Science,Technology,& Human Values

This study was designed to find out what scientists and science students actually do when they are reading familiar and unfamiliar graphs. This study provides rich details of the subtle changes in the ontologies (ensemble of elements perceptually available) of scientists and science students as they engage in the reading tasks assigned to them. In the course of the readers’ interpretation work, initially unspecified marks on paper (“ its ”) are turned into objects with particular topologies that are said to correspond to specific features in the world. We theorize this interpretive work as a transition of graphs from things to signs that come to stand for natural objects. Especially among physicists and theoretical ecologists, graphs enter new relations and become natural objects in their own right.

This article examines the main approaches to public understanding of science (PUS) in light of recent developments in social and cultural theory. While traditional and critical perspectives on PUS differ in terms of their models of the public, science, and understanding, they nevertheless share a number of commonalities, which are humanism (an emphasis on the pure person), incorporeality (a neglect of embodiment), and discrete sites (science and the public are presupposed as separate entities). These are contrasted, respectively, to versions of the person as hybridic, to treatments of embodiment drawing especially on Whitehead’s notion of prehension, and to a rhizomic view of science and public as interwoven. Throughout, it is stressed that the alternatives posed do not constitute an accusation of deficit on the part of traditional and critical PUS. Some research and political implications of interweaving these three perspectives are presented.

Recent research has focused on how gender and computer technology contribute to the structuring of professional roles. A case study was carried out at a long-term care facility in Winnipeg, Canada, in which a nursing unit-based automated system had been installed to control the distribution of medication to patients. A questionnaire was distributed to all nursing staff, and detailed interviews were carried out with pharmacists and nursing administrators. It was found that gender and technological change did interact to produce an ambivalent impact on professional practice and identities. New clinical pharmacy positions were established; however, the pharmacy was split into clinical and deskilled data entry positions. Nurses hoped the new system would improve medication accuracy, but they resented features that controlled their time and their autonomy. Neither group accepted the new system as a boundary object effectively linking the nursing and pharmacy departments, and it eventually was returned to the manufacturer.

This article examines HIV-positive patients’ experiences of treatments within a context characterized by the multiplicity of opinions expressed both by specialists and the public domain (media in particular). It is based upon a survey of 63 patients encountered in a Paris hospital. The authors demonstrate the contrasts between these patients in terms of two main dimensions: the degree of the patients’ proximity to specialist knowledge, and the level of homogeneousness that the patients attribute to medical know-how. At the point where these two dimensions meet, the article distinguishes between three forms of patient attitude towards treatment; in other words, three ways of simultaneously positioning oneself with regard to the media, associations, doctors and family circles/entourage: resorting to exteriority; self-integration into biomedical institutions; arranging heterogeneous actors. It analyses the transformations relating to the main experience profiles highlighted by sociological studies of other pathologies.