Social Studies of Science最新文献

Sensory labor as un/knowing in a waste composition study: Identifying a chain of translation. 感官劳动在废物成分研究中的认知：翻译链的识别。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-07-23 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251357625

Taru Lehtokunnas,Niina Uusitalo,Ulla-Maija Sutinen,Alma Onali

引用次数: 0

Computational universalism, or, Attending to relationalities at scale. 计算普遍性，或者，关注尺度上的关系。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-07-14 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251345089

Francis Lee,David Ribes

{"title":"Computational universalism, or, Attending to relationalities at scale.","authors":"Francis Lee,David Ribes","doi":"10.1177/03063127251345089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251345089","url":null,"abstract":"The social sciences and humanities have increasingly adopted computational terminology as the organizing categories for inquiry. We argue that by organizing research around vernacular computational objects (e.g. data, algorithms, or AI) and divided worldly domains (e.g. finance, health, and governance), scholars risk obscuring the universalizing practices and ambitions of computation. These practices seek to establish new relationalities at unprecedented scales, connecting disparate domains, circulating resources across boundaries, and positioning computational interventions as universally applicable. Drawing on intellectual traditions that inspect the fixity of universalizing claims, we problematize the easy adoption of computational categories and argue that they serve as epistemic traps that naturalize the expanding reach of computational universalism. Instead of accepting the hardened categories of our interlocutors, we propose attending to the partial, effortful, and often contested work of translation and commensuration that enables computational actors to position themselves as obligatory passage points across all domains. This approach reveals not only the remarkable achievements of computational relationalities at scale but also their exclusions, betrayals, and partialities. Our intervention aims to spur perspectives that examine how computational actors parse both technical objects and social worlds to advance universalizing ambitions while simultaneously obscuring the enormous labor required to maintain these divisions and connections.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"38 1","pages":"3063127251345089"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144622108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Predictions, uncertainty, and collective epistemic work: How projected futures informed and misinformed enactments of Covid-19 预测、不确定性和集体认知工作：预测的未来如何为Covid-19的制定提供信息和错误信息

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-07-11 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251351336

Tobias Olofsson

{"title":"Predictions, uncertainty, and collective epistemic work: How projected futures informed and misinformed enactments of Covid-19","authors":"Tobias Olofsson","doi":"10.1177/03063127251351336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251351336","url":null,"abstract":"By connecting an uncertain present to a potential future, predictions and other forms of projected futures construct meaningful contexts on which actors can lean when seeking to act in the face of uncertainty. This article outlines the background and careers of many, and often contradicting, futures that informed the collective work to define and represent Covid-19 in Sweden during the first half of 2020. Through an analysis of press briefing transcripts, in-depth interviews with centrally placed informants, and a timeline of Covid-19–related events, debates, and policies in Sweden, this article outlines how enactments of Covid-19 evolved over time—from straightforward comparisons to past experiences, to repurposed models intended to make the pandemic calculable, to survey-based extrapolations produced by the Public Health Agency. The article demonstrates how a combination of contextual factors and a continuously evolving knowledge base led some enactments to become more influential than others, allowing them to influence evolving decisions and strategies. The article highlights the role of competing voices and perspectives in the collective epistemic work performed during the pandemic and explores Covid-19 as a multiple entity composed of a patchwork of data and assumptions. Depending on what futures informed them, these enactments varied from catastrophic and dystopian, to hopeful promises of an eventual return to normality.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"88 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144603061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Scientific-intellectual movements in the post-truth age: The case of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis 后真理时代的科学知识运动：扩展进化综合论的案例

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-07-11 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251348254

Sophie Juliane Veigl, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Ruth Müller

{"title":"Scientific-intellectual movements in the post-truth age: The case of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis","authors":"Sophie Juliane Veigl, Zinaida Vasilyeva, Ruth Müller","doi":"10.1177/03063127251348254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251348254","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past decade, evolutionary biology has seen an unusual number of heated debates centered around the pronouncement of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). This theoretical framework brings together researchers from a range of disciplines in biology, such as ecology, developmental biology, and epigenetics, as well as philosophers of science, to challenge some of the key tenets of contemporary evolutionary theory, by arguing for a greater role of the environment and the organism in evolution. In this article, we analyze the EES as a scientific-intellectual movement (SIM) that has emerged under two specific conditions. First, evolutionary biology has always been both scientifically and socially influential and contested. As a field that claims to answer fundamental questions of how life has come to be, evolutionary biology has shaped causal thinking in fields as diverse as biology, psychology, and economics, and has influenced cultural thought and politics. Second, this specific contestation of mainstream evolutionary thinking emerges in the midst of challenges to particular sciences by what are seen as ‘post-truth’ and ‘anti-science’ movements. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, we examine the credibility strategies that EES proponents employ under these conditions, highlighting what happens when opponents of the EES make use of the ‘post-truth’ label to argue against the EES. We argue that this transposition of structures familiar from public and political debate onto contestations within science represents an important topic of study for STS researchers in the current political moment.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144603412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Making data markets: Assetization, valuation, and proxy work in a digital health start-up 打造数据市场：数字化医疗初创企业的资产化、估值和代理工作

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-07-10 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251353027

Joseph Donia, Jennifer Gibson, James A Shaw

{"title":"Making data markets: Assetization, valuation, and proxy work in a digital health start-up","authors":"Joseph Donia, Jennifer Gibson, James A Shaw","doi":"10.1177/03063127251353027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251353027","url":null,"abstract":"Digital data are increasingly framed as essential resources in health and medicine, implicating diverse actors who work to transform them into different forms of value. In this article we focus on the diverse and contingent valuation practices that shaped an artificial intelligence-enabled ‘smart’ health technology and the data it generated at different moments in time, and the corresponding asset forms that were envisioned, developed, tested, and marketed. We also outline the role of assetization as a contested but essential design and marketing activity, and introduce the notion of proxy work as an intermediary between data generation and assetization, where people, infrastructures, and other material devices are arranged in such a way that data become capable of ‘standing in’ for something else, allowing accountable forms of value to be realized across multiple sites. We conclude with a discussion of the consequences of assetization as a dominant lens through which governments, firms, and other actors increasingly understand the value of digital health data, and the different health-related futures those practices make possible.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144594466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Exclusionary data, inclusionary appeals: Gender and equity in an HIV-prevention clinical trial. 排除性数据，包容性申诉：艾滋病毒预防临床试验中的性别与公平。

IF 2.9 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-06-27 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251349231

Jason V D'Amours, Miranda R Waggoner

{"title":"Exclusionary data, inclusionary appeals: Gender and equity in an HIV-prevention clinical trial.","authors":"Jason V D'Amours, Miranda R Waggoner","doi":"10.1177/03063127251349231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251349231","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite the social and regulatory expectation that contemporary clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs will include a diverse set of research participants, achieving appropriate representation in clinical research remains tenuous. Of ongoing concern is how experts and regulators navigate decisions about drug approvals when presented with clinical studies that have limited demographic data. Drawing on regulatory discussions about Descovy, an HIV-prevention drug that was studied only in cisgender men and transgender women who have sex with men, we analyze a contentious debate over the meaning and impact of including and excluding certain populations from clinical trial design. Extending prior work in science and technology studies on how epistemological frameworks in clinical trials matter for concerns about the production of knowledge and social justice, we show how different conceptualizations of inclusion and equity (specifically, equity in data versus equity in access) come into tension in deliberations over pharmaceutical drug approvals. We argue that the discursive conflict over gender and inclusionary/exclusionary research practices that emerged in the case of Descovy points to an underappreciated feature of equity-temporality-that should be attended to when examining knowledge production in 21st-century clinical and regulatory landscapes.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"3063127251349231"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144512772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

The extractive loops of biocapital: Venom procurement and antivenom production in India. 生物资本的提取循环：印度的蛇毒采购和抗蛇毒血清生产。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-06-20 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251347915

Mathieu Quet

{"title":"The extractive loops of biocapital: Venom procurement and antivenom production in India.","authors":"Mathieu Quet","doi":"10.1177/03063127251347915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251347915","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of research and scholarship has examined the exploitation of animals by the biopharmaceutical industry, framing it variously in terms of labour, commodification, or hybrid processes. This article adds to the discussion through an ethnography of antivenom manufacturing in India. It introduces the concept of 'extractive loops' embedding species, locations, and work practices. Extractive loops form a continuum through which non-human life contributes to the manufacturing of resources (raw materials and finished products). The argument relies on a description of the operations required by the production of antivenom, involving: (a) several animal species (mostly snakes, horses, and rodents), (b) connections between a multiplicity of locations, from outdoor fields to industrial sites, (c) a wide range of professional practices, some of them strictly formalized whereas others are mainly informal (such as snake catching), and (d) heterogeneous exploitation of non-human life and products. Extractive loops highlight a key feature of animal exploitation: a recurring series of extractive practices contributing to the continuous fabrication of natural resources.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"37 1","pages":"3063127251347915"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144328916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Handmade relief models as matters of concern: Maintaining, restoring, and repairing mountains? 手工浮雕模型值得关注：维护、修复、修复山脉？

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-06-14 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251346168

Alain Müller

{"title":"Handmade relief models as matters of concern: Maintaining, restoring, and repairing mountains?","authors":"Alain Müller","doi":"10.1177/03063127251346168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251346168","url":null,"abstract":"Through a case study of what are known as ‘relief models’—for example of areas of landscapes—this article approaches representational objects in and as practice. Such an approach implies following the multiplicity of practices that are gathered in representational objects to bring them into and maintain their existence, especially those that often remain unacknowledged by analytical attention. Most discussions of representational objects focus on their representational capacities and properties, paying less attention to the activities that ensure their ontological security as objects. Those activities concern not only the manufacture of representational objects, but also their maintenance—which is placed at the heart of this discussion. The maintenance of relief models manifests itself as a semiotic-material ecology. Entangled here are the ontological tact of the craftsperson, the affordances, resistances, and responsiveness of the materials, and the meaning-makings and stories that articulate and guide maintenance and repair. The practice of maintaining such objects, however, diverges from their production. Their production essentially accommodates metric distance since representation involves transporting a ‘thing’ through chains of reference. On the contrary, their maintenance aims to accommodate multiple temporalities. This involves not only the ways of being in time that are specific to each material that composes the object but also the idealized past of an unused object, its worn present, and its anticipated (repaired) future. By playing with the double meaning of the word ‘representing’, this article speculatively questions the extent to which practices of maintenance of, and care for, representational objects can inform a re-vision and rethinking of the relationships to what they are meant to re-present —that is, to what counts as nature.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144290120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Precision justice: An imaginary of data and justice 精确正义：数据和正义的想象

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-06-14 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251342275

Margarita Boenig-Liptsin

{"title":"Precision justice: An imaginary of data and justice","authors":"Margarita Boenig-Liptsin","doi":"10.1177/03063127251342275","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251342275","url":null,"abstract":"In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World every person is conditioned through technologies to fit their social role, which is the source of the society’s alleged stability and rightness. This utopia of ‘precision justice’ is alive today in projects that deploy data and algorithmic models in decision-making in diverse branches of life to realize computing’s promise to create more just societies. I identify the sociotechnical imaginary of ‘precision justice’ by analyzing the promise and contestation of the use of an algorithmic model to calculate exam grades in the United Kingdom during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘Precision justice’ is the product of the coupling of a normative concept of just distribution with data practices of identification and risk assessment, and is characterized by interventionist action, optimal distribution, and system management. It crystallized in the contexts of the emerging ‘information society’ in the 1970s United States, when visions of the risks and opportunities of information in digital form converged with the popular theory and practices of distributive justice. At stake in this imaginary is the model of the human with which it operates and that it reproduces. Instead of keying people to a substantive and expansive concept of justice, the union of distributive justice and data practices bind people to indicators and allocate them to specific places in society. To move beyond precision justice, this article calls for the need to look at justice and data symmetrically, as a simultaneously epistemic and normative set of concerns that must be addressed together in terms of what worlds we want to build.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"37 15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144290115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Self-tracking in endometriosis: Evolving expectations around a gynecological app developed by a Finnish patient organization 子宫内膜异位症的自我跟踪：芬兰患者组织开发的妇科应用程序的演变期望

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2025-06-14 DOI: 10.1177/03063127251344961

Venla Oikkonen, Maria Temmes

{"title":"Self-tracking in endometriosis: Evolving expectations around a gynecological app developed by a Finnish patient organization","authors":"Venla Oikkonen, Maria Temmes","doi":"10.1177/03063127251344961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127251344961","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the possibilities and limits of patient advocacy-led health technology design through a case study: a non-commercial mobile self-tracking app developed by a Finnish patient organization to advance medical care and research in endometriosis, an underfunded and understudied gynecological condition. Drawing on interviews with patient organization representatives, specialized clinicians and people with endometriosis, as well as written endometriosis stories, this article traces the evolving expectations around the app to understand the landscape of hopes and concerns in which patient advocacy-led design is conceived and received. This article identifies tensions in visions about how the app could be used as well as locates shifts in expectations as the app moved from an idea to everyday use. The article also shows how structural aspects of established technological systems, such as digital health infrastructures or data ownership relations, shape expectations about future uses of patient advocacy-led technology. This case study contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on self-tracking and health technology development by providing a nuanced understanding of how the dynamics of expectation in patient advocacy-led design operate in a complex and underdiagnosed gendered chronic illness.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144290117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0