minutes of agricultural societies makes it clear that both scholar and ignoramus were polarized types. They were as often as not rhetorical tropes of the abiding eighteenth discourse of modernity and state expansion-the discourse of improvement. By promoting agricultural improvementsubdividing estates, importing seeds, experimenting with fertilizers, and the like-provincial elites forged a transnational network of expertise binding the interests of landlords, politicians, and scientists. This talk will explore how the rhetoric of agricultural improvement naturalized the relationship between expertise and the territorial expansion of the empire and 2) how the actual practice of colonial agriculture, whether experimental or practical, was shaped by environmental and social constraints. By focusing specically on scientic and common farmers in colonial and early national New England and Nova Scotia, I will point to the resemblance and indeed, inuence, of ordinary on scientic agricultural practices. The crucial distinction between them, I argue, was improvers self-fashioning as and identication with other scientic practitioners throughout the enlightened world and, ultimately, their modernist belief that with modest adjustments their approach was practicable from tropical Kingston, Jamaica to cold temperate Kingston, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, or Nova Scotia.
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2.3D QUESTIONING RELEVANCE: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN STS AND STP
Organizer: Roger Pielke Jr., University of Colorado Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines Chair: Roger Pielke Jr.
SESSION ABSTRACT: Last year, at the 4S Annual Meeting, Bruno Latour suggested that we should remind ourselves that we are not in the business of imitating traditionally conceived ways of practicing the sciences, but in the business of studying how the sciences are really practiced in order to learn how to practice them differently. In effect, Latour posits that the STS community could do more to impact decisions about the practice of science. Thus, these decisions comprise the policies that STS purportedly seeks to inuence, which we refer to as science and technology policies (STP). In so doing, he and other STS scholars reveal an oft-overlooked boundary between STS and STP. We explore whether overlooking this boundary between the theories of STS and the practice of STP threatens the relevance of STS. Sheila Jasanoff echoes Latours sentiment: too much of the worlds economic and political order today depends on science and technology for STS scholars to retreat into esoteric epistemological debates (Jasanoff, 1999). This session evaluates and questions this boundary between STS and STP. It begins with an examination of the nature and goals of STS as a eld, and asks: as currently practiced, does STS describe, advise, or inform STP? Thus, it explores the relevance of STS in a general sense - in the context of decisions about science. It then evaluates the idea of relevance more comprehensively, and suggests a set of criteria of what useful information is and how this applies to STS. Subsequently, it asks what STS might lose by over-emphasizing relevance. Finally, this discussion examines how these ideas vary between the US and the UK in order to explore the transferability of issues of relevance.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts During last years 4S meeting, Bruno Latour challenged this community to realize its imperative of relevance. In so doing, he suggested that STS has an obligation not only to better understand the practice of and decisions about science and technology, but to better engage and assist those who make these decisions as well. In effect, he recommended that STS not stand apart from science and technology policy (STP), but should instead work with it to evaluate and inform decisions. Several other scholars, namely Steve Fuller, Sheila Jasanoff, Michael Guggenheim, and Helga Nowotny, voice similar sentiments. Others however, suggest that the goal of relevance serves only to distract the STS scholar from important questions as well as intellectual progress in the eld. This conict hints at fundamental questions facing STS: what are its goals, and how can it work to fulll them.? What ultimately should STS produce and how should it interact with STP? Finally, how well do the current products of STS accomplish this? This paper attempts to sort through recent trends in order to clarify the goals of STS, paying special attention to the benets coming to science from STS, and the verisimilitude of STS concepts when compared to the empirical work of STP. It will examine the historical interest in relevance within the eld, and will then discuss the current trends in this regard. It will ultimately strive to answer this question: are these calls for relevance an indication of a broader trend and possibly an emerging goal for the eld or are they simply short-term indigestion spurred on by a subset of scholars?
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Reclaiming Educational Value in Public Engagement with Science and Technology: PEST as a Site of Informal Science Learning
Brandiff R. Caron, Virginia Tech Ellen McCallie, Kings College London Sarah Davies, Imperial College London Ben Gammon, Science Museum of London Sally Duensing, Kings College London Jane Lehr Kings College London
ABSTRACT: Today, a new mood for dialogue has emerged within scientic and technical decision-making processes. This desire for increased public involvement has resulted in a growing number of mechanisms to increase public engagement with science and technology (PEST). In this paper, we suggest that to understand the role, value, and practice of PEST, it is necessary to distinguish between two classes: (1) mechanisms that seek to enable direct public inuence on policy-making and (2) mechanisms that seek to promote a broader culture of public dialogue between scientists, policymakers, and various publics but do not seek to enable direct public inuence on policy-making. This differentiation is necessary because class 2 mechanisms are currently invisible within the research literature due to the establishment of impact
4 S Final Program with Abstracts on policy as the primary criteria of success for PEST positioning class 2 mechanisms as truly second class, in all senses of the term. In this paper, we explore the usefulness of reconceptualizing the class 2 mechanisms as sites of informal science learning. In this exploration, we address four questions: First, in rejecting the decit model of education, is it necessary to reject the possibility of education altogether? Second, how does understanding class 2 mechanisms as sites of informal science learning change our understanding and assessment of their role, value, and practice? Third, how does understanding class 2 mechanisms as sites of informal science learning change our understanding of PEST mechanisms that seek to enable direct public inuence on policymaking?
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts the denitions and concepts used in gender and technology studies. The aim of the paper is hereby to take risks to take steps into the unknown and unvisited feminist technology research by revisiting our own use of concepts and denitions. We also want to explore if there are some brave ones, who already have visited the unknown and who can tell new stories of their journeys and experiences?
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Delicate Empiricism and Other/Older Ways of Knowing: Anthropology and Goethes Science in the Age of Aquarius
Kyriaki Papageorgiou, University of California, Irvine
ABSTRACT: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe believed that his major contribution to humanity would not be his literary works but his scientic writings. Between composing poetry and theatrical plays, Goethe spent most of his time conducting numerous experiments on plants, color, and weather phenomena. His observations formed the basis of an approach to the natural world that provided an alternative epistemology to the prevalent scientic paradigm. Termed delicate empiricism by Goethe himself, this methodology contested the dualistic and mechanistic ways instituted by Galileo, Newton, and Descartes and argued against Kants separation between subject and object. For Goethe, the mathematical and quantitative nature of modern scientic inquiry excluded large areas of phenomena that could only be qualitatively captured. Key to Goethes scientic methodology is a conscious-process-participation whereby the scientist is an active participant of the phenomena observed by employing his intuition, imagination, and inspiration. After two centuries of near silence, the proposed paper presents Goethes delicate empiricism and positions it against recent scholarship in science studies, particularly Bruno Latours work. The paper begins with my discovery of Goethes science while conducting eld research in Egypt among practitioners of an alternative/organic farming movement called biodynamics. What distinguishes biodynamics from organic farming is a series of preparations that reect a broader approach to plant growth inspired by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of the infamous anthroposophical movement who was greatly inuenced by Goethe. Steiner
4 S Final Program with Abstracts edited the complete volume of Goethes works in 1888 and was a great advocate of Goethes Kantian critique of concept/percept division. This presentation suggests that Goethes epistemology has survived in biodynamic agriculture and has also found renewed support in other alternative scientic new age circles that embrace older ways of knowing such as intuition and channeling. Goethes delicate empiricism, my paper proposes, offers a productive addition to discussions on method in science and science studies, and a creative way to address this years theme of silence, survival and other/older ways of knowing.
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The Integration of Other Ways of Knowing: Knowledge and Information Sharing in the Management of the British Columbia Salmon Fishery
Catherine Collins, Indiana University
ABSTRACT: Since the early 1980s, social scientists have attempted to increase awareness of the overlooked and undervalued knowledge of sh harvesters. Harvester knowledge, or local ecological knowledge (LEK), has generally been ignored by sheries management institutions, and yet holds much promise for modern sheries management. The current management approach for sheries in British Columbia adopts the principle of sustainability (Fisheries & Oceans Canada (DFO), 2001). One of the tenets of sustainability is to nd ways to combine and share a wide range of knowledge that originates in differing epistemological traditions (Kates, et al., 2001). Researchers have identied several categories based on, cultural factors, technological factors, structural factors, power asymmetries and ethical considerations, funding concerns, and legal requirements, as barriers to or facilitators for the integration of harvester knowledge with scientic knowledge for use in management planning and decision making. This multiple case study utilizes semistructured interviews of 36 leaders of harvester, scientic, and management organizations, to discover patterns of communication and sharing of LEK, as well as attitudes toward both sharing and the shared
4 S Final Program with Abstracts knowledge, within and across organizations. Preliminary results show: 1) vastly differing levels of capacity for sharing knowledge and for utilizing shared knowledge; 2) a range of formal and informal methods for communication and knowledge sharing, and, 3) unequal degrees of willingness to participate in knowledge sharing with all harvester groups.
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Upon Opening and nding it empty? Lessons from anti-dam movement in India for politics and STS
Esha Shan, University of Sussex
ABSTRACT: Several political controversies in India, especially in the last two decades, have been about science and technology, such as: social and environmental desirability of large dams and nuclear power, social impact of green revolution technology, industrial accidents like Bhopal disaster and more recently biotechnology. There also exists a vibrant debate in India on merits and demerits of traditional and modern science and technology, on history of colonial technology, and on philosophy of science. And, still it is not uncommon that STS is considered a case of a missing discipline in India. One of the leading scholars in India called STS as deaf and mute on democratic imagination. Especially in responding to real life situations involving adjudication between alternative technologies in India, the black box of STS is often found politically empty. In this paper, I intend to revisit a two decade-old debate on the social desirability of large dams, which was inspired by one of the most prominent anti-dam movements in India, to understand why is STS a case of a missing discipline. In 1987, on World Bank approving the funding for the construction of two large dams on the river Narmada, which would have displaced 2.7 million people mainly from the protected tribes and castes and transformed the river ecology irreversibly, a social movement was initiated against the construction of the dams. During the next two decades, the movement heralded a highly polarized, high pitch debate on the social and environmental appropriateness of the large dams. This debate took place largely in the disciplinary boundaries of social sciences and discussed issues such as costs benet ratio and social, ecological and economic impact of large dams. Normative issues such as whose development at whose cost, alternative development and alternative to development, whose science and technology, validity of expert science vis--vis citizen knowledge were centrally discussed in this debate. And still, the methods, tools and concepts prominently employed in the international STS were rarely engaged with, the discipline of STS was rarely even referred to in this debate. Two worlds of the debate on appropriateness of large dams and STS were resolutely separate. The paper will attempt to answer why. Ultimately, I intend to push the boundaries of STS scholarship internationally to include the issues that are more specic to developing countries. This paper will make a plea for the new concepts, methods and epistemologies that can induct politics in the STS to ultimately address the development issues.
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Safety from ooding in low countries: Katrina, New Orleans and the Netherlands
Anna Wesselink, University of Twente
ABSTRACT: In this paper I show Dutch culture to be a technological culture vulnerable to ooding, but with no apparent choice except to continue with the historically developed system for ood risk management. I also show that this vulnerability is socially constructed, e.g. through a combination of political decisions on nancing and a lack of risk awareness. The question whether there is a need or even a possibility to escape from the present technological lock-in remains out of bounds for a society that imagines ood protection to be absolute. The need for the same absolute protection was claimed in New Orleans just after Katrina caused extensive ooding. Because of its circumstances and its much shorter history New Orleans seems to have opportunities to deal with ood risks in a more creative, accommodating way.
Naturalized Disaster
Dehlia Hannah, Columbia University
ABSTRACT: The aesthetic concept of the sublime describes the paradoxical pleasure of witnessing the overwhelming power of nature from a position of safety with respect to that power. This paper examines the concept of the sublime in a time of epistemological and technological domination of nature, and argues that, for some members of wealthy technoscientic societies, natural disaster has become a perverse object of sublime enjoyment. Increasing capacities for prediction and control over nature expand and multiply positions of safety with respect to dangerous natural phenomena, but at the same time foreclose opportunities for the pleasurable perception of nature as immensely powerful. Too much power over nature renders the sublime elusive and dangerous nature all the more attractive, to the point, I argue, where pleasure must be derived vicariously from the real fear and suffering of others. Human relations to nature are socially stratied with respect to danger as well as pleasure. The benets of technoscientic prediction, control and response to natural phenomena are evenly distributed internationally as well as within communities in wealthy nations. As recent events including hurricane Katrina and the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean
4 S Final Program with Abstracts have made clear, the impact of natural phenomena on human life and interests is radically mediated by the socioeconomic and political contexts in which they occur. Naturalization renders disaster blameless, relieves social responsibility, and provides an opportunity for display of pure compassion, untainted by feelings of guilt, obligation and resentment that tend to undermine sympathy for the victims of catastrophic social conditions of war, poverty and environmental destruction. Aestheticization and depoliticization produce naturalized disaster as an antidote to social catastrophe.
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Inventing Culture/Constructing Knowledge: Roger Revelle and The Polynesian and the Scientist
Laura Harkewicz, University of California, San Diego
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the claim that, in times of scientic discipline development and periods of conict between applied and basic science, expressions of difference are important to the construction of identity within the disciplinary community. To explore this argument, I will deconstruct a speech delivered by Scripps Institution of Oceanography director (and future founder of the University of California, San Diego), Roger Revelle, in March 1954. In the speech titled, The Polynesian and the Scientist, Revelle invoked well-known images of a Pacic paradise. He noted that the purpose of his speech was not to create Edenic revelry and dreams of escape in the minds of his audience but rather to trace their heredity, as Westerners, to the ancient men of reason and knowledge the Greeks and the Jews. Although Revelle did not specify the special place of the scientist in the speech, further analysis of the entire text will illustrate how he articulated his place as standing outside of the experience of the common person, explicitly the Polynesian but implicitly the non-scientist. Revelle invoked the image of difference to justify the expert/ lay divide that marks the connes of authority in modern knowledge production. By legitimating these images through scientic authority, alternative representations were silenced forcing Pacic Islanders to be conned to the spaces constructed by science and popular culture.
Theyre Here, I Can Feel Them: The Epistemic Spaces of Indigenous Knowledge
Annette Watson, University of Minnesota
ABSTRACT: Studies that utilize IK frequently adhere to a conception of expertise that is actually quite analogous to the Western expert: the elder, the person who has drawn from years of experience and the experience of elders before to testify about environmental conditions. The knowledge that these elders share is of course extraordinarily valuable to researchers from disciplines ranging from wildlife biology to climatology. But this characterization nonetheless does not encompass how this knowledge accumulates and circulates. Therefore, like other ethnographies of scientic practice, we will articulate the practices of IK involving moose and Koyukon hunters in Interior Alaska. We follow the practice of a single moose hunt, which demonstrates two things: rst, it shows the importance that the geographic concept of space has in Indigenous epistemologies. Second, it shows the importance that non-visual senses play in the making of Indigenous knowledge about moose. Instead of an objective practice which aims to divorce facts from the contexts in which they are understood, it is this very engagement with contexts that distinguish Native expertise from Western expertise. Furthermore, we argue that these are not merely places or locations, such as a laboratory within which experts practice, but that these are spaces created through an engaged relationship with the environment, animals, and ancestors. Demonstrated here is an ethical component of IK in the form of the conceived relationship with moosewith both humans and moose occupying the same ontological plane.
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Live Data Mining for Games Research: Techniques, Challenges, and Ethical Considerations
Nic Ducheneaut, Xerox PARC
ABSTRACT: not available
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Genealogies of Play: Surveillance, Discipline, and the Training of the Virtual Body, or How to Make a Docile Avatar
Douglas Thomas, University of Southern California
ABSTRACT: not available
Organizers: Valerie Hanson, Philadelphia University and Melissa Littleeld, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
SESSION ABSTRACT: Our proposed panel will explore what may be obscured in seemingly transparent or clear presentations of scientic work. Specically, we are interested in the effects of omission, silence and exclusion on the production and dissemination of information using technologies like scanning probe microscopy, polygraph, IMAX, and language. Images and graphic outputs may seem easily understandable: they record natural phenomena, reveal processes we cannot see with our naked eyes and follow standards of quantication. Yet, these images, graphs, representations are manufactured. What they communicateand dontabout a technology to non-scientist viewers obscures some vital aspects of their production. One example can be found in the forensic science of polygraphy which has made criminality and interiority seem transparent to its publics. What gets obscured are a few things: use of women as subjects, classication of behaviors as criminal, necessity of interpretation for the graphic record. Each of our panelists works with and beyond such concepts as Bruno Latours concept of black boxing. Thus, we combine studies of rhetoric, technology, gender and literature as we investigate the scientic processes involved in communicating science. By bringing together a wide range of technologies, theoretical techniques and genres, we hope to illustrate some common themes: what types of subjects are obscured? What networks, hypotheses and information are silenced? What counts as transparent knowledge? And what determines effective scientic communication to a lay public?
4 S Final Program with Abstracts systolic blood pressure deception detection test. His early experiments attempt to categorize several deviant mental states through an examination of particular subject populations: Negroes and women. These initial experiments on and conclusions about raced and gendered bodies have been largely erased from polygraphys disciplinary record, even as assumptions about subjects/suspects remain integrated in scientic hypotheses. To uncover the ways that these polygraphic records signify in scientic and public presentations, we must return to eras before technologies become black boxed. I will illustrate the ramications of my argument through graphic records and rhetorical explanations published in journal articles, popular magazines, polygraph manuals and, nally, some contemporary research on post-9/11 lie detection.
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Manufacturing Dissent: Global Warming, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Scientic Truth
Jenell Johnson, Pennsylvania State University
ABSTRACT: In this paper I analyze the rhetorical strategies and political consequences of a memo by the Luntz Research Companies that deliberately attempts to obscure scientic consensus about human inuence on climate change. The memo, leaked to the press by the Environmental Working Group in 2003, addresses the language that GOP politicians should use when discussing matters of the environment with the public, with particular attention to the issue of global warming. In the battle for public opinion about the environment, Luntz urges politicians to make the science of global warming the matter of debate, despite the overwhelming consensus within the scientic community about the human inuence on climate change. In a recent article, Bruno Latour uses the memo to provoke a reevaluation the role of critique within science studies (Matters of Fact), but neglects the signicant political effects when scientic truth becomes a matter of political concern. I argue that Hannah Arendts normative theory of the demarcation between the scientic and political realms offers a compelling answer to the question posed by the Luntz memo.
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Organizers: Flis Henwood, University of Brighton; and Roma Harris, The University of Western Ontario
Ending the Silence of Ethno-cultural Communities with Technology: A Case Study of Video Technology with the Farsi-speaking community in British Columbia.
Iraj Poureslami, University of British Columbia Irving Rootman, University of Victoria Ellen Balka, Simon Fraser University.
ABSTRACT: In recent years, great emphasis has been placed in Canada on the availability of consumer health information and self-care resources delivered directly to the public via telephone, the Internet, and other technologically-based approaches. One assumption is that these approaches can help individuals to prevent injuries and monitor and/or manage symptoms from home, school, or workplace; thereby reducing unnecessary use of hospital care services and emergency rooms. However, in order for these resources to be effective, individual consumers require a minimum level of health literacy; that is, being able to access, understand, evaluate and communicate the information available. Internet health resources in
4 S Final Program with Abstracts particular require a specic skill set such as basic reading and writing skills in the language in which the information is available, a working knowledge of computers, a basic understanding of science, as well as an appreciation of the social context that mediates how online health information is produced, transmitted and received -- the skills now widely referred to as eHealth literacy. Therefore, while consumer-directed health information resources hold great potential for improving public health and easing demand on health systems, their value depends largely on the ability of their intended users to access, understand, and use them effectively. The current study investigated whether Iranian community, among BCs largest and fastest-growing immigrant communities, who live in the Greater Vancouver Area (GVA) are using the BC HealthGuide (BCHG) program, and if so, when and for what purposes is it being used, and levels of satisfaction with and users perceptions of the resources. The ndings reported here cover a portion of the study aimed to assess attitudes towards and perceptions of this community about the Online (Internet) feature of BCHG program, and explored a model for introducing the BCHG Online services to ethnic communities in the GVA and BC.
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Invisible and (usually) silent: The challenge of information exchange for rural-dwellers living the HIV and AIDS
Irving Rootman, University of Victoria Judith Krajnak, University of British Columbia Roma Harris, The University of Western Ontario Leslie Bella, Memorial University of Newfoundland Tiffany Veinot, The University of Western Ontario
ABSTRACT: People living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs) in rural Canada face special challenges in locating help and information. In-depth interviews with PHAs, along with their friends and family members from rural regions in three Canadian provinces, suggest that rural-dwelling PHAs face signicant HIV/AIDS-related stigma and frequently experience isolation and loneliness as they face a challenging health concern. Some participants have confronted stigmatizing attitudes and misconceptions about the disease when they share their experience with others in their communities. Some hesitate to seek information locally if they must disclose their disease status and, as a result, have small personal networks for HIV/AIDS-related support and instead rely heavily on formal care providers. In contrast, a few PHAs have refused to be silenced, and have undertaken leadership roles as visible information leaders in their rural communities. Their contribution is signicant during physician shortages and under-resourced health services in rural areas, when lack of local formal care forces many participants to seek support from service providers in (sometimes distant) urban locations. Many of the participants in our study lack the nancial resources or skills to use the Internet, adding to their reliance on expensive and time-consuming travel to obtain needed services. Further adding to their isolation are hospital policies regarding email use with patients that may prevent e-support for those who live at a distance. We argue that local stigma, coupled with the overwhelming concentration of HIV/ AIDS-related services in urban areas, perpetuates the silence of rural-dwelling PHAs and enables many rural-dwellers to view the disease as an urban issue that doesnt affect them.
The promotion of self-reliance: How e-health strategies shift the burden of care
Roma Harris, The University of Western Ontario Jana Fear, The University of Western Ontario
ABSTRACT: The idea of consumer empowerment has been embraced by governments and other organizations in order to contain health care costs by encouraging people to stay healthy and avoid unnecessary use of services. The presumed basis of empowerment is public access to health information. Informed, empowered consumers are positioned as those who take responsibility for their own health, are enabled to make health decisions, and are in control and capable of self-care (usually at home). Taking care home means that many of the tasks involved in personal health maintenance and illness management will fall to women, including the work of nding and interpreting health information. The internet is an important enabler of this work and is used extensively by women to locate and pass along information about health, including treatment options and support services. However, because of the immediacy and continuity of its presence and the vast range of information to which it provides a link, the internet also creates imperatives that may add to the burden of womens care work. Women have not only internalized the idea that they are obliged to keep themselves healthy, but also that they are responsible for maintaining the wellbeing of others. As a
4 S Final Program with Abstracts result, women often feel obliged to be vigilant about new information related to illnesses, treatment, health conditions, and strategies for healthy living that is, or might be, relevant to themselves or members of their families. And, when they encounter this information, women may not only have the job of translating it, but taking follow-up action as a result. Case examples will be presented to illustrate some of the gender and technology relations that are embedded in the public health discourse of self-reliance.
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2.3L NANOTECHNOLOGY II
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Beyond Empowerment and Mobilization: The role of citizens in the US nanotechnology policy
Byoungyoon Kim, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: This paper explores how the scientic community conceives of the role of citizens in the decision-making of nanotechnology development in the United States. After the debacles concerning biotechnology and global warming in the 90s, scientists and science policy circles became more aware of the role of citizens in technological decision-making. Thus, the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), launched in 2000, has incorporated social and ethical considerations into the research plan as well. These concerns, which stress the correspondence of research to citizens interests, even citizen participation in policy process, implicitly assume the correspondence of NNI with democratic ideals. Previous discussions of democracy in science and technology have tended to assess the degree to which citizens have been empowered with decision-making. In this paper, I aim to explore the transformation of the science-citizen-
4 S Final Program with Abstracts government nexus in the United States. I intend to investigate the scientic understanding of citizenship and democracy revealed by ofcial reports and implementation plans regarding nanotechnology. Through the examination of the past ve years discussion about nanotechnology policy from the lens of democratic theory, I will track and interpret the changing conguration and of science, government, and citizenship in the landscape of the politics of science.
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Organizers: Cori Hayden, University of California, Berkeley and Stefan Ecks University of Edinburgh Chair: Cori Hayden
Brand India and the Clinical Trial: Experimental Machineries and Desiring Machines of Biocapital
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of California, Irvine
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I explore the almost breathless establishment of clinical research infrastructure currently underway in India, with an aim to making it the top destination for outsourced global clinical trials from the West (mainly the United States). I do so by analyzing a number of apparently incongruent emergences in the clinical research arena in India. For instance, instead of Western companies seeking out cheap Third World destinations to perform their trials, one sees Indian state and corporate actors explicitly strategizing how to brand India as the ideal destination for clinical trials (a branding that is akin to, and indeed performed in the manner of, the branding of India as a tourist destination). I ask two questions here. The rst concerns the affective structure of this phenomenon -- why would a nation pride itself on being the worlds primary site for clinical experimentation? The second concerns infrastructure -- what does it actually take, in terms of both technoscientic as well as legal and regulatory capacity, to make Brand India for clinical trials? I address these questions through ethnographic research conducted amongst regulators, members of the clinical research industry, and physicians in India, as well as with a US-based company seeking clinical research alliances in India.
Silent Suffering and Loud Numbers: Mass Clinical Risk and Prognostic Sovereignty
Joseph Dumit, University of California, Davis
ABSTRACT: Planet-scale risk rates suggest planet-scale drug markets, as if clinical trial guidelines are biological reality. Public health ofcials, doctors, and mass media regularly talk in supra-national numbers, such as Globally, the discrepancy is even more dramatic: About 25 million are taking the pills while an estimated 200 million meet guidelines for treatment [for high cholesterol with statins]. 200 million people worldwide is presented as a new target number, one out of every thirty persons in the world. Global biological citizens are here imagined as already committed to, but failing to live up to the U.S. standards
4 S Final Program with Abstracts imposed by clinical trials gured as global ethical forms. Based on eldwork, archives, and interviews with biomedical marketers, doctors, and economists, this paper seeks to understand the increasing convertibility of aggregated future suffering measured through market risk rates, and underwriting national and international monitoring and interventions.
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Pharmaceuticals and mass politics, or: medicine, markets, and the popular in Latin America
Cori Hayden, University of California, Berkeley
ABSTRACT: Does the emergence of a range of policies promoting generic drugs signal a resurgence of the public good or even the state in Latin America as a countervailing force to corporate intellectual property? Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Mexico and Argentina, this paper suggests that the answer to such a question might well be no. The paper outlines two very distinctive articulations of a politics of the generic. Noting Argentinas reversal of the taxonomies of legitimate and illegitimate pharmaceuticals that dominate the generics question in Mexico, this paper will discuss the limits of notions of the liberal pharmaceutical public domain, highlighting how discussions of a politics of access can seep out of the framework of patent and generic.
2.4A BETWEEN CONSTITUTION AND EMPIRE: PRODUCING SCIENCE AND CITIZENS IN GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS
Organizers: David Winickoff, U.C. Berkeley; Mark B. Brown, California State University, Sacramento
SESSION ABSTRACT: Within the process of economic integration and disintegration known as globalization, certain nodal institutions have emerged around trade, environment, and development e.g., WTO, World Bank and the U.N.E.P. in which powerful new representations of the world are emerging simultaneously with supranational political order. How do such global institutions think, and how do their cognitive processes allow citizen-actors to appear or disappear within global legal and political rationalities? How do mechanisms of political representation within such institutions congure global knowledges, and vice versa? How are traditional constitutional triads such as citizens, norms and institutions co-emerging with the
4 S Final Program with Abstracts constitution of knowledges and globalizing epistemologies, e.g., the epistemology of sound science? How can individual citizens of the world polity, and their actor-networks, achieve standing in the co-emergent processes of global knowledge production and political world-making? How do the emergent federalisms within global order simultaneously give voice to some constituencies, even as they silence others.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts their binding status and their interpretive exibility makes the World Trade Organization and its legal process a key locus for the constitution of regulatory worldmaking. Exploring the role of science within WTO legal process and ideology, this paper argues the importance of science both as idea and practice in constituting, often tacitly, normative hierarchies as well as spheres of power in the regulation of life.
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Dirty Pretty Things of Neo-Liberal Globalization: Medical Tourism, Medical Transcription, and Drug Testing by Multinational Companies in India
Sirupa Prasad, University of Missouri-Columbia Amit Prasad, University of Missouri-Columbia
ABSTRACT: Parallel to a growing convergence on neo-liberal globalization in the last decade or so among the Indian middle class and the ruling elite, there is a new imagination of an Indian citizen that is emerging - which has a variety of dimensions such as that of a global citizen (though this is visualized through an Indian lens), a consumer, or as people skilled in science/mathematics. Such an imagination is not merely an ideological construct; it has also been constituting citizens rights in different and hierarchical ways. Moreover, since the pretensions and entrapments of a welfare state are still present in the Indian governments policies, neo-liberal globalization is creating several contradictions, sometimes in the very denition of a citizen and citizens rights. We will analyze some such emerging contradictions in relation to medical tourism, medical transcription, and drug testing.
Building the World at the Patent Ofce: Dening Science and the Polity at the European Patent Ofce
Shobita Parthasarathy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT: In 2000, the European Patent Ofce (EPO) issued DuPont a patent covering a variety of maize with high-oil content (that had been cultivated through both traditional and genetic engineering techniques). A number of groups, including the Mexican government, Greenpeace, and Misereor (the overseas development agency for the German Catholic Church), expressed anger at the patent, arguing that the invention was an example of biopiracy, because corn varieties similar to those claimed in the patent had been cultivated and used in Central and South America. If the patent was not revoked, they warned, there could be catastrophic consequences for small farmers in developing countries. These groups were able to do more than simply express their concern through public statements and press conferences, however. They took advantage of EPOs opposition mechanism and challenged the patent. EPO allows anyone to challenge any patent within 9 months of its issue, on a variety of grounds including charges that the invention is not novel or inventive, not useful, is a discovery, or is contrary to ordre public or morality.) In this paper, I describe this opposition process and its resolution, with a particular focus on the emergence of EPO as a global site for science and technology policymaking. In this case, groups from both inside and outside Europe challenged the maize patent, forcing EPO to consider its decisionmaking processes in a global context. What kinds of groups had standing, and how was invention determined on a global scale? What kind of scientic and political world did EPO envision?
4 S Final Program with Abstracts farmers and consumers. I present a history and the development of international rice research as viewed through the RF, and ask how the global and its publics get constructed. I argue that the RFs historical and contemporary involvement in rice research raises crucial questions of representation concerning both how such research gets framed to a wider global public, and who gets spoken for through such rhetorical use. At the same time as rice research is presented as globally benecial, the beneciaries of such research are made to be the poor and marginal of the Third World. Such a discursive construction has important representational consequencesnot just in creating certain types of citizens or consumers, but also often in silencing the lived realities of those it claims to represent.
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Negotiating Global Norms: The Role of the Codex Alimentarius Commission in the Global Architecture of Trade, Health, and Environment
Douglas Bushey UC Berkeley,
ABSTRACT: The 1995 WTO Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS) ensures that domestic legislation regulating food safety is not unduly burdensome to international trade. However, the SPS also provides safe harbor for trade restrictive domestic regulations that are based on the standards made by the Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex). This study explores the shifts in structure and function that have occurred in the Codex in the last decade as a result of its elevated status within the global trading order. The rise of the Codex as an international legal body has led to rapid increases in both participation within the organization, as well as external scrutiny of its activities. The de facto enforceability of these experts recommendations and their perceived independence from the WTO has made them into an international analog to Jasanoffs Fifth Branch. This paper compares this international body of experts to their domestic counterparts, and identies four processes that this group of experts has utilized in order to shore up its own legitimacy and secure its continued role as an arm, or branch of WTO power. (1) Democratic decision making has been introduced within scientic bodies. (2) Decision making norms have shifted from a consensus model to a majority-vote model. (3) Issues are increasingly framed in terms of risk. (4) Boundary work has intensied in the form of an attempt to more rigidly separate risk assessment from risk management.
Discussants: David Winickoff, U.C. Berkeley and Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University 2.4B WHATS TO BE DONE WITH UNDONE SCIENCE?
Organizers: Scott Frickel, Tulane University and David J. Hess, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Chair: Scott Frickel
Between genomics and the breast cancer lobby; mapping the shifting space of the environment in breast cancer genetic research
Sahra Gibbon, University College London
ABSTRACT: The recent emergence of breast cancer genetics at the forefront of a rapidly evolving eld of predictive medicine has been situated as part of revolutionary approach to preventative health care(Department of Health, UK 2003). Such developments index the way a diverse breast cancer lobby has helped mobilise public awareness of the disease and how the condition has become the target for and garnered a very large proportion of health care and scientic research investment. Yet the emergence of novel arenas of medicine and science, such as breast cancer genetics, stand in contrast to way that concerns about possible environmental dangers are framed and addressed. Drawing on ethnographic research with health practitioners and scientists working inside emergent elds of breast cancer genetics in the UK this paper examines how the environment has been constructed as space of contingency, uncertainty and/or undoability in relation to breast cancer. At the same time the paper acknowledges the shifting ground on which the environment is being congured. It reects on how a new paradigm of systems biology taking shape across various arenas of genomic research meets an increasingly vocal and scientically savvy segment of the UK breast cancer lobby determined to make the case for environmental research.
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But for buckets: Regulatory standards and the undoing of citizen science
Gwen Ottinger, University of Virginia
ABSTRACT: How pollution from chemical manufacturing facilities affects the health of residents of adjacent communities has been a concern of community members, environmentalists, and (arguably) environmental regulatory agencies. Nonetheless, few systematic efforts have been made to determine the extent of residents actual exposure to toxic chemicals in these so-called fenceline communities. In response to this dearth of information, some communities have used homemade, low-cost air samplers, known as buckets, to measure the levels of toxic chemicals in the air that they breathe. Their results, however, have not contributed to the slim body of scientic knowledge about environmental quality in fenceline communities; rather, they have struggled to gain any recognition from regulatory and industry scientists. Thus, despite community members efforts to do it, environmental monitoring in fenceline communities remains apparently undone. This paper argues that regulatory standards play a major role in marginalizing communities environmental monitoring efforts and perpetuating the lack of scientic knowledge about chemical exposures in fenceline communities. First, the standardization of methods for collecting and analyzing air samples constrains residents participation in environmental monitoring in myriadsometimes ambiguousways. Second, the form taken by regulatory standards for ambient air toxics concentrations circumscribes the domains in which bucket results can be viewed as meaningful data. Moreover, it limits the possibilities available for either residents or scientists to represent the aspects of environmental quality of most concern to fenceline communities.
Undone Science, Unproven Therapies: The Status of Energy Healing in the New Medicine
Paula Jean Davis, University of Pittsburgh
ABSTRACT: A philosophical element of mystical traditions including Tantra, Susm, Neoplatonism, and Taoism, auras or subtle bodies mediate the ow of life-force (prana, qi, life force), serving as conduits (chakras) to higher states of consciousness through practices of contemplation, breathing, and movement. Recent work by Barbara Brennan (1987), Rosalyn Bruyere (1989) and Valerie Hunt (1989) uses scientic language, concepts, and methods to explain the phenomena: life-force becomes energy; aura is replaced by the more precise human energy eld or HEF; energy ow is quantied by measuring chakras; and interactions of energy and the HEF are characterized as electromagnetic wave motion. In her conception, the HEF surrounds and penetrates the physical body, extending as much as two feet beyond the bodys surface, and existing in layers of varying colors and textures. Her goal in writing the science of human auras is to develop and validate healing modalities that work by detecting, manipulating, and balancing the HEF (energy healing). This paper examines the status of energy healing in current policy debates and political struggle around the formation of the new medicinea blending of mainstream biomedicine and alternative therapies. I rst describe activities of those who are doing the science of energy healingenergy healers, academic research groups, NIH-funded research centers, equipment manufacturers (Kirlian and GDV imaging)and the scientically based studies completed on therapies that work with bioeld energy. Next I discuss more recent efforts at undoing the science of the human bioeld, e.g. activities of NCCAM, NIH review panels, and sceptics. Finally I will attempt to explain why the new medicine has chosen to do some energy medicine (electro-acupuncture, TENS), and to undo others, leaving energy healing and bioeld therapies unproven.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts funding or institutional approval to continue the study, to losing face among ones peers, to facing the possibility that their work will be (mis)used to cause something terrible out there in the world. Likewise, researchers strategies for managing these boundaries vary depending on ideological or pragmatic issues. Like any other form of deviance, there are those who revel in it, while others avoid it at all costs.
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Undoing innovation
Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the question of what new knowledges might become possible through some undoing of prevailing discourses of knowledge production. More particularly, my focus is on undoing rhetorics of innovation within the context of technology research and development. I take this to be at once a theoretical and an empirical project, involving the analysis of material practices both within the research lab and beyond, in generative engagement with explorations by science and technology studies scholars of the imaginaries and arrangements that inspire and legitimate the initiatives that those practices enact. This includes understanding the ways in which, as Barry (1999) suggests, a translation of innovation as speed of change might work less to expand the space of possibilities than to hold things in place. The aim in subjecting the trope of innovation to critical scrutiny is neither to dismiss nor to reappropriate it, but rather to respecify change as both a strategic category, and as a gloss for more deeply ambivalent and contested forms of ongoing practical activity.
Discussant: David Hess, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 2.4C TECHNOLOGY: POWER, TRUTH AND CULTURE
Chair: Steven A. Walton, Pennsylvania State University
Technology as culture and technology as practice: The idea of progress in some Latin American countries
Monica Salazar, Simon Fraser University Sandra Daza, Colombian Observatory of Science and Technology Angela Rivera, Colombian Observatory of Science and Technology
ABSTRACT: We truly live in technology world or a technological culture, were social changes are sometimes driven by technology, therefore the need to understand the role of technology within society. But what are those different cultural shared social- meanings ascribed to the notion of technology? Based on various authors (see for instance Berg & Lie, 1995; Franklin, 1999; MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999; Marx, 2003; Pacey, 1983; Pursell, 2001; Wajcman, 2000; Winner, 1999), dening technology as culture and practice implies different things, such as: Technology is socially shaped, is the outcome of social processes, including gender and political structures. Technology is not given, is not static, it is constantly altered. Technology takes historically and culturally specic forms, therefore we need to put it in context, where the technology is created and used. Technology is not neutral, responds to social necessities and also creates them. Technology is much more than artefacts and machines, technology is knowledge, ways of doing things. Technology should be seen as endogenous, as part to the individual, not as something external or exogenous. The meanings ascribed to technology are highly related to the understanding of progress. It seems that in the past there was a separation of the concept of social progress form the concept of scientic progress. Different authors take various stances regarding the relation between progress and scientic and technological development. Winner, Noble and others afrm that modern S&T can be socially progressive. Mitcham argues that S&T are not internally progressive. Lasch afrms that what S&T have to offer are not central to social progress as traditionally conceived (Goldman, 1989). The goal of this paper is to analyze recent surveys in Latin American countries on the social/public perception of science and technology (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay), especially looking at the cultural meanings ascribed to the concept of technology and their relation to the idea of progress (Aguirre, 2005; OEI, RICyT, & CYTED, 2003; Oliv, 2003; Polino, Fazio, & Vaccarezza, 2003; Polino, Vaccarezza, & Fazio, 200?; Vogt & Polino, 2003)
Making Corruption Legible: Political Artifacts and Public Proofs in an International Art Exhibit
Raymond June, American University
ABSTRACT: This paper bridges the anthropology of politics and science studies by exploring recent efforts to render corruption visible and hence knowable via technologies of truth. Corruption has long been considered a subterranean activity diffuse, irrational, secretive that is antithetical to marketized and democratic societies. Correspondingly, civil society activists and governance elites have come to rely on techniques of transparency ranging from opinion poll surveys to audits in order to transform corruption into a legible fact and pressure key institutions to reform. These instruments are especially prominent in emerging democracies, such as the Czech Republic, where bribery and other forms of illicit behavior are perceived to be endemic yet beyond social knowledge and representation. Based on long-term ethnographic eldwork at the Czech national chapter of the global anti-corruption NGO, Transparency International, I examine an October 2001 international public exhibit Art against Corruption in Pragues Wenceslas Square (held in conjunction with the Transparency International-sponsored 10th International Anti-Corruption Conference) as a contingent techno-political assemblage that aimed at publicizing crime and corruption in the Czech Republic within a global (anti-)corruption framework. Although the exhibit offered simulated, indirect, and partial public proofs of corruption and its effects via media, inscription, and performative technologies, I argue that the novel assemblage of things and people is one signicant example of how corruption has been problematized and made into an object of public concern and intervention in the Czech Republic
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts themselves objects (weights), while other standards are measures of objects (number 2 wheat). All standards require tests (although some tests are more rigorous, precise, or accurate than others) that shape the natural/ technological/ social world. Finally, standards often escape from democratic governance as they are passed over as being of little concern, as mere technical details.
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Counting cells, measuring evidence: The contested nature of international therapeutic guidelines in HIV
Denielle Elliott, Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT: Therapeutic guidelines for HIV/AIDS dene when clinicians should initiate treatment in patients and what drugs should be used. These guidelines, developed and recommended by an international panel of scientists and clinicians, act as critical instruments in therapeutic practice especially since HIV remains to be one of the only infectious diseases where treatment is intentionally delayed. However, in the rapidly evolving worlds of HIV and pharmaceutical science, these guidelines are regularly being challenged and revised. HIV treatment guidelines balance immunological science (CD4 cell counts), virological measures (plasma viral load), resistance testing, and other factors with new developments in pharmaceutical research. In this paper, I examine the contested nature of these guidelines and the ways in which particular types of scientic evidence are contested, negotiated and peripheralized in the development and deployment of these guidelines. Here I offer a historical analysis of the development of these guidelines and consider the effect of them on improving medical care. In which ways does industrys role in clinical trials inuence these therapeutic guidelines? How do clinicians account for experience and personal knowledge in the deployment of these scientic guidelines in everyday practice? I examine ethnographically how international guidelines based on objective scientic criteria may be unevenly deployed across local settings, focusing on Vancouvers inner city a community plagued by high rates of HIV infection and continual disparities in treatment.
Time will tell: GM crops in Argentina, between national policies and corporate strategies
Ana Vara, Universidad Nacional de San Martn
ABSTRACT: Argentina, a traditional exporter of meat and grain, is the second producer and exporter of genetically modied (GM) crops, mainly due to its extremely fast adoption of Monsantos Roundup Ready (RR) soybean, a product which was not granted intellectual property protection. Approved for commercial
4 S Final Program with Abstracts release in 1996, RR soybean currently covers half the total cultivated land, and has played a key role in the countrys recovery after the 2001-2002 economic crisis as it represents a signicant portion of Argentinas exports. Adoption of patented GM corn and GM cotton has followed more conservative patterns. From Argentina, RR soybean was smuggled into Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, a situation that contributed to make the South Cone a key player in the world soybean market, and which helped turn it into a virtually GM market. As this situation stabilized, Monsantos protests against Argentinas weak IP protection reached high tones, an attitude acrimoniously responded by Argentine authorities. This paper analyzes the process of adoption of GM crops in Argentina, reviewing national policies in relation to both local and global contexts, where pro and anti-GM actions helped congure a changing landscape. While adoption of GM crops in Argentina has been heterogeneous and does not follow easily generalizable patterns, it nevertheless represents an important case to consider in order to understand how GM crops are introduced and appropriated in developing countries, as it reveals the complex interplay of factors which could lead to unintended consequences for both local and global, pro- and anti-GM actors.
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The Nature of North-South Partnership in Bioprospecting and Impact on Capabilities and Innovation Systems. Case Studies in Latin America
La Velho, University of Campinas
ABSTRACT: Partnerships in biotechnology-related activities have become an increasingly important means of creating and diffusing technical and organisational knowledge around the world. Yet, systematic information on biotechnology partnerships involving developing country research institutions and rms is notably lacking, despite: a) observers attesting that this is an increasing practice; and b) claims from various fronts that N-S partnerships are essential to strengthen research capacities, transfer technology to the South and help to build national innovation systems. This article presents empirical results of an extensive investigation on the nature and impact of N-S partnerships in biotechnology applied to bioprospecting activities. The study describes the range of N-S partnerships in bioprospecting in four Latin American countries, namely Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia and Surinam. It builds a picture of the different ways in which benets to participants can be derived from partnerships, with a special focus on the impact on scientic and technological capacities in the South. It also analyses the relationship between partnerships and developing local innovation systems. Results question the role of bioprospecting as a tool for conservation and sustainable development in third world countries with high levels of biological diversity. The rhetoric surrounding bioprospecting suggests that all the relevant actors or stakeholders benet. Our analysis suggests that, in practice, benets accrue to very specic stakeholders and are quite limited. Moreover, only countries that already have some established knowledge producing capacity seem to be able to reap some benets. Linkages of bioprospecting activities to innovation activities in relevant industrial sectors are notoriously missing. Contributions, when occurring, seem to be restricted to collecting and classication of biological specimens.
Patients, Prots and Values: Genzyme and the Creation of Informed Consumers of Potential Innovations
Carlos Novas, London School of Economics
ABSTRACT: The hope for innovations that will treat or cure has led many biotechnology rms and patients organisations to invest in and conduct genetic research. This paper explores how the creation of biomedical futures is a contested eld of activity which requires paying attention to whose visions of the future get promoted, whose values get supported and who benets from the creation of these futures. Drawing upon a case study of the biotechnology rm Genzyme, this paper explores the biomedical futures and markets it is creating in the eld of ultra-orphan diseases through the development of enzyme replacement therapies for illnesses such as Pompe disease. One feature that will be drawn out of this case study is how Genzyme is involved in the creation of informed consumers of potential innovations. It will be argued that central to the development of markets for rare diseases is the creation of informed consumers prior to the marketing of a treatment. These consumers are encouraged to become knowledgeable about their condition, understand the long research and development process, and comprehend the regulatory procedures required for the approval of new therapies. Furthermore, they need to be provided with a range of services to help them understand and cope with their condition whilst the therapy is being developed. By focussing attention on Genzymes branding practices prior to
4 S Final Program with Abstracts the licensing of a treatment by regulatory authorities, I wish to draw attention to the multiple ways in which economic value is generated by biotechnology rms that does not solely rely on the manipulation of life itself. Using this case study, the aim is to enrich understandings of biocapital and biovalue which tend to primarily focus on how life itself has become a resource for the generation of value.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts I will show how biotechnology appeared in a very favourable ideological context to the market economy, in which it was looking for elds where to support a new cycle of material wealth increase. Product of this will for economical growth, biotechnology has turned itself into a modelling strength of research, science and economy, with potentialities to open new markets full of sensitive ethical and political implications.
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Political Process of Quantication : Case Analysis of the Quantication of Use-rate in the Environmental Controversy
Yuko Fujigaki, University of Tokyo
ABSTRACT: Things seem to take on a life of their own when they are turned into numbers. Once things are transformed into numbers, they start to seem objective and globally applicable, things that have no context and can be applied everywhere. This paper argues for the importance of going back to the moment when a particular number gets dened and thinking carefully about the process that produced it. In fact, important variables are always deliberately selected, and depend on the subject and the purpose of the particular research project in question. Important variables are for this reason likely to vary in accordance with cultural and historical context. It seems worryingly possible that globalization will lead to the enforced export of culturally specic variables: the variables of a powerful culture could easily become imposed on other cultures, where they may well be entirely inappropriate. The present study focuses on the case of controversy over the lling-in of a tidal at that happened in the Nagoya area in Japan in the 1990s. In the process of assessment of a project designed to ll in some tidal ats in the Fujimae area, on the potential environmental impact of the project, at the center of the controversy was the crutial question of how to calculate the use rate, which was the data intended to show how much birds like snipe and plover used the area targeted by the proposed project. This survey reveal the process of the controversy carefully and underlying hypothesis of quantication.
We Need a Greenpeace for PMF: Industry Characterizations of Stakeholder Management in the Governance of Plant Molecular Farming
Jennifer Medlock, University of Calgary
ABSTRACT: Plant molecular farming (PMF), the so-called third generation of GM crop techniques, uses plant systems not to produce food, but as factories to manufacture pharmaceutical and industrial products. Through a qualitative content analysis of interviews with members of the PMF industry (n=9), the objective of this study is examine how industry interviewees characterize the roles of various stakeholder groups in PMF governance arrangements in Canada. The paper provides an overview of PMF technology and the state
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of regulation in Canada. The notions of pluralizing expertise and providing opportunities for new actors to participate in technology governance are reviewed, and the discussion is placed within the context of the stakeholder management and innovation studies literatures to provide a framework for analysis. The study shows that members of the PMF industry are steeped in a technological frame advocating the benets of PMF technologies and a sound-science regulatory framework. The interviewees understand social shaping to the extent that their technologies can be stalled or killed by sociopolitical stakeholders, but do not see most of the reasons for opposition as reasonable. Positioning themselves in a leadership position, they see cultivating relationships with public groups as educating and convincing, in the hopes of alleviating their fears. In relation to government stakeholders, the respondents see themselves as advisors for science-based regulations and partners in facilitating commercialization. NGOs are not seen as necessary stakeholders in PMF development, though their tactics of inuencing the public were seen as powerful and as ones that the industry itself should adopt.
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Noise, silence and persistence in UK governmental public dialogue on science and technology
Kevin Burchell, London School of Economics
ABSTRACT: Sciencehorizons is an ambitious public dialogue project funded by the UK Ofce of Science and Innovation. The aim of the project is to elicit views about the issues raised by possible future directions for science and technology, from a broad set of participants, with the stated primary objective to inform policy and decision-making on setting the direction of research and the regulation of science and technology. In this paper I make the case that, while it is a welcome development, the sciencehorizons project embodies a number of tensions that are characteristic of public dialogue on science and technology. In particular, in addition to the objective stated above, the project has six further objectives some of which might be conceived as contradictory. Further, since quantity of participants appears to be valued more highly than quality of information, the project might produce more noise than views. In addition, since, the issues for discussion are determined by a governmental expert exercise, silence may prevail on other important issues.
Explaining the Silence of Public Good Scientists: Operative Assumptions of Biological Control Entomologists
Keith Douglass Warner, Santa Clara University
ABSTRACT: As US public land-grant universities restructure their professional incentives toward the commodication of research, scientists whose work furthers the common good nd their institutional locations increasingly vulnerable. Without products that can be patented, they must nd some form of public support in order to assure continued funding for their work. The University of Californias biological control entomologists profoundly shaped this applied discipline, but their positions, numbers, and funding have declined dramatically over the past 15 years. This has occurred despite the public good generated by their work by introducing insect natural enemies to control adventitious agricultural pests. This presentation reports on the metrics that this eld has used to evaluate their work, and seeks to explain why these entomologists have not more aggressively justied their work to the public. It will describe an effort to compare perceptions of agricultural leaders with the general public of the benets provided by biocontrol control. Despite the clear economic and ecological benets created by agricultural classic biocontrol, these scientists have assumed a silence in the public sphere.
Clima(c)tic risk communication: Environmental NGOs and the representational politics of communicating climate change
Julie Doyle, University of Brighton
ABSTRACT: [T]echnologically-induced hazardsare characterised by an inaccessibility to the senses. They operate outside the capacity of (unaided) human perception. This im/materiality gives risks an air of unreality until the moment they materialise as symptoms. In other words, without visual presences, the hazards associated with these technologies are difcult to represent as risks (Adam, Beck & Van Loon, 2000: 3) Human-induced climate change has been identied by risk society theorists as characteristic of the problematic nature of risk and its effective communication, i.e., its existence and effects are incalculable, unquantiable, and often invisible. Current dominance of images of melting glaciers in the news media supports the risk society thesis that risks only become visible when they materialise as symptoms, here
4 S Final Program with Abstracts through visible glacial retreat, and thus too late for preventative action. This paper will examine how the representational limitiations experienced in the communication of climate change risk i.e. the temporal authority of the visible present - have been negotiated by environmental NGOs in their efforts to bring attention to the reality of climate change before impacts could be seen. In doing so it will critically analyse the representational politics of a risk society, through the interconnected discourses of the visual, the temporal and the scientic, used to verify environmental risks like climate change, yet knowledge systems that have proved inadequate for legitimising environmental problems that materialise over time. By analysing the communicative strategies deployed by environmental NGOs in their communication of climate change, it will offer insights into the ways in which environmental and scientic discourses in the context of a risk society inform, and are resisted by, the discursive strategies of NGOs.
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ABSTRACT: Privacy as silence is the background condition which, in the healthcare setting, allows patients to freely discuss sensitive matters with healthcare providers. Obligations surrounding health information privacy act as institutionally imposed silences upon those who have access to private patient information. Patients are encouraged to expect that their information will remain private. The requirement for consent to release information is a reection of respect for patient autonomy. While computer-based record systems promise increased privacy, they also carry the potential for violations of privacy. This dynamic is articulated in the literature on electronic health records; in this paper we shift the focus to the use of health information in research. Databases containing medical information hold enormous potential for researchers, and the social and commercial benets that may be derived are increasingly important. Researchers are gaining access to personal information that contains identiers. Even databases containing solely de-identied data are invaluable sources of information, but the progressive linking of increasing numbers of de-identied data sets greatly increases the likelihood that individuals can be identied and their information revealed. The argument supporting this practice is that research is in the public interest, and therefore should be permitted to be conducted unimpeded. The public is unaware of how much access there is to health information and the extent to which their privacy, with its underlying value of autonomy, may be compromised. This paper explores the tension between the silence of privacy that is required for personal ourishing and what happens in silence to ostensibly foster the public good.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts advances in biomedical technology. In Germany, the state and other authorities train citizens in how to think about science and expertise at the same time as asking for their consent. Informing, conceived by the state as a dialogue, thus emerges as a pedagogical exercise aimed at producing particular kinds of knowing and reasoning citizens, while maintaining cognitive divides between relevant and irrelevant knowledge. The paper also shows how such efforts can backre, so that attempts to instill reason are met with the assertion of a right not to know.
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Informed Consent and the Politics of Responsibility in the Governance of Assisted Human Reproduction in Canada, 1988 - 2006
Laura Fenton, York University
ABSTRACT: This presentation is based on a larger study of the making of the informed consent provisions in Canadas Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHR Act) of 2004. Thus far, the assumptions underpinning and the practices involved in and consequences of acquiring informed consent have received little critical scrutiny from social scientists. I argue that the inclusion of informed consent provisions in the AHR Act is, in part, a response to feminist critiques and political mobilization around reproductive technologies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Moreover, I consider how acquiring informed consent can be interpreted as a technique for making the women and men undergoing AHR procedures take on an increased amount of responsibility for the health and other types of risks associated with AHR and embryo donation. The subjects envisioned by the AHR Acts informed consent regulations are self-governing, free to make rational decisions based on the impartial information provided to them by clinicians. Indeed, by virtue of their obligatory status, informed consent practices are designed to produce such subjects where they do not already exist to educate and responsibilize the women and men involved in AHR.
Resistance and Truth: Two subaltern discourses regarding the ethics of human subjects research
Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington-Tacoma
ABSTRACT: This paper compares two discourses regarding human subjects research. Each seeks to contest ofcial notions of ethics. First, the paper examines the ofcial version of research ethics involving humans by examining its construction as a formal set of principles as stated in the Belmont Report, which provides guidelines for of Institutional Review Boards, which oversee human subjects research in the U.S. The paper then examines concepts of ethics in the underground journal (zine) Guinea Pig Zero (GPZ). GPZ provided a public forum for professional human subjects between 1995-2000. Using discourse analysis and interviews with GPZs editor I argue that ethics from a subject standpoint is grounded in politics rather than principles, is inherently anti-teleolgical (they deny that there has been progress since the Belmont Report), and is grounded in guinea pig agency. This discourse is compared with that in the comic book Truth that retells the origin story of Captain America through the eyes of black soldiers who were used as test subjects for the serum that gave him his power. This is a retelling of post-War American techno-military-scientic
4 S Final Program with Abstracts narrative of progress through the horror of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Ethics is again based in politics, but there is no conception of agency. After multiple incidents of abuse to Blacks at researchers hands, ethics comes to mean evasion and silence, rather than action. The conclusion examines how these two visions of ethics are connected to specic histories and the relative social positions of their narrators and audience.
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Politics of Science Studies: Can Questioning the Autonomy of Science be a Solution to the Lack of Normativity in the Field?
Sanem Guvenc-Salgirli, State University of New York at Binghamton
ABSTRACT: This paper argues that the ambiguous place politics occupies within science studies (or one can put it as a hesitancy towards offering normative statements) can be related to the fact that autonomy of scientic establishment is still a taken for granted issue, or another black box in the eld. Although science studies have opened a radical and challenging venue in this manner by placing science into its social and political context, in the end, most of the analyses, including studies of the Edinburgh School, the Bath School, Actor-Network Theory and feminists, privilege the world of science over other social components surrounding it. They do so by building their primary analyses on the scientic world. However, questioning the autonomy of science should rst be a questioning of the social order and the power relations underneath it. It should also be a problematization of the power that science is supposed to possess. The problem with the position of science studies in relation to politics, has not been the lack of discussions about political implications of the works produced in the eld. Nevertheless, politics have entered the eld not as a research initiative, but followed the research as a complementary category. Instead, politics need to be the very starting point of our studies. I argue that by modifying some of the principles developed by the aforementioned four schools primarily by constructing the world of science and other worlds as symmetrical partners we can begin questioning autonomy of science.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts to social life. Critique is silenced by neo-liberal and technocratic arguments that appeal to these simulacra of science. This paper concerns critical strategies that have been employed for addressing the resistance of rationality to rational critique. Romantic rejection of reason has proven less effective than strategies that contextualize rationality socially. This approach rst appears in Marxs analysis of capitalist economics. Although the concept of underdetermination is unavailable to him, Marx gets around the silencing effect of social rationality with something very much like it in his discussion of the length of the working day. Frankfurt School Critical Theory later blended romantic elements with Marxian ones in a suggestive but confusing mixture. The concept of underdetermination reappears in contemporary science and technology studies, now clearly articulated and philosophically and sociologically elaborated. But somewhere along the way the critical thrust was diluted. Critical theory of technology attempts to recover that thrust in a further development of an STS approach.
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2.4H STS AND THE CITY - CITIES AS TECHNICAL ARTIFACTS AND COMPETING INTERPRETATIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL CITY
Organizers: Steven Moore, and Andy Karvonen, the University of Texas at Austin Chair: Steven Moore
SESSION ABSTRACT: This two-part session will address the contested nature of technological development in the context of the city. The presentations and discussion will explore the connections between STS and the disciplines of architecture, planning, and urban studies to reveal the political, social, and cultural relationships between urban residents and the technologies that dene and sustain cities. An implicit assumption shared by the participants is that cities can be interpreted as socio-technical artifacts and thus, conceptual tools of STS can be applied to better understand how cities develop and change over time.
The Discipline of Urbanism: Urban Design and the Technology of Place in the Post-Suburban Era
David Brain, New College of Florida
ABSTRACT: In urban sociology, it has been commonplace to treat the city as a natural object with sociological implications (e.g., a social ecology with an underlying functional logic), or as a reection in spatial form and material culture of social, political, and economic processes (e.g., a reex of the political economy of place, played out in the politics of gentrication). Few have looked at the city in terms of the mediating technology of place-making: the disciplinary knowledge, practical techniques, and the program of action of a distributed network of actors involved in the accomplishment of the contemporary built environment.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts The paper proposes an analysis of urban place-making as technology, not just as part of a symbolic economy of space but as a specic identity-producing, history-generating practice that inscribes certain kinds of social relations in built form as it constructs the nature of the city as both artifact and normative ideal. This inscriptionthe symbolic economy and ecology, the production of value, the articulation of identity, the making of historydepends not just on the nished product, but on the heterogeneous engineering that simultaneously produces and reproduces place-making capacities as well as tangible places. Places are things we do together, not just containers for social relations. The disciplinary formations and institutional matrix that constitute agency in place-making are a critical part of the social constitution and signicance of place, with profound implications for our capacity to work toward such normative goals as environmental responsibility or social equity. The empirical basis for this paper is an analysis of the current development regime and efforts to transform it under the rubric of the new urbanism. In order to reconstruct the civic art of building neighborhoods and towns, new urbanists have found it necessary to change not only their own practices as professionals, but the regulatory apparatus of local governments, signicant areas of public policy, the practices of lending institutions and real estate investment interests, the habits and routines of developers, the assumptions of real estate market analysts, and the expectations of home buyers. In this regard, I have identied three transformative tendencies: (1) A reversal of the patterns of technical specialization and an integration of the rationalized but fragmented problem solving techniques typically applied by specialists within the relative isolation of their professional disciplines; (2) A reconguration of the practical interface between technical expertise and democratic politics in planning; (3) Formation of a new discipline of urban design, as an integrative practice connected to a normative ideal of urbanism and catalyzing change across professions involved in the distributed network of place-making.
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The Tale of the Turning Torso: Contradictions of Urban Sustainable Development in Malm, Sweden
Andrew Jamison, Aalborg University
ABSTRACT: The paper draws on a work-in-progress on the history of urban environmentalism, tracing the efforts to green the city from the early attempts to deal with the social and environmental problems of the industrializing city in the early twentieth century to the recent efforts that have been undertaken to redesign the post-industrial city as part of the worldwide quest for sustainable development. There has been both a circulation, or transfer of ideas and practices, especially from the United States to Europe, and there have also been distinctive patterns of appropriation, as the more general or universal notions of environmental sustainability have been adapted to the needs and conditions of particular cities. As an example of these appropriation processes, the paper offers a brief case study of the small Swedish city of Malm, where the
4 S Final Program with Abstracts modern(ist) skyscraper, the Turning Torso, has been constructed in an area of the city that was meant to be a showpiece of sustainable urban development. The tale of the Turning Torso, and of the conict between modernism and environmentalism, exemplies some of the dilemmas and contradictions of sustainable urban development as they have manifested themselves in many European cities in recent years.
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What happens when the technical and the spiritual meet: Examination of Spiritual Discourse in Green Building
Kathryn Henderson, Texas A&M University
ABSTRACT: This study explores the ethics, morals, and values discourse of home owners and home builders in their choices to build with straw bale in comparison with older discourses in the folk culture of straw crafting and in the manner in which representation of straw bale building in publications has changed over time. Particular attention is paid to the way in which a discourse of spirituality or reverence is incorporated into ways of discussing straw bale building in terms of process, aesthetics, and dwelling atmosphere. The discourse of home owners will be compared both with that of those who have made straw bale the technique of choice for building spiritual retreats and with that of those claiming empiricism and rationality as the reason for their choice of straw bale as a building technique. Sources of discourse are from participant observation on building sites, in-depth interviews, and document analysis. Attention to discourse situated in the interactions of the building process reveals the links between discourse and
4 S Final Program with Abstracts embodied practice. Comparison of this discourse with that in straw bale publications facilitates tracking changes in representation over time to reveal transition from a discourse of values, ethics, and spirituality to one of technical detail and rationality as the technique has become legitimatized through the passage of building codes and availability of mortgages and insurance.
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Discussants: Steven Moore, The University of Texas at Austin, and Andrew Jamison, Aalborg University 2.4I SILENCED PASTS: ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE AND THE POLITICS OF MANIFESTATION [NEW MEDIA]
Organizers: Christopher Witmore, Brown University; Matt Ratto, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Michael Shanks, Stanford University Chair: Christopher Witmore
ABSTRACT: If we remain true to the etymology of archaeology then archaeologists work with ta archaea, quite literally, old things. But this is no longer taken to be the past as it was. Rather, archaeologists work with what is left of various pasts as they are mixed into the present. As such archaeology is seen to be a practice of visualizing, verbalizing, and vocalizing. Archaeology is a practice of unforgetting. Still, in practice, to be underlined as process of transformation and documentation, certain interactions with, and aspects of, these pasts are manifest while others fall through the sieve into silence. Whether particular understandings of local heritage, the more ineffable qualities of human relations with archaeological locales, or peculiar qualities of things (i.e. the abject textures of detritus or whatever) a great deal is overlooked. Silenced in translation many voices, relations, and qualities are all too often ignored, treated as background noise, and are utterly (re)forgotten. Why do archaeologists speak of some pasts while at the same time they silence others? This session explores the politics of manifestation in archaeology. As such it is concerned with the silencing of pasts and their alteration (survival) in the context of archaeological practice and documentation. Sensitive to archaeological modes of manifestation (i.e. paper-based, analog or digital media), we ask which qualities of, or relations with, the material pasts are silenced? And likewise which aspects survive in the process of translation? Moreover what other pasts should be unforgotten? Through a variety of case studies we offer a combination of analyses and examples of archaeological modes of engagement, memory practices and understandings for dealing with the articulation of various pasts. This session brings together sociologists of science and archaeologists to explore a discipline which, spanning both the humanities and sciences, is beginning to set forward
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Making silent industries speak differently: a performance of the mobile telecoms industry by the Future Archaeologist
Laura Watts, Lancaster University
ABSTRACT: not available
The Right Health Information, In the Right Place at the Right Time;
Elizabeth Cardno, University of Brighton
ABSTRACT: Recognized as a determinant of health, quality, accessible, health information can potentially reduce harm. Increasing access to local, quality, health information was identied as a signicant goal by a cross-sector partnership of organizations known as the PlaceToBe.Net. The goal recognized that Internet searches for relevant health information were bounded in quiet practices that privileged certain information and silenced other. The competitive, noisy, online environment exacerbates the constraints of the public, community/volunteer sectors to fully engage in the provision of online health related information. How an information system solution was shaped by its social and technical environment was the focus of a qualitative, case study employing Structuration and Actor-Network theories, to understand marginalized issues of community, health, information, quality and access. Enabling processes identied by comparing the emerging elds of Community and Health Informatics highlight participation and social learning. Grounded theory revealed a framework for praxis, based on the contextual data gathered from interviews, document analysis and meeting observations. How information user - provider relations promote and/or constrain the provision and quality of health information is relatively unexplored. Findings suggest that the gap must be bridged with transparent methods, to support real innovation beyond the survival of traditional health information practices.
Women and Water: Feminist Analyses of Occupational and Environmental Health Studies on the RCA Groundwater Pollution Case
Yi-Ping Lin, National Taiwan University
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I critically reviewed six published health effect studies of the RCA groundwater pollution case from a feminist perspective. The RCA (Radio Company of America) factory in Taiwan was found to have polluted groundwater with trichloroethane (TCE), perchloroethylene (PCE), and other industrial solvents. Former RCA workers diagnosed with cancer organized to question if their illnesses were related to their environmental and occupational exposure. A series of public health research was published, including animal studies, environmental health risk assessment, environmental epidemiology,
4 S Final Program with Abstracts and occupational epidemiology studies, which explored the occupational and environmental health issues. In examining the gender variables in these published peer-reviewed research papers on the RCA case, I tried to ascertain why it was so difcult to establish correlations between occupational and environmental pollution and womens health under the current public health research paradigm. These published RCA research studies neglected either womens social lives or womens biological differences in their data analyses. In environmental health risk assessment, female residents exposure to pollutants in their house-keeping jobs were underestimated. In environmental epidemiological research, the lost to follow-up occured with a much higher rate with female residents. In a series of occupational epidemiological studies, the researchers did not acknowledge the fact of critical puberty exposure or take it into consideration. I suggest that in conducting research on womens occupational and environmental health, public health researchers should take a feminist approach, and think from womens lives
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Between politicization and neutralization: The politics of ethics in the governance of biomedicine in the UK
Alfred Moore, University of Hannover
ABSTRACT: The language of ethics and morality has over the last 25 years become a conspicuous feature of the politics of biomedical research in the UK. The last 20 years has seen the creation of governmental ethical advisory commissions, administrative bodies charged with ethical decision-making, and public funding for studying the ethical implications of new technologies. The relationship between the language of ethics and societal contestation and politicization of science is becoming ever more important to understanding the dynamics of scientic research. In this paper I will introduce and develop the notion of an ethics regime in the governance of biomedicine. I will argue that political struggle was central to the emergence and development of this regime. The politics of ethics, I suggest, is a response to the failure of the traditional politics of expertise to contain new forms of political mobilization and social protest. Yet what is ethics doing in the government of biomedicine in the UK? I will describe the UK ethics regime as a predominantly liberal settlement. It is characterised by extensive communication and consultation with the public, an exclusion of radical opposition, and one of the most relaxed research regimes in the EU. Yet does this mode of discussion of the ethical consequences of new technologies serve to contest scientic development, or to stabilize it? And will this regime be able to maintain its liberal neutrality in an increasingly politicized environment?
Where Do Epidemics Prevention Measures Come From? Controlling SARS Risk in 2003
Yen-Fen Tseng, National Taiwan University Chia-Ling Wu, National Taiwan University
ABSTRACT: In this paper, we discuss the decision-making process of these two important SARS prevention measures. By examining these two measures, we argue that the adoption of epidemics prevention measures often comes less from responses to new bio-medical evidences than from the risk perception framework selected by public health authorities and their political concerns over how the public perceive and respond to these decisions. We rst analyze WHOs issuing and lifting the travel advisory against all but essential trips to SARS- affected areas, the harshest warning ever issued by WHO in its history. The ban measure is a result of WHOs shifting from a neutral to a cautious risk framework to communicate SARS risk to the public. Secondly, we discuss the introduction of home quarantine institution from Singapore by Taiwan health authorities. The Taiwan implementation put some 130,000 people in home quarantine as a result. While Singapore aimed to prevent the increase of SARS cases from secondary and tertiary transmission, based on the epidemiological theory of transmission pyramid, policy-makers in Taiwan adopted it to handle political crisis, rather than to respond to new scientic evidence. In conclusion, we argue that in the end, these measures play an even stronger role than the advancement of scientic knowledge does in shaping what SARS is to the general public. The purpose of writing this paper is to re-examine the presumed biomedical decisions behind every disease prevention measure and to disclose some of the scientic myths of such measures.
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The birth of public health in France or the little story of a successful standardization
Virginie Tournay, McGill University
ABSTRACT: Traditionally, historians connect the birth of collective medicine with the establishment of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1778. They considered it the rst agency of the State dealing with medical matters. However, the reasons why this is considered a historiographic turning point are discussed. From a pragmatic approach of public policy, the mobilization of the doctor-agency members is analyzed in order to dene the repertoire of practices engaged in the production of this historiographic transition. By comparing the established medical data-gathering with previous failed attempts, global realization of this experimentalacademia is distinguished by its standardization of stabilised medical data collection. This study proposes to consider the link between the standardization of administrative practices, the consolidation of medical mobilization and the writing of History. Attention is turned to the introduction of measure instruments in the administrative space of the Royal Society, such as the thermometer and the barometer. These technological yardsticks product data which are comparable and regularly archived. The archives then provide a window into the main historical focus of medical observations. In this way, instruments of measurement are tools of standardization that permit inscription of a durable historiographic record. Objectives are: 1. To describe the establishment of medical objectivity around the French revolution and ways in which the medical quantication of environment were dened 2. To understand previous failures (Royal Academia of surgeons) in standardization of medical datagathering during the 18th century. 3. To make explicit links between standardization of medical data-gatherings and the constitution of the historiography of medical practice
Rituals of silence and the cyclical expression of the careers of psychotropic drugs (1900-2000).
Toine Pieters & Stephen Snelders, VU Medical Centre
ABSTRACT: The careers of therapeutic drugs show in their conception, production, marketing, and uses that they are more than just medical commodities. They also reect developments and transformations in the science and art of healing as a cultural process. Given increasing visibility by the marketing practices
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of the pharmaceutical industry, and used in contexts that are increasingly subjected to media attention, therapeutic drugs have become in the 19th and 20th century important focal points of cultural mediation and imagination in public domains. They have taken on a special symbolic signicance as icons of the increasing healing powers of modern medicine. The societal embedding of new drugs involves not only not only market success, but also regulation and public acceptance. Cultural enthusiasm about benets and societal concern about risks and dangers are important in that respect. Conceptualising interactions between product champions, cultural enthusiasm and societal concerns the paper articulates in a comparative perspective the historical dynamics of psychotropic drug trajectories. Sleeping pills, tranquillizers and other psychotropic drugs have been focal points of cultural enthusiasm in the public sphere as well as the locus of public contestation. The careers show a cyclical temporal course. Expanding use of the drugs and high expectations of their effects on their introduction are followed by rising criticism and disappointments, sometimes but not necessarily ending in a phase of contracting use and limited application. The cycle can complete itself by the disappearance of the drug from mental health care, only to be replaced by new drugs with a new prole of promise and hope. By describing the careers of the barbiturates and benzos in ve different countries we show that these cycles show phase differences when we look at the different regions of mental health care: asylums, extramural psychiatry, general practice, and the large but often neglect
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The market reservation for Brazilian minicomputers and the experience of their production in the 70/80s.
Henrique Cukierman, COPPE/UFRJ - Rio de Janeiro
ABSTRACT: The paper is focused on the case of Cobra Brazilian Computers, a Brazilian company that completed 30 years in 2004. Along its existence, it suffered several transformations. In the very beginning, it was Brazilian Navys branch for computers technological development. Then, it became an obligatory point of passage for different interests that were translated into the Brazilian public policy for Informatics, articulated around the market reservation for Brazilian minicomputers. Finally, when that policy came to its end in the beginning of the 90s, the coalition of interests around that policy was dissolved, turning the company into a reseller of imported technologies. Our purpose is to sketch the potentialities of a sociotechnical history of the company based on interviews with some of its former employees, chosen among hardware and software developers of the rst Brazilian minicomputer. The paper refers to the concept of discourse as presented by Paul Edwards in his The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War Amrica (1997), understood as a collective of heterogeneous entities - techniques and technologies, metaphors, practices, experiences, ctions, fantasies, ideologies and language - partially related around a material support (in this case, the Brazilian minicomputer). Thus, it is discussed the national autonomy in technology discourse which sustained and was sustained by an alliance that brought together nationalist military, dictatorial government, professors from public universities, managers of state companies and Brazilian entrepreneurs. The interviews overow enthusiasm face to that effort in making real the dream of manufacturing a Brazilian computer with international quality standards, revealing young engineers and technicians in action in the building of a local knowledge that has remained until today a pride for its builders.
Barbarians at the Cybergate: The Social Construction of the Deindividuated Computer User, the Marginalization of Open System Access, and the Institutionalization of Network Paranoia, 1981-1995
Bryan Pfaffenberger, University of Virginia
ABSTRACT: This paper shows how a discredited psychological theory -- deindividuation -- was dredged out of oblivion to justify a paranoid approach to computer security -- and how this maneuvers success, now unquestioned and institutionalized, very nearly silenced an alternative (and more empirical defensible) explanation of misbehavior in networked computing. Beginning with an analysis of the computer security architecture of 1970s-era operating systems (including Multics), the paper shows that engineers constructed an image of the typical malevolent user the barbarian at the cybergate. The paranoid approach to computer security gained credence in the late 1980s and early 1990s when a swath of sociologists and psychologists resurrected a discredited theory of dysfunctional public behavior, called deindividuation theory; soon, an unreective academic consensus arose in which it became unquestionably true that the Internets anonymity led to unusually aggressive behaviors. An alternative explanation of user malevolence one that focused on the anger generated by making users feel excluded and unwanted was all but silenced by this consensus. Originally developed by MITs famed AI Lab hackers in the 1970s, this alternative
4 S Final Program with Abstracts explanation predicts that networked computer systems can ourish even if they lack even the most basic security measures, such as logins and passwords. That this silenced theory deserves recognition is attested by the success of Wikipedia and other wiki-based Internet sites, which emulate the principles originally developed by the AI Lab hackers.
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Selling Sexual Science: Viagra, the Gay Niche Market, and the Stigma of Recreational Use
Emily Wentzell, University of Michigan
ABSTRACT: Viagra is marketed in the US as an end to the silent suffering of men whose penile erections fail to live up to normative standards. However, Viagra is marketed only to certain types of men, and portrayed as facilitating only certain types of sex. Paradoxically, its marketing and medical studies of its use have created new silences (and hailed old stigmas) around gay mens sexuality. Viagra is sold as an aid for faltering heterosexual unions and performances of hegemonic masculinity, a portrayal that has helped to ensure that insurance companies classify it as a coverable medical necessity rather than a mere lifestyle drug. Viagra advertising is never targeted at the gay niche market, a silence that results from the continuing stigmatization of gay sex and serves a productive marketing function by hailing medical and scientic discourses that cast gay Viagra use as recreational, illegitimate, and dangerous. These discourses link with earlier conceptions of gay sex as productive of sickness, and scapegoat social fears about Viagras facilitation of sexuality onto its gay users. Recent medical studies on sexual risk behavior and increased STD rates resulting from gay mens Viagra use serve to reinforce the illegitimacy of gay mens sexuality and sexuopharmaceuticals use, and provide seemingly objective scientic evidence for the scapegoating of Viagras negative consequences onto an already stigmatized population. This serves to further legitimate heterosexual mens use of Viagra by guring it as opposed to gay mens dangerously recreational Viagra use.
The Total Observation Collage: Weather Forecasting and the Search for Ground Truth
Phaedra Daipha, The University of Chicago
ABSTRACT: This paper seeks to shed light on everyday scientic practice at the lab/eld border. Based on eldwork at a forecasting ofce of the National Weather Service, I explore how forecasters take stock of the weather and establish that they must contend with multiple, partial, non-overlapping and often contradictory weather reports derived from a variety of sources. In fact, I argue, the weather in its tangible materiality still has a most consequential place in forecasting practice: nature in the wild manages to seep into the hi-tech environment of the forecasting ofce in a number of ways, most notably when forecasters feel compelled to leave the impressive array of weather graphics in front of them to go outside and see for themselves what is really going on. To illuminate how forecasters deal with the material complexity of the weather, I introduce the concept of the total observation collage, a heuristic that highlights the interplay between the physically tangible and the technologically mediated materialities of the weather. I then go on to discuss how forecasters seek to capture the weather suspended between place and a collaged space but also between past knowledge, present reality and future probability.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts Finally, following Ian Hackings suggestion that quantitative representations of social phenomena are also interventions into those phenomena, I suggest that the uses of psychiatric imaging technologies in neurofeedback therapy and of statistical probability accounts in public mental health are reconstituting conceptual and operative categories of race. While these practices draw from a long history of scientic, taxonomic racialization, this paper posits that other forms of racialization are taking place with a different sense of human bodies and subjects. I explore these transformational tendencies through Michel Foucaults descriptions of biopolitics and state racism.
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2.4L BLACK-BOXED SECURITY? DISCLOSING COLD WAR TECHNOLOGIES AND REFRAMING TECHNOLOGIES SINCE 9/11
Organizers: Rebecca Slayton, Stanford University; Sonja Schmid, Stanford University; Kathleen Vogel, Cornell University Chair: Rebecca Slayton
SESSION ABSTRACT: The modern security state is sustained by techno-science and its diverse representations - threatening, defensive, risky, or reliable. This two-part panel, Black Boxed Security? will theorize the silences underlying such representations, and the persistence of resistance to closure. Case studies will illustrate the adaptation of techno-science and its controversies through periods of dramatic political change, including the end of the Cold War and the beginnings of a so-called war on terrorism. This rst part of this panel, Dis-closing Cold War Technologies, will examine the persistence of controversy surrounding techno-science developed for the Cold War. Lynn Eden will discuss a double-effect of U.S. government secrecy: long-term ofcial disregard for important collateral damage from nuclear weapons; and the difculty, though not impossibility, of gaining scholarly closure on the issue. Sonja Schmid will analyze the Soviet Unions attempts to black-box nuclear energy to prevent proliferation, show how these efforts failed, and discuss similar endeavors that are nevertheless resurfacing today. Hugh Gusterson will show how nuclear weapons simulations, ostensibly developed to facilitate closure without physical testing, have instead sustained controversy and exacerbated cultural divisions within communities of nuclear weapons scientists since the end of the Cold War. Joseph Masco will provide comment on these three papers. The second part of this panel, Reframing Technologies since 9/11, will examine how scientists and engineers have adapted their work to changing perceptions of security in the so-called war on terrorism. Nicholas King will discuss the idea of dual use technologies, as mobilized by public health and national security experts to justify recent biodefense initiatives. Kathleen Vogel will examine bioterrorism concerns surrounding the emerging eld of synthetic biology and show how synthetic biologists and policy makers are constructing boundaries to shape those concerns. Rebecca Slayton will examine controversy surrounding information technology for counter-terrorism as a tension between technological determinists and social constructivists, and argue that this tension illustrates reasons that digital weapons should not be black-boxed. Paul Edwards will provide comment on these three papers.
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Organizers: Paul Edwards, University of Michigan and Steven Jackson, University of Michigan Chair: Paul Edwards
SESSION ABSTRACT: In the mechanical, natural, and statistical sciences, degrees of freedom express the number and range of potential positions of a given system. In highly constrained systems, DOFs will approach zero; under conditions of complexity or signicant indeterminacy, DOFs will multiply exponentially. This has NOT been a language typically applied to infrastructure. In their functionalist guise, infrastructures have been viewed as closed systems, in which degrees of freedom (and freedom more generally) have little place. Or they have been viewed as straightforwardly technical affairs, subject to a sort of mechanical relationality governing even the most complicated of system interactions. Recent work in the history and social study of infrastructure, including some within STS itself, has challenged this view. From railroads to river systems to advanced cyberinfrastructure for the sciences, the real-world experience of infrastructures past and present points consistently away from blueprint fantasies of order. In this work, infrastructure shows up in a messier, more partial, less autonomous, and altogether more ambivalent guise. Where order exists, it does so not as a natural property of infrastructure, but as a hard-won and potentially fragile accomplishment. Under the 2006 meeting theme of Silence, Suffering, and Survival, we propose to explore this dynamic, with reference to two central claims: rst, that efforts to design infrastructures frequently embed particular (if not always articulated) control aspirations; second, that despite these efforts, freedom (in the form of accidents, surprises, frictions, breakdowns, and unintended consequences) lurks as an ever-present possibility within infrastructure. Along the way, we explore a set of conceptual tools and categories (speed, breathing room, infrastructural time and memory, monsters, etc.) that can help to unpack both the dangers and promises of infrastructure.
Controlling the roads: negotiations, politics and silenced actors in infrastructural planning
Jane Summerton, Linkoping University
ABSTRACT: It has been argued that it is impossible to understand historical or social change without analyzing issues related to speed (Virilio). Efforts to discipline/regulate speed in for example, transportation infrastructures, can be seen as attempts to construct, enforce and sustain social order and political control in public spaces where complex circulations of machines and humans take place. This paper will discuss multiple constructions of the meaning of speed (and particularly its social-moral regulation in the form of speed limits) among heterogeneous groups of actors who are responsible for dening, negotiating and enforcing limitations on speed in road infrastructures in Sweden. Particularly, the paper will analyze negotiations and contestations among public ofcials, managers, politicians and transport planners in a large region in southern Sweden. Examples of questions asked are: how are issues of speed/disciplining speed actualized in contemporary transportation infrastructures? What are the conictual linkages between speed on the roads and on the one hand societal concerns (such as high deaths on highways, harmful emissions, problems of access for marginalized groups) and on the other hand perceived societal benets of high speeds (such as short commuter distances, efciency in delivering goods, regional development)? How are these issues constructed and contested, in what forums do negotiations take place, what powerful actor groups are involved and what groups are excluded from these processes? Finally, what are the groups who are silenced in the rumbling roar of trafc and what are the implications for our understandings of the often hidden sufferings in large infrastructures?
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Not too close, not too far: building breathing space into information infrastructures
W. Turner, LIMSI-CNRS B. Habert, LIMSI-CNRS G. Ripoche, LIMSI-CNRS and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne M. Zacklad Tech-CICO, University of Technology at Troyes
ABSTRACT: The role that distance plays in forging social ties has long been a subject of interest to the 4S community. Fielding an idea, putting it into the marketplace of competing proposals, making it visible and convincing over time implies mobilizing social and technical resources located in different places and used in different social, technical, economic and cultural situations. The 4S community has developed a rich arsenal of conceptual and methodological tools for studying this problem. But what does it say about Internets role in this mobilization process? A lot has been said empirically. Distributed activity has often been contrasted to co-located activity in order to focus attention on the specicity of technologically
4 S Final Program with Abstracts mediated interactions as opposed to face-to-face interactions. Findings show that the social mechanisms of condence building, sense-making, interpersonal awareness, coordination and articulation are harder to implement and sustain at a distance than when people are in the same location. But a lot remains to be done theoretically. For example, what does it mean to be distant in the face of a growing always on culture. Peoples cell-phones are generally always on and if not, they can be contacted rapidly by using their personal digital assistants or by leaving a message in their Email box. But at the same time, organizations often complain about the inefciency of distributed work structures in which people are always off, simply too busy with what they have to do locally and only too willing to use distance as an excuse for not being there when solicited. So what do we have here, a performance problem? Is the question one of nding a middle ground where people are neither too distant so as to ignore each other, nor too close so as to lose their freedom for engaging in personal initiatives? Lets ask instead the question of the 4S conference this year: What is being silenced by the use of the always on /always off categories? Do they not suggest that we are trapped in an analytical framework which holds that developing social ties over Internet requires improved information processing capacities? And if the answer to this last question is positive, and we think it is, how do we change perspectives? How do we move away from the idea that people are in the world as performers, as efcient information processors who are either on or off? These questions suggest the extent to which distance is an ambivalent concept when trying to understand the forging of social ties through technology mediated interactions. However, new and promising methods are being developed to deal with this issue. Sociologists and cognitive scientists are developing ethnographic tools for studying on-line interactions in communities like Bugzilla, Debian or through wikis and blogs. Mathematicians are developing graph analytical techniques and linguists are increasingly using them for mapping out the semantic content of large electronic corpuses. Computer scientists are developing new visualization techniques for identifying and exploring the structure of social networks. So were starting to get to a feel for how people organize themselves at a distance. And what we see is that people are rst and foremost in the world cognitively and socially and, because they are, they are developing a variety of techniques and procedures for using technology to keep people at arms length. People want to feel emotionally comfortable in their dealings with others and this is illustrated in their efforts to build shared terminologies, group ontologies and workow management protocols. We will illustrate the fact that people are actively building breathing room into the information spaces of Internet by discussing the results of a study underway for UNESCO aimed at computer supporting diaspora knowledge networks.
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Friday Evening
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6:00 7:00PM 4S BUSINESS MEETING COAL HARBOUR 3 [M] 6:00 7:00PM RECEPTION (CASH BAR) PAVILION 1-4 [C-F] 7:00 9:00PM BANQUET (TICKETED EVENT) CRYSTAL BALLROOM EAST & WEST
Saturday
Organizers: Patrick Feng, University of Calgary and Edna Einsiedel, University of Calgary Chair: Patrick Feng
SESSION ABSTRACT: Food is a central facet of modern life, not just because of its obvious link to health, but also because the production and consumption of food is intimately tied to issues of local and regional identity. This panel examines the construction of food and food safety within contexts of regional identity and global health risks. Our specic concern is with how foods are conceptualized by local communities and how these conceptualizations (along with their linkages to food producers, regulators, and consumers) change in the face of a crisis such as avian u or BSE. Consequently, this panel brings together critical perspectives on food production and consumption, with an emphasis on how peoples conceptions of food and their responses to food crises are tied to issues of local identity. One issue we examine is food safety, and how the production of food safety standards is informed by (and in turn inform) regional politics. Another issue we examine is the cultural meanings that are attached to food, whether this be the pride that a particular region attaches to its food products (e.g., Alberta and beef) or the pride that a particular consumer attaches to their insistence that their pets eat only high-quality pet food. Throughout all these papers we emphasize the ways in which science, risk, and politics are intertwined in everyday practices surrounding the production and consumption of food.
Its a mad, mad (cow) world: The politics of food safety in the wild, wild west
Patrick Feng, University of Calgary Edna Einsiedel, University of Calgary
ABSTRACT: not available
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SESSION ABSTRACT: The panel looks at four hot spots, where unruly voices are subdued or managed by scientic rhetorics. This panel examines the resilience and recongurations of scientic rhetorics in the face of organized public challenges to scientic legitimacy and scientic authority. By focusing on cases in which the ideals and norms of epistemic rhetoric are explicitly negotiated, the papers in the panel explore rhetorical means by which unruly voices are subdued, managed, or otherwise co-opted by scientic rhetoric.
Partitioning Order and Wonder: The Protective Polarities of Contemporary Scientic Display
Freya Thimsen, University of Pittsburgh
ABSTRACT: not available
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Ecological Restoration and Social Justice as Boundary Objects: Searching for Common Ground between the Environmental Justice Movement and the Grassroots Ecological Restoration Movement
David Tomblin, Virginia Tech
ABSTRACT: Since the early 1980s, the environmental justice (EJ) and the grassroots ecological restoration (GER) movements have separately worked to redene and make sustainable the anti-environment of urban and rural ecosystems. Furthermore, they both have emphasized democratic principles through public participation in environmental management practices and creating knowledge about nature through work. Despite these broad similarities, the relationship between the EJ and GER movements are obscure and, at times, antagonistic. These epistemic cultures often have competing visions of what the open spaces of rural and urban environments should constitute. For instance, the GER movements focus on rewilding, even in urban environments, has historical links to the exclusionary preservationist narrative of the mainstream environmental movement. This has had the effect of redening these spaces from a culturally and ideologically privileged standpoint; thus overlooking social justice issues and alienating the disadvantaged people living in these environments. Therefore, the purpose of this talk is to present an ecocultural map of the actual and potential relationships among community-based organizations of the EJ and GER movements. The map reveals boundary objects (instruments, ideas, techniques, and actions that each culture has in common) that can serve as avenues of between these epistemic cultures. This analysis has also identied two newly emerging cultures, which incorporate both restoration and social justice among their goals: the indigenous peoples restoration (IPR) movement and the environmental justice restoration (EJR) movement. The IPR and EJR cultures represent examples of how the broader EJ and GER cultures can democratically come together to dene eco-cultural spaces and restore degraded ecosystems within urban and rural environments.
Tell the Truth / Stop the Plant: Lessons from an Activist Campaign
Langdon Winner, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: Overcoming an inevitable development and done deal, citizens in the Hudson Valley waged a successful battle to prevent a global corporate giant from building a massive, coal burning cement plant. This episode in environmental politics resembles many ongoing struggles around the world. In this case a key element was a clever blend of local, democratically articulated knowledge along with the expertise of heavy hitters from engineering, law and the biological sciences. What lessons can we draw from the campaign to Tell the Truth / Stop the Plant?
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Measuring the Pollution in People: Implications of Human Biomonitoring for Constructions of Bodies and Environments
Rachel Washburn, University of California, San Francisco
ABSTRACT: In March 2001, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released initial results from a novel study that revealed in unprecedented detail, the presence of hazardous chemicals in the bodies of average Americans, most of which had ever been widely measured in the U.S. population. Since the publication of this initial report, the CDC has released two subsequent reports in which over one hundred additional chemicals were measured. This process of collecting and analyzing bodily uids and tissues for the presence of environmental chemicals is known as human biological monitoring, or biomonitoring. It differs signicantly from traditional methods for assessing human exposure to hazardous chemicals in that it shifts the focus of analysis from the outside environment, including the air, water, and soil, to the interiors of the human body. As such, hundreds of previously undetectable chemicals residing in human blood, breast milk, semen, saliva, adipose tissue are rendered visible and analyzable (Lynch, 1985) in substantively new ways. The signicance of biomonitoring data spans many social domains. Its meanings and utility are, in fact, differently articulated and mobilized by several constituents, including those in the environmental health sciences, environmental justice communities, health advocacy networks, and policy circles. Utilizing interview data and textual materials, this paper traces emergent and familiar constructions of human bodies and environmental chemicals as enabled through the practice of biomonitoring. The implications of these constructions for producing fresh congurations of the boundaries between bodies, environments, health, and illness are also explored.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts Beginning April 2006, the 4 year study will follow a large-scale ($34M), cross-national research network spanning sites in Canada and the UK that is investigating the pathogenomics of innate immunity. The researchers ask why some of us succumb to infection, while most of us do not. The answer has to do with our innate immunity -- the bodys natural defences against potentially pathogenic microbes. Through an understanding of innate immunity they hope to develop new interventions that will resolve infections without relying on increasingly ineffective antibiotic therapies. Unlike many of their colleagues in genomics research, the leaders of this network embrace the values of what I have come to call merchant science (a not uncritical term) and the translational ideal. Merchant scientists often depict translational work in normative terms, speaking of serving the common good by advancing therapies or contributing to overall prosperity. My project will attempt to frame the ethical dimensions of the individual, institutional, and public interests at stake, while developing an evidence-base for informed policy and debate. The current paper presents a conceptual framework for approaching these questions.
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Balancing the wet and the dry: STS researcher becomes science manager
Nicholas Chrisman, Universit Laval
ABSTRACT: A recent job change has brought me directly into the sticky boundary between wet and dry. I have become a science manager, the director of a network of research scholars spread across 29 Canadian universities. One of the great privileges of the academic is to profess, to have ones own viewpoint to present to the world. Thus, independence is highly prized, a kind of badge of honor. The peer review process is something we must do for the good of the collectivity, and it rates down with other service functions. The myth is that we somehow move from professing to impartial judge when we take on a review. The lessons of science in action cannot be avoided in the daily obligations of approving budgets, running cycles of peer-review. From one viewpoint, an STS background would make it hard to do anything, since one would be aware of so many possibly bad interpretations. However, the reexivity does not slow me down, but it provides a kind of guidance to operate a network conscious of how my actions inuence the process. In this working session I would like to talk about the relationship between concrete actions in operating a network of scientists and the theoretical stance of STS research. The specic case, the wet, comes in direct contact with the espoused goals of how the process is meant to work. The specics of individual cases must be held condential, but the overall nature of the balancing act bear open discussion.
Working in the Lab: The Relationship between the Organization of Research and Training Developed under Competitive Standard Grants in the Biomedical Sciences
Annalisa Salonius, McGill University
ABSTRACT: This paper examines the relationship between the organization of research and post-graduate training in the biomedical sciences that developed under competitive standard operating grants to academic scientists. Using an ethnographic approach, evidence gathered in more than 70 in-depth work history interviews with graduate students, postdocs, technicians and current and retired faculty in biomedical labs at two leading Canadian research universities, I show that under standard operating grants to faculty, and the accommodations in departments that grew up around them, a particular pattern of incorporation of students and postdocs into the research process occurred, which involved the extension of scientic credit to trainees. In turn, scientic credit has been fully integrated into the structure of post-graduate training. The paper examines the relationship of these two institutionalized systems through evidence from a large and very successful academic lab studied. Findings show that the interaction of these two institutionalized systems may be incompatible with the demands of cutting edge science, since it constrains attempts to rearrange the social organization of research work.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts what kinds of indicators can be developed given the possibilities offered by ICTs for collating and processing data. Different methodological approaches have been used to explore these questions, and these will be presented in this session. In line with good STS-reexive practice, contributors will also reect on how they themselves make sense of different types of research data.
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Capturing internet sessions in context: Can technology and ethnography inform the design of health websites
Karen Smith, Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT: Both medicine and interactive design share in the tradition of using interventions to solve problems. In the medical eld, an intervention may be intended to improve the health of an individual or in the case of public health, an entire community. In the eld of interactive design, an intervention may consist of a web-based communications strategy to replace a real-world process. The question and answer component of the medical consultation is an established practice that is becoming automated to a certain extent, as illustrated by the plethora of health information web sites and their popularity of use. Health information web sites appear to blend aspects of medical and interactive design interventions. This paper will explore the consequences of blurring these boundaries by drawing upon a recent field study. In the summer of 2005, I used off-the-shelf Internet session capture software to aid my analysis of health information seeking activity from a public access Internet terminal in a Vancouver clinic waiting room. Twenty-ve sessions were recorded using either the software or eld notes. This paper will explore the methodological history and potential of using Internet session capture software within ethnographic research to inform the design of health information websites. Certain reactions to the presence of an Internet terminal in the waiting room and technological monitoring from the study necessitate a discussion of the medical gaze and medical surveillance in the age of the Internet.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of the screening experience suggests considerable uncertainty and ambiguity around interpretation of the results. Drawing upon data from a recent study of health technologies adopted by midlife women and their health practitioners, this paper argues that the use of technology that offers a visual representation of the body helps to obscure both uncertainty of interpretation and exactly what is being measured. We will explore these issues through the examples of mammography/ ultrasound screening for breast cancer and bone densitometry, a health technology used to screen for risk of osteoporosis. The data set includes: interviews with professionals, clinical consultations and follow up interviews with women patients, thus enabling us to explore the issues raised by triangulation of data
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The social construction of health & safety indicators: A case study of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority
Kate Laxer, York University Pat Armstrong, York University, Canada Karen Messing, University of Quebec at Montreal
ABSTRACT: Social choices are made when constructing data systems and these reect political and economic priorities. In this paper, we review the system of indicator development and data collection at the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority (VCHA) with special attention to indicators on occupational health. At the highest level within the authority, we nd that these data exist to help monitor activity to meet performance agreements and targets set by the provincial government. We explore the variety of sources from which these data are drawn along with the process of data collection, data input, and data implementation. We also review issues related to consistency, comparability and continuity. We question how jurisdictions within the VCHA differ in their delivery of data, how these data compare with data collected by other health authorities and the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Finally, we assess how these data systems succeed or fail at capturing issues related to the occupational health of health care workers. Our methodology involves interviews with data managers at the VCHA and a critical analysis of the indicators themselves. At the highest level of data construction within the VCHA, we nd that there are key absences in the occupational health and safety data and that these are related to gender and the nature of the employment contract.
SESSION ABSTRACT: Amid all the recent discussion of the open source movement, little work has rigorously explored the historical precedents for todays developments or attempted to separate the ideology of open source from the movements own creation myths. These papers do both. T. Haigh uses the development
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of mathematical software libraries by the SHARE user group during the 1950s to show that all the formal characteristics of todays free software projects are as old as the programmable computer. Although the pragmatic motives and corporate organization of these early efforts clash with the genius in a dorm room image of todays open source movement, T. Haigh argues that the massive commitment made to open source by rms such as IBM shows a fundamental continuity. P. Meyer continues the search for historical antecedents, arguing that the early days of the airplane industry saw a similar free exchange of information among tinkering enthusiasts to the better known cases of the early personal computer industry and todays open source software movement. He offers a general explanation for this phenomenon of collective innovation, using the economics of information sharing to explain why it predominates in some industries and circumstances but not others. M. Haigh shifts the debate beyond western countries, to examine ways in which the reception of open source software and peer-to-peer le sharing in Ukraine have been inuenced by its historical experience of communist party rule (which eliminated intellectual property but monopolized the means of mechanical reproduction) and the rival samizdat tradition (which privileged illicit information redistribution).
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Agency, Locality, and Representation in Proprietary and Open Source Software: Silences, Voices, and Concretizations
Michael Felczak, and Andrew Feenberg, Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT: Free and open source software has been the subject of many recent debates in regards to its political signicance, relation to the economy, and internal social dynamics. This paper contributes to these
4 S Final Program with Abstracts debates by analyzing free and open source software in terms of its implications for technical democracy. We begin by considering the emergence of free and open source software in terms of recent work in the sociology of technology and suggest that it may be understood in terms of the perceived conict between the interests and needs of its early practitioners and commercialized software production and distribution. The paper proceeds to a discussion of the politics of technology and considers free and open source software in terms of the concepts of network localities, agency and technical representation. It is argued that in contrast to proprietary software, free and open source software products, practices, and processes enable a wide multiplicity of actors to realize their diverse interests and needs in design. In this way free and open source software contributes to the democratization of sociotechnical relations.
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Missing the Future?: Murray Leinster, Vernor Vinge, and Science Fictions Prescient and Less-Than-Prescient Views of Open Source, Networks, and Personal Computers.
David Ferro, Weber State University
ABSTRACT: With notable exceptions, the bulk of speculative ction (science ction) missed the possibilities of some of the most innovative and inuential technologies of the 20th century. This paper surveys that literature and its dis-incentives for such comprehensive futurist views. It then dealves into two noteworthy exceptions that not only predict the future but play a role in driving that future. While an informal culture of understanding of the inuence of science ction exists in the computer industry (even celebrated in works such as The Cathedral and the Bazaar) it has not been documented. One work, James Frenkels edited volume True Names: And the Opening of the Cyerspace Frontier looks at a story, in this case True Names by Vernor Vinge, in a way that documents that storys inuence on the development of open source, technological convergence, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. After noting the comments in this study, the paper we are submitting explores the work of another author of more than three decades earlier: Murray Leinster. The authors have examined original material in Leinsters les that tell the tale of how his early works played (and did not play) a role in the development of those same technologies. This paper gets at a less-told but always interesting aspect of technological development: creative inuence. It also hints at the underlying politics of a ctional genre and what those creative inuences bring to the technology created.
Discussant: Atsushi Akera, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 3.1K SHIFTING GEAR: WHAT DO CHANGES IN AUTOMOTIVE INFRASTRUCTURES REVEAL?
Organizer: Jameson Wetmore, Arizona State University Chair: Jameson Wetmore
SESSION ABSTRACT: For many Westerners, the automobile is such a part of daily life that all of the systems that make its use both safe and efcient are hidden from view. When there is a failure or an attempt at change, however, the details and importance of these infrastructures are revealed. While the technical details of these arrangements are often uncovered, perhaps much more importantly is the fact that failure reveals the values that infrastructures both embody and promote. This panel will look at four instances where a sudden shift exposed automotive infrastructures that are often taken for granted. Daniel Neyland and Steve Woolgar will examine what happens when basic regulations (like parking laws and trafc light systems) break down. Jameson Wetmore will detail how the design of crash test dummies embodied a certain vision of the driver and how this vision was severely rebuked (and revised) when it was blamed for the death of women and children. Peter Norton will explore how rights to the roadway were reassigned during the 1920s in the United States. Jong-Min Lee will detail the effects of changing the way fares are paid on Seoul City Buses. Wendy Michael will look at how the infrastructure of the factory melds together people and machine. In each of these cases, the disruption of the infrastructure caused many groups including corporations, politicians, and members of the general public to question the values embedded in the systems and initiated calls for change.
Parking is Such Sweet Sorrow: disruptions and the moral order of trafc regulation
Daniel Neyland, University of Oxford Steve Woolgar, University of Oxford
ABSTRACT: This paper examines examples of the temporary disruption of trafc regulations (the inadvertent suspension of parking regulations in a town centre; the breakdown of trafc light systems at a busy interchange) for what these can tell us about the moral order which sustains normal functioning. Of special interest are the ways in which reports and stories of disruption articulate what is taken for granted about technical features of the scene, about the relevant agencies and courses of appropriate action, and about how these mutually relate to one another.
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Created in his Own Image: The Crash Test Dummy as Critical Infrastructure
Jameson M. Wetmore, Arizona State University
ABSTRACT: In the 1960s, General Motors (GM) developed a crash test dummy to help its engineers develop safer automobiles. In the early 1970s, when the National Highway Trafc Safety Administration (NHTSA) began a serious push to integrate new safety technologies into US passenger vehicles, it needed a way to test the devices. Having no crash test dummies of its own design, the US government turned to the most advanced design available the one being used by GM. Thus the dummies developed by General Motors for internal experiments suddenly became one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure in the US efforts to make cars safer. This paper will explore the role that the design of these dummies played in the development of technologies and regulations over the following decades. In particular it will look at the ramications of building and mandating dummies that were designed to represent the adult male population of the United States.
Make Way for the Motor Age: The Social Reconstruction of the City Street
Peter Norton, University of Virginia
ABSTRACT: In the middle decades of the twentieth century, engineers rebuilt American cities to accommodate automobiles. Historians seeking to explain the automotive city have looked for answers to the planners who designed automotive infrastructure, as well as to the fortunes of the vehicles that used it. These explanations tend to underestimate the role of a once-crucial class of street userpedestrians. The Motor Age depended on pedestrians substantial exile from the street. Before cities could be rebuilt for the Motor Age, city streets had to be redened as places where motor vehicles belong. As late as 1920 many city people and experts regarded motorists as intruders in streets. Because streets were socially constructed as public spaces (like parks), uses that endangered or obstructed other street users were of doubtful legitimacy. Motorists therefore had to shoulder most of the blame for high pedestrian casualties and trafc congestion. Above all, before a street could be a place chiey for motor vehicles, pedestrians legitimacy on the pavement had to be overturned. In the teens and twenties this was accomplished. Those seeking to win legitimacy for cars in city streets fought to redene the safety and congestion problems, for example by redening some oncereputable street uses as jaywalking, and by timing automatic signals to the benet of motorists. Together, by 1930, these changes amounted to the substantial reinvention of the city street as a motor thoroughfare. Only then could the physical reconstruction of cities for the Motor Age begin.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts help from the passenger with T-money (RF ID payment card). Drivers are not controlling the bus fully, but are under the control of the central system with GPS and CCTV. Passengers are getting a discount, but also getting new responsibility to prove their status. These changes on the Seoul city bus will reveal more detailed look on the changing status of the transportation workers, the responsibility of the citizen, the new markets of electronic industries, and reconstruction of the Seoul.
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Organizers: Pei Koay, Rice University; Bettina Bock v. Wlngen, University of Bremen; Michelle McGowan, University of Washington Chair: Pei Koay
SESSION ABSTRACT: Genes create identities socially, politically and phenotypically. This panel discusses the production and silencing of difference following Foucault in terms of processes of subjectivation. Within historically specic struggles identities surface in a necessary subject formation in accordance and friction with the state and its institutions. New technologies and their applications create new needs for identities and deepen gaps within hierarchies of already existing conicting and competing identities. As different identities show different advantages in differing local elds of power the local-global dichotomy is challenged by competing localities. The globalised gene-talk offers a platform of translation between them. In the extensive politicking and media coverage of the rst draft of the human genome sequence, the gene has been heralded as the future of science and medicine. Coupled with this discourse have been globalised and localised shifts towards discourses of geneticisation, or processes by which differences between people are reduced to their genomes. At the expense of other epistemologies of social difference, geneticisation has become increasingly dominant in a range of medical, scientic and social spheres. While the approaches and subject matters of the panel members differ, each member highlights in her work not only silence/ absence in emerging biomedical technosciences but tensions between the local and the global. However, members also address the consequences and challenge that these tensions and silences/absences have for gender, disability, and/or race studies. For STS, we ask, how can its theorising/approaches better articulate the localising of `global science, visibilise `Otherness, without reifying dichotomies of natural/social, east/west, modern/traditional, normal/pathological?
4 S Final Program with Abstracts including Edison Liu, Executive Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore. These quotes included the following: Pan Asian scientists believe that regional Asian populations share unique genetic variations that go back thousands of years. This talk focuses on the (dis)placing of nations, race, and ethnic groups with X populations in the post-universal human genome project genomics.
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Producing Users of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis: Dominant and Marginalised Discourses in the US
Michelle McGowan, University of Washington, Seattle
ABSTRACT: not available
3.1M AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS ARTHOR MEETS CRITICS: THE EFFORTLESS ECONOMY OF SCIENCE BY PHILIP MIROWSKI (DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004)
Organizer: Wenda Bauchspies, Pennsylvania State University
Discussants: Martha Lampland, University of California, San Diego; Martina Merz, University of Lausanne: Daniel Breslau, Virginia Tech
Saturday 10:15-1 1:45am
4 S Final Program with Abstracts relatives of someone with Alzheimers Disease exercise a type of consumer citizenship in minimizing their risk of getting the disease and actualizing a certain vision of their future. For these individuals, their imagination of the future is one of controlled aging, perhaps with normal memory loss, but one without Alzheimers Disease.
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Meanings of Bio-Relations and Genetic Risk: Alzheimers Disease and Aging in a Genomic Information Age
Laura Mamo, University of Maryland Jennifer Fosket, McGill University
ABSTRACT: not available
Discussant: Janet Shim, University of California, San Francisco 3.2F TRANSGENE TRANSGRESSIONS: CONTROVERSIES OVER TRANSGENIC MAIZE IN MEXICO
Organizers: Jason Delborne, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Abby Kinchy, University of WisconsinMadison Chair: Jason Delborne
SESSION ABSTRACT: In 2001, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley published an article in Nature suggesting that native landraces of maize in Oaxaca, Mexico had inadvertently become contaminated with transgenic DNA. Controversy quickly erupted over the scientic validity of the published claims; the ecological signicance of the arrival of transgenes into the center of genetic diversity for maize; the political implications of an apparently failed Mexican moratorium on the planting of GM maize; and the cultural impact of traces of biotechnology among indigenous peoples and rural campesinos. Governments, corporations, NGOs, scientic institutions, activists, farmer groups, and the media have all struggled to make sense of this controversy. Actors continue to engage its various dimensions for producing knowledge and playing politics. By bringing together diverse approaches to this complex case study, this panel attempts to satisfy three goals: 1) to bring together more information and analysis of this case than has been assembled in any previous forum; 2) to explore the complementarities among distinct lines of research that emerge from a single case study; and 3) to reveal our scholarly communitys patterns of attention and silence toward an arena of controversy that crosses disciplinary, political, biogeographic, and cultural boundaries.
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Knowledge Work in the Social Movement against Transgenic Maize in Mexico: Implications of the Claim that Transgenes Cause Maize Malformations
Abby J. Kinchy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: The controversy over transgenic maize in Mexico provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which social movementsin this case the transnational antibiotechnology movementmake otherwise invisible phenomena widely visible. I argue that the use of monstrous images of biotechnology in this case reects a desire to reduce the movements dependence on scientic experts for the visualization of these microscopic transformations. In Mexico, rural activists have used local, sensory knowledge of their maize elds to generate a new hypothesis about the effects of gene ow between genetically modied corn and native varieties of maize. They claim that transgenic contamination is causing a wide variety of deformities in maize plants. Scientists have dismissed this claim, stating that such malformations occurred in maize long before transgenic corn was ever introduced. Members of the activist network in Mexico are divided on this issue. On one hand, the claim that transgenes cause deformities has motivated more people to action because it has made the issue more tangible. On the other hand, some activists believe that the claim is unscientic and that it damages the movements credibility and leverage in the eld of policymaking. In this paper, I explore the implications of this controversial claims-making for movement strategy and for the alliances between the diverse groups that make up the activist network.
The Case of the Disappearing Transgenes: Analyzing the Roles of Values and Facts in Interpreting Scientic Data on Transgenes in Maize Landraces in the Sierra Jurez, Oaxaca, Mexico
David A. Cleveland, University of California, Santa Barbara Daniela Soleri, University of California, Santa Barbara
ABSTRACT: The two published analyses of maize landraces in the Sierra Jurez, Oaxaca, Mexico for the presence of transgenes as a result of unintentional gene ow came to seemingly opposite conclusions Quist and Chapela reported transgene presence, and Ortiz-Garca et al. reported absence of detectable transgenes. We analyze these studies and the scientic and public reaction to them in terms of explicit and implicit values, and the use of scientic method and data. We show that both supporters and critics of genetically engineered, transgenic crop varieties (GE varieties) tend to conate value based and empirically based knowledge, leading them to contradictory evaluations of these two studiesthey see the facts (transgene presence) differently because they see what should be (the role of GE varieties in Mexican maize farming) differently. Their extrapolation from the facts established by the two studies to wider spatial and geographic dimensions and to policy recommendations involves the same conation they see what should be (broad policies for GE varieties) differently because they see facts differently. In other words, objective evaluation of empirically based knowledge gets squeezed out by subjective values. Our analysis of this case study suggests that science can provide guidelines for agreement on facts only if subjective values are acknowledged and discussed a priori, and that general agreement about the facts is necessary for successful policy making, which is necessarily primarily value based.
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Positioning as Central and Frontier: The Gordon Research Conferences and Scientic Infrastructure
Arthur Daemmrich, Chemical Heritage Foundation
ABSTRACT: not available
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Immaterial and Affect Labor in the Changing and Enduring Worlds of Patient Care and Health Systems: from Spinoza to radical Italian sociology and ethics in relations
Judith Gregory, Illinois Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: We reach back to Spinoza in order to reach forward to theorizing the inter-animation of new forms of semiotic mediation and new modes of labor that result from the historical transformation of labor since the 1970s. We explore immaterial labor and affect labor (affective labor) in relation to the changing and enduringworlds of patient care and health systems, with central attention to caring (care-giving) and emotion in interactions in health care work and the pressures these come under from recent periods of changing patient care and changing power relations in the context of the US health care sector. For this, we are working from Spinoza and recent interpretations of Spinoza (e.g., the new Spinoza), from radical Italian sociology (Negri, Hardt, Lazzarato,Virno, others), theories of affect in philosophy and in nursing (Levinas, Heise, Bourdieu; e.g., Watson, Hall, Leninger), and ethics in relations. We draw relations to long discussions of materiality and ideality in cultural historical activity theory (Ilyenkov, Vygotsky, others), with the aims of extending these and joining the dialogue between and amongst these discourses. The discussion continues concerns with how, when and in what ways logics collide in patient care interactions and health information infrastructure-building projects, and the need for negotiations between disparate logics and diverse imaginaries in technology design (Gregory; Gregory, Hyysalo & Kangasoja). The analysis builds on the concepts of incomplete utopian projects (Gregory) and social silencing (Yard), towards new possibilities for politics (Aronowitz).
4 S Final Program with Abstracts in the intervening centuries. They have now matured and become urgent. They may become destructive or creative in their outcomes. Much depends on whether they are recognised and confronted. There are many hopeful signs, including the response of the elite scientists in the UK and elsewhere, and also the ferment of new initiatives such as this 4S conference. If I had to offer a key word for the new consciousness that is needed, it would be awareness
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Socio-technical analysis of slave workforce-based production systems (Africa-America, between the XVI and XIX centuries). A theoreticalmethodological proposal
Hernn Thomas, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes/CONICET - Argentina
ABSTRACT: The aim for this paper is to introduce an actually developing research project where the technology-slavery relationship is analyzed from a socio-technical perspective. To be focused again on that issue from this analytical viewpoint supposes the chance to identify new relationships, to re-build new processes, to generate new explanations. At the same time, the paper is a proposal for an theoretical-methodological approach that it had never be applied within the Latin-american countries, at least- on historical and social studies. In this sense, it can be read like an attempt to broadening the possible analytical approaches used for historical studies. Up today, many scholarly work had been addressed to the analysis of the slave trade between the XVI and XIX centuries and the production systems based on the slave labor force as well from economical, demographical as legal approaches. Particularly, in the socio-historical studies on slave economy, the sparse depicting of the specic technologies developed in that period are circunscribed to the different capture and transport technics, the tools and facilities used in the slave system, and the disciplinary methods. To carry ahead the research project, an analytical distinction is made into the slave-based production systems between: a) the processes of slave production; capture, transport, concentration and slave selling (from the capture inside Africa to the end market), and b) the processes of production based on slave workforce into plantations, haciendas, mining and urban jobs. In a rst stage the research will be developed only about the slaves production processes.
ABSTRACT: Contrary to what survival of the ttest theories tells us, human and non-human animals seem to want to help each other out, judging from both extensive circumstantial evidence and recent scientic research. Everyone living with a pet can testify that their animal seem to know and respond to their needs, and companion animals are now employed in various therapeutic contexts. The interest in human-animal connections are reected in mass media, stories such as the one about the old tortoise adopting an orphaned baby hippo, is abundant on TV news. Current scientic research indicates that chimpanzee toddlers are inclined to help a human if they perceive that the human is in need. The prospect of interspecies collaborations seriously questions our leading scientic and artistic (and religious) paradigms. How do we conduct research in collaboration with someone whose experiences, sensations and knowledge cannot be understood, and certainly not quantied? How do we make a meaningful reading of an artwork when we cannot be sure there is an intention behind it, and even less certain about what that intention could be. Both the scientic world and the art world have a long tradition of *using* animals. How do we transition to collaboration? The four artists on the panel address questions such as: How can we set up meaningful collaborations with non-human animals? How can we interact meaningfully with an other that has been conditioned for centuries, if not millennia, to mistrust us? How can we use technologies to enable and facilitate these collaborations?
PigeonBlog
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Empathic Play
Kathy High, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: This is a research report from the eld, tracking exchanges between human donor and transgenic rats. Through the effects of enriched habitat, touch, K. High works with her transgenic rats (the uncounted workers) to create new empathetic investigations. Highs relationship with the rats was one of mirroring, as she, like them, carries the dysfunctional genes of a compromised immune system. High participated in the exhibition Becoming Animal at MASS MoCA. Her installation, Embracing Animal, was a lab environment for observation, an experimental playground to feel the tension of exchanges, transitions between humans and animals. This installation honored our relationship and exchange with animals, and celebrated our kinship with laboratory animals, in particular with transgenic rodents. The installation looked like an ersatz laboratory with large glowing test tubes, and an extended animal habitat which housed three transgenic lab rats, retired breeders, model HLA B27, purchased from a science products vendor. The public viewed the rats and the care of these rats over the 10 months of the exhibition. The animals were treated with alternative medicines, environmental enrichment, good food and play. The rats were combined beings that resonate with us in ways that other animals cannot because they carry our genes.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts behavior of non-human animals. We expect and want nature (individuals of other species are commonly categorized as being nature), to be natural. However, one can argue that burdening non-human animals with our idea of what is natural for them leads to speciesism, and speciesism is a cousin to sexism and racism, as expectations of natural behavior is an integral part of those. Making art projects together with animals was for many in the class a truly frustrating experience. However the frustration seemed meaningful and interesting. It appeared to be an indication that there is something truly important at stake and that the rewards could be profound, both on a personal, political, and environmental level. As research, interspecies collaboration is located outside normal science. What is lacking is not the observations and experiences, but the theories, the belief systems, which makes the observations cohesive. As with all fringe research, the pain involved with the endeavors probably stems from a discrepancy between what is experienced and observed and what our models of the world allow us to believe. When working with other species one major obstacle is that we dont have the cultural illusion that we can understand each other. However, artists are trained in creating alternative yet believable vistas, cosmologies, horizons or umwelts, and to take responsibility for them. The students, and artists in general, can use this asset to move beyond the frustration and into collaborations with other species, and in the process, allowing our non-human collaborators to teach us what they know.
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3.2J WHAT SHOULD THE HUMANITIES OFFER TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY? [WORKING SESSION]
Organizers: Adam Briggle, University of Colorado;Britt Holbrook, University of North Texas; and Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas Chair: Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas
SESSION ABSTRACT: Public policymaking brings facts and values together in the analysis of problems and formation of alternative courses of action. Policymakers increasingly rely on natural and social scientists to help them understand relevant factual information and attendant uncertainties within a given context. The contributions and challenges of science for policy are well-recognized by science studies scholars. This community has remained relatively silent, however, about the role of humanities for policy. The humanities encompass older, non-scientic ways of knowing that can offer guidance for policy and encourage reection within the public sphere. Yet, humanities scholars face many challenges to their efforts to connect with public policy, even as science and technology continue to raise non-scientic and non-technical issues: The humanities are often dismissed as irrelevant to the practical demands of decisionmaking, especially as the pace of policy is pushed by the accelerating realms of science and technology. At other times, the humanities are accused of playing an alibi functionproviding a legitimizing cover to the inevitable dictates of the technological and market imperatives. Other concerns center on the specter of ethics experts becoming philosopher kingspaternalistically dening the good life or the common good and usurping power from the people and their representatives. The purpose of this panel is to explore the promises and challenges of a humanities policy by addressing specic public policy cases from humanistic perspectives in order to answer the general questions: What do the humanities offer to policymaking? What should they offer?
Lessons from Katrina: Engineering, Science, and the Policy Turn in the Humanities
Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas
ABSTRACT: not available
Suffering in Silence: What Can Scientists Say about the Broader Societal Impacts of their Research, and Why Arent They Saying It?
Britt Holbrook, University of North Texas
ABSTRACT: not available
4 S Final Program with Abstracts half-century. This great die-off, already underway, would be earths largest in 65 million years and the fastest ever. The potential consequences are unknown, but a majority of these same biologists believe that these trends pose a major threat to human existence. More fundamentally, in the words of the Provost of the American Museum of Natural History, they warn of an impending irrevocable catastrophe to the planets biota and endanger the continuation of life as we know it. This paper explores how understanding of this profound conjuncture as yet poorly grasped by larger publics is being constructed and disseminated in international mass media and political arenas. What institutions and populations are most crucially active in acting upon this understanding? How is new knowledge being inected into specic tactics and policies? How are academics across disciplines shaping this developing awareness in their work as public intellectuals? Why are these topics understudied in recent STS literatures, and what insights may be gained from using methods developed in these elds? I explore these questions with special reference to central African primate survival and forest conservation.
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3.2K FACT(ORY)/LABOR(ATORY)
Organizers: Park Doing, and Stephen Hilgartner, Cornell University Chair: Park Doing
SESSION ABSTRACT: The laboratory and the factory are two of the central symbols of modernity, and they stand in a dialectical relationship to one another in a way that broadly parallels the dialectics of fact/ technique, designer/operator, worker/knower, and creative/routine. This session looks ethnographically and historically at how the concepts of the factory and the laboratory are put to use in some signicant technical projects. The focus is not on similarities and differences between labs and factories, but on how these concepts are asserted, merged, torn apart, and resisted in contestations of expertise, ownership, and control over the means of (knowledge) production. Papers will explore how various forms of the factory/ laboratory dichotomy are invoked and reconstituted in the course of the epistemic politics of technical practice (including institution building) in such projects as synchrotron protein crystallography, nuclear power, and genome mapping and sequencing. The conduct and consequences of these negotiations will be examined in arenas ranging from the shop oor politics of the lab to the formation of national science policies.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts themselves being blamed for failing to prevent something they had not been required to know. The paper provides the historical background to these politics of knowing, and illustrates how professional identities were re-negotiated in the post-accident struggles over accountability for production and distribution of knowledge.
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3.2L WHAT DO THEY KNOW? AND HOW DO THEY KNOW IT? AMATEURS, HOBBYISTS, AND R ETHINKING THE NATURE OF EXPERTISE
Organizer: Kalpana Shankar, Indiana University-Bloomington Chair: Kalpana Shankar
SESSION ABSTRACT: Often dismissed as uncredentialed dabblers or dilettantes, the amateur, the hobbyist, and the volunteer have played pivotal roles in creating new knowledge, mitigating suffering, and insuring survival. What can foregrounding the often-invisible efforts of amateurs and volunteers teach us about creating and negotiating expertise when there are no standards for assessing it? In this panel, we explore the hidden worlds and multiple manifestations of deep amateur knowledge. One paper investigates the different ways that parents and doctors develop expertise on autism, and the different types of expertise that result from their efforts. Another examines the establishment of expertise in an online group of volunteers who mobilized ofine to implement Internet service in the regions affected by Hurricane Katrina. Our third paper documents the emergence of a network of stewards concerned with the protection of eelgrass habitat along coastal British Columbia and the networks engagements with professional scientists. A fourth paper
4 S Final Program with Abstracts examines Xbox enthusiasts who use hobbyist expertise to give interpretive exibility to the closed world of the game system. And the last case study asks serious questions of a playful topic: what does expertise mean and how does it become established in a community of rubber duck collectors and enthusiasts? Through exploration of these topics, we seek to reconceptualize amateurs as not only partners to legitimized experts, but also as important holders and creators of expertise themselves.
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Wind, water, and wi-: Volunteers, online networks, and Internet service deployment in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath
Kalpana Shanka, Indiana University-Bloomington Muzaffer Ozakca, Indiana University-Bloomington
ABSTRACT: The primary focus of this research activity is to understand how online networks conceptualize and verify expertise, especially in stressful and rapidly changing environments . We are examining the role of some volunteer organizations and individuals in deploying wireless Internet service in the Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina. Broadly, the researchers expect that project will produce useful insights into the role of grassroots volunteers in disaster relief, their communication patterns and information needs, their effective mobilization, and the mechanisms for evaluating the outcomes of their efforts.
Great SCOT!: Grid group sociology, SCOT, and the Xbox 360
Colin Beech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: I am looking at hacker and cracker enthusiasts who are modding xboxes with chips. These chips allow them to run linux as an academic pursuit, so called moral hacking, and also to run homebrew apps and pirate software, so called cracking, or immoral hacking. From a theoretical point of view, this encompasses a policy question regarding the nature of intellectual property and the DMCA, and my own marxist interpretation of the hackers desire for the means of production to write their own software. However, that is a sidebar to a new emerging theoretical viewpoint Im developing between SCOT and grid group sociology (Mary Douglas). I argue that hackers (and crackers) use modchips to aggressively move their artifact (an xbox) from a state of closure back to one of interpretive exibility using their hobbyist expertise.
Rubber duck collectors: Of amateurs, experts, and the serious side of silly business
Charlotte P. Lee, University of California-Irvine Ciaran Trace, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: Creating cabinets of curiosities that held collections of unusual objects was a hobby undertaken by nobles in the 1700s that was later embraced by wealthy traders. Today, collecting as a hobby is broadly
4 S Final Program with Abstracts popular with collections encompassing an endless variety of both rare and common natural objects and manmade artifacts. For artifacts that are seen as culturally valuable, expert knowledge of an objects provenance, value, preservation needs, and authenticity is often available through formal organizations and through those that have been vetted by them. However, when collecting items commonly dismissed as kitschy nonsense, the determined enthusiast may not so different from their more respectable counterparts. Lacking experts vetted by formal organizations such as institutions of higher learning, amateur or professional organizations, or even book publishers, how do people look for, identify, and cultivate expertise? This research project uses qualitative methods to conduct a case study of rubber duck collectors that frequent an online message board to explore: 1) what expertise is sought; 2) how is expertise identied by those in a domain seemingly without formal experts, and 3) what role does the online community play in helping collectors nd, identify, and cultivate expertise.
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Visible Bodies, Invisible Politics: The Visible Human Male and the Politics of Death
Rachel Prentice, Cornell University
ABSTRACT: Anthropologists have long noted the tendency in capitalist societies for social problems to become medicalized. This paper examines how social and political facts of one mans life were forgotten as a death-row inmate became the US National Library of Medicines Visible Human Male. I consider how each step in the production of the Visible Human Male, each step towards its incarnation as a digital artifact, erased Joseph Paul Jernigans biography, history, and subjectivity, including the facts of his life, death, and digitization. I develop a theory of the politics of informatic objects that considers the implications of the erasures of a bodys history, biography, and materiality as it becomes a digital, medical artifact. This has implications for how we think about the abstraction inherent in processes of digitalization and in the production of medical artifacts made from material bodies.
Experiencing and experimenting together : E-groups as laboratories for patients collective action
Madeleine Akrich, Ecole des Mines de Paris Ccile Madel, Ecole des Mines de Paris
ABSTRACT: This paper will draw upon the analysis of electronic groups of discussion on health issues. These groups gather patients or patientsrelatives concerned by specic health problems. They display a number of common features : of course, they are places for mutual support, but also for extensive exchange
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of information, including scientic publications. Moreover, they allow the circulation of patients specic forms of knowledge, such as personal bodily experience, medical experience (impact of medication for example) institutional or organisational experience. These exchanges and discussions allow both the constitution of some patients expertise and the constitution of the group as a kind of community of practice . In some cases, these communities can result into forms of collective agency whose visibility extends outside of the Web, in public arena. We will investigate various congurations of the possible linkages between e-groups and different kinds of patient organizations, some in which organizations preexist to e-groups, others where e-groups are at the origins of the organization through the involvement of part of their members. We will show how these discussion groups can be considered as kinds of laboratories in which information and opinions circulate and are discussed, in which identities are forged, strategic options are worked out and could be included in other spaces.
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Saturday Lunch
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ROUNDTABLE: STS ENGAGED: A CONVERSATION ON THE FUTURE OF STS EXPERTISE AND THE PARTICIPATORY TURN CO-SPONSORED BY 6S
Organizers: Wyatt Galusky, SUNY-Morrisville and Benjamin R. Cohen, University of Virginia
This lunch-hour session is part of the STS Engaged series, which foregrounds questions of interdisciplinary STS expertise and of audience. This caucus will involve a discussion for and among graduate students and junior scholars, engaging the topics of STS interdisciplinary expertise and the positioning of that expertise in various forums - traditional and non-traditional.
Discussants: Matthew R. Harsh, University of Edinburgh; Wyatt Galusky, SUNY-Morrisville; Jason Delborne, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Benjamin R. Cohen, University of Virginia NSF FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
Organizers: Priscilla Regan, Science and Society Program, NSF Frederick Kronz, Science and Society Program, NSF
Science and Society considers proposals that examine questions that arise in the interactions of engineering, science, technology, and society. There are four components: Ethics and Values in Science, Engineering and Technology (EVS) History and Philosophy of Science, Engineering and Technology (HPS) Social Studies of Science, Engineering and Technology (SSS) Studies of Policy, Science, Engineering and Technology (SPS) The components overlap, but are distinguished by the different scientic and scholarly orientations they take to the subject matter, as well as by different focuses within the subject area. For complete details, see the S&S Program Solicitation (NSF 05-588) at: http://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_ key=nsf05588 This program solicitation covers the following modes of support: Standard Research Grants and Grants for Collaborative Research proposals for research, infrastructure or education projects; not require full-time investigator support; may involve Co-PIs, post doc researchers, or grad/undergrad students. Maximum award, excluding indirect costs, is $300,000 for two or three years. Scholars Awards full-time support normally for only one year, up to $70,000 for total direct costs. Postdoctoral Fellowships to enhance the methodological skills and research competence of researchers; must have both a training and a research component; site must be different from where received PhD. Stipends range from $36,000-$42,000 a year for maximum of 2 years. Professional Development Fellowships to improve and expand skills in areas different from that of PhD; must contain both a training and research component. Range from $36,000 to $60,000 plus $3,000 for travel and research expenses. Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants to provide funds for dissertation research expenses not normally available through the students university and in settings away from campus. Up to $8,000 for research in North America and $12,000 for international research. Small Grants for Training and Research (SGTR) (August submission only) to provide sustained research opportunities for graduate students and post-docs. Maximum of $100,000 per year for one post doc and up to three graduate students a year; generally for three years. Conference and Workshop Awards to develop, evaluate, and share new research ndings; need cosponsor from national association or organization. Limit of $25,000. Proposal Due Dates: August 1 and February 1 Contact: Frederick Kronz fkronz@nsf.gov (703) 292-7283 (HPS & SSS) Priscilla Regan pregan@nsf.gov (703) 292-7318 (EVS & SPS)
4 S Final Program with Abstracts John P. Perhonis jperhoni@nsf.gov (703) 292-7279 (Dissertations) Website: http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=5324&org=SES&from=home
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Saturday 1:30-3:15pm
Science-based policy or politics-based science? The EU Impact Assessment system through a sustainable development lens
John Turnpenny, University of East Anglia
ABSTRACT: The European Union Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS), rst adopted in 2001 and renewed in June 2006, aims to guide the Community towards prosperity, environmental protection and social cohesion. In parallel, the so-called Lisbon Strategy (re-launched February 2005), aims to deliver stronger, lasting growth and...more and better jobs. Lisbon contains a commitment to simplifying and reducing regulatory burden. A major part of delivering both these strategies is the EU Impact Assessment (IA) system, introduced in 2003 to encourage an evidence-based and transparent approach to EU policy making. All items on the European Commission Work Programme (regulatory proposals, White Papers, expenditure programmes and negotiating guidelines for international agreements) require an assessment of their potential impacts, and how far they meet the criteria of the two overarching Strategies. How well these IAs have been carried out in practice, and the wider questions of the compatibility of the two overarching Strategies, are the subject of a large and growing literature. Consultation with stakeholders is a major part of the IA process, and conicting interests, normally hidden from public view, are often clearly revealed but rarely resolved. The key questions are then whose voices are sought, whose are heard, and whose has most inuence. The role of science through the IA process, while important, is clearly limited, since IA is an aid to political decision-making, not a substitute for it. This leaves ample room for political manoeuvring, emphasising the importance of understanding both the inuence of stakeholders and the paradigms they embody. Scientic analysis is often invoked as a set of truths to bolster pre-dened political positions, and the IA system often neglects or even reinforces implicit principles and assumptions about problem denitions and solutions.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts Our research has been carried out as part of the MATISSE (Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment) project, funded by the European Commissions Sixth Framework Programme. Through elite interviews and secondary source analysis, we have investigated the use of knowledge in the EU IA process, and the dominant paradigms which frame the debates. The empirical evidence shows a strong Jobs and Growth paradigm in the EU, and a persistent focus on economic aspects of policy impacts. We conclude with implications for the design and use of research tools, and suggestions for their further development.
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Energizing UK climate change policies: shaping and changing policies around these two wicked issues
Irene Lorenzoni, University of East Anglia
ABSTRACT: Since the turn of the century, the UK has witnessed increasing attention devoted to environmental issues and sustainable development by the New Labour government. Analyses of how these have been related to other governmental priorities have uncovered dexterous and sometimes contradictory policies. More recently, this has been evident in the evolution of UK energy policy and its abrasive relationship with climate change. Two separate publications made the spotlight. In 2003, the UK government published its Energy White Paper, outlining the aspiration of reducing the nations carbon dioxide emissions by 60% by the year 2050. Concurrently, support for further development of nuclear power, potentially a major contributor to achieving ambitious climate change mitigation, was frozen. Come 2006: the UK governments energy review announces that the conditions are now more favorable for new nuclear power to be considered part of future energy mix, specically for delivering on climate change mitigation and energy security. The UKs energy considerations are now boldly enmeshed with reservations about future climate change, a wicked issue which appears to be opening the doors to other, controversially less desirable, technological solutions. The focus of this paper is on the development of UK energy debate since 2003 and its spill-over into the climate change arena. It examines the drivers, pressures and multiple interests revealed from documentary analysis that are involved in shaping policy, and draws some conclusions on the future of energy and climate policies in the UK.
Public Value Mapping for the Assessment of Big Science Policy: will the US Climate Change Science Program contribute to policy and decision making?
Ryan Meyer, Arizona State University
ABSTRACT: Traditional research policy analysis has tended to focus on products (peer-reviewed papers, new research tools, etc.) or impacts (usually economic) that have no necessary connection to public value. New tools are needed for analysis of research with explicit goals that cannot be evaluated in terms of these more common metrics. Public Value Mapping, a new framework aimed at remedying this lacuna, is explored here in the context of the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). Public Value Mapping, and this work in particular, is motivated by the recognition that publicly funded research programs directed toward explicit societal goals should be evaluated in terms of their ability to reach those goals. Put differently, research intended to generate public value should be structured to achieve that end; it must go beyond the generation of new knowledge and explicitly bridge the gap between scientic product and social outcome. This approach is consistent with calls for the democratization of science toward the generation of knowledge that is both scientically valid and socially robust. I will present the results of an analysis of the structure of the CCSP, which constitutes a rst step in the application of Public Value Mapping to this particular federally funded scientic effort. The purpose of this step is to hold the CCSP accountable to those values identied in its own internal structure through an analysis of its strategic plan and other supporting documents. The CCSP strategic plan, published in 2003, outlines many milestones, products and payoffs which, ostensibly, will contribute to the achievement of ve overarching goals for climate science and climate policy. Thus, a careful reading of the plan reveals implicit policy models, for the achievement of internally dened public value through climate science. I then discuss plans for further applying Public Value Mapping to the CCSP, which include the identication and mapping of an appropriate knowledge value collective, which requires a more complete understanding of the research and agenda setting ecology of a diverse group of institutions and actors that make up US climate science.
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The Implications of the New Genetics for the Structuring of Health Care Delivery in the United Kingdom
Helen Cox, University of York
ABSTRACT: The mapping of the Human Genome and the New Genetics were introduced with great noise and promise of the potential to improve health and eradicate disease. However, the integration of these innovative health technologies into the UK National Health Service (UK NHS) still remains unstructured and unformed (and quiet). Recent work has identied a gap in the current social science understanding of health services delivery in this era of the New Genetics. From a health policy perspective, understanding why certain innovations have been adopted in one eld and not in another may provide useful information for future policy implementation. This paper will begin to explore how uneven, variable and disruptive the integration of new genetics will be and its impact on professional practice. This social and policy analysis of the implications of the New Genetics for the UK NHS will use a Sociology of Science and Technology approach. The focus will be on the ways in which different social, professional and organisational processes and networks will shape, and in turn be shaped by, the integration of genetics into clinical specialities. It will map the different systems that play an important role in explaining the unevenness in the diffusion of innovation across networks and the formal and informal processes of regulation acting upon those networks. It will also explore the ways in which various actors attempt to stabilise particular versions of genetics in certain contexts, while institutional practices and organisational policies keeps them muted or silenced in others.
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3.3F LIBERATING THE CIRCUITS AND THE SOURCE CODE: TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC PRAXIS OF TECHNOLOGY
Organizer: Brent Jesiek, Virginia Tech Chair: Brent Jesiek
SESSION ABSTRACT: While the origins of the Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement can be traced back to at least the mid-1980s, academic interest in FLOSS methods, projects, and communities has picked up signicant momentum in recent years. Numerous investigators, for example, are actively working to account for the benets of open access and collaboration, both in the domain of software development and beyond. Further, calls for openness are now extending deeply into a variety of creative and media elds, scholarly and scientic communities, and even business sectors. Yet even as FLOSS provides inspiration for work in these diverse domains, the original movement continues along its own unique historical trajectory. The goal of this session is to document contemporary currents in the theory and practice of FLOSS, particularly at the intersection of open source principles and democratic praxis. The presenters in this session cut a wide topical swath, reaching into public policy and democratic political theory, software patents and open source hardware. These papers also engage with diverse contexts and constituencies, ranging from the sociopolitical milieu of the European Union to transnational communities of software and hardware developers. Yet the panelists ultimately comes together to speak about how freelibre/open source modes of production are related to democratic principles of governance. Hence, we both contribute to and extend ongoing conversations about how the liberation of circuits and source code can support positive transformations in the relations between citizens, property, and the state.
Democratizing Hardware: Lessons from the Free and Open Hardware Movement
Brent K. Jesiek, Virginia Tech
ABSTRACT: Signicantly inspired by the Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movement, a growing cadre of individuals and groups are exploring how principles of open access and collaboration can extend into the domain of computer hardware. I use Free-Libre Open Source Hardware (or FLOSH) as an umbrella term for the diverse actors and groups who promote the free and open creation, modication, and sharing of non-proprietary computer hardware designs. Realizing this vision often involves the distribution of detailed information about devices and interface specications, as well as the various software tools needed to create and modify hardware designs. On the surface, applying open source principles to computer hardware may look like an obvious and incremental step beyond FLOSS. Yet by delving into the history of
4 S Final Program with Abstracts this relatively small and marginal movement, this paper identies and analyzes the full array of challenges ranging from the economic and logistical to legal and political that must be overcome on the way to realizing truly open hardware. In addition to connecting with a variety of theoretical and philosophical issues in the realm of technology studies, my analysis supports two additional themes. First, I argue for the overall and continued importance of FLOSH, especially against the backdrop of ongoing calls for the democratization of technology. And second, I highlight the benets that might accrue when FLOSS and FLOSH projects are better coordinated and integrated with one another, especially through software/ hardware co-design methods.
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European Citizens and Privileged Witnesses: Activism Against Software Patents in Europe
Jelena Karanovic, New York University
ABSTRACT: This paper draws on a controversial European software patenting directive in order to study activist efforts to broaden the constituencies involved in making regulations and policy about software. By presenting themselves as concerned European citizens excluded from negotiations about the proposed European directive on patenting of software, free software advocates framed the issue of software patenting as one of general signicance and made claims about democratic decit in the European Union. The citizen politicization of software patents denounced the abandon of policy-making to intellectual property lawyers and patent examiners and translated the purported technical character of debates in order to clarify it to other European citizens. In this way, they attempted to orient the debate away from focusing on relative legitimacy of various kinds of expertise, or on making a software patenting system viable, assuring the quality of patents. These strategies, along with insights about decision-making in European institutions that the advocates gathered (and shared) while ghting the software patenting directive, in turn provided a basis for debating the European Constitution. Finally, as privileged witnesses of the co-decision process (on the dossier of software patenting), main free software advocates decided to vote against the Constitution. The impression of successful apprenticeship of European decision-making was conrmed in July 2005, when the Parliament rejected the software patenting directive.
The Distributed Laboratory: The Internet and 21st Century Citizen Science
Tyson Vaughan, Temple University
ABSTRACT: There may have been a time when a typical scientist was essentially an amateur natural philosopher, but todays scientist is a highly trained, specialized and accredited professional, and the contemporary scientic enterprise shows all the hallmarks of a mature industry: bureaucratized funding mechanisms, formalized review processes, exotic and expensive equipment, and rigidly hierarchical
4 S Final Program with Abstracts institutions. By the end of the 20th Century, the voice of the amateur or citizen scientist had grown smaller and more marginalized, until, with a few exceptions, it had reached the verge of silence. But in the 21st Century it has regained its strength, as a result of new research tools and methodologies made possible by the Internet. This paper will examine this relatively recent development in experimental and observational research, in which critical but mundane tasks of measurement, calculation and observation are allocated to volunteer members of the public. Pre-Internet, such a distributed laboratory model for conducting rigorous scientic work would typically have been prohibitively difcult to manage, if not technically impossible, but now researchers in a variety of elds are creating innovative solutions that take advantage of the Internets unique properties to facilitate an increasing number of these broadly participatory research projects. This paper will survey, describe and classify a sample of such projects currently under way, focusing on key case studies. A taxonomy of this distributed laboratory research, based on tools and techniques rather than academic eld or content, will be proposed. If the recent emergence of this kind of research marks the beginnings of a signicant trend, there may be a number of potentially important implications for the future of the scientic enterprise beyond simply the survival of citizen science, including implications for education, public deliberation of scientic and technical issues, and public policy.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts many, the legacy of colonial rule inspires mistrust. In West Africa, some mothers refuse to vaccinate their children for polio. In South Africa, AIDS dissidents question mainstream antiretroviral therapies, pointing to pharmaceutical greed. Building on the concept of boundary work as a rhetorical style experts use to secure credibility, this panel considers the boundaries of mistrust, where distinctions between science and non-science are co-produced, contested, and de-scripted. In the second part of this double-panel, Nicoli Nattrass examines AIDS science and health policy in South Africa, where some dissident researchers are seeking legitimacy through unauthorized drug trials. She suggests that specialization among mainstream AIDS scientists (and mistrust) may have prevented a more concerted attack on AIDS dissenters. Marianne de Laet and Babette Mueller-Rockstroh each interrogate unexpected outcomes of technology transfer. Their work reminds us that Africans play an active role in shaping (and co-producing) technology. Taken together, these papers offer a range of perspectives on public participation in the production of scientic knowledge, public appropriation of science, and public interrogation of boundaries.
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White Machines, Black Bodies, Gray Science: (Ultra) Sound Research Practices in Tanzania
Babette Mueller-Rockstroh, Maastricht University
ABSTRACT: not available
Appropriating Technology: What Goes Where and How Does It Get There?
Marianne de Laet, California Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: not available
Discussant: Stacy Leigh Pigg, Simon Fraser University, Madeleine Akrich, Ecole des Mines de Paris
Chair: Rick Worthington, Pomona College
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3.3H LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS AND NON-LOCAL PROBLEMS [WORKING SESSION] Black Rocks, Borderlands, and the Big Bend: Air Pollution on the Rural U.S.-Mexico Border
Francisco Donez, University of California, Berkeley
ABSTRACT: This project examines the occurrence and investigation of air pollution, in the form of regional haze, in the Big Bend region of the Texas-Mexico border. The geographic setting of this haze problem in the rural U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the scientic investigations of the problem, have interacted in unusual and interesting ways. The Big Bend as a sparsely populated rural area provided a useful laboratory for regional haze research, with little urban pollution to obscure the haze signal under investigation. Preliminary technical conclusions on the causes of this haze pinpointed Mexican pollution sources, supporting prevalent racial narratives and fueling U.S.-Mexican tensions over border environmental issues in the 1990s. Further research then undermined these same narratives by concluding that the worst episodes of Big Bend haze are dominated by U.S. pollution sources. Finally, investigation and data gathering regarding the human health aspects of air pollution are minimal and declining within this region, though air quality-related health concerns have received a great deal of local attention for the past few years. By examining the science of Big Bend air pollution, the project will shed light on the social relations within and surrounding this deceptively quiet section of the border.
Constituting Risk and a Risk Community: Radiological Suffering, Democratic Survival, and the Hanford Downwinders Challenge to Nuclear Silence
William J. Kinsella, North Carolina State University Jay Mullen, Southern Oregon University
ABSTRACT: This paper uses Becks concept of the risk society and Luhmanns concept of ecological communication to examine the discursive constitution of environmental risks and an associated risk community. Following revelations in the mid-1980s about releases of radioactive materials into the environment surrounding the U.S. Department of Energys Hanford reservation in Washington, regional residents and former residents forged a shared identity as downwinders. Building on that identity, they have developed communicative strategies that have linked them with downwinders from other regions and with journalists, congressional policy-makers, and a broader public. In doing so, the Hanford downwinders have challenged two forms of nuclear silence: a culture of secrecy inherited from the Cold War, and a technocratic framework that has increasingly supplanted the secrecy principle as a mode of discursive containment. Although the health risks associated with Hanford remain contested within the scientic discourse of epidemiology, the downwinders have expanded the range of public discourse through the use of personal narratives, local knowledge, popular epidemiology, and public expertise. Their ecological communication has simultaneously constituted a set of material risks, an affected risk community, and a process of democratic engagement.
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3.3I THE USES OF MOBILE WIRELESS TECHNOLOGIES: DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON NEW MEDIA STUDIES [NEW MEDIA]
Chair: Judy Wajcman, Australian National University
SESSION ABSTRACT: Research on the impact of wireless, mobile technologies has proliferated in recent years. A central theme has been the way constant connection and ubiquity afforded by the mobile phone recongures relationships between people, activities, and the spaces they occupy. This session brings together leading researchers on the mobile phone to assess the state of the art and to explore future research agendas. The papers represent a range of different perspectives, crossing the longstanding divide between the multidisciplinary approaches of the social studies of science and technology (STS) and new media/ communication studies. Given the increasing interest in STS on user studies, and the increasing interest of communication scholars in STS perspectives, this session provides an opportunity to consider how research on mobile technologies can build on the distinctive strengths of both approaches.
Turning a summons into a treat : musical mobile ring tones and the design of personalized and public so undscapes.
Christian Licoppe, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications
ABSTRACT: I discuss here the results of a study of how users choose and design personalized ringtones. As a result of the growing demands of connected presence mobile phone users are faced with the proliferation
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of ringing phones (theirs and those of other co-present actors) in their soundscapes. They therefore exploit the new resources for customizing their ringtones with a concern for managing the interactional problems that may arise from the development of ubiquitous summoning. Musical ringtones are chosen or designed by users, so that the shaping of the summons becomes a personal project of the recipients, directly related to the management of availability. They are shaped as ambiguous cues inviting two kinds of responsive actions, i.e. treating them as a summons (inviting their being answered to) or as a music (inviting their being listened to). Their design becomes the issue of contested claims with some users trying to exacerbate their summoning power and others to maximize their ambiguousness. Moreover musical ringtones are also selected so as to constitute a personal gratication that the user addresses to himself (and sometimes also to potential bystanders). They become a treat that stands opposite to the obligation to answer that the ringtone incarnates.
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Intimate Connections: The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Work Life Boundaries
Judy Wajcman, Australian National University
ABSTRACT: This paper reports on a research project that examines the social impact of the mobile phone on the shifting boundaries between work and home life. Wireless technologies are said to be transforming public/private boundaries by making location irrelevant, and the pace of events instantaneous and simultaneous. But how are social relationships being transformed through mobile modalities? Does the constant connection and ubiquity afforded by wireless ICTs foster a mobile privatisation, reconguring the boundaries between work and everyday life? In practice, much of the contemporary debates is about how to manage time in everyday life time for work, time for families and time for leisure. This paper will therefore investigate how mobile devices are transforming the way time is experienced, managed, used and disciplined. The overall theme is the affect of mobile technologies on the temporal dimensions of contemporary society.
Noise, Sound and other Callings: Re-Placing the Discourse of Public and Private
Heather A. Horst, University of Southern California.
ABSTRACT: Shifting boundaries between public and private behaviors and spaces have been a key focus in the foundational literature on the mobile phone. From Finland and North America to Japan, scholars note that the transportability of the mobile phone often enables individuals to transgress norms of public and private, transgressions which result in embarrassment and anxiety articulated in terms of the cell phones ability to create distractions and obtrusive noise. This paper focuses upon the ways Jamaicans conceptualize public and private communication. Drawing upon the work of Roger Abrahams, I argue Jamaican communication is contingent upon noise, sound and communal conversation in a fashion which fundamentally differs from conventional Euro-American sensibilities. By demonstrating how these attitudes towards communication have been incorporated into cell phone usage in Jamaica, I seek to challenge the assumptions concerning the cell phones capacity to create noise and, in turn, permeate the borders of the public and private.
From autonomy to hybridizing: some aspects of the contextual work by which people connect or disconnect mobile phone uses to their proximal contexts.
Marc Relieu, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications
ABSTRACT: Like other ICTs, mobile phones are made at home with the world (Sacks) through contextual work, by which users either keep their technological-mediated activity in isolation from their surrounds or nd and build connections between them. Through looking at data consisting of audio and video records of mobile phone uses (vocal conversation and sms chat), we propose to examine the main features of this contextual work. We stress the methods by which users either keep their mobile phone interaction isolated from or connected with other co-present participants or simultaneous activities. We emphasize that the regulation of the activity of a synchronic conversation strongly constrains how to introduce references to proximal contextual features, whereas the organisational and technological features of other activities (chat)
4 S Final Program with Abstracts open more opportunities for collaborative uses. In order to develop this contrast, we present two pieces of data. First, we explore the conversational sequences in which callers and called manage the permeability of their talk to proximal events. Second, we present video records of a sms-chat session at restaurant in which a young user negotiates the accessibility of this phone-based activity with a co-present friend.
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New methods for enhancing the reliability and usefulness of research ndings: The research synthesis revolution
Ingemar Bohlin, Gothenburg University
ABSTRACT: Long before the term publication explosion was coined half a century ago, information overow had been perceived as a problem in several disciplines. Some of the means by which research ndings are currently being summarised for practitioners of various areas thus have a long history. Review articles, for instance, have long served this function, and the genre to which the Jasanoff et al Handbook of Science and Technology Studies belongs is well-established.In some areas, however, the need for a more systematic form of research review has made itself felt. In the health sector, in particular, what is sometimes referred to as the research synthesis revolution has had a strong impact. Research synthesis is a key element of the evidence-based medicine movement, which is now expanding into social work, education and other areas. Central to this movement are procedures devised in order to enable experts to extract, from individual studies published in a multitude of journals, relevant information in such a manner that bias is avoided. Secondary research, as the practice is sometimes called, ought to be no less systematic and objective than primary research, proponents insist.This paper focuses on the rationale of research synthesis. Why, I will ask, has the methodology of research synthesis been adopted in some disciplines but not in others? What are the assumptions of objectivity and reliability on which the methodology is based? What can STS analysts contribute to the understanding of this revolution?
When the standards arent standard: evidence-based medicine in the Russian context
Anna Geltzer, Cornell University
ABSTRACT: The move towards the standardization of medical practice in the US and parts of Europe has recently become a subject for discussion not only in healthcare circles, but among social scientists as well, and a number of books and articles have come out addressing the subject. But what happens when the same move is made in a very different context? Evidence based medicine has made its way to Russia. But how does one introduce its principles into a healthcare system in crisis? With a crashing population, a booming AIDS and tuberculosis crisis and a severely under-funded and under-supported healthcare system that in some parts of the country is barely hanging on, Russian soil provides a strikingly different climate for its principles and recommendations than the Western countries where they were rst formulated. This paper explores the role of evidence based medicine in Russian healthcare and the tensions between rhetoric and practice.
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Unsettling alienation and profound embodiment: The re-conceptualization of phantom limbs as productive phenomenon
Cassandra Crawford, University of California, San Francisco
ABSTRACT: Often considered in isolation from the very bodies they evoke and mimic, phantom limbs have historically been severed, disconnected from the contexts in which they materialize. This paper intends to reattach phantoms to ambulating bodies and to locate phantom-ed bodies within an aesthetics and economy of embodiment. I argue that the disciplined esh of militarized men was central to the construction of amputation and lived dismemberment, as well as the appreciation of phantom phenomena, until circa 1980. Some version of idealized masculinity informed early ideas about phantom formation, and because of the association with war, phantoms connoted loss and disruption of one kind or another, while simultaneously demonstrating at best moral virtuosity and at worst a form of physical vulnerability. With the modernization of dismemberment and the medicalization of phantoms, amputees became icons of the libratory promise of science/medicine/technology and phantoms were re-conceptualized as productive phenomenon, with properties capable of exploitation in the purist of elaborating bodies with technologies. I argue that prosthetists and researchers have historically assumed that prosthetic replacement was eminently desirable. Early accounts of prosthetic use, as necessary for combating stigmatization or resolving body scheme confusion, were replaced by accounts of prosthetic usage as central to restoring mobility, independence and productivity, and the phantoms that animate the lifeless prostheses, integral to proper use and integration. Thus, a reciprocal relationship between prosthetics and phantoms was assumed that emphasized the productive aspects of phantom materialization.
Organizers: Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto and Sabine Hoehler, University of Hamburg Chair: Sarah Lochlann Jain, Stanford University
SESSION ABSTRACT: On what terms have aggregate forms of life conjoined and interrupted capitalist relations of production and commodication? Foucaults formulation of biopolitics, to which much
4 S Final Program with Abstracts work in feminist technoscience studies is indebted, has encouraged scholars to examine technoscientic projects directed at the individualized and national population scales of living being. This panel disrupts this tendency along two axes. First, the panel juxtaposes different formulations of aggregate life, bringing transnational, macrological, individualized and micrological scales into the analytic frame of biopolitics. Second, the panel explores how these aggregations become enrolled into capital accumulations. How have aggregates been framed and processed to t them into economic regimes that account for life as biocapital, manageable, marketable, exchangeable, or disposable? The panel focuses on examples from epigenetics, fertility studies, epidemiology, and human ecology. Landeckers paper examines how the sugar industry and WHO struggle over diet recommendations has animated research that turns famines into laboratory environments causing gene expression. Murphys paper explores U.S. databasing practices within foreign aid programs that translated military security and aggregate birth rates into freedom as an individualized attitude and macroeconomic indicator of development. Bauers paper examines the case of a Copenhagen data assemblage that enrolls molecular, socio-economic and lifestyle data into biovalue. Hoehlers research charts the production of global population as a probabilistic aggregate generative of surplus. The panels ambition is to jointly map out a constellation of aggregate gures (at once enabled and foreclosed by the concept of biopolitics) complexly connected by modes of economizing life.
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Modelling Population Health: How Epidemiologic Studies Tie Together Lifestyle, Economy and Molecules
Suzanne Bauer, Copenhagen Univeristy
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the biopolitics evolving around a local epidemiologic database in Copenhagen: Initiated in the late 1960s, epidemiologic studies recorded individual lifestyle and biomedical information from large population samples that were surveyed through questionnaires and medical screenings over several decades. Mainly established in the context of research into the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, these data repositories have developed into resources for much broader hypotheses testing and modelling of health and disease. By following a specic assemblage of biomedical, socio-economic and lifestyle data over time, I examine how data organization and biostatistical procedures draw together otherwise disparate
4 S Final Program with Abstracts contexts and how risk estimates are produced and mobilized along this trajectory. As part of global data aggregates, such as WHO multicenter studies, these data assemblages both constitute and are informed by the trade offs of global health governance. Primarily due to the combination of individual data and retained blood samples, these data have acquired additional biovalue for molecular epidemiology and postgenomic biomedicine. This paper describes how aggregating life along a grid of risk factors performs a exible and fragmented population body as one that is to be managed and optimised.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts to reproduce scientists. We argue that the interdisciplinary calling is a response to the disenchantment of scientic life which Weber discussed almost a century ago as an inevitable consequence of the necessary specialization of scientic practice. We conclude by situating the calling for interdisciplinary science within the broader motivational structure of science to understand where it ts among the elements that have remained the same and those that have changed since Webers time. We thus address the question of how well Science as a Vocation characterizes scientic motivation today and consider ways we as science studies scholars might revise our thinking on these matters.
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Aardvark et al.: The Status Returns to Names in Social Science and Beyond
Dalton Conley, New York University Rebecca Glauber, New York University Giorgio Topa, New York Federal Reserve Bank
ABSTRACT: Recently sociologists and economists have become interested in both the determinants of names and the socioeconomic consequences of names. Most of this research has focused on rst names and on the statistical association of names with race and gender in the population. By contrast, the present study examines a previously overlooked aspects of naming: Last names (and focuses on their intrinsic characteristicsspecically alphabetical order--as well as complexity and commonness). In the rst part of the study I will ask whether there are status returns to having a last name that is alphabetically relatively early in the academic eld of ecnomics. In this domain, the strong norm for publishing is that authors are listed alphabetically. Economics is fairly unique among scientic disciplines in this regard. Its close cousins, sociology and political science, both generally attempt to indicate an order to authorshipboth in giving credit for work and the genesis of ideas. Alphabetical authorship occurs either by chance or when authors agree to share credit equally and often indicate this in a footnote. Likewise, in the natural sciences there is often a very rigid structure in which the person whose idea the research was primarily and/or who
4 S Final Program with Abstracts did the most work is listed rst, while the most senior author (under whose auspices, funding or lab the work was performed) is often listed last and other contributors are sandwiched in between.It is my presumption that while the assignment of order in authorship may be fairly random in economics, the consequences of order are not. In fact, many economists with last names that begin with T, W, or Y lament this institutional norm, joking that they would fare better if they had an earlier last name. In multi-authored articles, both formal and informal citations are more likely to name just the rst author, summarizing the others with et al. So even if economists are aware that authorship order is presumably deter
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Keeping it Clean: The Role of Pharmaceutical Monitors in the Clinical Trials Industry
Jill Fisher, Arizona State University
ABSTRACT: Clinical research associates, or monitors as they are more commonly called, are charged with ensuring that the data being collected during pharmaceutical clinical trials is accurate and complete or clean. Moreover, monitors have the dirty work of cleaning up the corruption and negligence risked by a system of clinical trial outsourcing. Any physician investigator or research staff malfeasance must be detected to sterilize the pharmaceutical industry of those clinical sites. In addition, monitors must eradicate from the data any remnants of care at the investigative sites to produce auditable documents that are stripped of empathy or interpretation. Within this particular version of audit culture, however, the focus is on more than accountability and rationality. In addition, pharmaceutical monitoring engenders a system of disembodiment and similitude. It is the messiness of patients that must be cleaned into disembodied subjects, and it is the messiness of humanity that must be sanitized to erase difference. Thus, the process of cleaning clinical trial data is one which decontextualizes for the sake of rationality. Monitoring emphasizes the goal of drug research and development over the care of individuals within the system, the goal of prot and the cultivation of consumers over the health of patients.
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Saturday 3:30-5:30pm
Organizers: Casper Bruun Jensen, Copenhagen Business School and Kjetil Rdje, Simon Fraser University Chair: Casper Bruun Jensen
SESSION ABSTRACT: STS and related elds such as cultural anthropology have increasingly been recognized as dealing with complex materials. Sometimes, they are concerned with how people do things in practice. At other times they wonder about how people think or how cultures and institutions are constituted. These various questions are often conceived of as operating on different levels. Consequently, many debates evolve around how to theoretically and practically connect such issues. Does matter shape practice, which again
4 S Final Program with Abstracts shapes knowledge? Does knowledge shape practice, which then shapes matter? Or, is knowledge an attempt to comprehend matter, which again determines practice? Further important discussions revolve around the question of the practical and political implications of these questions. The Deleuzian response to these problems consists in a refusal to differentiate between spheres on the basis of their essential qualities. Rather, practice, knowledge, politics and so forth are seen as continually produced in heterogeneous assemblages without central control agencies. Further, these move across (transverse) modern distinctions such as the human and non-human or the material and ideal. While similar ideas have been explored in actornetwork theory and posthumanist theory, there has been little sustained exploration of the challenges, which Deleuzian thought could pose for STS. The session aims to explore the implications of a Deleuzian turn for contemporary studies of technoscience, culture and politics. What are the epistemological, methodical, and ontological consequences of such a turn? How do they enable regurations of science and politics? And what do they entail in practical terms?
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Conicting Denitions of Stress in the Air Trafc Controllers Strike, and the Value-ladeness of Knowledge
Gerald Doppelt, University of California, San Diego
ABSTRACT: There are various models of how values shape scientic inquiry. Here, I explore ways in which a groups values can get embodied in the standards of evidence used to establish knowledge-claims, in a context of political controversy. My examination focuses on the Air Trafc Controllers Strike during the Reagan presidency and the Congressional Hearings convened to assess the Controllers claim that their work had become intolerably stressful. The government solicited testimony from scientic experts whose ndings failed to reveal evidence of stress among the Controllers. These experts assumed a narrow medical denition of stress on which measurable physical variables such as heart rate provide the key evidence of its presence or absence. Science was taken to defeat the credibility of the Controllers case. An analysis of the Controllers own reports provides the basis for a wider denition of stress which exhibits empirical patterns linking their conditions of work, their experiential states at work, and negative impacts on their lives beyond work. The interest of the Controllers in legitimating their grievances would have been well-served by this wider standard of evidence. But the possibility of a counter-knowledge of stress was lost in deference to the scientic experts and the self-evidence of the medical model they assumed. Through this example, I argue that my account of the value-ladeness of knowledge informs a critical theory of scientic argument. It illuminates a politics of knowledge in which marginalized actors articulate their interests on the very cognitive level at which their claims are otherwise discredited.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts will resonate much louder than the hype and hubris put forward by stem cell research proponents. I show that, in navigating the delicate relations between scientists, ethicists, policy-makers, and publics, the roles of trust, accountability, transparency, and accessibility cannot be overstated. These provide our only chance at getting good and effective governance, rather than overcomplex, inadequate, and suspicious politicking.
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The Multiple Realities of Bioethics at the Science-Technology-Society Interface: Beyond Dichotomous Model of Academic and Citizens Sector
Miwao Matsumoto, The University of Tokyo Yuji Tateishi, The University of Tokyo Atsushi Sadamatsu, The University of Tokyo
ABSTRACT: This paper describes and analyses the complex ne structure of bioethics told at the sciencetechnology-society interface with particular reference to the delicate but telling differences of academic and citizens sector. The paper focuses on arguments centring around an ongoing large-scale governmentsponsored epidemiological project to link genetic information and information on medical history in Japan. Based on in-depth interviews with scientists and medical doctors and focus group interviews with citizen groups, it is found that there is a kind of circle structure of argument in terms of bioethics told by academic and citizens sector over social problems unexpectedly caused by the project. In particular, citizens sector tends to ascribe everything to the scientic judgment of academic sector, whereas academic sector tends to ascribe everything to the decisions of society as a whole including citizens sector and wait and see until the decision is made. When interpreted within the framework of multiple sector relationships, this nding strongly indicates that a dichotomous model of academic and citizens sector as assumed in usual endeavour of public understanding and/or risk communication of science deviates from the reality signicantly. The insight has profound sociological implications for designing public arena to keep scientic integrity and appropriately mediate academic and citizens sectors.
The role of experts/ideas in international economic collaborations: The rst decade of APEC
Ray-Shyng Chou, University of California, San Diego
ABSTRACT: This paper aims to examine the relationship between experts (e.g. economists) and international economic collaborations such as Asia-Pacic Economic Cooperation (APEC). As the majority of AEPC members were developing economies, the initial institutional goal of APEC was focused on business facilitation and economic capacity building rather than aggressive market liberalization. However, a shortlived (1992-1995) advisory committee of APEC (the EPG or the Eminent Persons Group) successfully fore-grounded the liberalization agenda within APEC, even though the ambitious liberalization agenda was antithetical to most Asian members economic policies. While this case might demonstrate knowledge experts (i.e. the economists in the EPG) strong epistemic inuence on policy-making processes, we should not mistakenly regard their source of authority was entirely drawn from the ideas embodied by them. The liberalization move of APEC was actually momentary and was retreated after 1997. The once inuential EPG was also dismissed in 1995 as many APEC economies started to have concerns about the EPGs radical proposals on liberalization measures. A discussion of the rise and demise of the EPG shows that the EPGs epistemic inuence eventually depended a lot on its access to bureaucratic power and political play with APEC members. This raises the question of how experts/ideas are in play in policy-making processes and how they are able to be in play forcefully. Furthermore, the discussion also shows that participants of an international collaboration (i.e. APEC members) would use experts and their expertise not only as an epistemic instrument to resolve the uncertainty about the future of the cooperation but also as a political tool to build consensus or even to achieve their own interests.
The organizational context of trust: Genetically modied food in the United States
John Lang, Rutgers University
ABSTRACT: In the last decade, scholars have repeatedly studied the effects of trust on public perceptions of genetically modied food (GMF). Yet, two relatively large gaps in our understanding of trust continue to exist. First, scholars frequently cite the effects of trust in the debates on the public acceptance of GMF, but they know little about how trust varies across expert groups. Second, previous work has stressed the existence
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of expertise over the content of expertise. In doing so, this scholarship has underplayed the interaction between the attributes of the expert groups and the social ties that connect them to the public. This has created, in effect, a default assumption that trust operates identically for disparate organizations. In this article, I undertake a number of discrete objectives to address these two decits. In doing so, I characterize the debate surrounding GMF as involving myriad organizations and publics interacting in an uncertain environment, trying to solve perplexing social and technical problems. The analysis in this article departs from previous work in two ways. First, by placing problem of trust within a broader organizational context, I explore the social factors and interests that shape denitions of acceptable trust. Second, by placing trust in specic organizations as the object of analysis, I use measures of trust as tools for understanding how the public reacts under ambiguous conditions involving multiple actors. These results have implications for understanding public trust in organizations involved in GMF and for understanding public opinion formation in emerging technologies.
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You Vote. It Counts(tm): Electronic voting machines, computer security research and the re-legislation of democracy.
Christopher Kelty, Rice University
ABSTRACT: Electronic Touch screen voting machines have recently caught the attention of computer security researchers, who see them as both medium for research and a platform for advocacy. Based on ethnographic research amongst computer security researchers, this paper analyzes how individuals can be conceived of as calculative agencies in the domain of democratic elections. Computer security researchers see serious aws in the technical decisions made by the corporations providing EVMs and from these analyses draw the implication that the machinery of democracy is in grave danger. These researchers nd themselves trapped between operative denitions of objectivity and inevitable moves to politicize their research by EVM advocates--an opposition familiar to recent science studies work on the relationship of expertise, politics and matters of concern.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts and read, he says that he doesnt use it to perform mathematical calculations. If he has to do them, he relies not on his computer, but on other humans, tools, and techniquesfor example, he observes and supervises while colleagues do the work on the black board and/or while they interact with diagrammatic prostheses. Through the description of these delegations, interactions and coordinations of competences, I will interrogate the role and the nature of diagrams, and also of thought experiment in the problem solving process. In this way I will address the central question of this session: where and when does calculation happen, and what does it imply with regards to agency?
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Really New God: Random Number Generators, Gambling Technology, and the Enchantment of Technology
Natasha Schull, MIT
ABSTRACT: This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted among slot machine gamblers and game designers in Las Vegas, focusing the calculative mechanism of the random number generator (or really new god as designers call it), a mathematical device that both constrains and enables human encounters with contingency. What sorts of quantied enchantments (or manufactured incalculabilities, as Beck has named them) does this meticulously-congured ghost in the machine inspire? How does the calculative program of the RNG mediate between the disenchanting calculative practices of game designers and the sometimes enchanted calculative practices of gamblers? The scattered locus of calculation in the digital gambling interface shifts the question of whoor whathas agency (that is, agency as an endowed property of a discrete host) to a question of when and where and how agency transpires in the playerdesigner-machine assemblage.
Helping Silences Speak: Using Positional Maps in Situational Analyses in STS Projects
Adele Clarke, University of California, San Francisco
ABSTRACT: I recently extended the grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis through new approaches called situational maps and analyses. These can be used in a wide array of research projects drawing on interview, ethnographic, historical, visual and/or other extant discursive materials, including the multi-site research so characteristic of STS. To counter Enlightenment-induced simplifying and universalizing strategies, situational analysis takes situatedness, variations, complications, differences of all kinds, and positionality / relationality in situations of inquiry very seriously. The overall situation becomes the main unit of analytic focus. Situational analysis is accomplished through the making of three kinds of maps. Situational maps lay out the major human, nonhuman, discursive and other elements in the research situation of concern and provoke analyses of relations among them. Social worlds/arenas maps lay out collective actors and the arena(s) of commitment within which they are engaged in ongoing negotiations, offering mesolevel interpretations
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of the situation. Third and last, positional maps lay out the major positions taken, and not taken, in the discourses in the situation vis--vis particular axes of variation and difference, concern, and controversy. This paper focuses on using positional maps to help silences speak by elucidating positions not taken in pertinent discourses. Perhaps the most important aspect of positional maps is that, unlike traditional social science practice, positions here are not correlated with persons or groups or institutions. Individuals and groups of all sorts commonly hold multiple and contradictory positions on the same issue. Here instead we seek to move beyond the knowing subject to grasp the full array of positions in pertinent discourses and positions are therefore analyzed separately. The goal is to represent the positions articulated on their own terms. These are not necessarily the terms of the researcher but rather the researchers best effort to grasp and represent the positions as taken in the discourse(s). Thus this is based in a radically democratic interactionist theory of representation. The traditional social science focus on similarities rather than differences constantly places heterogeneities under erasure. It is difcult to see that which one does not expect. And yet even more difcult to hear silences, absences of positions where they might be expected. I am ironically arguing that articulating positions independently of persons, organizations, social worlds, arenas, nonhuman actants, and so on ultimately allows the researcher, downstream, to see situated positions better. The presentation will offer in-depth examples of doing positional maps in STS studies. The concept of positionality creates an important space between. The researcher can at least temporarily attempt to step outside the usual politics of representation which tend to imbricate our analyses in politics of identity. Instead, the space between actors and positions allows new analyses. This space between is not naive, but rather highly reexive and analytic. Such spaces can allow us to see what happens to the empirical data itself in our own visions of it as the analyses begin to merge, and to see what other shapes it might ow into or might ow into it. It can allow us to articulate doubts and complexities where heretofore things had appeared unnaturally pat, sure and simple. As Massumi (2002:8) has asserted, positionality is an emergent quality of movement.
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Discussant: Michael Callon, CSI Ecole des Mines, Paris 3.4H GENETICS, R ACE, AND IDENTITY [WORKING SESSION]
Chair: Alondra Nelson, Yale University
Remaking Difference While Making Prot? Race, Clinical Trial, and Pharmaceutical Industry in Taiwan
Yu-Ling Huang, SUNY-Binghamton
ABSTRACT: The greater inclusion of people in different races, sexes, and ages in to biomedical research is a new phenomenon in the United States since 1990s. Medical investigators who cannot branch out beyond the usual white male subjects may not get research funding from National Institutes of Health (NIH). Moreover, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asks every new drugs clinical trial data should cover the population of two sexes, men and women, and three race groups, Caucasian, Asian, Black. The signicant change in the production of medical knowledge about sex and race is attention-getting to social scientists. Studies show that the shift of the federal health policy and regulatory is resulted from the women and minority identity politics and relative social movements in last two decades. However, the consequences and the inuences of this shift remain unclear. This paper examines how the compulsory inclusion of different races in new drugs clinical trials in the United States affects the conception of race in an East Asian country: Taiwan. As latecomers in the pharmaceutical industry that lacks enough investment to do the whole R&D of a new drug by themselves, pharmaceutical and biomedical industries in Taiwan nd their niche in this highly competitive industry: conducting the clinical trial of Asian population for other transnational pharmaceutical enterprises. Even Taiwanese government herself creates a series of policies and institutions to facilitate institutional environment for clinical trial of new drug. Unlike the multiracial social context in the United States, race as a conception of human difference is a business rather than a social issue or scientic debate in Taiwan in terms of clinical trial. In this paper I investigate the origins of clinical trial as an industry or business, relevant policies, and the associated discourse of racial differences in contemporary Taiwan.
Genes, environment or society? Conceptualising the link between race, ethnicity and health in twenty-rst century genetics
Paul Martin, University of Nottingham Richard Tutton, University of Nottingham Richard Ashcroft, Imperial College London George Ellison, St Georges Hospital Medical School Andrew Smart, Bath Spa University
ABSTRACT: A major focus of post-genomic research is the relationship between genetic and environmental factors in the causation of common, complex diseases. Within this eld the link between human health and race/ ethnicity is becoming of central concern, with increasing attention paid to genetic variation between individuals and groups. This has led a number of analysts to argue that race and ethnicity are increasingly becoming geneticised and inscribed at the molecular, rather than the social or cultural level. This paper present ndings from an empirical study, which explores how race/ ethnicity are being constructed in the discourses and everyday practices of applied population genetics research in the UK. In particular, we analyse how researchers understand race/ ethnicity when working within the so called gene-environment interaction paradigm, which aims to quantify the various disease risk factors associated with genotypes, lifestyles, cultural practices and different environmental conditions. We found that genetic epidemiology is characterised by uncertainty and instability regarding key conceptual and operational tools related to models of disease causation and the meaning of race/ ethnicity. In particular, there appears to be a number of competing versions of gene-environment interaction, which contribute to race/ ethnicity sometimes consolidating around a social model that emphasises cultural and lifestyle factors, and at other times around the central role of genetic and biological factors. The paper will reect on the signicance of these multiple constructions of race/ethnicity, how researchers are conceptualising the environment, and the extent to which we are seeing a molecular rewriting of race.
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Organizers: Wes Shrum, Louisiana State University; Annette Burfoot, Queens University; Jennifer Poudrier, University of Saskatchewan Chair: Wesley Shrum, Louisiana State University
SESSIONS ABSTRACT: The use of video in ethnographic eldwork has increased dramatically in recent years, given lower costs and user friendly technologies. This will be a working session devoted to crafting STS stories using audiovisual media.
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The Politics of Womens Dowries: Western Feminism, Technology and Social Change in South India
Meredith Anderson, Louisiana State University
ABSTRACT: not available
Protecting the Environment and Preventing Pregnancy Loss: A Conversation with Lois Gibbs, Executive Director of the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice
Linda Layne, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
ABSTRACT: not available
The Art of Workarounds: two case studies of documentation systems in the healthcare sector.
Marianne Tolar, Vienna University of Technology Nina Boulus, Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT: Documentation is an important part of the daily work practice in the healthcare sector. Due to the fact that the medical work practice is highly complex and evolving, and various unexpected contingencies may arise, documentation is a challenging task. Different mechanisms have to be established in order to cope with the ambiguities related to the medical practice. This includes various kinds of workarounds and undocumented strategies developed in order to compensate the gap between the information system and the local situated work practices. This paper will shed a light on challenges that were off the record and issues that were taken for granted or even silenced. In other words, we will listen to the noise created by the information system. For this purpose we draw upon results from extensive ethnographic research conducted in two settings. The rst case takes place in two oncology clinics in Austria, that are about to introduce an Electronic Patient Record (EPR); while the second case takes place in a clinic in Canada that has already implemented an EPR. These cases are different in many perspectives, however our focus is on the documentation systems and the way in which they are worked around, both in a paper-based and electronic realm. Analyses from both studies emphasize the importance of having sensibility to such hidden issues, as well as providing congurability and adaptability of the system.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts proving a causal link between polluter, pollutant and ill health through scientic methods has led to these illnesses being rendered invisible, resulting in the marginalization and silencing of sufferers. This apparent knowledge decit has been challenged by many campaign groups, who in an attempt to resolve the scientic uncertainty have commissioned their own research investigating the possible links. Phthalates, a group of synthetic chemicals have recently been scrutinised by both the scientic and campaign community within the EU over concerns that use of consumer goods containing phthalates may be adversely affecting human health and the environment. This case is used to examine how ideas of scientic uncertainty regarding risk have been framed by both scientists and campaign groups. Specically, the research seeks to understand how contending groups mobilise their resources and use science to not only justify their position but as a tool to challenge and discredit other forms of knowledge.
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My Next Dose? Perspectives on the Potential Utility of Prognostic Genetic Testing in Rheumatoid Arthritis
Susan Cox, University of British Columbia
ABSTRACT: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that causes joint inammation, chronic pain and suffering. It affects three times as many women as men and is a major cause of functional disability. Genetics plays an uncertain role in this complex multifactorial disease yet there is much speculation about the potential utility of prognostic genetic testing. A reliable genetic marker predicting the severity of RA in newly diagnosed patients could be extremely useful in customizing therapeutic interventions. Speedier access to expensive classes of drugs might also prevent some of the most debilitating consequences of RA. What, however, are the clinical, social and ethical implications of using genetics to stratify patient populations in this way? Moreover, what is implied by framing the central question in this way? Drawing upon in-depth interviews with RA patients and family members as well as Rheumatologists, this paper situates emergent questions about the implications of genetic testing within the context of: the need for early diagnosis and equitable access to effective treatment, the role of prognostic knowledge in psychosocial well-being and quality of life, concerns about genetic discrimination and the power of the pharmaceutical industry in shaping the research agenda. Given the rapid proliferation of genetic tests, it is important to develop criteria for appropriate use. Diverse perspectives are especially needed to ensure that salient issues are considered but so too are case studies that challenge us to articulate sites of silence in our data without putting words in the mouths of our participants (Clarke, 2005:85).
4 S Final Program with Abstracts string of scientic eccentrics. Dominant conceptions of ageing changed and the idea of combating ageing fell out of favour until recently when it has been utilised by a resurgent group of maverick hormone-regimen promoters and an increasing group within the mainstream biogerontology establishment. This renewed interest comes at a time when modern (western) societies are again confronted with a possible crisis of ageing - as a result of the maturing baby-boomer generation and the potential strain on healthcare costs incurred by greater numbers of people living longer than ever before. This paper will use a comparison of these historical and contemporary situations to explore the utilisation of different medical models of old age in relation to the development and establishment of scientic elds. The paper also aims to investigate the relationship between mainstream and maverick science and their roles in production of societal expectations about ageing.
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts death, there is no political movement in the U.S. organized around infant death as there was at the turn of the 19th century. There is also no comprehensive Federal initiative focused on improving infant mortality rates. I argue that this lack of political attention cannot be attributed solely to improvements in mortality statistics. Some areas of the United States have infant mortality rates comparable to developing nations, while the national rate is signicantly lower than many other industrialized nations. My work draws on feminist geography, critical demography, social movements theory, and feminist STS to address the signicant and curious gap between the reality of infant death in the United States and its relative obscurity as a public health or political issue. I am particularly concerned with the different registers used to frame the issue (e.g., emotional, familial, political, statistical, sociological) and their policy consequences. Of special interest here is the role of demography and the language of quantication in shaping public debates about and health care responses to infant death.
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3.4K INTERSECTIONS AND DIALOGUES ACROSS POSTCOLONIAL, FEMINIST, AND LABORATORY STUDIES OF SCIENCE
Organizers: Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Amit Prasad, University of MissouriColumbia Chair: Joan Fujimura
SESSION ABSTRACT: Postcolonial, feminist, and laboratory studies of science have shared concerns; and the latter two in particular, deploy some common theoretical and methodological tools. Over the last thirty years laboratory studies have also signicantly expanded in their scope. Financial markets or global institutions, for example, are now being analyzed by laboratory studies scholars. However, we have to be careful to not reduce the postcolonial and feminist studies of science to emanations from or extensions of the common program of laboratory studies. We need to delineate separate genealogies of these three strands of critical engagement with production and dissemination of scientic knowledge so as to avoid and move beyond any possible reductionism of their particular concerns and theoretical and methodological tools. It is, for example, necessary to investigate whether the laboratoryeither as the central site or as a source of theoretical and methodological toolslimits analyses of postcolonial and feminist issues. The aim of this panel is to engage in a self-reexive dialogue between postcolonial, feminist, and laboratory studies of science and throw light on their intersections with the purpose of further deepening and rening the debates over science.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts (which are not identical). Another is the macro-political economy of lab and eld. A third are counterdisciplinary sciences developed from disvalued standpoints. These three categories of the hard to see expand and redene both the concept and standards for science and what should count as the social aspects of nature and inquiry.
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Colonial Contexts and Nationalist Imperatives: Caste and Gender in Modern Science in India
Abha Sur, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: Text book versions of the history of modern science as a triumphant victory of the European man over nature have been challenged simultaneously by two related yet different impulses. Some scholars have shown the ways in which race, gender, colonialism and class mediate scientic knowledge, while others have illustrated the extensive inuence of Afroasiatic knowledge systems in the development of modern science. The attendant abnegation of modern science as inherently alien, reductive and violent in the rst impulse is infused with the possibility of an alternative vision in the second impulse, which implicitly afrms and identies with certain aspects of science by proclaiming its own past and present participation in it. Together, however, the two bring to the fore the essential contradiction in science science as imperialism and science as knowledgewhere class mediated science can still produce some real truths about the world. Yet the dominant tendency in postcolonial studies, with its preoccupation with knowledge as power, and with positing an essential cultural difference between the colonized and the modern West, is to deemphasize not only the syncretic, multicultural roots of modern science, but also the intellectual contributions of the Indian intelligentsia. The generic bifurcation of the Indian society into western educated elite and the subaltern precludes considerations of caste, gender and class in modern science. In this paper I would argue that differences between subaltern and elitist histories, both invariably written by the elite, are not easily mapped onto the intellectual, material, and spiritual traditions of the plebian versus those of the privileged. Rather, for a more accurate and inclusive understanding of modern science in the third world, we need a philosophy of science which recognizes the complexity, differentiation, and stratication in social relations that inevitably inform scientic practice, but which also sympathizes with the democratic potential in science.
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The Silent Proliferation of Virtual Reality; UnPacking the Video Game Industry
Dimitrios Gripeos, University of California Irvine and California State University, Long Beach
ABSTRACT: Societal benets of new technologies throughout the post-industrial period in 20th century were often driven by well-recognized industries. But can we comfortably rest on our post-industrial laurels? And are there silent technologies that are disguised as a commodity and yet markedly impacting human behavior or interactions both individually and at a population level? One such overlooked technological space is the video game industry. Oftentimes, video games are framed as consumer goods without attention to the attendant complex technological process and the socio-ethical or economic negotiations amongst diverse stakeholders before this technology reaches the consumer market in epidemic proportions. Additionally, video games have been associated with aggressive and socially destructive human behavior in some, but not all, studies. These medical epidemiology studies could conceivably benet from cross-disciplinary inquiries from social studies of science and technology. Drawing upon the actor network theory, we aim to present an interdisciplinary unpacking that is crucial for decisions concerning whether, to what extent, and in which form, this silent technology (i.e., the video game industry) should be regulated to allow for appropriate socio-ethical reection. We identify the role of video game designer as a human actor, the associated computer technology and video game industry as non-human actors and the ways in which these elements interact while importantly shaping consumer expectations and more broadly, human social behavior. We submit that consideration of these factors is essential for informed socio-ethical analyses of the video game industry and evaluation of its potential adverse societal consequences.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts revolutions. This paper represents the dialogue of computer scientists, scholars, survivalists, and religious devotees who shared a common, yet diverse perspective on the risks of computerization at the turn of the twenty-rst century and it focuses on the issues of reliance, captivity and survival related to the ever increasing dominance of computer infrastructure and metaphor in modern culture.
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New IC Technologies change awareness of Personal Information? -Citizen opinion survey for comparative study
Arisa Ema, University of Tokyo
ABSTRACT: The effects of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) to the society is so enormous that it is expected to solve todays problems such as protecting kids from strangers using GPS, checking grandparents health living far away or passing the station gate with IC (Integrated Circuit) Card without purchasing ticket.In Japan, u-Japan strategy has built in 2004 by government which aims at ubiquitous networking society: it will enable to connect the internet network whenever, whoever and wherever. Although this concept is attracting enough to imagine more convenient and safer life, it is argued that such a world would treat a person as a data with no respect as human beings. Moreover, this might be concerned about an invasion of privacy. It is a time to rethink about what the individual dignity is?, or to be more concrete, how we can control our personal information? while many kinds of technologies such as biometrics, RFID tags or IC cards are quietly spreading our society and connecting our personal information. This study analyzes peoples awareness of controlling his/her personal information, for example, by researching the Resident Register Network System introduced in 2003 by Japanese government which is still not adopted by most municipal government, and surveying the wording of mass media whether it is for or against the new technologies such as above. This study will facilitate for comparative study between Japan, USA and EU for further studies considering the effect of ICT to societies.
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Food Insecure or Just Plain Hungry: How Humanitarian Organizations Dene Famine
Jericho Burg,UC San Diego
ABSTRACT: not available
Resistant to Treatment: The Use and Misuse of Scientic Knowledge about Drug-Resistant HIV in Africa
Johanna Crane, Univ. of California, San Francisco/UC, Berkeley
ABSTRACT: not available
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Children of Chernobyl: International Aid Efforts and the Problem of Scientic Uncertainty
Olga Kuchinskaya, UC San Diego
ABSTRACT: not available
Including Expert Dissent in Policy Making: A Case of AIDS, Science and the State in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Manjari Mahajan, Cornell University
ABSTRACT: In late 1999, the South African president Thabo Mbeki shocked the world by questioning whether HIV caused AIDS. This questioning was followed by the South African governments repeated skepticism of mainstream science around AIDS. Members of the government claimed that there were still many uncertainties in the science, and that more attention needed to be paid to theories of so-called dissident scientists who had been silenced by the global scientic community. These seemingly bizarre statements by the South African government met with widespread ridicule and criticism from both within and outside of South Africa. In this paper, I use the controversies around AIDS-related science in South Africa to ask why a modern highly technocratic postcolonial government went against widespread scientic consensus and foregrounded scientic uncertainty in its policies. The consequent examination of South African politics and history leads me to ask how governments may factor expert dissent into democratic decision making.
Legacy of Cholera Research in Bangladesh: The Challenges of Science Studies in Postcolonial Context
Saydia Kamal, Simon Fraser University
ABSTRACT: In 1960, making an amendment to the agreement of South East Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) a cholera research laboratory was established in the-then East Pakistan, afterward in the post independence Bangladesh the Laboratory was transformed into an international diarrhea disease research center which in the new millennium achieved global recognition for its humanitarian nature. This paper documents the multilayered history of cholera research conducted in the geographic territory of Bangladesh either under the regime of colonial/inter-colonial/independent state. My archival work primarily followed the traces scientists left on their journey to generate better knowledge about cholera, development of an oral therapy and the continued trial of anti cholera vaccine. The parallel history of pain, suffering and death toll of the cholera stricken population buried underneath the triumphalist story of cholera related science followed the footsteps of the scientists. The changes in the global political landscape transferred the control over the local epidemic sites the end of British colony in the region and the emergence of international development body reshufed the scientists from one site to the other based on fundamentally their national identity and political afliation to the global divide during cold war political economy. The ethnographic evidence shows that the history of a humanitarian science coincides with the history of bioethical violation and the political economy of the epidemic site. This paper outlines why a theoretical dialogue between science studies, history of medicine and anthropology of bioethics is necessary to understand the making and unmaking of science and civilization in Cholera endemic of Bangladesh.
Saturday Evening
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7:00-8:00PM RECEPTION 8:00-10:00PM PRESIDENTIAL PLENARY: SILENCE, SUFFERING AND SURVIVAL Reasonable Suffering
Rebecca Herzig, Bates College
ABSTRACT: not available
The End of Digital Silence? First Nations Communities and SuperNet Access in Alberta, Canada
Nadine I. Kozak, University of California, San Diego
ABSTRACT: not available
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4 S Final Program with Abstracts a system of representations which embed transactions. Examples here are software technologies for conducting nancial transactions, for economic forecasting, debt management, or rating economic actors; scientic or quasi-scientic knowledge which grounds the modeling of economic exchanges and value metrics. In spite of their relevance, market-related technological systems and forms of expertise have not yet been thoroughyl explored from an STS perspective. The panel brings together a set of STS scholars known for their work on the relationship between technology, expertise, and economic exchanges, with the aim of exploring various aspects of this relationship in different economic formats, and of advancing the STS understanding of this complex relationship.
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Six Degrees of Reputation: The Uses and Abuses of Online Review and Recommendation Systems
Shay David, Cornell University Trevor Pinch, Cornell University
ABSTRACT: not available
Silent but Salient: Social Networks and Private Spaces in Economic Forecasting
Robert Evans, University of Cardiff
ABSTRACT: not available
4.1E CAPITALIZING R ACE IN A GENOMIC AGE: REFLECTIONS ON COMMERCE, EQUITY AND R EIFICATION IN BIOTECHNOLOGY
Organizer: Jonathan Kahn, Hamline University School of Law Chair: Jonathan Kahn
4 S Final Program with Abstracts for the descendents of slaves in the U.S., reveals that recreational genetics may have far-reaching social implications. Drawing on the boundary-work literature, this paper explores how the effort to enter genetic ancestry testing results into evidence in this historic reparations case may also legitimate the reication of race as a scientic object.
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Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs): silencing the social critique of race in genetics
Stephanie Fullerton, University of Washington Joon-Ho Yu, University of Washington
ABSTRACT: While social and natural scientists debate the signicance and utility of race for genetics research, human geneticists are increasingly using DNA variants known as Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) to estimate individual and population ancestry. In this use, the genealogical contribution from socalled parental populations is approximated by an assessment of contemporary population genetic variation. For example, variations in present-day West African communities are used to infer the genetic endowment
4 S Final Program with Abstracts of African ancestors to African-American descendents. AIMs, it is argued, provide an objective assessment of biological afliation and are preferred to proxy measures such as race because of inherent advantages for identifying genetic susceptibility. Many prominent social scientists accept this presumed utility and support the use of AIMs in lieu of self-reported race, largely because gene-based ancestry estimation promises to undermine races biological reication by demonstrating the heterogeneity of social categories. This promise is, nevertheless, undermined by an examination of the assumptions driving AIMs development and application, which show ancestry to be as inappropriately reied as race itself. To the extent that AIMs have been successfully marketed (and, more relevantly, accepted) as objective measures, however, they have had the unfortunate affect of silencing social critiques of biological understandings of racial and ethnic identity. It is incumbent on social scientists and science studies scholars to take back the terrain earmarked for exclusion by human geneticists and promote a more comprehensive critique of the scientic and social uses of such technologies.
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Discussant: Karen-Sue Taussig, University of Minnesota 4.1G BIOMEDICINE, GENDER & SEXUALITY: THE POLITICS & PRODUCTION OF SILENCE
Organizers: Katrina Karkazis, Stanford University and Karl Bryant, UCSB Chair: Katrina Karkazis
SESSION ABSTRACT: Much scholarly work has productively explored medicoscientic epistemologies; that is, how science and medicine know what they know and how that knowledge is made. This panel explores a silence produced by this focus; namely, how or why science and biomedicine dont know and how knowledge is not made, thus pointing not only to the absence of knowledge, but to the production of knowledges absences. We specically examine silences inherent in medicoscientic knowledge-making about gender and sexuality, demonstrating that although some silences arise from complex and historically situated assumptions about gender, sexuality, and the body embedded in medicoscientic questions, methods, and observations, others are actively produced through delay, oversight, disinterest, strategy, confusion, neglect, or suppression Drawing on diverse sources of data and analytic methods, panelists explore how and why varied forms of knowledge concerning gender and sexuality have or have not come to be; how silences are recognized, understood and explained; and the sequelae of their production. In doing so, panelists reveal normative ideas about sexualities, genders, and bodies undergirding research; contrast lay and expert understandings of sexuality; and examine how these understandings are deployed through assessment and treatment to produce normative sexual subjects. The case studies include: 1) biomedical constructions of normative sexuality that undergird the practice of genital surgery on intersex infants (Karkazis); 2) the silences and multiple effects produced by narrow medicopsychological understandings of gender variant children (Bryant); 3) the production of new erasures created by biomedicines adoption of the ostensibly inclusive term transgender (Valentine); and 4) the uneven biomedical characterization of male gender and sexuality in the context of AIDS in India (Solomon).
Erasing Knowledge, Excising Pleasure: Whats Behind Technoscientic Rationales for Genital Surgery in Intersexuality
Katrina Karkazis, Stanford University
ABSTRACT: not available
Pretranssexual? Pretransvestite? Prehomosexual? Preheterosexual? Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood and Narrow Frames of Scientic Interest
Karl Bryant, UCSB
ABSTRACT: not available
New Silences for Old: The Use of Transgender in Medical and Public Health Discourses
David Valentine, University of Minnesota
ABSTRACT: not available
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Discussant: Carole S. Vance, Columbia University 4.1H PATIENTS, SUBJECTS, POWER, AND ETHICS [WORKING SESSION]
Chair: Deborah Blizzard, Rochester Institute of Technology
Postcolonial Panic: Science, Global Capital, and the Crisis over AZT
Karen Booth, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
ABSTRACT: This paper deconstructs the 1997-1999 debate among African, Asian, and American scientists over whether placebo trials of AZT to be conducted on African, Asian, and Latin American pregnant women with HIV were ethical given that AZT was at the time the standard of care for HIV positive pregnant women in the Global North. I argue that despite the apparent polarization of views, those in favor of the trials and those opposing them shared assumptions about the universality and power of biomedical science and its products on the one hand and the particularity and powerlessness of subaltern female bodies on the other. Because of these assumptions, the potential that this panic had (and is believed to have had) to expose and begin to undo biomedicines complicity in the ever-growing inequality between the global north and south is limited. I also demonstrate however that through the World Medical Association, the panic has promoted solidarity on the part of some Northern researchers with Southern physicians and activists struggling for greater access to drugs and drug production. I conclude this critical reading of over 120 articles, letters to the editor, editorials, and opinion editorials in English-language medical journals with a discussion of the conceptual and methodological relevance of feminist postcolonial theory to critical histories of medicine.
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Thinking on your Feet: Managing the Unexpected and the Constitution of Patient Safety
Jessica Mesman, University of Maastricht
ABSTRACT: With its high level of interdependency and interrelations, many modern health care practices can be considered as a high-3 work environment. High-3 practices are characterised by complex systems tightly-knot infrastructures, high technology, high time-pressure and a high level of specialisation. Errors may lead to unacceptable and irreversible consequences. Whereas most strategies in health care are geared towards prevention of adverse events, the focus of my study is on the process of stabilizing and strengthening the existing safety structure itself. Besides the intended formal safety measures patient safety is also achieved by an unplanned but effective set of safety barriers. After all, in practice incidents can be -and in most cases are- the outcome of a unique set of interrelating factors. In these cases maintaining the necessary level of safety requires a circumstantial intervention in which both formal and informal safety activities are combined. This raises the question about the locus of resilience in a safety net. What informal measures and non-initiated initiatives contribute to a high level of patient safety? What informal knowledge systems are involved in the maintenance of patient safety? On basis of ethnographic research in a neonatal intensive care unit I will discuss the process of alignment of these different sets of platforms for action. To identify the resilience of a critical care practice I will explore the role of sense-making, ambivalence and improvisation in the way they enable staff members to manage the unexpected and overcome decisionmaking dilemmas.
4.1K R E/PRODUCING AND ENDANGERING SPECIES: QUESTIONS OF SURVIVAL IN THE REMAKINGS OF KIN AND KIND
Organizer: Astrid Schrader, UC, Santa Cruz
Sesssion ABSTRACT: Why do our concepts of classication shift through time? ask Lynn Margulis and Karlene Schwartz in the preface to their Five Kingdoms. They answer, Every taxon class, order, phylum, kingdom is articial but based on the study of relationships. We recognize only that the species is a natural taxon. The question of what constitutes a natural taxon becomes particularly pertinent as increasing numbers of species become threatened with extinction. Ecologists, evolutionary biologists, population geneticists, and public decision-makers not only continuously invent new strategies to rebuild depleted populations, but also recongure who/what counts as conservable kind. At the same time, more and more newly devised organisms fall in-between established species categories. What are the politics of considering certain kinship relations to be articial or humanly constructed and therefore changeable through time, while others are marked as natural or self-reproducing? How do scientic interventions contribute to the existence and ourishing of particular kinds of organisms to the exclusion of others? Resisting a priori nature-culture distinctions, this panel explores entanglements of ontological and ethical questions in the making and unmaking of species. We ask, for example, what happens when kin and kind are no longer easily distinguishable, when seemingly separate interspecies life histories begin to intra-act with or
4 S Final Program with Abstracts without the help of new technologies. In a series of case studies, the contributions to this panel investigate links between scientic classication work, environmental policies, and interspecies intra-actions, destab ilizing clear distinctions between productive and reproductive practices, and ecological and evolutionary signicance in species denitions
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Let the domestics do the reproductive work for the endangered species. Reworking the species body
Carrie Friese, University of California, San Francisco
ABSTRACT: Cloning is one of a handful of techniques that is in part used with the intention of reproducing animals of endangered species in a manner that moves much of the reproductive work to domestic species. To date, all known attempts to clone animals of endangered species have used what is referred to as interspecies nuclear transfer. Here, nuclei are removed from preserved broblast cells taken from an animal of endangered specie and transferred to enucleated ova taken from a different, domesticated, and often closely related specie. As is the case with nuclear transfer generally, the resulting embryo is not a clone of the endangered animal per se because there is mitochondrial DNA from another individual. Given the centrality of genetic denitions of species across conservation worlds as well as the positioning of hybridity as a cause for extinction, it is not surprising that the presence of mitochondrial DNA from a different specie in cloned individuals would evoke contestation. This paper explores four rationalizations through which cloned animals of endangered species are either deemed or not deemed to be part of an endangered population. I examine the ways in which these rationalizations link up with discourses on im/ purity, risk, citizenship, and reproduction. I conclude by considering how these rationalizations link up with and disconnect from established practices in human relations with endangered species.
When Hatchery Salmon Go Wild: Population-Making, Genetic Management, and the Endangered Species Act
Heather Swanson, University of California, Santa Cruz
ABSTRACT: In 1990, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service received a series of petitions asking the agency to consider protecting several populations of Pacic salmon under the Endangered Species Act. Because the act allows the listing of sub-species groups of organisms only if they constitute distinct population segments, NMFS set out to create a denitive denition for distinct - and therefore protectionworthy - groups of salmon. The task has not proved simple. More than 15 years later, salmon population denitions remain highly contested and questions about what constitutes a full-edged salmon continue to be unresolved. Much of the difculty of dening salmon populations stems from conicting ideas about the status of hatchery-reared sh. For the last century, salmon hatcheries have raised young sh and released them into streams to augment existing sh populations. Though derived from naturally-spawning salmon stocks, hatchery sh are now considered by many sheries biologists to be one of the most pressing threats to wild salmon. Neither a separate domesticated population nor a part of natural ecosystems, hatchery sh complicate the concept of species and become central to debates about what and whom are conserved by conservation legislation. Drawing on eldwork in salmon genetic conservation facilities, hatcheries, and spawning streams, this paper will track the processes through which salmon are categorized based on modes of reproduction and traceable genetic differences. By focusing on the evolutionarily signicant unit a special ESA category used only for salmon, this paper will examine the ways in which hatchery/ wild distinctions, as well as salmon populations themselves, are made and unmade in the intra-actions of sh-mating behaviors, environmental policy documents, genetic technologies, and economic development schemes.
4 S Final Program with Abstracts intimate insofar as they have co-evolved into coterminous ecological niches as large omnivores; they have traded both predator and prey relationships; both vie as the appropriate marker of political boundaries in modern legislatures; and the bear is the central gure in human origin stories among circumpolar indigenous peoples. Yet despite such productive entanglements, bears and humans both live better when they do not exist in close proximity to each other. Because bears and humans share a naturalcultural history, neither the bear nor the human is an animal to itself. Both exist as they are today by virtue of their historical entanglements with each other. Thus, the ourishing well-being of bears becomes a political and ethical question for humans because humans ethical and political lives have long been co-constituted with bears. The species in question here are not domains given in advance, and the ontological status of both humans and bears has everything to do with who lives and who dies.
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Discussant: Donna Haraway UC Santa Cruz 3.4K INTERSECTIONS AND DIALOGUES ACROSS POSTCOLONIAL, FEMINIST, AND LABORATORY STUDIES OF SCIENCE, PART II
Organizers: Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison and Amit Prasad, University of MissouriColumbia Chair: Amit Prasad
Having It Both Ways Since 1945: National Science Cultures and Borderless Civil Societies
Sharon Traweek, University of California-Los Angeles
ABSTRACT: Now there is an intense strategic competition about designs and sites for the new global laboratories in several elds. The Europeans, North Americans, and Japanese are active in these debates. New networks are developing among Asian scientists, but African and Latin American scientists are not active in these negotiations; there are also almost no women making these decisions. Some have noted the role of scientists in the rapid development of transnational civil society. New laboratories are being dened and sited in new ways, but those new ways remain embedded in some very old global power relations in knowledge making.
Transnational Laboratories: Encountering Nations, Economies, Gender, and Postcolonialism in a Japanese Bioinformatics Laboratory
Joan Fujimura, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: This paper will locate a Japanese bioinformatics laboratory within a network of relations among actors, laboratories, companies, national governments, national and transnational economies, genders, and histories. It will explore the complex relations and multiple locations that become evident when examining the laboratorys work and then uses these explorations to ask what kind of lab study is this? What work does a lab study that examines postcolonial, transnational, feminist, political economic issues do, and how does this compare with the questions that motivated previous lab studies using ethnomethodological, symbolic interactionist, ANT, SSK, or cultural anthropological orientations?
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William James, the Dilemma of Psychical Science, and Conditions of Proof: A Postcolonial Reading
Bernadette Baker, University of Wisconsin-Madison
ABSTRACT: This paper examines debates over the terrain of science through the Jamesian ouevre, drawing especially upon his twenty-ve year involvement with psychical research in the US, UK, and continental Europe. Taking James analyses of mediumship phenomena as a case in point, the paper unpacks how the demarcation of events as extraordinary exposed the fragility of conditions of proof in late-nineteenth century scientic research. James associationist and sensationist theory of mind undergirded the naming and analysis of psychical phenomena and inspired a wrestling with their verity and causality. The philosophical psychology that James elaborated alongside his psychical research, buttressed an inscription of democracy, selfgovernance, and Republicanism that drew divisions between concrete/abstract, disability/genius, and savage/ civilized. Operating amid the turbulent space of emergent psychical sciences and parapsychology was, then, a particular distress over the ordering of the world, discourses of vision, and theories of humanhood and mind. The theorization of extraordinary phenomena rewrote belief in a morphing, absorbing self and a continuously redened other. The consolidation of research techniques and protocols in psychical sciences did not extend the domain of Science as James and his colleagues in the American Society for Psychical Research had hoped, then, but implicitly stratied not only extant cultures, but conditions of proof and mechanisms of truth-production that by the early decades of the twentieth century would lend ground to the normal sciences over the paranormal, giving particular legitimacy to techno-science and efciency discourse as acultural and as forms of seeing without being seen.
Science, Modernity, and the Non-west: An Analysis of Presidential Addresses of Indian Science Congress Association, 1914-2003
Amit Prasad, University of Missouri-Columbia
ABSTRACT: The establishment of Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) in 1914 is often regarded as marking the birth of the Indian scientic community. The presidential addresses of ISCA provide a rich archive to investigate the tensions and contradictions inherent in the formation of such an association (and in the pursuit of modern science) in a non-western society, particularly when it was under colonial rule. In 1914, Asutosh Mookerjee, the rst president of ISCA, in his inaugural address, while pointing towards the historical signicance of the location at which the meeting was being held, stated: We meet in this historic building on the anniversary of a date ever memorable in the annals of research scientic and philological, in the British Empire in the East, for it was just one hundred and thirty years ago, on the 15th January, 1784, that the Asiatic Society was founded by Sir William James. In 2003, K. Kasturirangan, the president of ISCA in 2002, in the preface to the book containing the presidential addresses of ISCA, while making a case for ISCA and modern science recalled the plea made by Albert Einstein back in 1931: concern for humankind itself and its fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavours. From the celebration of an orientalist institution to a more general celebration of science and humankind, the viewpoints of Indian scientists seem to have signicantly shifted in the last 90 years. Yet, a closer analysis of the presidential addresses shows how engagement with science continues to be circumscribed within Eurocentric boundaries. I do not, however, wish to take the term Eurocentrism as a catch all concept. In stead, I will problematize it and investigate its varying texture over the years by analyzing linkages between science, development, colonialism, modernity, and west/non-west as they have been perceived by Indian scientists over a period of nearly 90 years.
4.1M EXPERTISE, LAY KNOWLEDGE, AND LOCAL ACTIVISMS: REVISITING CERTAINTY, RISK, NEUTRALITY IN LAW AND POLICY REFORM
Organizer: Paisley Currah, Brooklyn College, City University of New York Chair: Lisa Jean Moore, Purchase College SUNY
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We Dont Know Who You Are: Birth Certicate Policy Reform, Transgender Activism, and Medical Expertise
Paisley Currah, City University of New York Lisa Jean Moore, City University of New York
ABSTRACT: Birth certicates, often referred to as breeder documents, are mandatory identity credentials used to establish age, citizenship, and parentage. They breed other documents such as passports, drivers
4 S Final Program with Abstracts licenses, and workers permits. Sex, a nascent biometric identier, is a mandated category on these documents. The persistent cultural anxiety over the gender binary being transitive produces legal, medical, and political constraints for changing documentation. On February 7, 2005, the Transgender Advisory Committee of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Health and the Bureau of Vital Statistics began meeting to revise the policy of changing the sex designation on birth certicates. The policy will be publicly reviewed on June 15, 2006 at a town hall meeting. The policy will most likely be the most progressive in the nation. Using participant observation, ethnography, in-depth interviews, and historical content analysis, this research project explores the social processes of changing state-sanctioned documentation. Bureaucrats, medical professionals and activists produce heterogeneous ideas about the biological reality of sex, the social consequences of the status quo, and the perceived risk of social change. Key themes that have emerged through interpretation of this policy discourse include the notion of permanence, the construction of expertise, and the persistent declarations about national security. The project considers the functional creep of state surveillance and links the changes in birth certicate to current deployment of the Real ID Act (H.R. 418).
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