Science,Technology,& Human Values

In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan–Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinary hierarchies of value affect the distribution of labor between Uganda and Australia and thematize the role of place and its affective atmospheres that texture the quotidian scientific work in this project. Unsurprisingly, they tend to devalue Ugandan sites and contributions, and turn Uganda into a rather unlikely site for new insights to emerge. However, in spite of doing devalued and outsourced “menial” labor such as fieldwork, Ugandan biologists’ fieldwork involves affective encounters with their experimental banana plants that thereby become differently thinkable. The paper argues that attending to affective atmospheres that infuse research sites offers clues about scientists’ position in global hierarchies and at the same time can help make room for insights that emanate from unexpected places.

Technology flows are becoming increasingly diverse in the twenty-first century, calling for an update of concepts and frameworks. Reflecting on the inherent tensions of technology transfer, including its technocratic dreams, insensitivity to technological materiality, and narrow focus on certain human actors, we propose technology translation as a complementary conceptual framework to understand traveling technologies. Taking a socio-technical approach, technology translation views artifacts as socially shaped with distributed agency, which makes technology flows unstable and unpredictable. In so doing, we develop a typology to explain five technology flow scenarios, shedding new light on the mechanisms of technology traveling by foregrounding the role of translators. Last, we discuss the politics of translation and elaborate how technology translation opens new space to engage with the complexity and uncertainty of technology flows, especially in the Global South.

In its “deliberative turn,” the field of science and technology studies (STS) has strongly advocated opening up decision-making processes around science and technology to more perspectives and knowledges. While the theory of democracy underpinning this is rarely explicitly addressed, the language and ideas used are often drawn from deliberative democracy. Using the case of synthetic biology and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), this paper looks at challenges of public engagement and finds parallels in long-standing critiques of deliberative democracy. The paper suggests that STS scholars explore other theories of decision-making and explores what an RRI grounded in agonistic pluralism might entail. An agonistic RRI could develop empirical research around questions of power relations in contemporary science and technology, seek to facilitate the formation of political publics around relevant issues, and frame different actors’ stances as adversarial positions on a political field rather than “equally valid” perspectives.

This paper explores an informal acoustic method developed by a group of industrial geologists working in geothermal energy landscapes in the southwest of Iceland. Through a series of ethnographic descriptions, this paper renders the work these geologists carry out in sonic terms, emphasizing how they use their bodies as sonic detectors in the production of geological evidence. Sound, the paper argues, is what allows geologists to make the intractable problem of volcanic cooling doable. It does this by differentiating two forms of evidence. Primary evidence, which ends up as data in geological reports, and secondary sonic evidence, which is what establishes that this primary evidence is, in fact, evidence. The paper introduces the concept data echoes as a way to think about how sound articulates between these evidential protocols. As echo, sound works as an outside, which, while remaining external to official protocols of knowledge production, nevertheless helps to constitute distinctions that are meaningful to the production of those categories. As data echoes through the various moments of data capture, analysis, and model building, sound’s temporal form helps to predict the time frame of volcanic cooling, as it affects both the immediate energy production scenarios and the long durée of volcanic time.

Prediction plays a vital role in every branch of our contemporary lives. While the credibility of quantitative simulations through mathematical modeling may seem to be universal, how they are perceived and embedded in policy processes may vary by society. Investigating the ecology of quantitative prediction tools, this article articulates the cultural specificity of Japanese society through the concept of Jasanoff’s “civic epistemology.” Taking COVID-19 and nuclear disasters as examples, this article examines how predictive simulations are mobilized, contested, and abandoned. In both cases, current empirical observation eventually replaces predictive future simulations, and mechanical application of preset criteria substitutes political judgment. These analyses suggest that the preferred register of objectivity in Japan—one of the constitutive dimensions of civic epistemology—consists not in producing numerical results, but in precluding human judgment. Such public calls to eliminate human agency both in knowledge and in policy-making can be a distinct character of Japanese civic epistemology, which may explain why Japan repeatedly withdraws from predictive simulations. It implies the possibility that Western societies’ faith in human judgment should not be taken for granted, but explained.

This study explains why and how Puerto Rican activists responded effectively to the crisis in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017. By relying on a structural approach, this study analyzes the local institutional environment. Using the seamful work framework, it examines activists’ practice to reveal activists’ relation with their official state infrastructure and their interactions with said infrastructure before and after Maria. Using semi-structured interviews, observations, and publicly available documents, this study shows that activists navigate the state’s unequal infrastructure by building their infrastructures, called alternative sociotechnical infrastructures, which consist of a set of heterogeneous assortments of actors, organizations, and technologies to address state-driven inequality and natural disasters. Activists do not work to restore existing state infrastructures, instead, they deploy their expertise in their communities to address many of the challenges brought on by disasters. This study emphasizes a bottom-up approach, highlighting local actors’ agency by focusing on the convergence of their knowledge, organizations, and Information and Communication Technologies. Moreover, this research proposes that state-community disconnect is rooted in neoliberal and colonial measures and cautions against considering disasters as opportunities to start anew. Finally, this research proposes new possibilities to plan bottom-up relief efforts that acknowledge the role of civil society and activists.

The more digital democracy applications lower the costs of political participation, allowing ordinary citizens to propose their own policy initiatives, the more they increase the burden of decision for the very same citizens, who are required to debate and vote on many issues. Drawing from this paradox, this article considers how the designers and administrators of six popular decision-making software (DMS) have introduced software features and norms of use whose function is to reduce the aggregate burden of decision for participants in digital democracy initiatives (DDIs). Building upon Andrew Feenberg’s definition of the design code of technology as a technical stabilization of social demands, this article considers how different DMS stabilize the democratic interventions of a plurality of actors, affecting political equality along two axes of the democratic process: the relationship between the exchange of opinions and the synthesis of opinion and the relationship between agenda setting and voting. This article concludes that the design code of digital democracy software reflects an ongoing tension between the need of governing actors to make the democratic process manageable and the pressure of social actors to make it more equal and inclusive.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of an initiative to establish a Community of Practice on citizen engagement at the European Commission’s (EC) Joint Research Centre (JRC). This initiative is one of the more recent attempts to institutionally stabilize citizen engagement in policy-making processes within the EC; such attempts are visible, for instance, in the political agenda of Ursula von der Leyen, whose sixth priority is a “new push for European democracy.” Drawing on science and technology studies literature, this paper directs attention to models of participation and democracy visible in particular engagement activities and to the overarching rationales for engagement. We explore the sociomaterial engagement collectives that emerge in the practices and accounts of actors involved in establishing this CoP and show how these engagement collectives at the supra-national research service JRC are co-constitutive with the wider institutional settings and cultural–political configurations of the EC.