Science Technology Studies

Using the Pfizer funded Swedish informational site about erectile dysfunction (ED), www.potenslinjen.se, we examine how potential users, their partners, and medical doctors are enrolled in the process of creating the Swedish Viagra user. Contextualized against other critical work on Viagra, our analysis shows how the commercial discourse embeds the ED patient into a network of actors. Three separate actors are co-constituted and enrolled by this erectile dysfunction information discourse, comprising Viagra marketing material in a country which forbids direct to consumer advertising of prescription medication. Doctors are enrolled to produce the cultural authority of expert medical knowledge, whereas partners are given responsibility for the emotional aspects of a man’s sexuality and encouraged to direct the man toward the relationship-saving Viagra. Throughout, though, the man is the patient responsible for taking Viagra to fix his dysfunctioning penis. We problematize this individu...

This article attempts to explain the swift development of renewable energy, in particular wind energy, in Portugal, by assessing the socio-political, community and market acceptance of renewables. We examine, on the one hand, the institutional and policy framework, the approaches to planning, and the ownership of facilities, and, on the other hand, the attitudes of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations and citizens towards renewable energy in general and local windfarms in particular. Results show that a highly attractive feed-in tariff system and a system of planning decisions at the national level has led to an expansion of wind power, regardless of a less than enthusiastic public opinion and a sceptical environmental movement.

With an innovative perspective on the social character of ignorance production, agnotology has been a fruitful approach for understanding the social and epistemological consequences of the interaction between industry and scientific research. In this paper, I argue that agnotology, or the study of ignorance, contributes to a better understanding of commercially driven research and its societal impact, showing the ways in which industrial interests have reshaped the epistemic aims of traditional scientific practices, turning them into mechanisms of ignorance production. To do so, I examine some of the main contributions to agnotology and provide a taxonomy of practices of ignorance construction common in commercially driven research today. In particular, I present the tobacco industry’s campaign against the health hazards of smoking as a paradigmatic case of ignorance production, identifying five central strategies. I then argue that the same strategies have been used in three other ...

This paper examines the accomplishment of making technology work, using the discourse around telemedicine in Swedish healthcare during 1994-2003. The paper will compare four projects launched in the mid-1990s and policymakers’ visions of healthcare through telemedicine. I will employ a sociotechnical approach developed within Actor-Network Theory that understands functioning technology not as something intrinsic but as an outcome of an ongoing process of negotiations. In the paper, I will extend the sociotechnical approach of what constitutes working technology to include spatiotemporal matters. I will also approach the closely related issue of space that has become a concern of Actor-Network Theory scholars interested in the accomplishment and continued workings of technology as it travels. In this discussion, an emphasis on fixed relations (network space) has been challenged by investigations into changing relations (fluid space). This paper suggests that in order to travel well, ...

Telemedical devices such as the Patient Suitcase for treating chronic heart failure patients at home have been suggested to foster new and empowered patients. In this paper we analyse to what extent the ‘virtual clinical encounters’ taking place through the Patient Suitcase can be said to have such effects. We find that new skills are developed for all actors involved and that the work involved in the consultation is largely shared, but the normative claims of an independent and self-managing ‘Patient 2.0’ are difficult to support. Rather than seeing this as a dismissal of the transformative effects of telemedicine, we will suggest the need to decentre the attention from the individual and include the place-making efforts and effects involved in emplacing telemedicine in the home. The technology does not move work, knowledge and power from one actor in the clinical encounter to another – rather it redistributes and transforms it among more actors and more places demanding continuous...

Diabetes is an interesting example of a healthcare sector where patients are responsible for producing and aggregating data about themselves, even if only for reporting details of their consultancies with specialists. This is valuable information because it orients the medical action taken on a specific patient and acts as the basis for aggregate-level investigations, and for new therapies and diagnostic procedures. The reliability, truthfulness, and accuracy of such information is therefore of crucial importance for healthcare practitioners; accordingly, being able to count on ‘empowered’ patients is the best way to obtain reliable, detailed, and updated data. Drawing on the results of a broader research project on diabetes services in Italy, the paper wants to address an essential feature of Patient 2.0: his/her being part of a network of fragmented practices and information and, at the same time, his/her becoming the main point of convergence of clinical information, tools and pr...

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...

The paper uses qualitative data from Norway and the United Kingdom to understand the new technology of In Home Display monitors as a material object loaded with meaning and norms that may affect social practices and relations. The displays are designed to encourage householders to reduce electricity consumption. In contrast to technologies associated with ‘smart meters’, the monitors under study cannot be used for controlling or automatising various types of electricity consumption, but these devises nonetheless often form part of ‘smart grid solutions’. A large part of the research in this area has attempted to quantify the impact of displays, and qualitative research focusing on the users has also mainly sought to explain why - or why not – the introduction of displays has resulted in reduced household consumption. This paper follows a more open approach to the introduction and impact of displays by paying attention to the existing routines and social practices into which the disp...

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...

Environmental economics and ecological economics became established scientific fields as a result of the growth and the success of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge and the general theory of scientific/intellectual movements, this article compares four pairs of scholars (two pairs of scholars appropriated for these fields and fields' founders during the emergence and establishment of the fields). The article depicts how their institutional, ideological and scientific backgrounds contributed to the divergence of these fields. Practitioners of environmental economics and ecological economics were influenced by different strands of the environmental movement. Environmental economics has epistemological and institutional links with environmentalism and ecological economics with ecologism. Different types of interdisciplinarity were used in these fields—a bridge building type of interdisciplinarity i...

Since the late twentieth century,  “citizen science” has become an increasingly fashionable label for a growing number of participatory research activities. This paper situates the origins and rise of the term “citizen science” and contextualises “citizen science” within the broader history of public participation in science. It analyses critically the current promises — democratisation, education, discoveries — emerging within the “citizen science” discourse and offers a new framework to better understand the diversity of epistemic practices involved in these participatory projects. Finally, it maps a number of historical, political, and social questions for future research in the critical studies of “citizen science”.

STS scholars are engaging in collaborative research in order to study extended socio-technical phenomena. This article participates in discussions on methodography and inventive methods by reflecting on visualizations used both internally by a team of researchers and together with study participants. We describe how these devices for generating and transforming data were brought to our ethnographic inquiry into the formation of research infrastructures which we found to be unwieldy and evolving phenomena. The visualizations are partial renderings of the object of inquiry, crafted and informed by ‘configuration’ as a method of assemblage that supports ethnographic study of contemporary socio-technical phenomena. We scrutinize our interdisciplinary bringing together of visualizing devices - timelines, collages, and sketches - and position them in the STS methods toolbox for inquiry and invention. These devices are key to investigating and engaging with the dynamics of configuring infr...

In this article, we describe how our work at a particular nexus of STS, ethnography, and critical theory—informed by experimental sensibilities in both the arts and sciences—transformed as we built and learned to use collaborative workflows and supporting digital infrastructure. Responding to the call of this special issue to be “ethnographic about ethnography,” we describe what we have learned about our own methods and collaborative practices through building digital infrastructure to support them. Supporting and accounting for how experimental ethnographic projects move—through different points in a research workflow, with many switchbacks, with project designs constantly changing as the research develops—was a key challenge. Addressing it depended on understanding creative data practices and analytic workflows, redesigning and building technological infrastructure, and constant attention to collaboration ethics. We refer to this as the need for doubletakes on method. We focus on ...

This article attempts to explain the swift development of renewable energy, in particular wind energy, in Portugal, by assessing the socio-political, community and market acceptance of renewables. We examine, on the one hand, the institutional and policy framework, the approaches to planning, and the ownership of facilities, and, on the other hand, the attitudes of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations and citizens towards renewable energy in general and local windfarms in particular. Results show that a highly attractive feed-in tariff system and a system of planning decisions at the national level has led to an expansion of wind power, regardless of a less than enthusiastic public opinion and a sceptical environmental movement.

Der Beitrag beschreibt das interdisziplinare Feld der Sound Studies und ihr Verhaltnis zu den Science & Technology Studies. In einem ersten Schritt diskutiert er den Stand der Entwicklung und resumiert die Diskussion daruber, ob es sich bei den Sound Studies um eine eigenstandige Disziplin, ein interdisziplinares Forschungsfeld ohne stringenten Theorie- und Methodenkanon oder schlicht ein Schlagwort handelt, unter dem sich Arbeiten mit einem gemeinsamen Interesse an der Erforschung akustischer Phanomene versammeln. In einem zweiten Schritt stellt der Beitrag dann zentrale Themen und Konzepte der Sound Studies, wie Soundscape, Transducer oder audile technique, vor.

Some authors have noted that in biobank re search participants may be guided by what is called therapeutic misconception, whereby participants attribute therapeutic intent to research procedures (Zawati and Knoppers, 2012; Lidz and Appelbaum, 2002).  This article argues that the notion of therapeutic misconception is increasingly less justified when evaluating biobanks. We present four examples taken from recent developments in biobanking to argue why the notion of therapeutic misconception is problematic in that biobanking practices are increasingly seeking to bridge research and treatment in different ways.  In this article we explore examples where the boundary between research and treatment become increasingly blurred, as well as the contextual significance of healthcare systems and their prevailing ideologies in healthcare management. We argue that biobanking practices are challenging the use value, as well as the philosophical and ethical underpinnings for the need to separate...

With an innovative perspective on the social character of ignorance production, agnotology has been a fruitful approach for understanding the social and epistemological consequences of the interaction between industry and scientifi c research. In this paper, I argue that agnotology, or the study of ignorance, contributes to a better understanding of commercially driven research and its societal impact, showing the ways in which industrial interests have reshaped the epistemic aims of traditional scientifi c practices, turning them into mechanisms of ignorance production. To do so, I examine some of the main contributions to agnotology and provide a taxonomy of practices of ignorance construction common in commercially driven research today. In particular, I present the tobacco industry’s campaign against the health hazards of smoking as a paradigmatic case of ignorance production, identifying fi ve central strategies. I then argue that the same strategies have been used in three oth...

This article presents an account of how a technology being transferred from one area of deployment to another entails that specific discourses travel along. In particular, we show that the development of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS, often referred to as drones) is importantly determined by its military progeny, as the civilian context inherits specific discourses from the military context. Contemporary ideas of privacy and security in drone use can be largely traced back to this original context. We show that concepts and their relative importance primarily depend on the discourses that travel together with the technologies on which the concepts aim to act. There is no technological reason for privacy and security to be implemented the way they are, nor can their implementation be explained merely from socio-political or moral discourses. Instead, material and discursive mechanisms successfully enact and reproduce the dominant military viewpoint.

We examine how building and appliance technologies relate to their use by occupants through practices at home and at work. The aim is to analyse how practices are influenced by buildings and other technologies and by social requirements and to add to ongoing research on how to contribute to a transition to more sustainable everyday practices. Interview, quantitative and observational material are used to compare experiences of occupying and using two different types of buildings, passive housing and large modern research laboratories. We apply the practice theory approach. The passive house case showed that the main project of a liveable, low-impact new building was on a fairly manageable scale, with a viable design and occupants who were prepared to adapt to it. The research lab study showed, however, that the configuration of unsustainable technologies and practices can occur at the design stage, and that most actors had very limited room for manoeuvre.

The focus of this article is on the relationship between research and education. The argument is that recent policy developments and the increasing emphasis on com-mercialisation and profitability of university activities weakens the connection of education and research. In this article, general characteristics of development of uni-versities and university policy in Finland are summarised. Main subjects of the analy-sis are three university departments that are situated in three different Finnish uni-versities. The concept of connection between research and education is explored and tested in these three cases. The relationship between research and education and its erosion is analysed with the help of four definitions of education’s research connection. The article shows that regardless of the definition, the connection be-tween research and education is becoming fragile as a result of practical, instrumen-tal and commercial aspirations of university activities. are facing a situa...

The UK has seen periodic attempts to develop large district heating (DH) networks to make use of residual heat from industry and power generation. Under concerns about climate change and energy security, DH has recently re-emerged in policy visions for future heat systems with small decentralised combined heat and power (CHP) generators playing a key role in the establishment of such networks. This paper draws on Stewart Russell’s accounts of earlier DH programmes, asking to what extent the reasons he concluded CHP and DH were systematically excluded continue to marginalise the technologies. In spite of governance changes which ostensibly open new opportunities for experimentation, key structural issues challenge the development of decentralised energy, particularly the alignment of the electricity sector to a centralised system and the dependency of local governments with limited capacity on central government. The reluctance of central government to engage in system planning and t...

Several studies over the years have paid attention to the entanglement of biomedical research and the multiplicity of expectations for scientific breakthroughs and economic gains. However, science and economy are by no means the only values attributed to the biomedical endeavour in an actual R&D project. In this article, we present an analysis of a case we studied in Finland, in which academic and commercial partners jointly studied minuscule extracellular vesicles (EVs) to develop related technologies and explore their commercialisation potential. Thus, we ask, what is the spectrum of value in biomedical R&D? Our analysis highlights that in the rapidly developing, but still immature, scientific field of EVs, the dominant value of the research project are related to the expansion of future possibilities (e.g., funding and collaborations) and the sustainability of research. The subject of our study is a new domain of biomedicine that is quite unexplored in science and technology stud...

UK energy policies position urban heat networks as components of a resilient low carbon, aff ordable system, but, as Stewart Russell’s work showed, such technologies have never been integrated into UK provision. This paper takes Russell’s legacy forward by examining prospects for urban district heating and combined heat and power development in the context of the fi nancial, rather than technological, innovations shaped by liberalised energy and fi nancial markets. Drawing on sociology of markets and social studies of fi nance, the paper examines the resulting evaluation practices. Findings indicate that such district energy infrastructure does not conform to the investment calculus, making a business case hard to establish. Bridging the value gap between liberalised fi nance and district energy requires actors willing to devise improvised solutions. In spite of the established sustainability credentials of the technology therefore, signifi cant deployment in the UK (and similar cou...

Households are increasingly the centre of attention in smart grid experiments, where they are dominantly framed in a role as ‘flexible consumers’ of electricity. This paper reports from the Danish smart grid demonstration project eFlex, which aimed to investigate the ‘flexibility potential’ of households, and it shows how householders are far from just ‘consumers’ in the system. Drawing on empirical material from ethnographic fieldwork in 49 households that tested smart grid equipment, the paper firstly demonstrates how eFlex users were also creative innovators. Secondly, by integrating user innovation literature, domestication theory and practice theory, the paper illustrates how the eFlex equipment interacted with a variety of collectively shared everyday practices in the household and argues that this unique family context accordingly had implications for the ‘innovative capacity’ of these pioneer users. The paper thus calls for smart grid stakeholders to begin taking the ‘innova...

Strategic research indicates a problem-oriented, collaborative process of knowledge creation. Analysing a Finnish research project Smart Energy Transition and a related Delphi survey, we conceptualize strategic research as ‘futures work’ and as translations of technologies, time frames and narratives into a future vision. We ask 1) What is the role of the notion of disruption in strategic research and in the acts of translation? 2) What are the available means of articulating “disruption” in a Delphi survey? and 3) How do academics carrying out strategic research align themselves as part of actor networks? We find that the notion of disruption mediates the boundaries between science, business and policy. Moreover, plural time frames of short-term changes in actor networks and long-term speculative visions enable boundary work. Alignment between actors hinges on methodology, specific academic backgrounds and expertize, public energy discourses, national and industry interests, as wel...

Participants in Belize’s water sector encounter challenges in identifying and living within shifting environments, and in conducting the work of expectation given ambiguities in rainfall patterns, historical records, institutional resources and political interests. Policymakers, scientists and practitioners generate and organise different kinds of foreknowledge as they anticipate future quantities, qualities and distribution of water, amid questions about the patterning of expertise and the nature of water as a resource. I present three ethnographic vignettes to address: the navigation of nonknowledge in water policy implementation; the frictions that arise in modelling workshops where trainees generate data-driven maps of future environments; and the situated sensing of environmental change. Building on a concept of ‘reckoning’ that highlights cross-cutting technical, relational, political and affective dimensions of meaning-making, I situate these foreknowledge practices in the so...

Recent papers by prominent scholars in science and technology studies (notably John Law and Bruno Latour) have crystallized a fundamental disagreement about the scope and purpose of intervention in actor-network theory or what we here choose to bracket as empirical philosophy. While the precept of agnostic description is taken as a given, the desired effects of such descriptions are highly debated: Is the goal to interfere with the singularity of the real through the enactment of multiple and possibly conflicting ontologies? Or is it (also) to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure? In this paper we think about this disagreement as a question of research strategy (a normative discord about the desirable outcome of an intervention) in order to assess its implications for research tactics (a descriptive accord about the practical crafting of an adequate account). A key point here is to challenge the impermeability of s...

Within the discourse promoting transdisciplinary research (TDR), also referred to as Mode 2 science, it is often claimed that scientifically coping with urgent life-world problems calls for interdisciplinary participatory research (or TDR), and that this represents a new mode of knowledge production. Although we look upon TDR as a fertile innovation, we have epistemological and methodological concerns in treating TDR as a (singular) new mode of knowledge production. Hence, our paper attempts to contribute to clarifying the meaning of TDR from an epistemological and methodological perspective. We develop a conceptual scheme for the analysis of knowledge production in problem-oriented research, which is subsequently applied to an empirical analysis of 16 transdisciplinary research projects. In our analysis, we focus upon forms of knowledge integration and participation. The results indicate that, from an epistemological point of view, TDR does not represent a specific mode of knowledg...

This article discusses calculation practices in the development of a monitoring device, aimed at improving therapeutic compliance of children and teenagers suffering from a deformation of the spine. In managing the complexities of physical parameters, therapeutic measures, and interventions in everyday life, numbers are central participants in inferring from and interfering with bodies and behaviours. Numbers constitute the input and output of such monitoring systems, translating, circulating, and visualizing physical conditions and therapeutic effects, as well as suggesting action. This generative process of capturing and interpreting data has at the core algorithms, which process data and provide seemingly unambiguous numerical outcomes, based on mathematical and technological means of processing information. Attending to the incremental process of “learning algorithms” as a central feature of the system’s development allows me to describe the robustness of certain modes of infere...

This article attempts to explain the swift development of renewable energy, in particular wind energy, in Portugal, by assessing the socio-political, community and market acceptance of renewables. We examine, on the one hand, the institutional and policy framework, the approaches to planning, and the ownership of facilities, and, on the other hand, the attitudes of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations and citizens towards renewable energy in general and local windfarms in particular. Results show that a highly attractive feed-in tariff system and a system of planning decisions at the national level has led to an expansion of wind power, regardless of a less than enthusiastic public opinion and a sceptical environmental movement.

This paper investigates the shaping of urban public transport by comparing ‘alternative leading objects’ to the car in the Norwegian cities Trondheim and Bergen. These have chosen different transport technologies, bus and light rail respectively. I draw on the concept of technological frames and illustrate how interpretations and expectations of sustainable urban mobility guide transport planning. The paper contributes to discussions in STS by exploring technological frames as ongoing practices instead of as outcomes, and as performed by what I identify as two framing coalitions. Both coalitions emphasised that Trondheim and Bergen represented different city identities and topographies. The paper demonstrates the importance of making such identities and representations of public transport systems in particular urban contexts in order to replace a car-dominated transport system. The paper draws on an observational study in two transport offices, interviews with transport planners and...

This article – grounded in ethnographic fieldwork within the organization of chronic patients with multiple sclerosis in Russia – empiricizes and problematizes the work it takes to craft ethnographic collaborations with care. We attend to the notion of collaboration ‘from a body’, or, rather, from bodies-in-movement. By scrutinizing three turning points of our ethnographic fieldwork along with our relations with partners in the field, we specify how movement matters in ethnographic collaborations. Attention to the embodiment work allows us to specify the energy and resources such collaborations ask for and that are otherwise silenced or neglected. We distinguish three instances of embodiment work in such collaborations – composition, moving with and being moved by, as well as pausing. By attending to how ‘we know’ through crafting and maintaining ethnographic collaborations, this article contributes to a broader question of how to care for differences in ethnographic collaborations.