Marco Sonnberger, Maria Pfeiffer, Alena Bleicher, Matthias Gross
{"title":"Wake effects and temperature plumes: Coping with non-knowledge in the expansion of wind and geothermal energy.","authors":"Marco Sonnberger, Maria Pfeiffer, Alena Bleicher, Matthias Gross","doi":"10.1177/03063127241246551","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127241246551","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Energy transitions are knowledge-intensive processes where a multitude of actors are trying to cope with inevitable knowledge gaps, surprises, and uncertainties. In this context, we focus on two techno-physical phenomena that are gaining practical relevance with the expansion of wind and geothermal energy extraction, and are surrounded by significant unknowns: wake effects and temperature plumes. Both phenomena can potentially affect the efficiency of energy production, but the extent of their impact is not yet known. Based on 28 semi-structured interviews with experts in the fields of wind and geothermal energy, we explore how different central actors perceive and interpret non-knowledge of wake effects and temperature plumes, and how they deal with it. We show that there are strategies for either using non-knowledge as a basis for action or simply ignoring it and sweeping knowledge gaps under the rug. Both strategies serve the function of protecting agency and keeping things going.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"859-882"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2024-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11590379/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140900313","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What work does ‘contamination’ do? An agential realist account of oil wastewater and radium in groundwater","authors":"Vivian Underhill, Karen Barad","doi":"10.1177/03063127241281708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241281708","url":null,"abstract":"Oil wastewater often contains high levels of radium, a carcinogenic and radioactive element. This article closely engages with two investigations of radium in groundwater downstream from oil wastewater storage pits. While one investigation found that radium did not travel beyond the storage pits, the other found evidence of elevated radium some two kilometers downstream. With an agential realist analysis, we resolve these differences, showing that these two experimental apparatuses defined and mobilized two different phenomena of radium, and of radium-as-contaminant. What geologists call ‘rock-water interactions’ are materially meaningful intra-actions. Far from being a mere philosophical gloss on otherwise conventional science, the ‘intra-’ signifies that, in these processes, the sediment and the groundwater are bringing each other into being. Groundwater sampling entails a specific set of intra-actions with the subsurface that enact different agential cuts. In addition, a geochemical focus on objects, rather than relations, also constrains understandings of chemical harm and accountability. These concepts do not only affect experimental apparatuses; rather, they come into being through and with each other. Therefore, rigorous approaches to groundwater and remediation do not lie in the pull to reify individual groundwater constituents, or to arbitrate between ‘contaminant’ and ‘contaminated’. Rather, rigorous approaches lie in the role of chemical relations in constituting specific groundwater phenomena. We elaborate three aspects of these relations: the constitution of radium-as-isolated-element through the ontological work of sampling schema, the formation of scale and attendant spacetimematterings within experimental apparatuses, and the work of contamination logics within conceptualizations of chemical harm. This analysis has major implications for understanding the potential harm of oil wastewater to groundwater.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142610597","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}
{"title":"‘Zoonati’ vs. ‘epistemic tresspasers’: Science identity in contentious online advocacy campaigns on the origins of SARS-CoV-2","authors":"Lynn Horton","doi":"10.1177/03063127241294028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241294028","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how science is mobilized as a collective identity, normative ideal, and instrumental tactic in contentious online global advocacy campaigns on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It incorporates qualitative analysis of over 2300 public Twitter postings by core zoonosis and lab origin proponents who identify as scientists. These online exchanges provide a real-time window into how the collective identity of scientist is constructed and mobilized as a master frame. Similarly, this paper explores ways in which the boundaries of science, conspiracy, and politics are set and contested in a context of complex and fast-moving global events.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"158 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142601930","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}
{"title":"Anthropocene angst: Authentic geology and stratigraphic sincerity","authors":"Alexander Damianos","doi":"10.1177/03063127241282309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241282309","url":null,"abstract":"In March 2024, the Anthropocene Working Group’s proposal for a formal Anthropocene Series/Epoch of the Geologic Time Scale was formally rejected by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. What does the failed formalization effort reveal about the relationship between science and normativity under conditions of ‘climate crisis’? Drawing on four years of ethnographic observation of the Anthropocene Working Group, this article explains how the Group developed its proposal, why it failed, and what it reveals about the social construction of geological truth. The effort to formalize an Anthropocene unit was based on a coupling of science and politics, wherein geo-scientists could make normative assertions in the register of scientific fact. Ultimately, the Group failed because it was seen as appropriating incumbent geological techniques to advance claims about the future, transitioning geology from a descriptive science about the past to a site of warning.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142598042","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}
{"title":"Proverbial economies of STS","authors":"Ranjit Singh, Michael Lynch","doi":"10.1177/03063127241294038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241294038","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses examples from an extended family of aphorisms, stories, and themes that have circulated widely in STS and remain associated with the formation and integration of the field. Drawing upon Harvey Sacks’s insightful remarks about features of everyday conversation, which he related to ancient practices in oral culture, we argue that familiar citation magnets in STS operate in many respects like proverbs, parables, and an extended family of neatly and memorably packaged viral articulations in ordinary language. After discussing the contingent production of proverbial truth, the article focuses on three well-known examples that combine memorable proverbs and themes with parables: Winner’s account of the low parkway bridges designed by city planner Robert Moses to show that technology has politics; Pinch and Bijker’s concise history of the bicycle to illustrate the social construction of technology, and Star and Griesemer’s viral two-word theme of ‘boundary objects’ as artifacts that sustain collaboration across organizational contexts. The discussion of these cases suggests that different elements of these examples become the focus of subsequent citations and applications, and that ambiguities about the origins and meanings of the cited items opens new avenues for critical reflection on practicing citational justice and the nature of STS as an affiliative discipline.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142596753","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}
{"title":"Gathering around a satellite image: Visual media cycles of the nuclear nonproliferation complex.","authors":"Christopher Lawrence","doi":"10.1177/03063127241274793","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241274793","url":null,"abstract":"How have Western nongovernmental experts used remote sensing to make public knowledge about Iran's nuclear program? This article recounts several episodes in which experts and journalists congregated around satellite images to uncover hidden nuclear objects in Iran. Drawing from the theoretical tradition of co-production, I describe this recurrent collective experience as an imaginative exercise that can both coordinate and transform diverse communities of knowledge. I outline common temporal and thematic structures that define these episodes, and illuminate the role of commercial satellite imagery as material anchor that threads distributed imaginings together such that broadly-shared experience and sensibility can emerge. I argue that these collective imaginative practices have fomented civic-epistemic closure, not around affirmative nuclear facts or beliefs about Iran, but around a set of persistent questions about the 'possible military dimensions' of its nuclear past. I close by exploring the broader political effects of this form of recursive inquiry within the global nuclear order.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"236 1","pages":"3063127241274793"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142489716","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}
{"title":"Beyond samplism: Rethinking the field in exposure science","authors":"Sebastián Ureta","doi":"10.1177/03063127241288581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241288581","url":null,"abstract":"Given the many forms of environmental pollution that have accompanied the global spread of industrial capitalism, there is an urgent need to carry out extensive assessments of the potential toxicity of many compounds on human and nonhuman populations. However, the scientific procedures developed to carry out such assessments present several critical shortcomings that greatly diminish their capacity to protect populations at risk. Through an ethnographic analysis of two field campaigns centered on the assessment of polluted sites in northern Chile, this article will reveal that these campaigns are embedded in what we can call samplism. Contrary to approaches that see fieldwork as generative spaces for knowledge creation, samplism radically simplifies the field into a neutral space for the collection of singular and well-defined lab-bound samples. However, samplism entails that multiple field phenomena relevant for assessing pollution levels are left completely unaccounted for, which greatly diminishes exposure science’s overall capacity to help improve the lives of those in need. Thus, exposure science urgently needs todevelop more capacious forms of engagement with the field, an ecological fieldwork that truly represents the complexity of forces and processes behind contemporary processes of pollution and damage.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"104 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142449426","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}
{"title":"Making citizens, procedures, and outcomes: Theorizing politics in a co-productionist idiom.","authors":"Hilton R Simmet","doi":"10.1177/03063127241269804","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241269804","url":null,"abstract":"The literature engaging political theory in STS often puts forward a deficit model view of STS, in which homegrown STS ideas about politics, such as co-production, are either treated as having an insufficient account of the political or not read as political theory at all. This article challenges the deficit discourse by reading co-production as a full-blown political theory in its own right, in particular by showing how it investigates normative questions of 'the good' that are central to any theorization of politics. Where political theory often concerns itself with the construction and application of universal political ideals-such as of the good citizen, legitimate procedures or smart outcomes-co-production looks at empirical sites where citizens, procedures, and outcomes articulate understandings of the good held by political actors in situ. By looking at the making of citizens, procedures, and outcomes in practice, we can better understand co-production as political theory. In particular, co-production elaborates on how the making of citizens, procedures, and outcomes constitute (and are constituted by) ideal normative positions, including: authoritative views about what citizens may claim to know, culturally-situated understandings of procedural legitimacy, and political values and ideologies embedded in seemingly 'objective' measurements of outcomes.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"33 1","pages":"3063127241269804"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142436373","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}
{"title":"The techno-politics of computing the mind: Opening the black box of digital psychiatry.","authors":"Katerina Sideri,Niels van Dijk","doi":"10.1177/03063127241273067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241273067","url":null,"abstract":"Psychiatry has recently witnessed the launch of digital phenotyping as a new research agenda. According to digital phenotyping's hypothesis, data about a patient's daily behavior can be continuously collected through wearable monitoring devices and used to build software that would send warnings of mental relapse or would tailor treatment choices. The research is exploratory, and the claims upon which it is based are contentious. Drawing on interviews, we followed a research team that aspired to build a digital system that could send such warnings to patients with mental health disorders like depression and epilepsy. This enabled us to learn how a new instrument to measure mental function becomes constructed and what translations take place in this process. Here we pay particular attention to the role of patients as research collaborators. We observed the frictions and debates in the research team between different mental health knowledge regimes, seeing them before they were black-boxed and lost from sight. We aimed to understand how actors anticipate software and data analytics to function alongside physicians and patients, as well as how different accounts reconstitute the 'mental', 'therapy', or the 'social' itself. We discuss several 'dissociations' that occur along the research trajectory regarding: less motivated and underrepresented patients, the role of clinical knowledge derived from patient self-reporting, and the social, political, and economic aspects of a patient's life affecting mental health. In this sense, we want to open the black box of this new behavioral technoscience.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"17 1","pages":"3063127241273067"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142436374","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}
{"title":"Indigenous DNA as a metaphor: Nation-building and scientific debates on the rediscovery of Taiwanese ancestry.","authors":"Yu-Yueh Tsai","doi":"10.1177/03063127241226869","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127241226869","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this paper, I investigate the co-production of genetic research and national politics in post-martial law Taiwan. This entails analyzing two co-produced phenomena: the nationalization of biomedicine-in which the national discourse over racial/ethnic categories and ancestral origin increasingly shapes scientists' biomedical research; and the biomedicalization of the nation-in which people in public discourse increasingly use biomedical categories in characterizing national differences and identities. I analyze how the production and representation of scientific knowledge of the ancestral origins and genetic make-up of Taiwan have been embedded in Taiwanese politics. This includes the emergence of a new categorization into four great ethnic groups, multiculturalism, and the assertion of a distinct Taiwanese national identity, particularly in response to the People's Republic of China's claims of common ancestry. I also examine how the scientific findings produced in the lab have spilled out into both Taiwan and China through journals, media, history textbooks, and public disputes since the 1990s and brought about significant social impact.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"777-802"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2024-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140195033","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}