Social Studies of Science and Technology

Biobanks are crucial institutions in the infrastructure of contemporary
life sciences. They depend on the participation of donors who give
tissues and data. Through their participation, donors can build identities and form biosociality. Biobanks are key sites in the current bioeconomy, that enable the generation of value from those tissues and bioinformation, transformed into assets or commodities. We define biobanks as hybrid zones of heterogeneous practices that blur the boundaries between institutional sectors and ways of producing economic values. On that basis we introduce a novel empirical, realist approach to the analysis of biobanking economies, explaining the different economic and social biovalues that emerge from the practices of valuing and interacting between the researchers, biobank staff and donor participants in specific banking activities. We discuss why STS studies on biobanking should explore the concrete practices through which multiple biovalues as well as biosocialities are produced simultaneously and in configurations of mutual interdependence.

The theory of technological determinism has been directly derived as a consequence to Veblen’s theory of institutional change (Brette 2003). Technological determinism is based on a reductionist explanation for social changes. Technological determinism is highly important to explain patterns of human interactions and behaviours, particularly in the wake of the industrial revolution. In the modern era, technology controls practically every aspect of human endeavour and enquiry. It cannot be denied that technology has a very important influence on human life since most of the primary achievements and constructs of human civilisation are based on technological innovation and technology use.

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

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

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

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

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

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

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

Today, human activities constitute the primary environmental impact on the planet. In this context, commitments to sustainability, or minimization of damage, prove insufficient. To develop regenerative, futuring capabilities, architectural design needs to extend beyond the form and function of things and engage with the management of complex systems. Such systems involve multiple types of dynamic phenomena—biotic and abiotic, technical and cultural—and can be understood as living. Engagement with such living systems implies manipulation of pervasive and unceasing change, irrespective of whether it is valued by design stakeholders or actively managed towards homeostatic or homeorhetic conditions. On one hand, such manipulation of continuity requires holistic and persistent design involvements that are beyond natural capabilities of human designers. On the other hand, practical, political, or creative implications of reliance on automated systems capable of tackling such tasks are as yet underexplored. In response to this challenge, this paper considers an experimental approach that utilized methods of critical making and speculative designing to explore potentials of autonomous architecture. Presented experiments combined knowledge of animal architecture with intelligent behaviors of robotic devices.

La proliferación de las edificaciones de altura para uso residencial en los paños centrales y pericentrales de las ciudades chilenas es un fenómeno reciente, cuya intensidad alienta la pregunta sobre sus efectos en la interacción urbana. El presente texto explora los regis-tros y relatos que dan pie a dos narrativas diferentes sobre el fenómeno de la verticaliza-ción: una, articulada en torno a las encuestas de edificación, y, la otra, en torno a notas de prensa sobre sucesos en edificios de altura. Ambas son útiles para verificar cómo este fenómeno, agenciado en entidades arquitectónicas, pasa a constituirse en un régimen ur-bano, es decir, como una configuración normativa capaz de producir modos de orden para la interacción en las ciudades.

Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water.
Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure.
My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking.

This PhD dissertation addresses changes that have taken place in recent years in the People’s Republic of China regarding the image, fate and value of discarded electrical and electronic equipment (DEEE, also known as “e-waste”) and of the people who make a living by trading, transporting, and transforming this type of object. It originates in multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Guangdong Province for a total of eighteen months (2014-2016), during which I paid particular attention to objects’ materiality, recycling technologies, valuation practices, representations of waste/wastefulness, and state-society relations.

Drawing on scholarship from the sociology of public problems, China studies, political ecology, discard studies, environmental politics and the socio-anthropology of development, my research interrogates China’s state program of “ecological modernization”. In particular, it analyzes the central government’s project of “formalizing e-waste management and treatment” and its implementation on the ground, at the local level. Official discourse in China justifies formalization by the need for improved pollution control and resource efficiency. However, as my research reveals, this explains only a small part of the revolution in material and symbolic approaches to DEEE that unfolded in early twenty-first century China.

In particular, this does not account for the conspicuous absence of self-employed workers, family businesses and small and micro enterprises from China’s new regulatory system and the industrial sub-sector this system gave birth to. These social actors and economic entities, often referred to collectively as the “informal sector”, dominated scrap recycling and object stewardship during the era of “reform and opening”. Some of them engaged in polluting practices, but others contributed in essential ways to object reuse, which is widely acknowledged as extending product lifespans, and thus reducing the overall environmental impact of EEE production and consumption. And yet, in China, the “informal sector” as a whole suffered from stigmatization, exclusion and dispossession.

Based on this observation, I conclude that, in order to understand China’s official solution to the “e-waste problem”, one should understand it as a response to the need for displaying markers of modernity, environmentalism being but one of them. Technological progress, material abundance and a position at the top of the international community, among others, also played a key role in shaping Chinese “e-waste” policies.

Keywords: e-waste, reuse and recycling, modernization, environmentalism, China

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

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

ETHICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

I – Critically Mapping Current Approaches

From an early stage, nanoscience and nanotechnology (NST) have been associated with a political will to integrate upstream the question of their "ethical and societal implications". In this context, the implication of the social and human sciences (SHS) has given way to a great variety of approaches to NST ethics. After a decade of SHS involvement, it is time for an appraisal. This article seeks to critically map the different approaches of SHS involvement in NST with regard to their problematization of ethical issues and to identify their shortcomings and limitations. Especially, it is argued that concrete technoscientific NST developments and the concerns with the values that they generate should be better articulated.

II – For an object-centred approach

The ethics of nanoscience and nanotechnology (NST) calls to question the division between the neutrality objects and the morality of uses. NST lead us therefore to a new kind of "Copernican revolution", taking us from a situation where the subject is the only moral being to a situation where objects fully enter in the field of moral philosophy. This article shows how the epistemological analysis of the mode of existence of nano-objects can renew the ethical issues on several singular fieldworks. The demonstration will be based on four case studies of nano-objects, conceptualized as "relational objects" : artificial molecular machines, drug nanocarriers, bio and eco-toxicology of nanoparticles, and biomarkers for personalized medicine.

ÉTHIQUE ET ÉPISTÉMOLOGIE DES NANOTECHNOLOGIES

I – Cartographie critique des approches existantes

Les nanosciences et nanotechnologies (NST) ont été placées très tôt sous le signe d’une volonté politique d’intégrer, en amont, la question de leurs « enjeux éthiques et sociétaux ». Dans ce contexte, les démarches « d’accompagnement » des technosciences par les sciences humaines et sociales (SHS) se sont multipliées, et diverses approches de l’éthique des NST ont été proposées. Après une décennie d’implication des SHS, un bilan s’impose. Cet article propose une cartographie raisonnée des différentes démarches d’accompagnement des NST par les SHS quant à leur problématisation du questionnement éthique, et en indique les insuffisances et les limites. Il soutient notamment que les développements technoscientifiques concrets des NST et les questions de valeurs qu’ils suscitent doivent être mieux articulés.

II – Pour une approche centrée sur les objets

l'éthique des nanosciences et nanotechnologies (NST) appelle à remettre en question le partage entre la neutralité des objets et la moralité des usages. Les NST nous poussent par conséquent à une sorte de nouvelle « révolution copernicienne », nous faisant passer d'une situation où le sujet est le seul être moral à une situation où les objets entrent de plain-pied dans le champ de la philosophie morale. Le présent article montre comment l'analyse épistémologique du mode d'existence des nano-objets permet de renouveler le questionnement éthique sur des terrains à chaque fois singuliers. La démonstration se fera sur la base de quatre cas concrets de nano-objets, conceptualisés comme des « objets relationnels » : les machines moléculaires artificielles, les nanovecteurs de médicament, la bio et l'éco-toxicologie des nanoparticules, et les biomarqueurs pour la médecine personnalisée.

In September 2016, BBC Three released Obesity: The Post Mortem, an alleged “health and well-being documentary” chronicling the dramatized dissection of a fat, white, American woman. In this article, the author uses a feminist science studies analytic to argue that this film serves a cultural, rather than medical, educational purpose, functioning as a fatphobic biopedagogy to teach its viewers how to be good bio-citizens by staying or becoming thin. Part I traces the historical, material, and discursive forces that allowed for this film’s emergence to show how it perpetuates anthropometric legacies of displaying and dissecting “abnormal” bodies for symbolic and economic profit. Part II takes up the consequences of these legacies, using narrative and visual analysis to outline the ways this film dehumanizes both its subject and fat people in general, reviving histories of dissection for spectacle, perpetuating the myth that “obesity” is bringing about the downfall of humanity, and manipulating viewers into trusting knowledge from a television program designed to be sensational. The dehumanizing final message of Obesity: The Post Mortem is that the value of fat corpses lies in how they can be used to control the population, rather than any medical knowledge that results from their examination.

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

This essay examines five ideal–typical conceptions of politics in science and technology studies. Rather than evaluating these conceptions with reference to a single standard, the essay shows how different conceptions of politics serve distinct purposes: normative critique, two approaches to empirical description, and two views of democracy. I discuss each conception of politics with respect to how well it fulfills its apparent primary purpose, as well as its implications for the purpose of studying a key issue in contemporary democratic societies: the politicization of science. In this respect, the essay goes beyond classifying different conceptions of politics and also recommends the fifth conception as especially conducive to understanding and shaping the processes whereby science becomes a site or object of political activity. The essay also employs several analytical distinctions to help clarify the differences among conceptions of politics: between science as ‘political’ (adjective) and science as a site of ‘politics’ (noun), between spatial-conceptions and activity-conceptions of politics, between latent conflicts and actual conflicts, and between politics and power. The essay also makes the methodological argument that the politics of science and technology is best studied with concepts and methods that facilitate dialogue between actors and analysts. The main goal, however, is not to defend a particular view of politics, but to promote conversation on the conceptions of politics that animate research in social studies of science and technology.

Following discussions on scientific biography carried out over the past few decades, this book proposes a kaleidoscopic survey of the uses of biography as a tool to understand science and its context. It offers food for thought on the role played by the gender of the biographer and the biographee in the process of writing. To provide orientation in such a challenging field, some of the authors have accepted to write about their own professional experience while reflecting on the case studies they have been working on. Focusing on (auto)biography may help us to build bridges between different approaches to men and women’s lives in science. The authors belong to a variety of academic and professional fields, including the history of science, anthropology, literary studies, and science journalism. The period covered spans from 1732, when Laura Bassi was the first woman to get a tenured professorship of physics, to 2009, when Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider were the first women’s team to have won a Nobel Prize in science.
Eds. P.Govoni, Z.A. Franceschi. Authors: Paola Govoni; Evelyn Fox Keller, Londa Schiebinger, Georgina Ferry, Marta Cavazza, Paula Findlen, Massimo Mazzotti, Vita Fortunati, Pnina G. Abir-Am, Zelda A. Franceschi.

TECHNOSCIENCE & SOCIETY BOOK SERIES

Series Editor: Kean Birch

Objectives

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

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

This is a longer version of a review article published in Writing Technologies 5 (2013): 36-54, which is available online at
http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/current_journal/156918.pdf.  The published article discussed the following two books:

Jon Agar. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer.  Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2003.  pp. 554. ISBN: 0-262-01202-2

Rebecca MacKinnon. Consent of the Networked:: the worldwide struggle for internet freedom. New York: Basic Books, 2012.  pp. 294. ISBN: 978-0-465-02442-1

This version also discusses two more books:

Andrew Barry. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: The Athlone Press, 2001.  pp. 305. ISBN: 0-485-00439-9

Chris Hables Gray. Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age. New York: Routledge, 2002. pp. 241.  ISBN: 0-415-91979-7.

I propose the adoption of programmatic research to meet the challenges of archaeological curation in the digital continuum, contingent on curation-enabled global digital infrastructures and on contested regimes of archaeological knowledge production and meaning making, as a “grand challenge” for digital archaeology. My motivation stems from an interest in the sociotechnical practices of archaeology, viewed as purposeful activities centred on material traces of past human presence, as exemplified in contemporary practices of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, in epistemological reflexivity and in pluralization of archaeological knowledge. Adopting a practice-centred approach, I examine how the archaeological record is constructed and curated through archaeological activity “from the field to the screen” in a variety of archaeological situations, I call attention to Çatalhöyük as a salient case study illustrating the ubiquity of digital curation practices in experimental, well-resourced and purposefully theorized archaeological fieldwork, and I propose a conceptualization of digital curation as a pervasive, epistemic-pragmatic activity extending across the lifecycle of archaeological work. To address these challenges, I introduce a medium-term research agenda that speaks both to epistemic questions of theory in archaeology and information science, and to pragmatic concerns of digital curation, its methods, and application in archaeology. The agenda I propose calls for multidisciplinary, multi-team, multiyear research of a programmatic nature, aiming to re-examine archaeological ontology, to conduct focused research on pervasive archaeological research practices and methods, and to design and develop curation functionalities coupled with existing pervasive digital infrastructures used by archaeologists. Its potential value is in helping establish an epistemologically coherent framework for the interdisciplinary field of archaeological curation, in aligning archaeological ontologies work with practice-based, agency-oriented and participatory theorizations of material culture, and in matching the specification and design of archaeological digital infrastructures with the increasingly globalized, ubiquitous and pervasive digital information environment and the multiple contexts of contemporary meaning-making in archaeology.

El estudio antropológico del espacio exterior,
o por lo menos del espacio exterior visto desde la
Tierra, abre un vasto abanico de posibilidades temáticas,
epistemológicas y metodológicas. Más allá
de los objetivos de la investigación –los imaginarios
mexicanos del futuro, las relaciones geopolíticas en
las cuales participa la industria espacial mexicana,
los estudios de ciencia y tecnología y las relaciones
entre arte y tecnología– este proyecto también
proporciona un espacio para reflexionar sobre el
ejercicio de la antropología en la actualidad.

This paper argues that, in order to take place, space and scale more seriously in the study of our discipline, we have to complement the pervasive understanding of geography as a tradition of thought or an extended conversation with an understanding of our discipline as a tradition of practice, in which the main focus is on the becoming of geographers. It is argued that the theme of 'what it takes to be a good geographer' is a fertile way to study this process of becoming. The four main advantages of this approach are illustrated empirically in the body of the argument by the author's reflections on his socializing within two very different geographical traditions.

The aim of this paper is to convey the relevance of a Gramscian perspective in medical anthropology, stressing his anti-essentialist way of reasoning about ‘nature’. The author claims that Gramsci's understandings of the bodily life of the state can deconstruct naturalized realities in ways that are helpful for the ethnographer engaged in the political anthropology of embodiment and the management of health, persons, and life itself. The paper is presented in three parts. An attempt is made, first, to frame the relevance of Gramsci for Italian medical anthropology and second, to explore the components of the Gramscian concept of ‘second nature’ within the perspective that he himself calls ‘an anthropology’. Third, an example is given of how the proposed Gramscian insights could inform an ethnography on the biopolitical aspects for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease, which is currently being carried out in Perugia.

El presente trabajo expone un relevamiento empírico de carácter histórico acerca de la inserción, definición y valorización de controversias científicas en psicología en función de ciertas tendencias historiográficas en psicología. Con el objetivo general de revisar la importancia de las instancias controversiales para el desarrollo científico de la psicología, y el objetivo específico de posibilitar acercamientos entre la historiografía de la psicología y los estudios sociales de la ciencia, se describe primero la definición y explicación de las controversias históricas realizadas por la historiografía clásica de la psicología, enfatizándose el carácter anómalo de
tales controversias para dicha historiografía dados sus implícitos teórico-metodológicos. Se detalla luego la
redefinición realizada en torno a controversias históricas por la ‘nueva historia’ de la psicología. Se remarca
que tal redefinición se debió en parte a la incorporación por los historiadores de ciertos principios y recursos
explicativos sociológicos de la historia social de la ciencia y de los estudios sociales de la ciencia. Se concluye sobre el carácter productivo de tal redefinición y de las prospectivas de  profundizar en análisis socio-históricos de controversias psicológicas.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents an empirical (historical) survey about the insertion, definition and valuation of scientific controversies in psychology on the basis of certain historiographical trends in History of Psychology. With the overall objective of reviewing the importance of controversial instances for the scientific development of psychology, and the specific objective of enabling rapprochement between the historiography of psychology and social studies of science, the definition and explanation given about historical controversies by the classic
historiography of psychology are first described, emphasizing the anomalous character of such controversies to said historiography given the implicit theoretical and methodological principles of such tradition. The redefinition of historical controversies by the ‘new history’ of psychology developed since 1970 is then detailed. It is noted that such redefinition took place partly due to the historians’ incorporation of certain sociological and socio-historical principles and explanatory resources from social history of science and social studies of
science. The positive character of such a redefinition and of the foresight of deeper socio-historical analysis of controversies in psychology is then concluded

Podría comenzar diciendo que este libro, que aborda la historia de la
emergencia y desarrollo de diversos espacios de la ciencia NO ES un
libro de historia de la ciencia. No lo es, en el sentido estricto de que no
creemos que la ciencia pueda ser una actividad que pueda explicarse
por fuera de la(s) sociedad(es) de donde surge y con las que interactúa,
las cuales se modelan, según creemos, mutuamente.
Podría decir, en cambio, que se trata de un libro de historia social
a secas, ya que entendemos que la historia de la ciencia es, simplemente, una parte de la historia de la sociedad. Eso nos acercaría un poco más a nuestro propósito pero, aun así, se queda un poco corto. Porque lo que nos interesa es algo un poco más ambicioso: tomando como puerta de entrada al desarrollo de nuevos campos de investigación de las llamadas “ciencias duras”, pretendemos observar diversos procesos sociales, políticos, culturales o económicos que han tenido lugar en el largo período que va desde el fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial hasta los comienzos del siglo XXI.
Lo anterior puede llamar la atención a los estudiosos y académicos
en las ciencias sociales, así como a un público más amplio, ya que
las investigaciones y análisis sobre las diversas sociedades suelen poner la lupa en los acontecimientos políticos, en las dimensiones de la vida simbólica, en los procesos educativos, en los aspectos culturales, en los vaivenes económicos, así como en los conflictos, luchas disputas, movimientos, y otras formas de organización, estructuración y de acción
social. Sin embargo, historiadores y sociólogos suelen ignorar, respectivamente, la historia y la sociología de los conocimientos científicos, tal vez bajo la creencia de que “nada de cierta relevancia social se pueda encontrar allí”.

Contemporary, technoscientific capitalism is characterized by the (re)configuration of a range of "things" (e.g., infrastructure, data, knowledge , bodies) as assets or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process. Rather than entre-preneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership or the appropriation of value through ownership and control rights (e.g., intellectual property [IP]), monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices (e.g., investment dispute courts, exclusivity agreements). While rentiership is often presented as a negative phenomenon (e.g., distorting markets, unearned income) in both neoclassical and Marxist political economy lit-eratures-and much in between-in this paper, I conceptualize rentiership as a technoeconomic practice and process framed by insights from science and technology studies (STS). So, rather than a problematic "side effect" of capitalism, the concept of rentiership enables us to understand how

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) – and no doubt other fields – have increasingly drawn on Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics to theorize a variety of new 'bio-concepts'. While there might be some theoretical value in such exercises, many of these bio-concepts have simply replaced more rigorous – and therefore time-consuming – analytical work. This article provides a (sympathetic) critique of these various bio-concepts, especially as they are applied to the emerging 'bio-economy'. In so doing, the article seeks to show that the analysis of the bio-economy could be better framed as a political economy of nothing. This has several implications for science education, which are raised in the article.

This work explores a sociological approach towards understanding the contemporary process by which certain territorial relations are grouped under the notion of region. The research adopts an ethnographic perspective to reconstruct the social life of regions by focusing not only on the processes and activities that have transformed territorial units into objects of intervention, but also on the practices and sites that have turned regions into meaningful fields of action through which people carry out their life projects. This argument is sustained through research findings that recorded the spread of salmon farming in the Patagonian Region of Aysén in southern Chile.

RESUMO
Para apresentar ao Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) uma avaliação do Programa de Apoio às Tecnologias Apropriadas (PTA/CNPq), proposta nesta dissertação, como resultado do esforço realizado durante o Curso de Mestrado em Desenvolvimento Sustentável - Área de Concentração em Política e Gestão de Ciência e Tecnologia, procurou-se, em primeiro lugar, recuperar os conceitos e fundamentos relativos às Tecnologias Apropriadas (TAs) e, ainda, buscar as suas origens no Programa de Transferência de Tecnologias Apropriadas ao Meio Rural (PTTA/CNPq), seu antecessor. Procurou -se, ainda, reconstruir o desenvolvimento dos dois programas ao longo do tempo, contextualizando -os, de forma a entendê-los como programas institucionais do CNPq.
Em seguida, como estudo de casos, partiu-se para a avaliação, propriamente dita, de 3 (três) dos atuais 12 (doze) programas estaduais de apoio às TAs, conveniados com o CNPq, tendo em conta que os programas estaduais escolhidos, Programa de Difusão Tecnológica do Estado do Ceará (Proditec/CE), Programa Paraibano de Tecnologias Apropriadas (PPTA/PB) e Programa de Verticalização da Pequena Produção Familiar (Prove/DF), além de serem os primeiros apoiados pelo PTA/CNPq, distinguem-se tanto nos objetivos e diretrizes, como na forma de atuação e gestão, o que nos permite perceber a diversidade e o alcance do PTA/CNPq.
A análise aqui realizada mostra que as iniciativas relacionadas às TAs, desde o seu início, encontraram grandes dificuldades, seja devido às críticas advindas de boa parte da comunidade científica, seja devido àquelas de caráter filosófico ou ideológico, que identificaram no programa um concorrente aos parcos recursos disponíveis para a ciência e tecnologia ou, ainda, mais uma ameaça ao modelo de desenvolvimento vigente no país.
O alcance do sucesso do PTA/CNPq nas unidades da Federação tem variado conforme o comprometimento político e financeiro de cada um dos governos estaduais e dos seus parceiros. Esta dissertação propõe algumas medidas relativas à gestão do programa para a direção do CNPq, com o objetivo de se alcançarem melhores resultados. Neste sentido , recomenda a sua reestruturação e conformação como um programa de apoio às tecnologias apropriadas voltadas para os princípios do desenvolvimento sustentável, que, considerando a sustentabilidade como um fenômeno multidimensional, de fato, incorpore características interdisciplinares e plurais, interaja com todas as áreas do conhecimento e, como recomendou a chamada Agenda 21 brasileira, pratique a ética da sustentabilidade como princípio universal e a afirmação da identidade brasileira, nas suas particularidades históricas e regionais.
ABSTRACT
In order to present the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) an assessment of the Programme of Support to the Appropriate Technologies (PTA/CNPq), proposed in this monograph, as a result of the effort carried out during the Master’s Degree Course in Sustainable Development - Area of Concentration Management Policy for Science and Technology, we tried, first of all, to recover the concepts and foundations pertaining to Appropriate Technologies (TAs) and, furthermore, to look for their origins within the Programme of Transfer of Technologies Appropriate for the Rural Milieu (PTTA/CNPq), its predecessor. In addition, we have tried to reconstruct the development of both programmes as time went by, putting them into context, so that they could be understood as CNPq’s institutional programmes.
Next, as a case study, we entered into the proper assessment of 3 (three) of the current 12 (twelve) state programmes for lending support to TAs, programmes that have agreements with CNPq, taking into account the fact that the state programmes chosen, the Programme for Technological Dissemination of the State of Ceará (Proditec/CE), the Programme of Appropriate Technologies of Paraíba (PPTA/PB) and the Programme for Providing a Vertical Structure to Small Family Production (Prove/DF), in addition to being the first ones to be supported by PTA/CNPq, highlight both in their objectives and in their guidelines and in the way they perform and are managed, which allows us to realise the diversity and the reach of PTA/CNPq.
The analysis carried out shows that initiatives pertaining to TAs, from the very beginning, have been facing major difficulties, either due to criticism coming from most of the scientific community or due to criticism philosophical or ideological in character, which have identified in the programme a competitor for the scarce funds available for science and technology, or, moreover, one more threat to the development model in force in the country.
The extent of the success of PTA/CNPq in the Units of the Federation has varied according to the political and financial commitment of each of the State governments and of their partners. This monograph proposes the higher management levels of CNPq some measures pertaining to the management of the programme, aimed at achieving better results. Along this line of thought, the monograph recommends that the programme be restructures and reshaped, as a programme of support to appropriate technologies geared to the principles of sustainable development that, deeming sustainability a phenomenon with multiple dimensions, may indeed incorporate interdisciplinary and plural characteristics, may interact with all domains of knowledge and, as recommended by the so-called Brazilian Agenda 21, may practise the ethics of sustainability as an universal tenet and the assertion of Brazilian identity, within its historical and regional particular features.

In this article, I apply an analysis of affects to results from my fieldwork of companies working in Algorithmic Trading and High-Frequency Trading (HFT), also known as “automated trading”. In order to delineate the affective specificity and singularity of the socio-technical ecology (affectif) in algorithmic finance, I use affect analysis to capture the multidimensional nature of human-machine relations. A historical comparison with previous affective relations in financial markets, such as attraction to the stock market ticker and syntheses with screens in manual trading, renders visible multiplied and intensified complex multi-frequential bonds – material, electrical, visual, acoustic, cognitive and bodily – between humans and machines. This is somewhat counterintuitive, because it means that automation in fact intensifies complex human-machine relations. Moreover, it is the intensity of these affective relations that underpins the coherence of HFT socio-technical systems. In order to account for the distinctiveness of affective relations in algorithmic finance I suggest the concept of affective symbiosis.
In the following section, I will give a short introduction to automated trading. This introduction will be of a rather general nature and focus selectively on those aspects that are relevant for the topic of this book chapter.

Introduction

          Education Information Network (EBA) was put into service in 2012 by Ministry of National Education Directorate General for Innovation and Education. Ministry of National Education explains the aim of this service as follows: “by using information technologies at school, home, etc, briefly everywhere if needed, to support effective material use and actualize the integration of technology to the education”. Education Information Network will be an alternative source for many lessons studied in primary, secondary and high schools by increasing e-contents and the scope of Fatih Project.

Significance and Purpose

          In this study, two different data collection tools (Interview-Document Review) were used in a single research paradigm, unlike the studies carried out so far. This allows comparison of the findings and better understanding of the findings. The study is also very important in that it is the first study with Social Studies and History teachers related to EBA and it is the first study to analyze course content in EBA (Education Information Network) related to Social Studies and History courses. This study aims to compare the content of EBA courses in social studies and history teachers in general and to provide a guide for the definition of the EBA platform in general and also to allow comparison and concretization of the developmental process of the contents of EBA. It creates the motive resources of the Thought Research. In this context, the purpose of our research is to get opinions and thoughts about the use and contents of EBA and Social Studies and History Teachers in the courses and to make an analysis of the contents of Social Studies and History course at eba.gov.tr.

Method

          Qualitative Research Design was used in the research. Qualitative research is a research strategy that often emphasizes words from digitizations in the collection and analysis of data. In other words, it is very meaningful in numbers (Bryman, 2001, Miles and Huberman, 2015). Qualitative research according to Glesne (2013) is "a type of research that focuses on qualities that are difficult to measure, such as words or observations, based on interpretation and resolution of qualifications". It has been decided that the most appropriate model to be used in data collection tools or in the data analysis process is Nitel Research to search for answers to our research questions. Two different qualitative data collection tools were used in the study. These are interviews and document reviews. Criteria sampling, which is a purposeful sampling method, was used in the study group of the study. The criterion used in our research is the teachers who are working in schools with Intelligent Board in their class within Fatih Project. The working group of the study creates 12 teachers who are working in secondary schools and high schools in certain branches (Social Studies & History) in 2015-2016 education and training year. Descriptive Analysis in analyzing the data obtained from the teacher's views, Content Analysis techniques were used in solving the social and historical course content at eba.gov.tr address.

Findings

          The books most frequently used by teachers of social studies and history are the textbook, internet resources and EBA. 10 of the 12 participants are actively using EBA. Teachers of Social Studies teach EBA in particular to T.C. They are used more frequently in the History of Revolution and Kemalism. Both social information and history teachers' most frequently used content in EBA are Animation / Videos and Presentations / Slides. The lack of content at the beginning of the shortcomings of the participants on the EBA platform and the narrative videos are boring. The vast majority of participants want more content on the EBA platform, content enrichment, updating and preparation of content in all units and topics. Participants expressed that EBA's greatest contribution to social studies and history education is visualization and interest in the lesson. When the total number of contents of 5th, 6th and 7th class social studies courses are examined in EBA Platform, 396 Animation, 98 Exercise, 96 Abstract, 64 Map, 30 Interactive Application, 10 Class Activity, 1 Game, 103 (880) 505) Teacher Special Subject Test and 6 (17) Teacher Special Study Question. The total number of these three class levels in the EBA platform is 953. 8th grade T.C. In the History of Revolution and Ataturkism, there are 1376 in total, 297 in the 9th grade history course and 433 in the 10th grade history course.

Result and Discussion

          As a result of the research, social studies and history teachers have reached the conclusion that they frequently use EBA, they especially benefit from the animations and presentations on the platform but they think that the contents should be enriched because they are still inadequate. Moreover, as a result of content analysis conducted at eba.gov.tr, it is observed that the content numbers in social information are mainly concentrated in geography and history subjects. As a result of the review, Social Studies and Grade 8 T.C. It has been observed that the contents of Revolution History and Ataturkism lesson have more regular, more visual, more useful and more content than the content of secondary history lesson. (2014), Alabay (2014) and Turan (2015), Türker and Güven (2016), Altın and Kalelioğlu (2015) and the results obtained in the studies carried out by Fidan, Erbasan and Kolcu 2015) and Tutar (2015) did not overlap with the results of our research.

Consultation is an important feature of research and, increasingly, researchers are required to work in partnership with stakeholders to increase the impact of their work. Our aim is to demonstrate what can be learned from the scholarship on, and practice of, member checking to facilitate productive knowledge exchange. Using dialogical analysis we explore three member check interactions from three different qualitative psychology projects focusing our analysis on difficult moments between researchers and participants conceptualised here as ‘sore spots’. We identify two major genres in these sequences: participant ambivalence and participant challenge. We then consider passages that allow us to explore a more theoretical understanding of these two genres in terms of the metaphor of portraits and mirrors. Overall, we outline how implicit epistemologies and theories of subjectivity (uncomplicated, blank, and complex) may be linked to the way in which stakeholders approach research. We also provide a map with regard to the theories within which member checks can be undertaken, associated research practices in terms of a range of researcher responses to stakeholder ambivalence and challenge, and implications of these moments for knowledge exchange for qualitative research but also for psychological science as a whole. We conclude that sore spots in knowledge exchange process can be productive opportunities of transformational validity.

Keywords: member check; knowledge exchange; research impact; dialogical analysis; participant validation

This study, presenting a history of the measurement of light intensity from its
first hesitant emergence to its gradual definition as a scientific subject, explores two
major themes. The first concerns the adoption by the evolving physics and
engineering communities of quantitative measures of light intensity around the turn of
the twentieth century. The mathematisation of light measurement was a contentious
process that hinged on finding an acceptable relationship between the mutable
response of the human eye and the more easily stabilised, but less encompassing,
techniques of physical measurement.
A second theme is the exploration of light measurement as an example of
‘peripheral science’. Among the characteristics of such a science, I identify the lack
of a coherent research tradition and the persistent partitioning of the subject between
disparate groups of practitioners. Light measurement straddled the conventional
categories of ‘science’ and ‘technology’, and was influenced by such distinct factors
as utilitarian requirements, technological innovation, human perception and
bureaucratisation. Peripheral fields such as this, which may be typical of much of
modern science and technology, have hitherto received little attention from historians.
These themes are pursued with reference to the social and technological
factors which were combined inextricably in the development of the subject. The
intensity of light gained only sporadic attention until the late nineteenth century.
Measured for the utilitarian needs of the gas lighting industry from the second half of
the century, light intensity was appropriated by members of the nascent electric
lighting industry, too, in their search for a standard of illumination. By the turn of the
century the ‘illuminating engineering movement’ was becoming an organised, if
eclectic, community which promoted research into and standards for the measurement of light intensity.
The twentieth-century development of the subject was moulded by
organisation and institutionalisation. Between 1900 and 1920, the new national and
industrial laboratories in Britain, America and Germany were crucial in stabilising the
subject. In the inter-war period, committees and international commissions sought to
standardise light measurement and to promote research. Such government- and
industry-supported delegations, rather than academic institutions, were primarily
responsible for the ‘construction’ of the subject. Practitioners increasingly came to
interpret the three topics of photometry (visible light measurement), colorimetry (the
measurement of perceived colour) and radiometry (the measurement of invisible radiations) as aspects of a broader study, and enthusiastically applied them to industrial and scientific problems.
From the 1920s, the long-established visual methods of observation were
increasingly replaced by physical means of light measurement, a process initially
contingent on scientific fashion more than demonstrated superiority. New
photoelectric techniques for measuring light intensity engendered new commercial
instruments, a trend which accelerated in the following decade when photometric
measurement was applied with limited success to a range of industrial problems.
Seeds sowed in the 1920s – namely commercialisation and industrial application, the
transition from visual to ‘physical’ methods, and the search for fundamental
limitations in light measurement – gave the subject substantially the form it was to
retain over the next half-century.

Most of the time, religion viewed as a motive for conflict and has emerged as a key component in many current and past conflicts. However, religion does not always drive violence; it is also an integral factor in the peace building and reconciliation process. So, this paper assessed the peace building contribution role of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), following the post-2007 election violence in Kenya. The National Council of Churches of Kenya took instant humanitarian and peace building roles during the 2007 election violence. There was the provision of psychosocial support to address issues of trauma occasioned by loss of lives and infliction of emotional and physical harm. In addition, it also conducted the provision of food and non food items. Moreover, capacity building workshops for church leaders were held to build their capacity in mediation and peace building skills. Furthermore, In addition, ecumenical joint services were held incorporating the Christians, the Muslims and the Hindus. Finally, the Council was involved in influencing the passage of pieces of legislation such as the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Act , National Cohesion and Integration Act, The Constitutional Review Act of 2008, and the Witness Protection Act in the Kenyan Parliament. In general, The paper deals with issues such as the general background of the role of religion in Africa as both source of conflict and peace building; the cause and impacts of 2007 election violence in Kenya; the background and the role of religious institution (National Council of Churches of Kenya) in the post 2007 election violence in Kenya; and my conclusion is included at last. In short, I tried to assess to what extent religious institutions should play a role in managing conflict based on religious connections in Africa by taking the case study of Kenya.

How does science evolve? This study confronts this problem here by showing different models of scientific development from sociology, philosophy and history of science. Firstly, this paper clarifies the concept of science and scientific research. Secondly, the study proposes different theories that can explain how science and its scientific disciplines develop over the course of time. Thirdly, some relevant laws about the production and evolution of science and scientific fields are presented. Overall, then, this study clarifies, as far as possible, some approaches and characteristics of the evolutionary dynamics of science that can lay a foundation for the development of comprehensive properties to explain the advancement of science and technology in society.

This introductory chapter to the technology section provides an overview of complex relationships between technologies and European integrations. First, it highlights that in European integration literature the term ‘technology’ is often used in multiple ways typically without explicit reflection on its meaning. While the term technology is frequently used in instrumental ways, this chapter emphasizes political, social, and cultural aspects of technology. Second, the chapter outlines three modes of European integration relevant for technology: first, ‘hidden integration’ of technology as infrastructure; second, integration outside the treaty framework, and, third, integration of technology policy within the EU. Finally, the chapter concludes with some questions for future research on mutual shaping of technologies and European integrations.