{"title":"The routinization of lay expertise: A diachronic account of the invention and stabilization of an open-source artificial pancreas.","authors":"Clay Davis","doi":"10.1177/03063127231214237","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231214237","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Embodied health movements (EHMs) advance their agendas by mediating the production, circulation, and revision of biomedical knowledge. To do this, their constituents become lay experts by blending their embodied experience of illness with self-taught technical knowledge. However, it is unclear how lay expertise is routinized within EHMs, and consequently, to what extent it can be made durable in long-term partnerships with credentialed experts. I follow the OpenAPS community-a group of people with type one diabetes who engineered an open-source 'artificial pancreas'-from their inception in the transient #WeAreNotWaiting movement to their research collaborations with endocrinologists and detente with the FDA. I argue that OpenAPS user-contributors formalized their expertise in three steps: First, they broke the OpenAPS algorithm into modules so that prospective users must become experts to assemble it. Second, they lowered this barrier to entry by facilitating the socialization of new user-contributors with a training ritual. And third, they intervened in the strained endocrinologist-patient relationship. These tactics-<i>restricting</i> membership, <i>reproducing</i> expertise, and <i>realigning</i> interests-won the respect of credentialled experts who saw themselves in the OpenAPS community's image. While not all EHMs follow this trajectory, this case demonstrates that lay expertise can mature and assume new institutional forms without relying on commercialization or patronage.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"626-652"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139049738","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":"Domesticating data: Traveling and value-making in the data economy.","authors":"Clémence Pinel, Mette N Svendsen","doi":"10.1177/03063127231212506","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231212506","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Data are versatile objects that can travel across contexts. While data's travels have been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the sites from where and to which data flow. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in two connected data-intensive laboratories and the concept of domestication, we explore what it takes to bring data 'home' into the laboratory. As data come and dwell in the home, they are made to follow rituals, and as a result, data are reshaped and form ties with the laboratory and its practitioners. We identify four main ways of domesticating data. First, through <i>storytelling</i> about the data's origins, data practitioners draw the boundaries of their laboratory. Second, through <i>standardization</i>, staff transform samples into digital data that can travel well while ruling what data can be let into the home. Third, through <i>formatting</i>, data practitioners become familiar with their data and at the same time imprint the data, thus making them belong to their home. Finally, through <i>cultivation</i>, staff turn data into a resource for knowledge production. Through the lens of domestication, we see the data economy as a collection of homes connected by flows, and it is because data are tamed and attached to homes that they become valuable knowledge tools. Such domestication practices also have broad implications for staff, who in the process of 'homing' data, come to belong to the laboratory. To conclude, we reflect on what these domestication processes-which silence unusual behaviours in the data-mean for the knowledge produced in data-intensive research.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"429-450"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11119098/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138441670","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":"How scientists become experts-or don't: Social organization of research and engagement in scientific advice in a toxicology laboratory.","authors":"David Demortain","doi":"10.1177/03063127231204578","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231204578","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Certain fields of research are deeply shaped by their proximity with policy-makers and administrations. The so-called 'regulatory sciences' and their corresponding expert communities emerge from this intermediary space between science and policy. Social studies of expertise and scientific experts show, however, that modes of engagement with policy-making vary greatly from one scientist to another. Two scientists that are part of the same research group or laboratory may engage the policy realm differently. How then does the social organization of research influence scientists' participation in scientific advice and the production of regulatory sciences? The paper looks at toxicology, a field in which knowledge production is centrally motivated by risk assessment, but one that has also seen the emergence of different knowledge-making motives, including advancement of fundamental knowledge and frontier research. A toxicology laboratory may thus harbor a diversity of moral economies of scientific advice. The paper argues that scientists' engagements with policy, through scientific advice and regulatory risk assessment, create organizational tensions and force changes to the standard, team-based social organization of research work.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"405-428"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66784584","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}
Carlos Cuevas-Garcia, Federica Pepponi, Sebastian M Pfotenhauer
{"title":"Maintaining innovation: How to make sewer robots and innovation policy work in Barcelona.","authors":"Carlos Cuevas-Garcia, Federica Pepponi, Sebastian M Pfotenhauer","doi":"10.1177/03063127231207082","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231207082","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investigates the relationship between innovation and maintenance and repair. This literature argues that the obsession with innovation crowds out attention to maintenance, that innovation creates future obligations of maintenance that are often not factored into technological promises, and that ordinary maintenance and repair practices are often innovative in their own right. Empirically, we explore a case where maintenance and repair become the explicit target of high-level, high-tech innovation initiatives and how, as a result, innovation logics colonize maintenance practices. Conceptually, we explore how repair and maintenance sensitivities can be applied to innovation practices to reveal the invisible work needed to align innovation instruments with socio-material and institutional configurations. Drawing on an in-depth case study of sewer inspection robots in Barcelona, we find that attempts to innovate maintenance require a symmetric effort to maintain innovation. In our case study, innovation processes as deployed by the European Commission, research consortia, and companies required substantial repair work to function reliably in specific settings. Our study shows how divergent understandings of the public good in innovation and maintenance contexts may lead to significant tensions, and that much can be gained analytically from not treating innovation and maintenance as opposites.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"352-376"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11119103/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138441703","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":"Listening for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker: Sonic geography and the making of extinction knowledge.","authors":"Hannah Hunter","doi":"10.1177/03063127231214501","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231214501","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>If an apparently extinct bird calls in a forest, and there are people there to hear it-to record it, even-is it still extinct? The Ivory-billed Woodpecker was last 'officially' seen in the United States in 1944, but its extinction continues to be a subject of intense debate between conservation authorities, scientists, and grassroots activists. Tensions peaked around 2005, when scientists from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology announced their rediscovery of the species. However, their evidence received significant challenge from other ornithologists, and this apparent rediscovery has since been generally dismissed. In 2021, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service recommended the ivorybill be declared officially extinct. Still, many people continue to trawl the Southeastern forests in search of ivorybills. In this article, I investigate the methods, debates, and results of efforts to locate this species, with a focus on sound. In doing so, I explore the interconnected roles of sound and space in the making of extinction knowledge. Sonic search methods of listening, sounding, and translating are core ways that searchers attempt to attune to, communicate with, and establish evidence of ivorybills. Additionally, sonic search practices are critical spaces of negotiation and contestation between different searchers, between searchers and ivorybills, and between searchers and skeptics. Ultimately, this article argues that sonic geographies affect the production of extinction knowledge, and vice versa-extinction knowledge making practices produce distinct sonic geographies.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"325-351"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11118777/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138805871","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}
Robert Dj Smith, Stefan Schäfer, Michael J Bernstein
{"title":"Governing beyond the project: Refocusing innovation governance in emerging science and technology funding.","authors":"Robert Dj Smith, Stefan Schäfer, Michael J Bernstein","doi":"10.1177/03063127231205043","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231205043","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article analyses how a recent idiom of innovation governance, 'responsible innovation', is enacted in practice, how this shapes innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation are left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed by this context. Adopting a mode of critique that assembles, this article considers some alternative approaches to governing the shared trajectories of science, technology, and society. Using the idea of institutional invention to focus innovation governance on four inflection points-agendas, calls, spaces, evaluation-would allow funding organizations and researchers to look 'beyond the project', developing new methods to unpack and reflect on assumed purposes of science, technology, and innovation, and to potentially reconfigure the institutions that condition scientific practice.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"377-404"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11118785/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136400182","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":"Health policy counterpublics: Enacting collective resistances to US molecular HIV surveillance and cluster detection and response programs.","authors":"Stephen Molldrem, Anthony K J Smith","doi":"10.1177/03063127231211933","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231211933","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Health policies and the problems they constitute are deeply shaped by multiple publics. In this article we conceptualize <i>health policy counterpublics</i>: temporally bounded socio-political forms that aim to cultivate particular modes of conduct, generally to resist trajectories set by arms of the state. These counterpublics often emerge from existing social movements and involve varied forms of activism and advocacy. We examine a health policy counterpublic that has arisen in response to new forms of HIV public health surveillance by drawing on public documents and interview data from 2021 with 26 stakeholders who were critical of key policy developments. Since 2018, the national rollout of molecular HIV surveillance (MHS) and cluster detection and response (CDR) programs in the United States has produced sustained controversies among HIV stakeholders, including among organized networks of people living with HIV. This article focuses on how a health policy counterpublic formed around MHS/CDR and how constituents problematized the policy agenda set in motion by federal health agencies, including in relation to data ethics, the meaningful involvement of affected communities, informed consent, the digitization of health systems, and HIV criminalization. Although familiar problems in HIV policymaking, concerns about these issues have been reconfigured in response to the new sociotechnical milieu proffered by MHS/CDR, generating new critical positions aiming to remake public health. Critical attention to the scenes within which health policy controversies play out ought to consider how (counter)publics are made, how problems are constituted, and the broader social movement dynamics and activist resources drawn upon to contest and reimagine policymaking in public life.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"451-477"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11118791/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138489046","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":"Equivocal diagnostics: Making a ‘good’ point-of-care test for elimination in global health","authors":"Alice Street, Emma Michelle Taylor","doi":"10.1177/03063127241246727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127241246727","url":null,"abstract":"What is a diagnostic test for? We might assume the answer to this question is straightforward. A good test would help identify what disease someone suffers from, assist health providers to determine the correct course of treatment and/or enable public health authorities to know and intervene in health at the level of the population. In this article, we show that what a specific diagnostic test is for, the value it holds for different actors, and what makes it good, or not, is often far from settled. We tell the story of the development and design of a rapid antibody test for onchocerciasis, or river blindness, tracking multiple iterations of the device through three configurational moments in the framing of onchocerciasis disease and reshaping of the global health innovation ecosystem. Efforts to build that ecosystem for diagnostics are often premised on the notion that public health needs for diagnostics are pre-given and stable; the challenge is seen to be how to incentivize investment and find a customer base for diagnostics in under-resourced settings. By contrast, we show that for any disease, diagnostic needs are both multiple and constantly in flux, and are unlikely to be met by a single, stand-alone product. In the case of the onchocerciasis Ov-16 rapid test, the failure to recognize and address the multiplicity and instability of diagnostic needs in the innovation process resulted in the development of a rapid point of care test that might be manufactured, procured and used, but is unloved by public health experts and commercial manufacturers alike. The equivocal value of the onchocerciasis rapid test, we suggest, reveals the inadequacy of the current global health innovation ecosystem for developing diagnostic ‘goods’.","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":"9 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140643229","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":"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}
{"title":"Unclearing the air: Data's unexpected limitations for environmental advocacy.","authors":"Dawn Nafus","doi":"10.1177/03063127231201169","DOIUrl":"10.1177/03063127231201169","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>What makes one dataset powerful for civic advocacy, and another fall flat? Drawing from a citizen science project on environmental health, I argue that there is an underacknowledged quality of datasets-their topology-that shapes the social, cultural, and political possibilities they can sustain or subvert. Data topologies are formal qualities of a dataset that connect data collectors' intentions with the types of calculations that can and cannot be performed. This configures how numerical arguments are made, and the sociotechnical imaginaries those arguments sustain or subvert. The citizen science project's data topology made any easy notion of shared exposure to pollutants, or singular health effects, unravel. The data appeared to tell a story of atypicality at scale, where each person suffers differently from different exposure. Lacking a central tendency, or pockets of tendency disproportionately carried by different subgroups, it became it harder, not easier, for citizen scientists to use data in regulatory contexts, where dominant sociotechnical imaginaries conceive of difference in epidemiological and toxicological terms.</p>","PeriodicalId":51152,"journal":{"name":"Social Studies of Science","volume":" ","pages":"163-183"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41219613","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}