{"title":"Epistemological Luddism","authors":"A. Nordmann","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.861","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.861","url":null,"abstract":"In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Langdon Winner was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Sharon Traweek. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This response to Winner’s Bernal lecture traces the roots of his epistemological luddism to 20th century modernism, politically as well as aesthetically.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46329020","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":"Left Button Picture, Right Button Bomb: Nature, Warfare and Technology in a Southern African Border Region","authors":"J. Merron, Luregn Lenggenhager","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.653","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.653","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we argue that the relationship between nature conservation and warfare was and continues to be actualized through socio-technical relationships and shared infrastructures. We historicize “green militari zation”—defined as the use of military techniques, technologies and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation (Lunstrum 2014)—showing that the partnership between military and nature conservation in Southern Africa has a long and violent history. Our paper accounts for the entanglements of war and nature through a shared technological infrastructure used in north-eastern Namibia during the Namibian War of Liberation (1966–1989). In particular, we focus on the Mirage IIIR2Z, an aerial reconnaissance and ground-attack supersonic jet which provided both the South African Defence Force and the civil administration’s nature conservationists with aerial photography and remote sensing data. The spatial information produced jointly by the military and the civil nature conservation department was used to produce strategic maps, but also to fight invasive plants and protect wildlife. Our reading of green militarization against this background sheds light on the long-lasting connections between warfare, conservation and ecology along Southern African border regions and contributes to a novel understanding of the contemporary “war on poachers” through a study of the techno-scientific networks that made it possible. Since there is nothing inevitable about the way technologies emerge or change over time (Bijker and Law 1992), this paper develops an empirically grounded and sustained analysis of technological change in the domain of green militarization through three interlinked concepts: “multiple” (Law 2002), “shifting down” (Latour 1994; 1999), and “firming up” (Bijker and Law 1992).","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47694900","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":"Hormonal Health: Period Tracking Apps, Wellness, and Self-Management in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism.","authors":"Andrea Ford, Giulia De Togni, Livia Miller","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.655","DOIUrl":"10.17351/ests2021.655","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Period tracking is an increasingly widespread practice, and its emphasis is changing from monitoring fertility to encompassing a more broad-based picture of users' health. Delving into the data of one's menstrual cycle, and the hormones that are presumed to be intimately linked with it, is a practice that is reshaping ideas about health and wellness, while also shaping subjects and subjectivities that succeed under conditions of surveillance capitalism. Through close examination of six extended interviews, this article elaborates a version of period tracking that sidesteps fertility and, in doing so, participates in the \"queering\" of menstrual technologies. Apps can facilitate the integration of institutional medical expertise and quotidian embodied experience within a broader approach to the self as a management project. We introduce the concept of \"hormonal health\" to describe a way of caring for, and knowing about, bodies, one that weaves together mental and physical health, correlates subjective and objective information, and calls into question the boundary between illness and wellness. For those we spoke with, menstrual cycles are understood to affect selfhood across any simplistic body-mind division or reproductive imperative, engendering complex techniques of self-management, including monitoring, hypothesizing, intervening in medical appointments, adjusting schedules, and interpreting social interactions. Such techniques empower their proponents, but not within conditions of their choosing. In addition to problems with data privacy and profit, these techniques perpetuate individualized solutions and the internalization of pressures in a gender-stratified, neoliberal context, facilitating success within flawed structures.</p>","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/de/4e/EMS174194.PMC7614476.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9438361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Data Durabilities: Towards Conceptualizations of Scientific Long-Term Data Storage","authors":"E. Sørensen, Laura Kocksch","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.777","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.777","url":null,"abstract":"With the increased requirement for open data and data reuse in the sciences the call for long-term data storage becomes stronger. However, long-term data storage is insufficiently theorized and often considered as simply short-term data that are stored longer. Interviews with scientists at a German university show that data are not in themselves durable; they are made durable. While Science & Technology Studies data research has emphasized the relational character of data, always embedded in local contexts and infrastructures, we propose to add the temporal dimension of data durability to this understanding. We replace notions of long-term and short-term stored data with notions of publication data and project data, because the latter terms point to the practices through which data durability is made in a variety of ways, contingent on the kind of research phases in which the data are embedded, and on their infrastructures and practices. With the notion of data durability devices we inquire into technologies and tools, techniques and skills as well as organizational arrangements, cultural norms and relations that contribute to making data durable. We define scientific data as durable as long as they can operate in a socio-technical apparatus and uphold their capacity to make claims about the world. The scientists’ data practices revealed what we term media data durability devices and scientific data durability devices. The former were media materiality, the care for this materiality, and the compatibility between data and the data apparatus, which all contributed to shaping data durability. Scientific data durability devices, on the other hand included concealment and competition, through which data durability was prolonged, but also distributed unevenly among researchers. With these proposed concepts we hope to initiate discussions on the making of long-term data storage, just as we believe the concepts to be helpful for making realistic and relevant decisions about what data to store and for how long.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48426020","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":"Can Renewable Energy Artifacts have a Global Politics? Towards a Translocal Imaginary of Energy Democracy","authors":"S. Raman","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.967","url":null,"abstract":"In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Langdon Winner was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Sharon Traweek. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This response to Winner’s Bernal lecture considers how visions of energy democracy speak back to decarbonisation imperatives grounded in industrial-scale renewable energy technologies, and asks if these arguments might be further trans-nationalised.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46593554","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}
Nishtha Bharti, C. O’Donovan, M. Smallman, James Wilson
{"title":"Public Trust, Deliberative Engagement and Health Data Projects: Beyond Legal Provisions ","authors":"Nishtha Bharti, C. O’Donovan, M. Smallman, James Wilson","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.1197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.1197","url":null,"abstract":"In England, a new scheme for collating and sharing General Practitioners’ data has faced resistance from various quarters and has been deferred twice. While insufficient communication and ambiguous safeguards explain the widespread dissatisfaction expressed by the public and experts, we argue how dwindling public trust can be the most damaging variable in this picture - with implications not only for this scheme, but for any future project that aims to mobilise health data for medical research and innovation. We also highlight the indispensability of deliberative public engagement on the values being prioritised in health data initiatives, the significance of securing social license in addition to legal assurances, and the lessons in it of global pertinence. ","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47294910","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":"Langdon Winner’s Theory of Technological Politics: Rethinking Science and Technology for Future Society","authors":"E. Schraube","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.811","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.811","url":null,"abstract":"In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Langdon Winner was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Sharon Traweek. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This response to Winner’s Bernal lecture reflects on his theory of technological politics, its implications for the psychology of technology as well as its relevance for rethinking science and technology for future society.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48094184","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":"Representing Race in Graphs: W.E.B. Du Bois, Corporate Bureaucrats, and Visualization Strategies for Change","authors":"L. Arciniega","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.565","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I draw together W. E. B. Du Bois and corporate bureaucrats to compare the graphical representation of race across three distinct racial epochs: the Progressive, Civil Rights, and post-1980s neoliberal era. I illustrate how, through visual and rhetorical strategies, corporate bureaucrats extend a Du Boisian legacy in constructing popular knowledge of race and racism. I show how they do this by making whiteness visible through data visualizations and rhetorically bundling them to liberal American values of equal opportunity. In examining them as epistemic and semiotic objects, I argue that graphical representations of race compel the enactment of meaningful strategies seen to challenge racial inequalities in the workplace. Yet, insofar as these are employed to equate racism with the absence of equal opportunity in capitalist firms, I argue, they also mask whiteness and reproduce systemic racism. The graphical representation of race, in effect, reveals how the practices of knowledge production and processes of signification are entangled in everyday corporate bureaucracies. Thus, I suggest that we need to reject analytical binaries that pose a bounded distinction between “business” and “social justice” to extend research into the cultural production and productive enactment of racial materiality.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47574362","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 Democratic Shaping of Technology: Its Rise, Fall and Possible Rebirth","authors":"L. Winner","doi":"10.17351/ests2021.825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.825","url":null,"abstract":"In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Langdon Winner was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Sharon Traweek. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This essay comprises Winner’s acceptance speech and is followed by a short postscript written in 2021. The postscript captures a brief reflection on the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic and the US election results which shifted the US to a Biden administration. \u0000In their award statement, the Bernal Prize committee noted: “Winner’s most cited article “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” of 1980 has inspired a wide spectrum of critique and analysis of technological arrangements as, among other things, political orderings of our society. Since then, his career has focused on the political dimensions of science and technology, technology policy and the politics of technology. Winner has addressed key intellectual questions of classical and modern political theory in order to debate how order, power, freedom, authority and justice had resonance within technological devices. More specifically, he has brought a new dimension into the field by addressing how these classic questions in political theory are often deeply embedded in technical and material frameworks. His work emphasizes that “because technological innovation is inextricably linked to processes of social reconstruction, any society that hopes to control its own structural evolution must confront each significant set of technological possibilities with scrupulous care.”","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2021-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41860104","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":"Editorial Note of Farewell and Gratitude to ESTS Reviewers","authors":"D. Kleinman, K. Vann","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.849","url":null,"abstract":"In response to the desire of the governing council of the Society for Social Studies of Science to have an online open access Society journal, we were asked to build Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. We did so and launched the journal in 2015. Today, in December 2020, we write to say farewell, and to thank the many reviewers who selflessly gave their time, energy, and expertise to support the journal and the efforts of other authors. On the eve of our departure, we delight in the strength of ESTS and the quality of papers that have been published over the six annual volumes realized since 2015. And in this moment in history, when so many incentives exist for scholars to confine their energy to self-serving activities and show indifference to the quality of literature produced, the good will and actions of the reviewers who have enabled the development and growth of ESTS are what we deeply appreciate. To those ESTS reviewers who are shown below, Thank You. And to those of you who read this, when you see those listed you should know, “There is someone who demonstrated a commitment to quality STS scholarship and to the field.”","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43242269","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}