| 1. |
- Barthe, Yannick, et al.
(författare)
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Technological Fix or Divisible Object of Collective Concern? Histories of Conflict over the Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste in Sweden and France
- 2020
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 29:2, s. 196-218
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Science and technology studies (STS) has cultivated a positive vision of technological controversies. By raising new issues to address, controversies are seen as generating more thorough and exhaustive processes of technology assessment. However, the ability to view controversies in this light remains dependent upon how technology is collectively imagined and understood. If it is envisioned as a classic technological fix then broader controversy is just what is intended to be overcome, not positively indulged. Albert Hirschman’s distinction between divisible and non-divisible conflicts captures such varying evaluations of controversy. In particular, it helps analyse how the long-standing fix of geological disposal of nuclear waste has been persistently defended as a non-negotiable object of technological concern – a recipe for escaping controversy by permanently isolating nuclear waste from the biosphere. Comparing the Swedish and French programmes for the geological disposal of nuclear waste shows how defending the technological integrity of a non-divisible disposal concept has remained an institutional fixation for Swedish nuclear waste management for over 30 years. In contrast, legislative demands for a reversible disposal concept introduced in France in the late 1990s have arguably served to unravel a technological fix into a divisible object of collective concern.
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| 2. |
- Bergwik, Staffan, 1975-
(författare)
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Father, Son and the Scientific Spirit : Otto Pettersson, Hans Pettersson and the imitation of oceanography
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Families have historically facilitated a migration of science across generations, but how has this repetition been achieved? The Swedish oceanographer Hans Pettersson (1888-1966) inherited oceanography, primarily through is father, Otto Pettersson (1848-1941). Academic power was transferred from father to son, and one of Otto’s major concerns was to find a successor from his family. By exercising control over the early institutions of oceanography, he created a regime where that goal was achieved. Nonetheless, the process of transferring knowledge was multifaceted and paradoxical. Resources were exchanged between father and son, and Hans did accept the academic kingdom, but their relationship was marked by severe tensions.The key analytical concept to capture these contradictions here is imitation – drawn from Gabriel Tarde’s sociology. Hans Pettersson did not so much overtake his father’s research as he imitated a posture – including attitudes, desires and embodiments – towards science. The right posture included dedication and asceticism in the laboratory setting as well as an ambition to produce new results. Pettersson imitated the desires of an academic entrepreneur. He learned how to design strategies, create his own institutional setting and a research field to dominate. In sum he imitated efforts to create renewal. Moreover, a key feature of the posture towards science was the willingness to struggle for academic survival, often through controversies. Imitating science thus meant repeating a historically specific culture.
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| 3. |
- Cozza, Michela, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Atmosphere in Participatory Design
- 2020
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 29:2, s. 269-292
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The relationship between democracy and design has been the topic of significant discussion in the design community. It is also at the core of participatory design that relies on the principle of genuine participation. According to this, users are not mere informants but legitimate participants in the design process. A great deal of participatory design, however, is driven by instrumental logics rather than participatory and democratic principles. In analysing these power relations, science and technology studies (STS) provides the starting point to introduce the concepts of ‘engineering an atmosphere’ (i.e. the process) and ‘engineered atmosphere’ (i.e. the outcome). These concepts problematise the principles and modes of participatory design, highlighting the tensions between economic and social agendas and top-down and bottom-up interactions. This problematic can be shown in the way that new teachnologies are targeted at older populations, necessitating an interrogation of the processes underpirnning the design and development of technological products and devices. It is important to reflect on who is included and who is excluded from technological design and innovation, which is always, and necessarily so, a fluid process.
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| 4. |
- Elam, Mark, 1960
(författare)
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How the Brain Disease Paradigm Remoralizes Addictive Behaviour
- 2015
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 24:1, s. 46-64
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent decades, addiction has been medicalized anew through the rise of an influential ‘brain disease paradigm’. This questions the equivalence of addiction to drug dependence by re-emphasizing loss of self-control over unhealthy impulses as the disease locus. While showing continuities with the nineteenth-century vision of addictions as ‘diseases of the will’, neurobiology objectifies disease as disrupted neurochemical transmission and lasting neuroadaptation. The brain disease paradigm emerged together with rapid advances in neuroimaging technology as well as intensified research efforts to confirm cigarette smoking as nicotine addiction. After smoking achieved such recognition in the late 1980s, numerous other unhealthy impulses and appetites have likewise come under neurobiological investigation as prospective cases of addiction. Despite its technoscientific sophistication, neurobiology's biomedicalization of addiction remains as partial and ambiguous as past medicalizations. By confirming moral self-transformation anew as an indispensable component of treatment and recovery, neurobiology revives addiction as a moral disease in the process of its objectification. Furthermore, through its rediscovery of a classic nineteenth-century ‘liberal disease’ at the molecular level, the neurobiology of addiction is acting as a vital moralizing resource in the biomedicalization of health and illness more generally today.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Galis, Vasilis, 1978-, et al.
(författare)
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Partisan Scholarship in Technoscientific Controversies : Reflections on Research Experience
- 2012
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - London : Routledge. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 21:3, s. 335-364
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Several academic traditions have addressed epistemological objectivity and/or partisanship in the study of technoscientific controversies. On the one hand, positivist andrelativist scholars agree that the political commitments of the social researcher should notimpinge on scientific enquiry, while on the other hand, feminist and Marxist scholars notonly take stands in diverse technoscientific debates, but even claim their agendas to bemore credible than those of orthodox scientists. Such perspectives stress that all researchis partisan in one way or another because it involves questions of who controls,manipulates, and establishes decisions, facts, and knowledge. With this in mind, it ispossible to identify different forms of partisan research including capture byparticipants, de facto and overt partisanship, and mercenary scholarship. These differentforms of partisan scholarship are characterised by differences in the motives underlyingepistemological choices of research topic and method, personal commitments to thefields studied, use of research findings in controversies, and positioning of results inwider debates. Two examples help to illustrate partisan scholarship: first, a study of newtechnologies for managing climate change (carbon dioxide capture and storage); andsecond, the construction of the new underground metro system in Athens and itsaccommodation of accessibility standards. Both cases entail partisan positions and raisesimilar concerns about the orthodox epistemological assumptions underpinningsociotechnical systems, especially when it comes to technoscientific controversies.Supporting STS partisan scholarship, therefore, enables greater social and democraticengagement with technoscientific development.
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| 7. |
- Graminius, Carin
(författare)
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Research Communication on Climate Change through Open Letters : Uniting Cognition, Affect and Action by Affective Alignments
- 2022
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 31:3, s. 334-356
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Affect is increasingly the object of study in research communication, and inducement of affect by means of different communication techniques is encouraged as a means for mobilizing the public. But a focus on affect in purely instrumental terms risks overlooking the multifaceted ways in which affect is used in research communication. Studying open letters on climate change penned by scientists provides an interesting context for an empirical and theoretical exploration of the intricate ways of using affect in research communication. Two analytical lenses which constitute two strands of research commonly seen as incompatible due to their different units of analysis – affect as linguistic representation and affect as practice – are combined to elucidate the aligning potentials of affect in communicative acts. Affective alignments as representation or practice are significant because affective connections made between actors, objects, actions and understandings are ways of looking at the indirect mobilization of the issue communicated. In relation to research communication, this analytical approach further reveals shifting science-society relations, where social alignments are responding to the nexus of practices in which researchers are situated. Attention to the use of affect in open letters reveals specific configurations between affect, cognition and action as scientists prescribe specific affective states – anxiety and concern – as integral to the understanding and action on climate matters. Furthermore, affect both aligns and separates scientists from other actors in society. Most notably, open letters position politicians as dissociated from scientists and civil society due to their lack of anxiety.
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| 8. |
- Gröndal, Hedvig, 1983-, et al.
(författare)
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Alignment Work : Medical Practice in Managing Antimicrobial Resistance
- 2021
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 30:1, s. 140-160
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Policies intended to reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics have been promoted as a key to preventing antimicrobial resistance. However, reduction of antibiotic use in health care potentially involves tensions between health of the patient receiving care and the health of the (future) population. An analysis of general practitioners’ talk about everyday medical practice in relation to respiratory tract infections shows how they manage to move between policy and patient interests through ‘alignment work.’ Alignment work is the discursive strategies used to manage risks and demands related to antibiotic resistance as well as patients receiving health care. Through alignment work conflicting demands and risks can be juggled, and antibiotic prescribing becomes discursively doable. Alignment work is not solely a matter of making conflicting demands and risks coherent, but might also involve leaving tensions and ambiguities intact. It enables general practitioners to align with AMR policy and the imperative of being restrictive with antibiotics, while still managing the risks threatening individual patients. As a consequence, lapses from AMR policy do not necessarily undermine it, but can instead be crucial to allowing the policy to work in the context of actual medical practice and, as such, be crucial to the overall success of the policy.
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| 9. |
- Gunnarsson, Andreas, 1978, et al.
(författare)
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Food Fight! The Swedish Low-Carb/High Fat (LCHF) Movement and the Turning of Science Popularisation Against the Scientists
- 2012
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 21:3, s. 315-334
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Science popularisation is widely recognised as having its 'political uses' and as serving as a conventional means for buttressing the epistemic authority of the institutions of science in society. By separating the work of producing new knowledge from its dissemination, popularisation promotes public understanding and appreciation of science placed beyond public reach and influence. However, simply by insisting upon such a separation, so popularisation remains vulnerable to 'capture' by skilled and resourceful communicators intent on turning it against the established authority of scientists. This is a phenomenon which can be analysed in relation to the communicative strategies pursued by a collection of general practitioners, diabetics and self-styled dietary experts in Sweden championing a low-carbohydrate/high fat (LCHF) dietetics akin to the Diet Revolution initiated by Robert Atkins in the early 1970s. By dedicating themselves to achieving an overwhelming public presence in the propagation of simplified accounts of dietary science, the LCHF movement has been able to fashion science popularisation into a weapon capable of being turned back upon established dietary expertise in Sweden. In this effort they have proceeded on two fronts; firstly by debunking established dietary advice for failing to live up to idealised standards of 'sound science', and secondly, by effectively mobilising the personal testimony and endorsements of dieters themselves in order to publicly confirm the authenticity and trustworthiness of the LCHF regimen.
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| 10. |
- Helgesson, Claes-Fredrik, et al.
(författare)
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Valuations as Mediators Between Science and the Market : How Economic Assumptions Shape Pharmaceutical Trial Designs
- 2017
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Ingår i: Science as Culture. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0950-5431 .- 1470-1189. ; 26:4, s. 529-554
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- How can economic assumptions be present in the heart of commercially driven drug development research? Such assumptions underpin industry-based bio-statistical discussions around a new pharmaceutical trial design, the compound finder'. This example illustrates several ways in which trials might be designed and situated in the larger setting of interlinked valuation practices central to the development, distribution, and use of pharmaceuticals. It shows how economic assumptions and considerations can be differently entwined with endeavors to produce knowledge. Different trial designs may further differ in what knowledge they produce. Adaptive design trials (ADTs), of which the compound finder is one kind, share the feature that they might be the object of thousands of simulations to specify the design taking many different kinds of considerations into account. These considerations include several economic aspects such as trial costs and assumptions about the future market. ADTs will likely continue to become more common in the years to come, even if the future for the specific compound finder trial design is uncertain. Yet, the continued rise in importance of ADTs means a further intimate entwining of economic assumptions into the specification of trial designs. This will be consequential for what knowledge is produced as well as where and how treatments are assessed.
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