Engaging Science Technology and Society最新文献

{"title":"Breathing Fire into Landscapes that Burn: Wildfire Management in a Time of Alterlife","authors":"A. Zahara","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.429","url":null,"abstract":"Across the globe, settler nation-states are being forced to contend with the large-scale ecological and social disruptions caused by settler colonialism. Wildfires are a charismatic example of this: when anthropogenic climate change combines with colonial forest management practices, wildfires act in ever changing ways with often violent and uneven impacts to human and nonhuman life. In a context of environmental change, managers, fire ecologists, and politicians alike are increasingly looking to reintroduce fire as a way of restoring “natural” forest landscapes while reducing fire suppression costs. In this paper, I examine one such policy of fire re-integration, in what is currently the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, the homelands of more than 50,000 Indigenous people (Cree, Dakota, Dene, Metis) who live in the province’s Boreal Forest region. In 2004, the Province implemented a controversial policy that locals colloquially refer to as “Let-it-Burn,” where fires are allowed to burn until they encroach upon something designated of “value” (typically human life, community structures, public infrastructure, and commercial timber). While wildfire managers, scientists, and politicians alike consistently advocate for policies of fire-reintegration as ecologically-sound and financially responsible ways forward with fire management, many locals have argued that “Let-it-Burn” is a direct affront to Indigenous sovereignty, destroying contemporary forest landscapes and rebuilding them through state-sanctioned settler values. Breathing fire back into landscapes that burn is a peculiar solution that at once acknowledges and erases the effects of fire’s removal through policies of restoration that risk ignoring the ongoingness of life in forested areas. Through interviews and archival and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper traces the history of the province’s “Let-it-Burn” policy, asking the question, “how to burn well in compromised lands?”  As a way forward with fire reintegration (or not), I highlight the necessity of Indigenous partnership, leadership, and direction within fire management practices on Indigenous territory, which may include fire suppression. This paper adds to STS scholarship on ecological ruination and alterlife, arguing that wildfire management practices are likely to cause harm so long as the effects of settler colonialism are placed in the past and Indigenous rebuilding is erased.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"555-585"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46386799","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":"Scrapping the Workshop of the World: Civic Infrastructuring and the Politics of Late Industrial Governance","authors":"Alison Kenner","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.391","url":null,"abstract":"To understand harm in breathing spaces requires analysis of the ways in which structural violence is built into technologies of environmental governance; a script that cannot recognize the dynamic relationships between bodies, atmospheres, and the industrial practices that condition both. In this paper, I show how community members in a small, Philadelphia neighborhood came to understand that toxic air is made permissible through late industrial political techniques. One of these techniques is a civic engagement platform, designed to more efficiently and transparently connect the public with municipal agencies, and recommended to community members as a means to address atmospheric hazards. Despite initial public optimism, the City’s civic engagement platform failed to address environmental hazards. Rather than abandon the platform, however, community members appropriated the City’s digital infrastructure to run an environmental reporting project. Drawing on the work of STS scholars, I describe the community’s work as civic infrastructuring, a sociotechnical process that utilized public infrastructure to better understand government failure and build community capacity to engage the administration, even if on late industrial terms.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"514-533"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48339134","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":"Zero Waste––Zero Justice?","authors":"Ruth Müller, Sarah Schönbauer","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.649","url":null,"abstract":"Plastic is slowly covering the earth, accumulating in oceans, soil, air, and human and non-human bodies. In the face of this catastrophe, zero waste activists call upon us for action, detailing, how we, too, can change our lifestyle to eliminate plastic waste and save the planet. Yet, who it is that is called upon, who speaks, and whose voices and lived realities might be ignored? In this contribution, we explore the social politics of the zero waste movement. This leads us to ponder: might popular environmental movements that relegate social justice to the back seat ultimately do more harm than good?","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"416-420"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-11-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47542019","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":"A Five-Year Engagement","authors":"Abby Kinchy, S. Parthasarathy, J. Delborne","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.749","url":null,"abstract":"In this editorial essay, Abby Kinchy, Shobita Parthasarathy, and Jason Delborne look back at the editorial and publishing practices of the first five years of the journal  Engaging Science, Technology, and Society  (ESTS), the open access journal of  The Society for Social Studies of Science  (4S). As three members of the inaugural  ESTS  Editorial Board, Kinchy, Parthasarathy, and Delborne reflect on what they value in academic practice, including publishing, and consider some of the highlights and accomplishments of  ESTS ’s first five years (2015-2020).","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"411-415"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46421091","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 I Learnt About How I Learnt About Behavioral Economists","authors":"Zara Thokozani Kamwendo","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.343","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is a discussion of the role of the experimental methods and the dissemination practices of behavioral economists in capturing public imagination. The paper is framed by auto biographical accounts of two episodes in my own exploration of behavioral economics as a topic of study: participating in a MOOC on the basics of behavioral economics and sharing my work in progress to a group of staff and students in Singapore. Drawing on Shapin and Shaffer’s notion of “virtual witnesses” (Shapin and Shaffer 1985) I develop the argument that a consequence of the dissemination practices of the Heuristics and Biases Program is the creation of both “virtual subjects” and “virtual experimenters.” I then give an account of Thaler’s use of rationality and Kuhnian paradigm shifts as a rhetorical device to persuade mainstream economists and policy makers of the value of behavioral economics and to establish the narrative of behavioral economics as critics of neo-classical economics. I argue that the reflexive approach adds to accounts of the success of behavioral economics as a story of persuasive techniques of behavioral economists embedded in their practices of experimentation and dissemination.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"391-410"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47848138","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":"STS, Post-truth, and the Rediscovery of Bullshit","authors":"B. Holman","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.265","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.265","url":null,"abstract":"Post-truth politics has led to a number of prominent reflections on the extent to which the basic tenets of STS (social construction, the symmetry thesis, etc.) must be amended (Briggle 2016; Latour 2004; Sismondo 2017a).  Alternatively, others have argued that the basic principles of STS should be maintained and the similarities of STS with post-truth should be embraced (Fuller 2016b; Woolgar 2017).  After first critiquing other scholars read on post-truth politics, I argue that one of the central drawbacks of STS is the absence of epistemic grounds to identify people who are plainly bullshitters (Frankfurt 1986).  I contend that the lesson that post-truth politics has to offer STS is that a minimal standard of an epistemological system is that it must have the intellectual resources to endorse the claim “Trump is full of shit.”  Yet it is not clear how one could go about reconciling central STS tenets with the clear and present need to oppose dangerous trends in contemporary politics. Despite arguing that STS should change, I contend that it should not do so at the expense of what is distinctive and valuable about STS.  After considering Steve Woolgar’s (2017) list of the strengths of STS scholarship I propose that with slight modification they can be preserved. As an example of an epistemology which does so, I introduce Helen Longino's critical contextual empiricism and then use it to analyze a case study of the recent FDA approval of flibanserin for hypoactive sexual desire disorder. I conclude by arguing that social epistemology, as developed in philosophy of science, is reconcilable with opposing post-truth politics and retains many of the primary virtues of STS.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"370-390"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48451925","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":"Producing the “Highway to Nowhere”: Social Understandings of Space in Baltimore, 1944-1974","authors":"Amanda K. Phillips de Lucas","doi":"10.17351/ESTS2020.327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ESTS2020.327","url":null,"abstract":"The “highway to nowhere” is a 1.32 mile fragment of an arterial expressway located in Baltimore, Maryland. This segment was designed to contribute to a proposed limited access highway system that was never constructed after years of activism, debate, and lawsuits. This article examines the history of the construction of this highway segment to suggest that conflicts over the design, sitting, and construction of infrastructure are fundamentally struggles over the definition and production of space. This analysis utilizes Henri Lefebvre’s triad of spatial production as an analytical framework to identify distinct spatial forms that surface during the process of infrastructure building. Utilizing this analytical framework may enrich the STS-based infrastructure inquiries by bringing to the surface the multiple forms of spatial production that structure system-building activities. In conclusion, I suggest that utilizing Lefebvre’s triad within studies of infrastructure surfaces important, and potentially transformative, local claims to space. Such claims are of renewed importance as cities across the US confront the segregationist histories of the built environment.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"351-369"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46973932","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":"Anachronistic Progress? User Notions of Lie Detection in the Juridical Field","authors":"Bettina Paul, Larissa Fischer, Torsten H. Voigt","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.433","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, progress in the field of lie detection has been linked to technological advances from classic polygraphs to neuroscientific brain imaging. In our empirical investigation, however, we found different notions of progress that do not comply with the popular understanding of progress as technological innovation. We follow the users of lie detection procedures in Germany in order to discern how they embrace seemingly old technologies and frame them in terms of novelty and improvement. We identify two notions of progress: one view of the polygraph in the juridical field as an instrument for procedural justice, and another view in which the device functions as a symbol of openness to improvements in the judicial system. These insights complement contemporary scholarship on lie detection by shining a critical light on the rhetoric of progress in relation to the promises of brain-based lie detection procedures. When analyzing the way polygraph tests are seen as progress, it becomes clear that the promises and hopes that are linked to this technology are of more relevance for its appraisal than its placement in time.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"328-346"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45662290","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":"Unintended by Design: On the Political Uses of “Unintended Consequences”","authors":"Nassim Parvin, A. Pollock","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.497","url":null,"abstract":"This paper revisits the term “unintended consequences,” drawing upon an illustrative vignette to show how it is used to dismiss vital ethical and political concerns. Tracing the term to its original introduction by Robert Merton and building on feminist technoscience analyses, we uncover and rethink its widespread usage in popular and scholarly discourses and practices of technology design.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45225146","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":"Lessons from Theranos: Changing Narratives of Individual Ethics in Science and Engineering","authors":"M. Jeske","doi":"10.17351/ests2020.411","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.411","url":null,"abstract":"The meteoric ascent and equally dramatic fall of Theranos has been covered prolifically in the media. Presented as an ambitious inventor gone rogue, the discursive construction of the Theranos scandal in popular media and in the biomedical community reifies tired narratives of the role of ethics in science and engineering fields more generally: narratives that emphasizes individual integrity and common sense rather than the structures and norms that leave scientists and engineers vulnerable to ethical quandaries. In this short critical engagement, I argue that the ways Theranos has been captured obscures important conversations about ethics in bioscience and biotechnology, both in the private sector and in university spaces. I call for STS scholars to engage with scientists and engineers to imagine ways to structurally embed ethics and justice in future technoscientific endeavors.","PeriodicalId":44976,"journal":{"name":"Engaging Science Technology and Society","volume":"6 1","pages":"306-311"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44478643","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}