Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-03-10DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2049597
Carin Graminius
{"title":"Research Communication on Climate Change through Open Letters: Uniting Cognition, Affect and Action by Affective Alignments","authors":"Carin Graminius","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2049597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2049597","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Affect is increasingly the object of study in research communication, and inducement of affect by means of different communication techniques is encouraged as a means for mobilizing the public. But a focus on affect in purely instrumental terms risks overlooking the multifaceted ways in which affect is used in research communication. Studying open letters on climate change penned by scientists provides an interesting context for an empirical and theoretical exploration of the intricate ways of using affect in research communication. Two analytical lenses which constitute two strands of research commonly seen as incompatible due to their different units of analysis – affect as linguistic representation and affect as practice – are combined to elucidate the aligning potentials of affect in communicative acts. Affective alignments as representation or practice are significant because affective connections made between actors, objects, actions and understandings are ways of looking at the indirect mobilization of the issue communicated. In relation to research communication, this analytical approach further reveals shifting science-society relations, where social alignments are responding to the nexus of practices in which researchers are situated. Attention to the use of affect in open letters reveals specific configurations between affect, cognition and action as scientists prescribe specific affective states – anxiety and concern – as integral to the understanding and action on climate matters. Furthermore, affect both aligns and separates scientists from other actors in society. Most notably, open letters position politicians as dissociated from scientists and civil society due to their lack of anxiety.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"334 - 356"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46906134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-03-02DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2043840
C. Pinel
{"title":"What Counts as the Environment in Epigenetics? Knowledge and Ignorance in the Entrepreneurial University","authors":"C. Pinel","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2043840","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2043840","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Epigenetics research is well-known for its attention to the ‘environment,’ as it explores how what surrounds the genes impacts gene regulation. In addition, epigenetics has commonly been described as the new socio-biology capable of capturing how the broadly defined social environment, structured by social inequalities, shapes biology. Yet, this vision is not realised in the context of the entrepreneurial university. In the two laboratories where ethnographic fieldwork was conducted, scientists focus their research on narrow articulations of the notion of environment, around individual ‘lifestyle’ or micro-environments within which tumours develop. While the entrepreneurial university is characterised by multiple authoritative agencies evaluating and legitimising research, the narrowing of research priorities in epigenetics can be explained by the overlap of multiple scales of environment in which such authoritative agencies exercise authority: a disciplinary environment with peer-reviewed journals, an institutional environment with research managers, a market environment with funding bodies and commercial firms. In a general context of precarity, these environmental scales successively shape the content of research, by imposing filters on researchers’ practices, while implementing incentives encouraging certain forms of research. In particular, it favours a certain type of epigenetics research that is individualised and clinically centred, while leaving unexplored the social determinants of health and its biological corollary. This article adds to existing scholarship by, first, operationalising the broad concept of entrepreneurial university through the analysis of authoritative agencies and their role on research practices, and second, by providing empirical evidence of the interplay between research content and research environment.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"311 - 333"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41398685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2035710
G. Ottinger
{"title":"Misunderstanding Citizen Science: Hermeneutic Ignorance in U.S. Environmental Regulation","authors":"G. Ottinger","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2035710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2035710","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the United States, ‘fenceline communities' next to petrochemical facilities have been conducting and advocating for air monitoring since the 1990s, highlighting gaps in U.S. environmental regulators' monitoring programs. Citizen science is imagined to be valuable as a source of data for filling such gaps. But fenceline communities' air monitoring activities also underscore regulators' hermeneutic ignorance, namely their lack of appropriate concepts, categories, and metrics for understanding the temporality of air pollution as experienced by marginalized communities. Citizen science could play a valuable role in addressing hermeneutic ignorance, by providing more adequate epistemic resources for understanding the environmental harms. In the case of community monitoring programs, these have included epistemic resources for understanding the immediacy of air pollution and the chronic nature of unpredictable spikes in pollution. However, regulators confronted with community-led monitoring have acknowledged neither citizen scientists’ contributions to epistemic resources nor their own hermeneutic ignorance, limiting the potential for citizen science to address institutionalized ignorance. Recognizing hermeneutic ignorance shows the important role that epistemic resources play in institutionalizing ignorance, and points to reforms necessary if citizen science is to make robust contributions to environmental protection.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"504 - 529"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45009621","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-01-28DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2025773
Gwendolyn Blue, D. Davidson, K. Myles
{"title":"Expectations of Genomic Selection for Forestry: Expert Narratives of Anticipation and Legitimation","authors":"Gwendolyn Blue, D. Davidson, K. Myles","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2025773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2025773","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Discourses of expectation shape technology development and uptake in subtle and profound ways. While STS research tends to view discourses of expectation in aggregate, disarticulating expectation into distinct narratives of anticipation and legitimation offers insights into the contradictory symbolic forces that inform novel technological applications. Interviews with forest science experts discussing the adoption of genomic selection as a response to climate change offers evidence of the rhetorical work performed by anticipatory and legitimatory narratives. Findings show that proclamations of novelty – consistent with discourses of anticipation – exist alongside efforts to secure legitimacy by establishing continuity between genomic selection and traditional breeding techniques, which would appear to defeat the rhetorical work done by the former. Reflective of previous public conflicts over biotechnology, legitimatory narratives also include assertions that genomic selection is distinct from genetic modification, when such distinctions are anything but clear. Ascription to these narratives, particularly legitimatory narratives that seek to distinguish genomic selection from more contentious biotechnology applications, justifies restrictions on public engagement that could offer valuable insights for management and decision-making. Other implications include restricting social scientific interventions to strategic communication intended to steer publics toward acceptance of genomic selection. Further research is warranted to examine how the dynamics of anticipation and legitimation play out across other sectors which expect benefits from novel biotechnological applications.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"256 - 275"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45883654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-01-20DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2025774
Lorna Heaton
{"title":"Chains of Participation in Producing Biodiversity Infrastructures: Digital Reconfigurations of Scientific Work","authors":"Lorna Heaton","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2025774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2025774","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43252602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-01-17DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2025775
F. Charvolin
{"title":"Faune France: Amateur Naturalists’ Attachment and Indebtedness in a Citizen Science Biodiversity Database","authors":"F. Charvolin","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2025775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2025775","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46917479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-01-17eCollection Date: 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2028135
Sonja Erikainen
{"title":"The Promissory Visions of DIYbio: Reimaging Science from the Fringe.","authors":"Sonja Erikainen","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2028135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2028135","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent years have seen a proliferation of do-it-yourself biology (DIYbio) initiatives, consisting of people undertaking a range of bioscience activities outside traditional research environments. DIYbio initiatives, while diverse, exist at the fringes of institutionalised science, which enables them to advance different promissory visions about what science, especially bioscience, could or should become in the future, including how it should be governed. These visions reconfigure conventional delineations of science in politically and normatively loaded ways that can simultaneously reaffirm, contest, and shift the traditional epistemic foundations of science. They put forth alternative science futures in ways that highlight the performative force of promissory visions in shaping not only mainstream but also fringe science activity. DIYbio offers a fruitful lens for understanding how science is currently being reconfigured by unconventional actors to encompass new meanings and domains. It offers a different angle on the wider sociology of expectations engagement with the future as an analytical object, by showing how the future of science is constructed and managed from the fringe. Yet, DIYbio initiatives' promissory visions are also embedded within neoliberal ideals of productive and entrepreneurial citizens, highlighting how the wider socio-economic context constrains the alternative futures manufactured by these initiatives.</p>","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 3","pages":"287-310"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9519120/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"40390393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-01-10DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2021.2025215
Tone Druglitrø
{"title":"Procedural Care: Licensing Practices in Animal Research","authors":"Tone Druglitrø","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2021.2025215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.2025215","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Animal research has always been debated on moral and ethical grounds. Non-governmental organisations repeatedly critique the lack of openness and transparency around the use of animals in science. In response to this critique, openness and transparency have, in the most recent decade, been integrated in new ways in systems and practices of licensing animal research in the EU, materialised and conceptualised by a harm-benefit framework. In the licensing system in Norway–this article's empirical site–articulating and balancing between ‘harms' and ‘benefits' are core activities to foster a ‘culture of care' that responds to a diverse set of care relations: those between science and society, science and policy, and humans and animals. Harm-benefit analysis is, however, plagued by tensions that can be traced into licensing procedures. Performing harm-benefit analysis in this context can be called ‘procedural care’. While procedural care is meant to manage conflicting cares in animal research, it also tends to conceal tensions that emerge in practice. Yet, procedural care is a genre promises to bring together types of care and more openly engage with the relationship among them. Conceptually and methodologically, procedural care calls for the study of care in the administrative and legal domain.","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"235 - 255"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43584645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Science As CulturePub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2022.2036118
K. Birch, K. Bronson
{"title":"Big Tech","authors":"K. Birch, K. Bronson","doi":"10.1080/09505431.2022.2036118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2022.2036118","url":null,"abstract":"Big Tech is in the public and political spotlight. Usually defined as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook/Meta, Big Tech is becoming the watchword for corporate surveillance, monopoly, and market power. Arguably, they are the defining institutions of our day, dominating our political economies, societies, and polities as Big Oil or Big Banks did in their time. Criticism of Big Tech is increasingly evident as well, cutting across popular books, academic work, film, and journalism: examples include, Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; recent documentaries like Social Dilemma and Agents of Chaos; and regular column inches in print media like the Financial Times and The Economist, this being particularly notable as these two are intellectual bastions of capitalism. As public, political, and policy backlash against the activities of Big Tech followed results of the 2016 US Presidential Election, the 2016 British Referendum on Europe, and the 2018 revelations about Cambridge Analytica (Zuboff, 2019), commentators have highlighted the significant loss of trust in these digital technology companies and their wares – dubbed the ‘techlash’ (Foroohar, 2019). This techlash is hardly surprising since, as Prainsack (2019) points out, Big Tech firms increasingly underpin much of our social, political, and economic worlds by providing the digital infrastructure on which we rely to live our lives. Consequently, governments and others around the world are increasingly turning their regulatory gaze onto Big Tech, leading to a surge in policy and legislative measures to curb their social and market power. Big Tech has been the subject of critical political investigations, like the recent US Congressional Hearings on Online Platforms and Market Power, or the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy. Big Tech has also been the target of specific policy action, like the European Union’s (EU) recently passed Digital Markets Act (DMA), which seeks to address the","PeriodicalId":47064,"journal":{"name":"Science As Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"1 - 14"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48610814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}