Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>This is a study of an action research project conducted in one of the biggest university departments for sociology in a Central Eastern European capital during the first half of the 2000s. The paper shows that researchers’ images of society have a strong impact on social scientific methodology, scientific explanations and narratives. I offer an example of how realist approaches to science and technology studies can be used in a field study and discuss the benefits and limitations of such an endeavor, which I define as an interpretive and explanatory social scientific work. The analysis shows ways in which latent knowledge structures influenced the wording of a questionnaire used in the research, the types of data that were gathered, and how the data were interpreted. These knowledge structures include notions concerning local policy discussions, different social policy traditions, and images of a Roma minority struggling with the effects of structural poverty and prejudices.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Universities and their changing role in society is a source of perennial debate. In this article, we examine the emergent phenomenon of University Campus Living Labs (UCLL), the set of practices by which universities use their own buildings, streets or energy infrastructure as experimental settings in order to support applied teaching, research and co-creation with society. While most existing studies of UCLLs focus on them as sustainability instruments, we explore the UCLL phenomenon from an open-ended and fresh angle. Using living labs in five European universities as exemplary cases, we demonstrate the breadth and variability of this emerging phenomenon through five analytical dimensions to unpack the multiple forms and purposes that UCLLs can have. We furthermore consider aspects of inclusiveness and situatedness of living lab co-creation and testing and what the UCLL phenomena may come to mean for the continuously changing university, calling for future studies to substantiate these aspects.</jats:p>

<jats:p>As part of ongoing research bridging ethnomethodology and computer science, in this article we offer an alternate reading of Alan Turing’s 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers”. Following through Turing’s machinic respecification of computation, we hope to contribute to a deflationary position on AI by showing that the activities attributed to AIs are achieved in the course of methodic hands-on work with computational systems and not in isolation by them. Turing’s major innovation was a demonstration that mathematical and logical operations could be broken down into elementary, mechanically executable operations, devoid of intellectual content. Drawing out lessons from a re-enactment of Turing’s methods as a means of reflecting on contemporary artificial intelligence (AI), including the way those methods disappear into the technology, we will suggest the interesting question raised in “On Computable Numbers” is less about the possibilities of designing machines that “can think” (cf. Turing, 1950), but the practical work we do, and which is made possible, when we ourselves set out to think like machines.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article draws on an ethnographic study of an e-science platform in Sweden to analyse how horizontal gender segregation across sciences plays out in e-science, a borderland in which sciences converge around state-of-the art computational technologies for scientific research. While the convergence of sciences in e-science has the potential to open a non-traditional trajectory to attract women to ICTs, we find that this potential remains untapped. Instead horizontal gender segregation is perpetuated through a) restricted mobility of women from scientific fields with higher gender parity to IT, b) gender friction negatively affecting women in cross-disciplinary e-science, c) a gendered developer/user divide permeating e-science collaborations under ‘the logic of domains,’ and d) perceived self-reliance in computational tool development across sciences acting as ‘gendered boundary work’ to strengthen the gendered hard/soft divide in sciences.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article focuses on how car drivers domesticate technologies of automation and the way this might inform our understanding of potential shifts to a more automated mobility system. The current literature on automated mobility has mainly addressed drivers’ roles in terms of their attitudes towards—and acceptance of—an anticipated shift to high-level driving automation. In this article, however, we take a step back from expectations around automated mobility to explore the domestication of driving assistance technologies and systems already in use.  The analysis is built on qualitative interviews with drivers of private cars in Norway. Based on our findings, we develop a typology of user-technology characterizations highlighting three themes of the drivers’ use (comfort, safety, and novelty) as well as two modes of engagements (modulation and non-use). Our analysis suggests that automation is likely to be an incremental and gradual process and that its eventual application depends on the specificities of the practices that it seeks to disrupt. Moreover, we argue that the governance of automated mobility needs to be attentive to the dynamic and unpredictable roles technology will have in processes of socio-technical change. In this context, we highlight the key roles of users in shaping processes of appropriation of both new technologies and broader innovations and argue that knowledge about technology domestication provides important insights to changes towards automation in our current mobility systems.</jats:p>

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<jats:p>Against the backdrop of human-induced climate change and severe biodiversity loss, feminist technoscience scholars stress the need for movements towards less anthropocentric knowledge production processes. The present paper delves into the alignment work involved in striving to coordinate and align human-centred epistemic cultures and epistemic cultures centring other species. In an early childhood education site, children, teachers, materials, imagination and the attribution of human traits to snails are elaborated on as key actors. In a literary fiction site, also referred to as environmental imagination, texts, choices of literary style, scientific facts and the attribution of human traits to eels, are featured as actors accomplishing alignment work. The paper argues that adding the concept of the terrestrial to the analysis of the alignment work, as proposed by feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway, makes other aspects and versions of non-anthropocentric or less anthropocentric knowledge production processes visible. The paper adds to STS-discussions on alignment work through highlighting alignment work processes as political, power-producing processes, which privilege certain interests while downplaying others.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This paper analyses how controversies shape an emerging field of AI in Danish child protection services. In a context of high controversiality, we examine how algorithmic systems evolve in conjunction with changing ethical stakes. Empirically, we report a study comprising all Danish attempts (n=4) to develop algorithmic models for child protection services. These attempts were never fully implemented and have been either cancelled, paused or changed significantly since their outset. Combining Fischer’s (2004) notion of ‘ethical plateaus’ with insights from valuation studies, we propose that public controversies shape how organisations enact their algorithms as ethically ‘good’. Our findings demonstrate how valuations of ethically contestable algorithms involve the very distribution of agency across humans and algorithms, i.e., how much power and agency should be delegated to algorithmic models. In the case of Danish child protection services, this moves towards reducing their agency.</jats:p>