Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> Long considered an object of the law, Americans increasingly encounter privacy via the operations and settings of networked technologies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with privacy engineers and their corporate colleagues, this paper examines how privacy’s manifestation in web technologies opens it to pragmatic linkages with new sensuous qualities and interpretive possibilities. The paper’s primary object is Project Quantum, a company-wide effort initiated by the Mozilla Corporation in 2016 to build a new engine for its Firefox web browser, thus radically improving Firefox’s “performance.” I show that animating Project Quantum was an ideal of smooth, snappy performance that Firefox engineers understood to be keyed to the demands of user attention and attempted to establish for users as meaningful signs of Mozilla’s engineering prowess and paternalistic care. Drawing on the study of “qualia”—phenomenal experiences of abstract qualities—I identify performance engineering as a key site of privacy’s semiotic bundling with attention, through which privacy’s practically available forms are taking on idealized qualities of speed and smoothness. Attending to privacy’s qualia, I propose, provides methodological access to the institutional and global value systems reconfiguring privacy’s political capacities as it becomes an object of technological stewardship and intervention. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article considers how Marilyn Strathern’s work on Western knowledge conventions can usefully contribute to debates at the intersection of the social and neurosciences: first, to understanding the nature of work at this intersection; and second, to providing new avenues for interdisciplinary engagement. The neuroscience explosion in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century held out the promise of understanding increasingly complex phenomena in terms of the brain. As the neurosciences ventured into questions of human sociality, social scientists found it difficult to make meaningful contributions within the confines of conventional models of neuroscientific work. This highlighted the need for conceptual and methodological innovation. In this article, we illustrate how Strathern’s concept of the merographic connection, which conceptualizes the link between overlapping parts belonging to separate wholes, is a useful frame for thinking about the shared objects of the social and neurosciences. We show how her consideration of analogy as an apparatus bringing different domains together assists in understanding work in this area. With social science experiments in working with neuroscientists ongoing, Strathern’s work encourages precision about what is being brought into relationship in interdisciplinary encounters and prompts innovative thinking about what might productively be brought into association. </jats:p>

<jats:p> How are socially and politically controversial security practices materially-technologically scripted into our lives in ever-deeper ways? This essay proposes that acts of aesthetic design are at the heart of that process and are being deployed by technology corporations to “smooth” the diffusion of security practices, discourses, and politics across global space. To substantiate that claim, we make three moves. First, we propose an understanding of the “script” that returns to the roots of the concept in theater and the arts. That understanding stresses that our material-technological enmeshing is governed strongly by aesthetic and affective factors that operate through forms of resonance (rather that reason). In consequence—we argue—much of the power of technology conglomerates is linked to their capacity to harness these aesthetico-affective resonances. Second, we demonstrate this through a case study focused on the material-aesthetic design activities of Google, teasing out how it deploys aesthetic practices to extend its sociopolitical power. Third, we speculatively conclude by introducing the architect Keller Easterling’s concept of “active form” to show how conceptualizing scripts in aesthetic terms also provides insights into how security practices are diffused across global contexts, irrelevant contextual sociopolitical differences, and seemingly without any limit. </jats:p>

<jats:p> In the past thirty years, the Web has developed from its inception as a layer of protocols on top of the Internet to use by more than 5 billion people and organizations. This has driven the creation of vast quantities of data and led to deep concerns about the politics of digital data and computational methods. To date, critical investigation of these concerns has focused on large commercial platforms built on top of the Web, and their use of machine learning methods. Meanwhile, less attention has been paid to the underlying design and protocols of Web itself, and how these might be implicated in the very same process and concerns. We explore ongoing endeavors to transform the Web from a library of documents intended for humans to a “semantic Web” using symbolic artificial intelligence to enable machine reasoning across multiple heterogenous data sources. In principle, this would transform the production and circulation of knowledge at Web scale. We present the findings from an experimental, interdisciplinary study exploring the epistemological politics and sociomaterial practices involved in situated accomplishment of the semantic Web. Our findings have consequences for the future of the Web and the future of Web-based platforms. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Our daily activities rely on a proliferating number of things that are subject to decay. As stressed in a growing body of literature, repair is critical to the smooth functioning of material infrastructure. However, this scholarship has overlooked a crucial dimension: things become fragile not only due to material degradation but also as a result of regulatory change. This article introduces the notion of “legal repair” to describe how, in the face of legal change, certain actors reassemble the material world. We elaborate on this concept through an analysis of the domestication of European Union (EU) animal welfare legislation by the French pig sector. While it was feared that stricter pig housing standards would fragilize the existing farms, pig farmers complied using technical systems that failed to significantly improve animal welfare. We analyze this domestication of EU legislation as a process of legal repair. Alongside the political work of the leaders of the pig sector, agricultural advisers also played a key role. Their work reveals the relational nature of legal repair: in the production of “local specifications” matching the demands of existing farming systems, in the negotiation of the finer points of the legislation, and in the redefinition of farming performance. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The past decades have seen increasing calls to actively involve publics in the governance of science and technology. Many public engagement initiatives aim to facilitate the formation of public opinion. But what is an opinion? While the notion is often taken as self-evident, different imaginaries of what opinions are and how they should be formed are highly consequential for shaping relations between technoscience and society. Based on participant observations and interviews, we analyze how “opinion” is enacted as an emergent object and category with specific properties and uses in a series of public engagement events on genome editing. By identifying two prevalent goals tied to partially conflicting imaginaries of opinion—open deliberation and “capturing” public opinion—our analysis contributes to a more reflective understanding of the tensions that participation facilitators navigate when making opinions their central points of intervention in the coevolving relationship between technologies and their publics. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The response to the 2014-2016 West African epidemic was a watershed for emergency research and innovation, forcing a shift in regulatory norms as evidentiary standards were pitted against humanitarian imperatives and biosecurity concerns. This article examines how those ethical and epistemic negotiations unfolded in practice through the development, testing, and use of novel tools for Ebola diagnosis with a focus on Sierra Leone. We track the priorities placed on the accuracy, feasibility, and clinical efficiency of Ebola diagnostic platforms and explore how these varied over the course of the outbreak and for different actors involved in their deployment. The lack of clarity over which tools might be fit for purpose exposed the profound ambiguities around the nature, scope, and purpose of building in-country Ebola diagnostic capacity. Ultimately, we argue that the accelerated regulatory process coordinated by the World Health Organization operated as a liminal procedure that both revealed the scientific, ethical, and political trade-offs and inequalities attendant to an emerging regime of emergency research and development, and provided a tentative, reflexive platform for regulatory experimentation, deliberation, and reform. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Today, emergent space technology engages in visions of future off-world colonizing, while conservation technology is employed in ensuring the continuation of life on earth. In this article, we combine social science of outer space literature with biodiversity conservation work to analyze how utopian visions of off-world futures and dystopian visions of earth entangle in technoscientific future-making practices. Our case is the Lunar Ark, which is a proposed technoscientific project for a conservation base to be assembled inside the moon’s lava tubes comprising samples of the earth’s ecosystems. We investigate two interwoven imaginaries involving an imaginary of the Lunar Ark as a “reseeding of earth” and secondly, an imaginary in which the Lunar Ark becomes a platform for “escaping earth.” Based on scientific papers, web material, news articles, an interview with the head of the research group, and ethnographic observations, we conclude that the Lunar Ark engages with a speculative bioeconomy, wherein earth is imagined as an unstable and unfit protector of life. In contrast, the Lunar Ark emerges as a pan-humanitarian and maternal-like technoscientific environment. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article explores how an innovative animal welfare methodology (Qualitative Behavior Assessment) negotiates subjectivism and objectivism in its distinctive epistemology, as it strives to produce a certain kind of laboratory mouse—a complex, social subject. Through an ethnographic study of the development of a Qualitative Behavior Assessment (QBA) tool for laboratory mouse welfare, I show how QBA foregrounds the animal’s lived emotional experience by using qualitative language to assess their welfare, while also relying on statistical methods of validation. Drawing on Mol et al.’s understanding of care as something that parses, handles, and balances diverse “goods,” I argue that QBA practitioners’ care for the data must balance competing priorities and values. I take particular interest in what makes a “good” assessor as they transform between subject and object. When two observers are found to be outliers, with their divergent judgments marring the successful statistical validation of the QBA mouse tool, the situated nature of knowledge is brought to the fore. I argue that turning to the embodied practice of attention, as distinct from care, helps us understand why, and raises questions about the epistemic culture of conventional animal welfare science and the extent to which the human observer risks reification within QBA’s formal methodological practice. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article investigates public issue formation catalyzed by Russian patient organizations (POs) that aim to change healthcare rules and practices following patients’ needs and expectations. Drawing on the socio-ontological approach of science and technology studies, which posits that issues do not exist independently of efforts to address them, we identify three main stages of public issue formation in the studied situation: (1) from individual troubles to systemic problems, (2) from systemic problems to shared concerns, and (3) from shared concerns to public issues. Transforming individual troubles into public issues is neither easy nor straightforward. Yet, as the key actors in the process, POs use events like conferences and roundtables, and consultative spaces like public councils to engage with healthcare experts and state policymakers. We propose to view these events and spaces as trading zones. Facilitating public issue formation through trading zones where collaboration with other healthcare governance actors occurs without consensus over meanings and priorities, POs address suffering among patients in nondemocratic situations where expert knowledge dominates and public participation is generally unwelcome. The resulting issues are public in scope and capability of mobilizing action, yet articulated in a de-publicizing manner that conceals conflicting stakes and commitments. </jats:p>