Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>The increased importance of datafication in different domains of society, and health in particular, has generated much attention in STS, specifically in the Nordic context. While much of this literature tackles newly emerging forms of data governance, we focus on a historically established and mundane data practice: that of recording vaccinations in vaccine registries. We mobilise the concept of data flows to compare the link between registry practices and governance in two countries: Norway – a data intensive welfare state - and Austria, which we label ‘data hesitant’. We ask: What is the role of registries in vaccination governance? How do data practices shape and reflect relations between citizens, health providers and the state? We show that the governance of immunity is interlocked with the material and political circumstances that make data flow. The paper makes visible the benefits of doing situated comparisons for better understandings of data practices across countries.</jats:p>

<jats:p>(no abstract)</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article closes the special issue Alignment Work for the Movement of Knowledge. It argues that the concept of alignment work, through making it possible to think about collaborations of different epistemic cultures, provides a useful addition to Knorr Cetina’s (1999) concept, keeping it relevant for current concerns in Science and Technology Studies (STS). The article discusses central issues in STS, concerning how different academic and professional cultures exchange knowledge, including trading zones, boundary objects, and aspects of Actor-Network Theory, alongside an interest in epistemic cultures and knowledge production. We argue and demonstrate how knowledge exchange can be understood through epistemic differences and their persistence in collaborative work.</jats:p>

<jats:p>The question of how professional and lay communities develop trust in new technologies, and automation in particular, has been a matter of lively debate. As a charismatic technology, artificial intelligence (A.I.) has been a common topic of these debates. This paper presents a case study of how the discourses and principles of ethics of technology development—specifically, of A.I.— were mobilized to form trust among actors in the fields of computer science, risk communication, and weather forecasting. My analysis draws on sociology of expertise and the literature on ethics of A.I. to ask: how emerging networks of expertise use ethics to overcome mistrust in technology? And, what role does the institutionalization of those networks play in the process of trust formation? I situate this discussion on the NSF Institute for Research on Trustworthy A.I. The Institute is positioned as a mediating organization with the goal of increasing trust in this technology primarily the weather forecasting community, but also among the public. I show that first, to better understand how scientific and professional fields react to increased automation it is crucial to unpack the historical backdrop of how the professional identity of those experts has been shaped by a relationship with computer-supported modeling. To this end, I situate the discussion in the long-standing tensions between computer modelling and tacit knowledge in weather forecasting. Second, I argue that the means of establishing trust in A.I. propagated by the actors in the paper, which pair norms of explainability to sensitivity to professional intuitions and domain-specific conventions, rely on a series of “mutual orientations” (Edwards, 1996). I mobilize the concept of “mutual orientations” to describe the work of tailoring the ethics of A.I. to the specific requirements of weather sciences, but also to the vision of a national strategy of investment in this technology.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In the early 2000s, authorities in Sweden and Denmark recognised that their personal identification numbers were about to run out but followed different interventions to resolve the same issue. In this paper, I start from these cases to analyse personal identification numbers as methods for knowing and governing populations. I draw on two assertions from the study of methods within STS: Methods are performative, and they produce multiple objects and realities. I demonstrate how such identification numbers enact individuals and populations simultaneously, and I identify a fundamental tension between them: one emphasising the representational potential of the part and another favouring the coherence of the whole. I conclude that issues surrounding personal identification numbers in use across all Nordic countries can be traced back to a fundamental tension in addressing individuals that is impossible to resolve via technical fixes, although those interventions are crucial to keeping the systems operational.</jats:p>

<jats:p>What happens when academics, who “conceptualise research questions”, and community groups, which aim to be “doing things”, collaborate? Building on STS research about collaboration, we focus on the collaborative experiences of three teams of academics and community groups to address environmental justice. Our research reveals a tension between the way two sets of actors understand the purpose and mode of science within environmental justice collaborations. We explain this tension by exploring the motivations of the academics and community group managers and by how team members arrived at a shared understanding of collaboration itself. Our findings reveal that the purpose and mode of science within the collaborations that unfolded can best be understood not as conceptualizing research questions or doing things, but rather as “conceptualizing doing things.” Recognizing this merged understanding of science could be beneficial in enhancing and accelerating the work of community group-academic collaborations labouring together to address environmental justice challenges.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Different world views and ontologies require different technologies to deal with environmental issues. Land reclamation plans in Bali’s south, meant to open up new space for tourist development, triggered strong but varied responses in the Balinese population, from rejection to enthusiasm. All actors claim to aim towards a prosperous Bali, and at the protection of a degrading environment, but notions of prosperity and protections and the means and technologies used differ tremendously which leads to ethical conflicts. This paper identifies three actor groups based on the technologies they use to mediate relationships in the ecologies they inhabit. Drawing on modern interventionist technology and development and implied universal moralities, scientists aim to manage environment and normalize ecologies for economic benefits or environmental protection. In contrast, religious Balinese actors, for whom environments are dwelling places of spirits and gods, make use of their bodies as means of mediation to communicate with the non-human and restore the balance between environment, humans and god. A third kind of technology used in the reclamation case is a broad mix of media, from traditional theatre to new social media, that are meant to mediate between locally rooted ontologies and global activism, communicate resistance to a broad public, and thus save a (sacred) environment and Bali. In the Bali case, technologies appear ambivalent as they contain contradictory forces and their relationship with the environment is highly complex, which makes consequences quite unpredictable and ethics quite diverse.</jats:p>