{"title":"Making sense of Nordicness, or making Nordicness?","authors":"Kristine Ask, M. Antonsen, A. Johansen","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V1I1.2120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V1I1.2120","url":null,"abstract":"What is Nordic? Does it make sense to talk about Nordic Science and Technology Studies (STS)? If so, what kind of contributions could Nordic perspectives give to global STS and other disciplines? And what elements of the international field of STS are being developed and honed by Nordic scholars?","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DISABILITY AND BUREAUCRATIC FORMS OF LIFE","authors":"T. Abrams","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2153","url":null,"abstract":"This paper employs a hybrid actor-network theory/phenomenological approach to a frequent bother in the lives of disabled persons: bureaucratic forms. I argue that these forms are key sites where disabled personhood emerges, something I examine through the lens of what philosopher Annemarie Mol calls ‘ontological politics’. To be disabled is to be entered into the bureaucratic form of life. These forms translate human existence into a categorize-able, transportable and combinable object, to be administered through ‘centers of calculation’. Combining Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with Latour’s theory of paperwork, I suggest that these forms represent disability in terms of ‘objective presence’, as a mere pre-existing thing, rather than a human way of being. I conclude with suggestions for further phenomenological research that takes embodied difference as its point of departure.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"12-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From ethics of restriction to ethics of construction: ELSA research in Norway","authors":"R. Nydal, A. Myhr, B. Myskja","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2155","url":null,"abstract":"Current trends in ELSA policies are marked by keywords like collaboration, integration and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). This article analyzes how these trends have manifested themselves in Norway with the aim to find ways to understand and respond adequately to these policy developments. Recent criticisms of ELSA strategies accompanied by arguments for a turn towards ‘post-ELSI’ research approaches hold that ELSA research was designed to maintain a sharp unproductive normative division of labor between natural scientists on the one hand and ELSA researchers on the other hand. ELSA strategies consequently have to be overcome and restructured towards collaboration, integration and RRI. Our account of the Norwegian ELSA history does not support this simple analysis of the ‘modernist’ character of early ELSA strategies. We present and analyze a shift as it took place in two successive ELSA programs in the Research Council of Norway, and argue that ELSA policies that rest only on post-ELSI analyses, risk reinventing the wheel of collaboration. By insisting on the creation of novel designing strategies, one disregards important lessons from the early phases of ELSA research, and even more importantly, fails to recognize that an ethics of construction implies different challenges for different groups of ELSA researchers.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"34-45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What’s in a slogan? Translational science and the rhetorical work of cancer researchers in a UK university","authors":"A. Rushforth","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V4I1.2170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V4I1.2170","url":null,"abstract":"Translational science is currently proving a highly influential term in framing how biomedical research is promoted and evaluated in a great number of countries. Although there has been a steady trickle of scholarly literature on the topic, the performative uses effects of the term in practices of academic researchers has been under-researched. Drawing on interviews with members of a cancer laboratory and research institute in a UK research university, the paper analyzes various uses and contexts in which the slogan is deployed. The findings demonstrate the multi-dimensional uses of the term across different levels of the organisation, acting at one level as a managerial function for formulating an ‘impact’ narrative, whilst also fulfilling researcher requirements to satisfy demands made of them in pursuing funding and positions. Analyzing how this specific slogan functions in this site evokes a wider set of considerations about the kinds of rhetoric invoked and increasingly expected of cancer scientists in academic settings.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"32-42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Writing ‘naturecultures’ in Zulu Zionist healing","authors":"Rune Flikke","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V2I1.2131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V2I1.2131","url":null,"abstract":"In this article my primary aim is to argue for an ontological and phenomenological approach to studying healing rituals within the African Independent Churches in South Africa. Through ethnographic evidence I will argue that the healing rituals are misrepresented in more traditional epistemologically tuned studies, and suggest that a better understanding is to be achieved through a focus on Latour’s ‘natures-cultures’ or Haraway’s ‘naturecultures’, thus showing how health and well-being are achieved through a creative process which continuously strive to break down any distinction of nature and culture as separate entities. I conclude by arguing that the contemporary healing rituals, which surfaced in South Africa in the mid eighteen-seventies, were a sensible and experience based reactions to the colonial contact zones of a racist Colonial regime dependent on African labor.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"2 1","pages":"12-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nature and texts in glass cases: The vitrine as a tool for textualizing nature","authors":"Brita Brenna","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V2I1.2136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V2I1.2136","url":null,"abstract":"What can glass cases teach us about how nature is written or read? This article seeks to understand the work done by glass cases in Bergen Museum in Norway around 1900 specifically, and more generally how glass cases was an important tool for making natural history museums into textual media. In this article it is claimed that when we focus on how natural history museums manufacture culturally specific museum nature, it is a legacy of a reform movement that set out to “discipline” museum nature around 1900 in order to make nature legible for “everyman”. An important museum movement by the end of the nineteenth century worked to make natural museums into places were one could learn by reading, not by touching or engaging with the natural objects, qua objects. This insistence on making nature readable, it is claimed, should make us cautious about analysing natural history museums as texts.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"2 1","pages":"46-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Assembling climate knowledge. The role of local expertise","authors":"J. Solli, M. Ryghaug","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V2I2.2151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V2I2.2151","url":null,"abstract":"The difference between indigenous knowledge and western science continues to be a central theme in the social studies of science. This paper investigates the use of climate knowledge in climate adaptation activities. The analysis is based on a case study of indigenous experts involved in practical operations dealing with risk of avalanches in an area particularly vulnerable to avalanches in northern Norway. We find that indigenous knowledge held by local area experts and western science overlap. From this we develop two lines of argument. Firstly that assemblages of climate adaptation is produced as collaborative guesswork related to coupling and negotiation of different types of knowledge in a decision context. Secondly, we discuss what such a practice means for the understanding of the relationship between climate knowledge and climate policy. By following different assemblages of climate knowledge we point to an alternative way of understanding a process of policy shaping in relation to climate adaptation: a sideways policy shaping process where what gets included or excluded and what is considered internal or external to a decision making context becomes evident.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"2 1","pages":"18-28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Cultures and Artscience. Interdisciplinarity and Discourses of “Twos” and “Threes” after Snow’s Two Cultures","authors":"N. Vaage","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2152","url":null,"abstract":"At least since C.P. Snow’s seminal Rede lecture The Two Cultures, the idea of a significant difference in kind between the natural sciences and the arts and humanities has been prevalent in Western culture. A gap has been perceived to exist not only in methodology and theory, but more fundamentally, in understandings and worldviews. This has resulted in a dichotomous debate both in academic and media discourses. As a reaction to this, and parallel in time, some actors have strived to achieve a ‘third culture’. This is a common attitude in the still emerging field of ‘artscience’, whose actors seek to combine the advantages and knowledges of the sciences with those of the arts and humanities. Researchers from every concerned field have contributed to the exploration of the interface between ‘art’ and ‘science’. However, I argue in this article that the very term artscience, in simply joining together the words ‘art’ and ’science’, is reenforcing an old notion of a binary opposition between these two fields. The idea of ‘two cultures’, still implied within the image of a ‘third culture’, disguises the plurality of perceptions and approaches within and across fields. While useful in pointing out lack of communication between fields, it tends to overemphasize divisions, ignore complexities, and, in some cases, leave out important parts of the picture. I suggest that the discourse of the ‘third culture’ and the term ‘artscience’ may jointly occlude the multiple possible constellations of practitioners, roles and approaches, and may be a potential limitation to interdisciplinary collaborations.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"3-11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stealing from Bakhtin: Writing the Voices of the ”Voiceless”","authors":"Guro Flinterud","doi":"10.5324/njsts.v2i1.2139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/njsts.v2i1.2139","url":null,"abstract":"This essay investigates an approach to writing about animals within the humanities. The goal is to focus attention on animals as actors, rather than speaking on their behalf. By combining Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres with Donna Haraway’s perspectives on co-habitation between all species, I suggest that a careful attention to animals as communication partners might give us a tool to capture the contribution animals make in the creation of history and culture. Two examples will be provided to illustrate this concept: The first example is a media story about celebrity polar bear Knut. The second example is an oral account of human-animal interaction in the zoo.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"68 1","pages":"71-76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Democracy or war? The communication and deliberation of the climate issue online.","authors":"T. Skjølsvold, M. Ryghaug, Eirik Frøhaug Swensen","doi":"10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5324/NJSTS.V3I1.2154","url":null,"abstract":"For years, technology optimists have hoped that the internet might serve as a vehicle for democratization. Meanwhile, many STS-scholars have called for a democratization of scientific practices through increased transparency and inclusion of lay-persons in scientific knowledge production. Many expect this to result in increased scientific quality and more legitimate knowledge claims. In this article, we explore what happens when science related communication moves online. Do climate scientists and climate ‘skeptics’ use the internet to engage lay persons in factual deliberations and debate? Does the rise of the internet as a channel of science communication herald a new, democratic scientific era? Our paper suggests that such claims should be made with caution. Instead we identify two ways that the internet is used by climate scientists. First, it is a tool to fight a cold war with climate skeptics, a dynamic which is hidden from public view. Second, it is a site of education, where ready-made packets of facts should be transported to lay-people to mitigate perceived knowledge deficits. This strategy is mimicked by climate skeptics who attempt to make their communication appear more scientific than the scientists.","PeriodicalId":91145,"journal":{"name":"Nordic journal of science and technology studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"22-33"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70787601","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}