{"title":"Citizen science in Latin America and the Global South, Part 1","authors":"Julieta Piña-Romero, Luis Reyes-Galindo, L. Novoa","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2145040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2145040","url":null,"abstract":"“Citizen science” has become, in recent years, an increasingly visible placeholder for various forms of public participation in science – even while the dominant definition of citizen science by scientists themselves is, still, the outsourcing of “genuine” scientific work to non-scientists (Fraisl et al. 2022; Rosas et al. 2022). Indeed, even metastudies reflecting upon the diversity of citizen science initiatives, when led by traditional scientific viewpoints, focus strongly on the “added value” that citizen involvement brings to “science” and reduced definitions of society (Vohland et al. 2021). In contrast, social studies of citizen science have placed significant emphasis on the work of non-scientists working outside – or even against – the interests of institutional science. Such a perspective, in which benefits to science may or may not be the end purpose of citizen science, comprises an array of more politically heterogenous activities, which are “more or less spontaneous, organized and structured, whereby nonexperts become involved, and provide their own input to agenda setting, decision-making, policy forming, and knowledge production processes regarding science” (Bucchi and Neresini 2008, 449). If citizen science is intended to broaden engagement in both the dominant science, but potentially also in counter-narrative and dissenting actions (Moore and Strasser 2022), it faces an ongoing process of redefining or even disassembling the boundaries between what is science and what is not, and between those who are legitimized to do science and those who are not (Eitzel et al. 2017). This is particularly important given how critical analysts of citizen science have pointed out that, while scientist-led citizen science can indeed be a successful form of “distributed cognition” within which non-scientists can still display bounded friction (Kasperowski and Hillman 2018), at another extreme, the term can and has been appropriated to carry out “citizen washing” of industrial propaganda and lobbying (Blacker, Kimura, and Kinchy 2021). Despite the generality of the term, there is nonetheless common ground across all citizen science from an analyst’s perspective. Citizen science, after all, always takes place in specific geopolitical, technical, and epistemic contexts that deeply shape and turn it. It also involves, at least in every paradigmatic case, one of two types of activities: those associated with the collection, classification, and/or analysis of data; or those","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83101980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What roles do civil society organizations play in monitoring and reviewing the Sustainable Development Goals? An exploration of cases from Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina","authors":"Cristina Espinosa, G. Rangel","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2143669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2143669","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The UN 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) constitute an international roadmap to end poverty, revert environmental degradation, and fight socio-economic inequalities. Monitoring and reviewing (M&R) processes can expose countries’ success or failure in achieving the SDGs. However, SDG M&R is a daunting task. Current mechanisms mainly rely on national statistics that lack the necessary spatial and temporal granularity. Building on policy and academic discussions about the potential of citizen science data to fill data gaps in compilations for the SDG framework, we study projects implemented by civil society organizations (CSOs) in Ecuador, Colombia, and Argentina. Through a theory-sensitive empirical analysis, we systematize five main roles through which CSOs engage in SDG M&R. These roles are (1) participation promoter, (2) information provider, (3) data innovator, (4) watchdog, and (5) advocacy. These roles encompass key activities such as making SDG-relevant data available to citizens, enhancing data literacy, promoting open data from governmental institutions to enhance transparency and accountability, producing counter-narratives, and encouraging collaboration for data collection. Despite differences in their political qualities and politicizing effects, all five roles contribute to the enabling environment for collective action that is needed in governance for the SDGs.","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91152766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Factualize and commensurate human rights violations and organized violence","authors":"O. Bernasconi, P. Díaz","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2128595","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2128595","url":null,"abstract":"ing behind the numbers the complexity of these perpetrations. 2. Truth accounts: truth commission and transitional justice processes Within the field of human rights studies, as transitions from authoritarian, totalitarian, and/or racist regimes (in the case of South Africa) to – at least procedurally – democratic regimes took place in Latin America and Eastern Europe, expert practices and theories on what has been called transitional justice were developed. While these studies did not make explicit use of heuristic tools from the STS field or its antecedents, as we shall see below, some critical research has devoted analysis to the procedures by which truth commissions have established their truth accounts. In this sense, these analyses contribute to a fruitful dialogue between human rights perspectives and STS studies, accounting for the social processes through which truth accounts about past crimes are constituted, and showing the mechanisms through which the objectivity of violence is constructed, without simply considering it self-evident or defining it normatively, according to moral and/or legal principles. The practices and theories of transitional justice consist of producing a truth account of political crimes, outside the judicial arena, as a political response to what is called the “right to truth” of the victims (Mendez 2006). Transitional justice refers to a conception of justice based primarily on the reparation of victims and not criminalizing those responsible for human rights violations, other than in exceptional cases. In this way, transitional justice aims to reconcile the interests of former officials of authoritarian/totalitarian/racists regimes with the demands for justice of the victims, their families, and human rights organizations in order to rebuild the nation-state and legitimize institutions. Truth and reconciliation commissions are themost popular device of this type of restorative justice (Lefranc 2002). During the last decades, a plethora of studies on truth commissions has been published. Schematically, we can identify two bodies of research. First, those that describe the public work of commissions and their concordance, or not, with the self-declared missions of these devices, without delving into the performative practices that these infrastructural devices perform (Hayner 1994, 2001; Teitel 2000, 2003). Most of these studies endorse the therapeutic objective that the political discourse of the democratizing elites ascribes to these commissions and their reports, namely, to heal the nation and thus achieve reconciliation. The second group of studies, mostly based on the analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Buur 2001; Wilson 2001) examined the political effects 4 O. BERNASCONI AND P. DÍAZ","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86308279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Juan Manuel Vargas-Canales, J. J. Brambila-Paz, Verónica Pérez-Cerecedo, M. M. Rojas-Rojas, María del Carmen López-Reyna, José Miguel Omaña-Silvestre
{"title":"Trends in science, technology, and innovation in the agri-food sector","authors":"Juan Manuel Vargas-Canales, J. J. Brambila-Paz, Verónica Pérez-Cerecedo, M. M. Rojas-Rojas, María del Carmen López-Reyna, José Miguel Omaña-Silvestre","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2115829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2115829","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The aim of this research was to map the state of the art on studies of new technologies in the agri-food sector through a systematic literature review in order to explore world trends. The systematic review method consisted of obtaining information from the Scopus database, with the search strategy limited by subject. Thiry-four keywords related to the topic were used and the search was limited only to title of scientific articles. For the coding and extraction of data and results, the VOSviewer software was used to generate, group and visualize networks and identify scientific fields and trends. In recent years there has been significant growth in the development of new technologies in the agri-food sector, concentrated in a few countries, institutions and disciplines. The results allow to identify changes in scientific paradigms and consolidate different scientific fields. It is possible to perceive that the fields of robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, among others, are gaining interest, and that genomics, biotechnology, and genetic improvement are losing dynamism. In addition, there is little research related to economic and social analysis and their relationship to the environment.","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77550498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Social design, whitening and epistemicide: a Mexican case","authors":"Paloma Sánchez, M. E. Sánchez","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2071097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2071097","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the colonial viewpoint that underlies Design, Social Design and their methodology, Design Thinking. We study this theoretical scaffolding and its application in eight projects carried out by designers in the city of Puebla, Mexico, with Indigenous Peoples from different communities in the country. We explore the approach to Social Design and Design Thinking from their historical configuration in articulation with empirical information obtained through interviews with professors of Social Design, the designers of the 8 projects, and with a design studio. Design has been conceived as a neutral discipline although it presents its social dimension as the answer to various problems facing society. This article argues that design has a modern-colonial core that permeates its sub-disciplines, orienting them towards the cultural whitening of populations. The findings show that when implemented, Social Design becomes a practice of cordial racism and a form of epistemicide that give continuity to the attempts to make invisible, eradicate or appropriate the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples. The findings also show that the methodology used by Social Design, Design Thinking, has a fundamental role in contributing and possibly masking this epistemicide.","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79832459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Science and religion in India: beyond disenchantment","authors":"R. Anderson","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2141013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2141013","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1917 lecture on Science as a Vocation at the University of Munich, sociologist Max Weber observed that “the fate of our age” is that “the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life.” And why is that the particular fate of our age, asked Weber, just before the end of the mass killing of WWOne? His answer was that it is due to his/our age’s “characteristic rationalization and intellectualization,” and “above all [to the] disenchantment of the world.” Since its publication in 1918, Weber’s interpretation has been applied strongly to explain the presumed detachment of scientific communities and individual scientists from spiritual and/or religious life, if not hostility to religion. Even occasional anti-theist movements among scientists have been explained by using Weber’s reasoning. In my case, as a young sociologist and anthropologist among scientists in the 1960s, I inhaled the Weberian premise, expecting to see few signs of the “spirited” or “enchanted” world among people in the labs which I was going to study in Chicago and India. By my mid-20s, I was accustomed to expect a disenchanted world. In 2011–2012, Renny Thomas walked into a nuclear spectroscopy lab in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in order to see whether he would be accepted sufficiently to observe the life of the lab and gradually engage the scientists in focused interviews. His timing was perfect. Bangalore was reaching its zenith for a world-wide reputation in high-tech research and development, and with its sublime climate and cosmopolitan culture, it was the place that scientists wanted to live in. He did his fieldwork inside a prestigious 110-year-old research-oriented Institute there. At that time, comparable cities in Latin America would have been Bariloche, Guadalajara, Sao Paulo, not to deny the status of megacities like Mexico City and Buenos Aires. But Bangalore was not (by Indian standards) a megacity. The ultimate leader of this lab had a nickname before Thomas arrived, and he was known in the Group as “Boss.” Fortunately, Boss was intrigued by Thomas’s focus on the religiosity of the scientists in his group and enabled him to become incorporated as a member. Thomas became “a lab member” and thus participated in the required Saturday morning group meetings which were about both ideas and plans for further work. He was allowed to reside and eat in an adjacent hostel for doctoral students. This group, doing work in Ultrafast Raman Loss Spectroscopy, was one of the largest in the Institute. Suspicious of Thomas at first, most of the 35 members of this group (post-docs, doctoral students, technicians, etc.) eventually accepted him and, as in all successful cases of ethnography, treated him as part of the furniture, part of the background. They even welcomed his return in 2016 for some follow-up interviews. Thomas found a high percentage of South Indian Brahmins and South Indian Christians in this well-known lab. There is/was high representation of both o","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75846261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"South-to-South dialogues between Brazilian and Kenyan artivists: decolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives","authors":"A. Medrado, I. Rega, Monique Paulla","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2126245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2126245","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, we analyze experiences in which Brazilian and Kenyan artivists (artists who are activists) used animation to challenge colonial hierarchies that devalue Global Southern knowledges, histories, and stories. We draw from ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, and artivists’ experiences in two animation workshops: (a) Portrait of Marielle, produced with Kenyan artivists in Nairobi; (b) Homage to Wangarĩ Maathai, produced with Brazilian artivists in Salvador. We ask: how can artivist creative practices be used as tools for global movement building, contesting the colonial legacy of fragmented relationships between Global South peoples? We evoke decolonial and standpoint intersectional feminist perspectives to propose an understanding of artivism that considers the specificities of Global South contexts, connecting it to two axes: (a) establishing dialogical spaces and (b) mobilizing memories and histories. Our understanding of South-to-South artivist dialogues results from the ways in which notions of “pluriversality,” “incompleteness” and “humility,” which stem from Latin American and African scholarship are intertwined. When marginalized groups exchange “situated knowledges” and express themselves through artivism from “intersectional standpoints” or “lugares de fala,” this can have a binding nature, creating transformative connections between Global South peoples.","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91367320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a Terrestrial Internet: re-imagining digital networks from the ground up","authors":"Marcela Suárez Estrada, Sebastián Lehuedé","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2139913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2139913","url":null,"abstract":"The expansion of digital infrastructure is having material and concrete impacts on society and the environment. This phenomenon is rendering obsolete binary distinctions between the “physical” and the “virtual” worlds. Giving a step further in this discussion, the articles comprising this Cluster trace the emergence of an imaginary that approaches territory as an actor actively shaping the development and governance of the internet. What we call the Terrestrial Internet is emerging from Indigenous, Afrodescendant, feminist and worker groups in Abya Yala (Latin America) envisioning alternative imaginaries as digital infrastructures expand in their contexts. In dialogue with science and technology studies (STS) and Latin American critical thought, we argue that this imaginary conceives of the internet as an earthly development whose material expansion is spurring novel human and non-human alliances and frictions, as well as colonial forms of territorial occupation. The articles that make up the Cluster were invited to respond key questions in times of terricide: What are the power dynamics of the disputed spaces that support the internet? What are the effects of such dynamics on territories and their various ways of life in Abya Yala? What imaginaries are put in motion as a response? The emergence of the internet was accompanied by claims on its alleged “cyber” or “virtual” character, as if it would be a realm different from the “physical” world. However, phenomena such as the increasing extraction of lithium to build so-called “green” technologies (Peña 2020) and disputes over the vast volumes of water required to cool off data centers (Hogan 2015; Hu 2015) are rendering such deterritorialized imaginaries obsolete. The concrete and material character of the aforementioned phenomena were overlooked in initial accounts of the impact of the internet, but are becoming now increasingly relevant for understanding the range of inequalities and politics associated with the development and expansion of the so-called network of networks. Looking at the materialization of these trends in Abya Yala, this Cluster develops the Terrestrial Internet imaginary by drawing on a series of articles chronicling varied","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82868671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The EXPLORA model of citizen science at schools: design and implementation in the intercultural south of Chile","authors":"Camilo Gouet Hiriart, Daniela Salazar Rodríguez, Wladimir Riquelme Maulén, Alejandra Rojo Almarza, Daniel Opazo Bunster","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2117492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2117492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Citizen science has grown as a promising way to promote scientific education and democracy. However, the realization of these goals has been hampered as most programs in educational and other settings have used top-down approaches (where scientists direct the whole research path). Here we present a school bottom-up initiative, where students’ interests are raised and collaborative projects are developed in academies formed by students, teachers and scientists. Projects addressing local territorial identities are especially motivated by the program. In this work, we explored: (i) diversity of interests, (ii) learning outcomes, and (iii) the scientific quality of the projects. In two years of implementation in the intercultural south of Chile, we have worked with 52 academies, in projects covering a variety of research topics, including some that seek to rescue Mapuche’s traditional knowledge. We have observed the promotion of scientific and socioemotional skills in students, and projects have been judged of high quality by independent panels of experts. These results support the feasibility of citizen science to promote learning and to foster links between school and scientific institutions towards a more democratic scientific development.","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84659390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"South Atlantic science and technology studies: histories and practices","authors":"B. Mendoza, S. Harding","doi":"10.1080/25729861.2022.2128593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2022.2128593","url":null,"abstract":"The history of the peoples of African origin in (so-called) Latin America and the Caribbean is largely unknown in the United States. This is unfortunate. Africans or people of African descent today represent 33% of the population in the region. 1 What accounts for this invisibility?","PeriodicalId":36898,"journal":{"name":"Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85355914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}