Social Studies of Science最新文献_第7页

Therapeutic value in the time of digital brainwaves 数字脑电波时代的治疗价值

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-08 DOI: 10.1177/03063127241241032

Megh Marathe

{"title":"Therapeutic value in the time of digital brainwaves","authors":"Megh Marathe","doi":"10.1177/03063127241241032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241241032","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the value of medical technology through the case of electroencephalograms (EEGs), devices used to visualize brain activity and diagnose seizures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows that EEGs are valued differently by patients and medical practitioners. While practitioners value EEGs for their clinical utility, i.e., ability to inform clinical decisions, patients value EEGs even in the absence of clinical utility. Indeed, patients derive long-lasting therapeutic effects from this diagnostic technology. These findings intervene in the utilitarian calculus of therapeutic value—a mode of reasoning that equates value with clinical utility—commonly deployed in biomedicine and engineering and call for a recognition of alternative notions such as the therapeutic value of being witnessed and cared for by medical experts via EEGs and other technologies that require time to work. Expansive notions of therapeutic value are imperative for including marginalized patients—especially low-income, disabled, and women patients—in debates on automation and the future of healthcare. Studying how multiple stakeholders value a medical technology provides insight into valuation, objectification, expertise, and other concerns central to science and technology studies.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140539025","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

Unclearing the air: Data's unexpected limitations for environmental advocacy. 不污染空气：数据对环境倡导的意外限制。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-10-14 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231201169

Dawn Nafus

引用次数: 0

Inside regular lab meetings: The social construction of a research team and ideas in optical physics. 走进实验室例会：研究团队的社会建设与光学物理学中的思想。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-08-22 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231188132

Axel Philipps, Laura Paruschke

{"title":"Inside regular lab meetings: The social construction of a research team and ideas in optical physics.","authors":"Axel Philipps, Laura Paruschke","doi":"10.1177/03063127231188132","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231188132","url":null,"abstract":"Scheduled meetings are associated with standardization and understood as a bureaucratic form of coordination, control, and rule observation. In attending assemblies of a research team in optical physics for over a year, we found regular lab meetings are compulsory for all their members and are an avenue to announce and give information about new and changed institutional regulations, to supervise members' activities and their output. But more importantly, they offer an environment for continuous thinking through talk that goes beyond announcements. Meetings are a protected space to comment on conducted research, to amend experimental set-ups, to test argumentation, and to outline potentially new directions of research. By participating in these practices, researchers, become members of the team as they get acquainted with the ongoing research; its scope, problems, and limits; the solutions at hand; and the know-how within the team. In functional terms, observed internal meetings seem to (a) ensure that the research team focuses on a specific research agenda by talking about and discussing ongoing research in the lab, (b) be used to discuss and assure the quality of the team's research output, and (c) generate and inspire new research within the team. Our findings suggest regular internal meetings, like shop talk, are constitutive of doing science by talking about ongoing research.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"257-280"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10981201/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10039715","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}

引用次数: 0

Total life insurance: Logics of anticipatory control and actuarial governance in insurance technology. 全面人寿保险：保险技术中的预期控制和精算管理逻辑。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-07-10 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231186437

Jathan Sadowski

{"title":"Total life insurance: Logics of anticipatory control and actuarial governance in insurance technology.","authors":"Jathan Sadowski","doi":"10.1177/03063127231186437","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231186437","url":null,"abstract":"Calling attention to the growing intersection between the insurance and technology sectors-or 'insurtech'-this article is intended as a bat signal for the interdisciplinary fields that have spent recent decades studying the explosion of digitization, datafication, smartification, automation, and so on. Many of the dynamics that attract people to researching technology are exemplified, often in exaggerated ways, by emerging applications in insurance, an industry that has broad material effects. Based on in-depth mixed-methods research into insurance technology, I have identified a set of interlocking logics that underly this regime of actuarial governance in society: ubiquitous intermediation, continuous interaction, total integration, hyper-personalization, actuarial discrimination, and dynamic reaction. Together these logics describe how enduring ambitions and existing capabilities are motivating the future of how insurers engage with customers, data, time, and value. This article surveys each logic, laying out a techno-political framework for how to orient critical analysis of developments in insurtech and where to direct future research on this growing industry. Ultimately, my goal is to advance our understanding how insurance-a powerful institution that is fundamental to the operations of modern society-continues to change, and what dynamics and imperatives, whose desires and interests are steering that change. The stuff of insurance is far too important to be left to the insurance industry.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"231-256"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10981172/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10141044","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}

引用次数: 0

Stakeholder engagement does not guarantee impact: A co-productionist perspective on model-based drought research. 利益相关者的参与并不能保证影响：基于模型的干旱研究的共同生产主义观点。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-09-27 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231199220

Catharina Landström, Eric Sarmiento, Sarah J Whatmore

{"title":"Stakeholder engagement does not guarantee impact: A co-productionist perspective on model-based drought research.","authors":"Catharina Landström, Eric Sarmiento, Sarah J Whatmore","doi":"10.1177/03063127231199220","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231199220","url":null,"abstract":"Stakeholder engagement has become a watchword for environmental scientists to assert the societal relevance of their projects to funding agencies. In water research based on computer simulation modelling, stakeholder engagement has attracted interest as a means to overcome low uptake of new tools for water management. An increasingly accepted view is that more and better stakeholder involvement in research projects will lead to increased adoption of the modelling tools created by scientists in water management. However, we cast doubt on this view by drawing attention to how the freedom of stakeholder organizations to adopt new scientific modelling tools in their regular practices is circumscribed by the societal context. We use a modified concept of co-production in an analysis of a case of scientific research on drought in the UK to show how relationships between actors in the drought governance space influence the uptake of scientific modelling tools. The analysis suggests an explanation of why stakeholder engagement with one scientific project led to one output (data) getting adopted by stakeholders while another output (modelling tools) attracted no discernible interest. Our main objective is to improve the understanding of the limitations to stakeholder engagement as a means of increasing societal uptake of scientific research outputs.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"210-230"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10981195/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41166017","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}

引用次数: 0

Enrolling the body as active agent in cancer treatment: Tracing immunotherapy metaphors and materialities. 将身体作为活性剂纳入癌症治疗：追踪免疫疗法的隐喻和物质。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-09-27 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231199217

Julia Swallow

{"title":"Enrolling the body as active agent in cancer treatment: Tracing immunotherapy metaphors and materialities.","authors":"Julia Swallow","doi":"10.1177/03063127231199217","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231199217","url":null,"abstract":"Immunotherapy is heralded as the 'fifth pillar' of cancer therapy, after surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and genomic medicine. It involves 'harnessing' patients' own immune system T-cells to treat cancer. In this article, I draw on qualitative interviews with practitioners working in oncology and patients in the UK, to trace metaphorical and discursive framing around immunotherapy. Immunotherapy aims to restore the functioning of the immune system to detect cancer (non-self), working with the self/non-self model that pervades immunology discourse more widely. Practitioners draw on metaphors that cement this self/non-self model, and that tend to depict the relationship between cancer and the immune system as an internal battle. Yet the discursive framing around immunotherapy also involves shifts that emphasize the body's own capacity to heal, where it is framed as 'gentle' or 'tolerable' on the body. Through this discursive shift, immunotherapy refigures the antagonism associated with the self/non-self model in the context of cancer. Analysing patients' embodied experiences of treatment, this article attends to the material realities and tensions provoked by this shift in discursive framing. This article contributes to feminist STS analyses of immunology discourse, and extends this literature by arguing that it is critical to address the material stakes of these discursive shifts by paying attention to patients' day-to-day experiences of treatment. The discursive framing of immunotherapy brings into being new forms of embodied patienthood in the context of cancer.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"305-321"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10981173/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41173417","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}

引用次数: 0

Trust in numbers: Serious numbers and speculative fictions in rare earth elements exploration. 对数字的信任：稀土元素勘探中的严肃数字和思辨小说。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-10-17 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231205044

Tom Özden-Schilling

{"title":"Trust in numbers: Serious numbers and speculative fictions in rare earth elements exploration.","authors":"Tom Özden-Schilling","doi":"10.1177/03063127231205044","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231205044","url":null,"abstract":"In the early 2010s, a spectacular fall in prices for a class of mineral commodities called the rare earth elements (REEs) and the collapse of hundreds of new exploration companies made clear the fragility of the high-risk markets around these companies and the strategies of legitimation that supported them. New regulatory processes built around technical disclosures generated vast stores of geotechnical data. Rather than generating trust among market actors, however, these processes dramatically altered the temporalities of global extraction and energized unruly narrative spaces. In their efforts to keep mineral claims active and companies afloat, REE-focused exploration experts have struggled to navigate different arenas of discussion while holding their respective logics in tension. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with exploration geologists and promoters, this article examines how experts federate flows of 'serious' and 'speculative' information in both carefully regulated reports and rumor-filled online forums. Such spaces are organized by aesthetic conventions and social criteria for establishing persuasiveness-forms that STS scholars have long analyzed as literary technologies. Rather than helping to secure experts' authority, however, I argue that the diverse literary technologies that now dominate exploration promotion and finance work have radically redistributed interpretive roles. In their struggles to mediate senses of 'crisis' endemic within venture markets, exploration experts must enact the ideals undergirding new regulatory requirements even as they learn to defer to the speculative musings of others.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"281-304"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41240736","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

Checking correctness in mathematical peer review. 在数学同行评审中检查正确性。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Epub Date: 2023-09-30 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231200274

Christian Greiffenhagen

{"title":"Checking correctness in mathematical peer review.","authors":"Christian Greiffenhagen","doi":"10.1177/03063127231200274","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231200274","url":null,"abstract":"Mathematics is often treated as different from other disciplines, since arguments in the field rely on deductive proof rather than empirical evidence as in the natural sciences. A mathematical paper can therefore, at least in principle, be replicated simply by reading it. While this distinction is sometimes taken as the basis to claim that the results in mathematics are therefore certain, mathematicians themselves know that the published literature contains many mistakes. Reading a proof is not easy, and checking whether an argument constitutes a proof is surprisingly difficult. This article uses peer review of submissions to mathematics journals as a site where referees are explicitly concerned with checking whether a paper is correct and therefore could be published. Drawing on 95 qualitative interviews with mathematics journal editors, as well as a collection of more than 100 referee reports and other correspondence from peer review processes, this article establishes that while mathematicians acknowledge that peer review does not guarantee correctness, they still value it. For mathematicians, peer review 'adds a bit of certainty', especially in contrast to papers only submitted to preprint servers such as arXiv. Furthermore, during peer review there can be disagreements not just regarding the importance of a result, but also whether a particular argument constitutes a proof or not (in particular, whether there are substantial gaps in the proof). Finally, the mathematical community is seen as important when it comes to accepting arguments as proofs and assigning certainty to results. Publishing an argument in a peer-reviewed journal is often only the first step in having a result accepted. Results get accepted if they stand the test of time and are used by other mathematicians.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"184-209"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10981185/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41160928","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}

引用次数: 0

The improvised expert: Staging authority at an OECD Nuclear Energy Agency workshop in Fukushima 即兴专家：在经合组织核能机构福岛研讨会上树立权威

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-03-05 DOI: 10.1177/03063127241231822

Makoto Takahashi

{"title":"The improvised expert: Staging authority at an OECD Nuclear Energy Agency workshop in Fukushima","authors":"Makoto Takahashi","doi":"10.1177/03063127241231822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241231822","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, concerns about a crisis of expert authority have been expressed across the globe. Japan is no exception to this trend. Scandals surrounding the (mis)management of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster severely damaged public confidence in state institutions, posing an additional challenge for those engaged in radiological protection. This article examines how claims to expert authority are made in these conditions of low public trust. To this end, I offer an ethnographic account of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA) Workshop on Post-Accident Food Safety Science—an event staged at the request of the Japanese Cabinet Office with the aim of inspiring confidence in Fukushima produce. I analyse the practices through which the organizers craft a credible public persona using the idiom of dramaturgical improvisation; drawing attention to the ‘performed resourcefulness’ with which they adapted extant institutional scripts in response to a discerned crisis of public reason. Concretely, improvisation invites us to consider how and why nuclear policy actors have sought to demarcate two variants of the deficit model: the (psychological) discourse of ‘radiophobia’ and the (economic) discourse of ‘reputational damage’. Where prior scholarship has identified the continuities between the two discourses, an attention to this boundary work reveals the dramaturgical advantages of ‘reputational damage’ over ‘radiophobia’ in contesting critics’ claims to the mantle of victimhood, securing international support, and producing the expert’s body as a site of evidence.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140045514","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

Close to the metal: Towards a material political economy of the epistemology of computation. 接近金属：迈向计算认识论的物质政治经济学。

IF 3 2区社会学

Social Studies of Science Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Epub Date: 2023-07-10 DOI: 10.1177/03063127231185095

Ludovico Rella

{"title":"Close to the metal: Towards a material political economy of the epistemology of computation.","authors":"Ludovico Rella","doi":"10.1177/03063127231185095","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231185095","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the role of the materiality of computation in two domains: blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). Although historically designed as parallel computing accelerators for image rendering and videogames, graphics processing units (GPUs) have been instrumental in the explosion of both cryptoasset mining and machine learning models. The political economy associated with video games and Bitcoin and Ethereum mining provided a staggering growth in performance and energy efficiency and this, in turn, fostered a change in the epistemological understanding of AI: from rules-based or symbolic AI towards the matrix multiplications underpinning connectionism, machine learning and neural nets. Combining a material political economy of markets with a material epistemology of science, the article shows that there is no clear-cut division between software and hardware, between instructions and tools, and between frameworks of thought and the material and economic conditions of possibility of thought itself. As the microchip shortage and the growing geopolitical relevance of the hardware and semiconductor supply chain come to the fore, the paper invites social scientists to engage more closely with the materialities and hardware architectures of 'virtual' algorithms and software.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"3-29"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10832340/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9764225","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}

引用次数: 0