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<jats:p> Few authors have investigated the origins of green chemistry (GC). Most literature relies on a narrative of its birth at the US Environmental Protection Agency in the 1990s through the original work by Paul Anastas and John Warner and the successful networking and institutionalizing activities that followed. However, this perspective has two drawbacks: it fails to consider the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) political background (without which individual action would not have been possible), and it highlights a contradiction between the revolutionary theoretical message of the founders of GC and their strategy of promotion, which is uncritical of “brown” chemistry and excludes participation by civil society and the public. I argue that GC is not only the success of enthusiastic individuals who took advantage of existing political resources to promote a new vision of greening research and innovation but is also an expression of major political changes and a tool for managing chemical risks at the EPA in the 1990s. Using the concept of “design,” I argue that GC is a tool illustrating the EPA’s comanagement approach with the regulated industry. The paper sheds light on how authorities react to the difficulties of regulating chemical risks. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Over the past thirty years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understanding, critiquing, and intervening in complex social inequalities. Emerging from critical race and feminist studies, intersectionality has many shared analytic priorities with science and technology studies (STS), including an emphasis on co-emergent social forces, historical contingency, and interventions that challenge and enhance knowledge production. Despite these shared affinities, STS and intersectionality remain largely nonoverlapping scholarly discourses. Based on a systematic review of intersectionality in eight STS journals, we observe a slight increase in intersectionality’s usage over time but find that its relevance is contained largely to venues outside of the STS mainstream. Our study identifies some ways STS scholars have modeled intersectionality’s responsible use through citation practices, methodological integration, and normative claims about justice/injustice. We also consider what epistemic exclusion of intersectionality might foreclose. We argue that increased use of intersectionality would amplify engagement with justice in STS work, not only by introducing new questions and theoretical frames but also opening possibilities for new interdisciplinary formations. This is not simply an argument for greater inclusion of a term, but rather for transformation in epistemic accountability toward feminist studies and other social justice–oriented fields. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Data have become a vital device of border governance and security. Recent scholarship on the datafication of borders and migration at the intersection of science and technology studies and critical security studies has privileged concepts attuned to messiness, contingency, and friction such as data assemblages and infrastructures. This paper proposes to revisit and expand the analytical vocabulary of script analysis to understand what comes to count as data, what forms of data come to matter and how “drawing data together” reconfigures power and agency at Europe’s borders. Empirically, we analyze controversies about the practices of asylum decision-making and age assessment in Greece. We show that agency of “users” is unequally distributed through anticipations of subscription and dis-inscription, while asylum seekers are conscripted within security scripts that restrict their agency. Moreover, as a multiplicity of inscriptions are produced, migrants’ claims can be disqualified through circumscriptions of data and ascriptions of expertise. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This paper presents a heuristic tool aiming at bringing the multiple dimensions of interdisciplinarity (ID) and transdisciplinarity (TD) into direct conversation for researchers, funders, and policymakers. These societal actors have divergent conceptions, definitions, and practices of ID and TD that can be fruitfully put into dialogue to prosecute successful projects and programs. We anchor our study on the concept of “knowledge regime” and its three components (ideologies and myths, shared beliefs and practices, and imaginaries and values) to develop a comprehensive view of the heterogeneous understandings of ID and TD that goes beyond the cognitive dimension. Founded on a qualitative methodology, we designed a heuristic tool to disentangle this heterogeneity and bridge the different understandings in a comparable way. Through a semi-structured dialogue, users of the tool discuss ten questions that guide reflections on understandings of ID and TD used in projects, funding programs, and policy processes and their implications to reveal differences and increase mutual understanding. The findings offer details on the tool and systematize insights from those users who tested it in different contexts. We conclude by discussing the contribution this heuristic tool makes when considering ID and TD as knowledge regimes in the scientific and policy domains. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay is written in the wake of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, grounded in the Cold War–Doctrine of National Security which understood Indigenous people as “internal enemy.” People who joined social movements were also seeking security: bodily integrity, land, a living wage. For Indigenous people, it was security to be who they are: speaking their languages, practicing their spirituality and lifeways. Before, during, and after the war, hydroelectric projects have been identified with security, given their promises of light and progress. I explore how “scripts” like Race, The State, Citizenship, and The Plantation are inscribed into such objects and how obdurate such prescriptions are. Yet Akrich says that users may define quite different roles of their own. If this happens the objects remain a chimera (p. 208). Through several moments over the last seventy years in Guatemala, I show how various forms of “security”—bodily, communal, productive, national, and financial—are at stake and how hydroelectrics are always under contestation, always chimera. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Anthropogenic pressures now shape the development, interrelations, and evolution of microbes, plants, animals, and humans. In an age of oxidative stress and failures of DNA repair, cytokine storms and microbial dysbiosis, social scientific theory stutters in the face of biological consequences of forces it masterfully detailed, from biopower to looping kinds. Concepts of the fallibility of knowledge from the unanticipated consequence to the wicked problem are too generic to fathom the nature of the living within reconfigured biotic-abiotic relations in the aftermath of industrialization. Working through examples—genetic modification in weed control, and solvents in cryobiology—this paper offers a novel analytic for anthropogenic biology specific to the relations between knowledge and life in the wake of the industrial twentieth century: a novel patterning of living matter and process from the molecular to the ecological arising with forms of biological control. Changes in pathogens and hosts, targets and bystanders are specific to the form of control but not anticipated by it, illegible within its originating logics. Hubris gone moldy, anthropogenic biology grows from forms of power that overestimate the comprehensiveness of their own efficacy, mistaking the ability to temporarily control living things for full knowledge of them. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of Warwick Anderson's 2023 Bernal Lecture. </jats:p>