ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

6. AMR in Globalized Economies: Knowledge, Regulation, Markets

Henri Boullier, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine; Nicolas Fortané, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine

Over recent years, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a central global health issue, as well as a stimulating object of inquiry for STS scholars. The development of resistant bacteria impacts our possible futures in a world deprived of (working) antibiotics and raises a lot of questions about contemporary healthcare and food systems, innovation and circulation of medicines, medical and veterinary practices in a globalized world. This panel wants to bring together scholars studying AMR and proposes to follow three lines of research:

(1) by focusing on the controversies that have emerged in and structured the field of AMR, which often take the form of attempts to draw a line between medical and veterinary uses (e.g. with the notion of “critically important antimicrobials”) or to put the blame on end-users’ shoulders (e.g. with the concept of “antimicrobial stewardship”);

(2) by investigating the policies and expertise that have been set up to mitigate AMR risks (national and regional plans, surveillance and monitoring systems, etc.), in particular those promoted by prominent international organizations which tend to produce knowledge without taking local specificities into account (e.g. policies framed through the northern concern of fighting antibiotic “excess” while “access” remains the major issue for southern countries);

(3) by studying circulation of antibiotics in a globalized world, through, for instance, the trade of animal products (basic standards or “antibiotic-free”) or industry strategies on pharmaceutical markets in the North and South (e.g. regarding the articulation of formal and informal distribution channels or the mechanisms of price formation).

Contact: h.boullier@gmail.com

Keywords: AMR, antibiotics, expertise, public health, pharmaceutical industry

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

13. Be(com)ing industrial:  objects, scales, and power dynamics at play

Benjamin Raimbault, Institute For Research and Innovation in Society; Mathieu Baudrin, CSI-Ecole Des Mines De Paris

Since the organization of the sugar cane plantations, industrial processes have colonized not only the model of manufacturing production, but also logistics, bio-objects, and the digital world. The common statement describing the service and digital societies as post-industrial ones is weakened by the continuous expansion of industrial processes where the know-how to make things, people, processes, more scalable and more profitable.

In the STS literature, industries have been much more discussed regarding their role in risk and pollution than regarding their specific regimes of constitution and perpetuation. This panel intends dealing with contemporary industrial processes through a twofold questioning:

1/ How scalability can be studied in the making? What kind of knowledge are produced to make things and tasks scalable? How do industrial processes articulate initial projects, international norms and cost evaluation? What does it do to the objects, to persons and spaces that are absorbed in those processes?

2/ How do industries define themselves across time? How economic interests emerge? How techno-industrial assemblages are reshaped through critical moments? Being an industry is not as obvious that it may be, it requires a process of self-definition, collective identification, political representation, that can’t be taken for granted. The ability to identify what are the core and might shift across time to preserve the industry facing controversies.

This panel invites empirical and theoretical papers that document or help to answer to one or more of these questions.

Contact: raimbault.benjamin6@gmail.com

Keywords: Scalability-industrial processes-extension and maintenance of techno-industrial assemblage

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

18. Can it Scale?: The scalability zeitgeist, entrepreneurial thinking, and the role of STS

Makoto Takahashi, Technical University Munich; Sebastian Michael Pfotenhauer, Technical University Munich; Brice Laurent, Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Gianluigi Viscusi, EPFL; Cian O’Donovan, University College London

Scalability is central to contemporary innovation discourses and, therefore, political and economic life. ‘Can it scale?’ Has become a cliche in venture capital firms and NGOs alike. Perhaps most prominent in discussions of platform technologies, big data, and new digital monopolies, scalability has also permeated public policy in the form of “grand societal challenges,” calls for “entrepreneurial statehood”, and scalable “living labs.” This panel questions scalability as a paradigm and ordering device in innovation and public policy. Our ambition is not to theorise scale, as geographers have long sought to do. Rather we aim to examine how actors mobilise and stabilise ideas of scale through their ‘scalable’ innovation instruments and practices, and the changing political economy associated with it. This opens the possibility of interrogating how actors mobilize, rationalize, and operationalize (the idea of) ‘scaling up’ and ‘scaling across’ space, and what it means to produce credible templates. Rather than repeating rehearsed objections to the very possibility of scalability, on the grounds that the local is irreducibly complex, this panel aims to work toward a new STS vocabulary for understanding and critiquing the entrepreneurial zeitgeist of scalability. We seek to open new avenues for enquiry, by attending to the practices through which spaces are hierarchically organised, like Russian-dolls, into scalar models of one another or ‘flattened’ into a single scalar register. The panel welcomes theoretical engagements with scalability, as well as efforts to broaden the STS toolkit for practically engaging with problems of participation, power, and justice at different scales.

Contact: mak.makoto.takahashi@gmail.com

Keywords: Scaling, Co-creation, Living labs, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Engineering and Infrastructure

28. Commodifying environmental data: markets, materiality, knowledge

Aguiton Angeli Sara, EHESS CAK Centre Alexandre Koyré; Sylvain Brunier, CNRS – Centre de Sociologie des Organisations; Jeanne Oui, EHESS

As digital tools promise to resolve environmental problems by leveraging new sources of data and by creating new services, this panel calls for papers focusing on the market logics involved in these processes. STS research on informational infrastructures warned us not to dissociate data production and circulation, we aim to enrich this approach by considering that market and economic dimensions are not processed downstream, but that they are already at stake when environmental data are produced. In many cases, the manufacturing of environmental data and their markets is simultaneous. The panel proposes to study both the production of environmental data and services, the role of public and corporate actors, the uses of natural sciences and market knowledge, the invention of new measurement tools and their economic valuation.

Case studies could include a variety of objects such as predictive maintenance applied to water distribution networks; index insurance based on the integration of climate parameters; customized services based on global infrastructures and low-cost sensors measuring air quality or crop development; forest certification schemes by remote sensing for ecological compensation or biomass valuation; etc. We aim to grasp a broad range of questions: using infrastructures that are often fragile and labor-intensive, how do various actors develop profitable models? What are the links between the trade and circulation of data on one hand, and the associated service market on the other hand? Which types of knowledge are being used and what roles do they play in the valuation of environmental data? In what way is data labor shaped by its commercial use?

By exploring these various issues, we hope that the contributions of this panel will deconstruct the promises of the greening of public policies and industrial processes through the development of an environmental services economy.

Contact: sara.aguiton@ehess.fr

Keywords: Data, Environment, Infrastructure, Market, Commodification

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

47. Discursive Traps in Global Health: Neglect, Poverty, and Emergence

Lina Beatriz Pinto-Garcia, York University; Mady Malheiros Barbeitas, Sociology – CERMES 3/ Unité Inserm 988 – Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales – Paris); Bernardo Moreno Peniche, Independent

In global health discourses, vector-borne diseases are typically portrayed as neglected problems that affect people in impoverished settings. Since they inhabit the margins of the economy, so continues the argument, they do not constitute a priority for states nor an attractive market for pharmaceutical companies. To stimulate neglected diseases R&D, public-private partnerships were proposed in the 1990s as a solution that would lure pharmaceutical companies into the game. Also, in 2007, the FDA established the priority review voucher program to promote the development of drugs for diseases considered neglected. Yet, these strategies have been criticized for leaving unchallenged a pharmaceutical development model that is profit-oriented and for obscuring severe differentials of power and influence between the public and the private sectors. In a similar vein, since the 1990s, some of these diseases have also been categorized as ‘emerging’ threats, seeking to highlight their potential of becoming epidemics of global proportions. Yet, this term often helps reanimate colonial stories of containment that regarded the tropics as natural hotbeds of diseases that required strict population management to prevent microbes from spilling over the metropolis and its colonial settlements. Thinking critically about ‘neglect,’ ‘poverty,’ and ‘emergence,’ this panel aims to unpack the politics behind these “official stereotypes” in global health narratives. Is this terminology sufficient to account for the problems that vector-borne diseases represent? Is it always useful to delimit the ways in which possible solutions are framed? What do these categories make visible and invisible? What do they enable and constrain?

Contact: lina.pinto.garcia@gmail.com

Keywords: global health, neglect, emergence, poverty, vector-borne diseases

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

54. Emerging Worlds of Eating: Interrogating the logics of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food

Tanja Schneider, University of St Gallen; Jeremy Brice, London School of Economics and Political Science; Karin Eli, University of Warwick

Food is increasingly caught up in processes of digitalisation, datafication and platformisation which are rapidly (if unevenly) reshaping exchange and interaction among those who produce, prepare, consume, (re)distribute and review it. These processes appeal to numerous values and logics: Food delivery services emphasize speed and convenience; surplus food redistribution apps promote sustainability by redirecting and revaluing the excess of conventional food commerce; and social dining platforms encourage unconventional socialities and economies around shared acts of cooking and eating. Meanwhile, platforms and devices promise consumer empowerment through knowledge: supply chain transparency platforms promise to demystify the provenance of food through aggregating data sourced from across the globe, while dietary tracking devices afford novel forms of digitised (self-)knowledge and modes of dietary intervention.

Elaborate socio-technical assemblages of people, capital, software and devices are thus engaged in reinventing foodstuffs and eating practices, along with the knowledges, affects and values which accompany them. In this session we aim to interrogate the diverse and intersecting logics which underpin, guide and govern the digitalisation, datafication and platformisation of food. In particular, we invite researchers working in critical innovation studies, food studies, studies of financialisation and capitalisation, and digital ethnography to join us in tracing the varied worlds of eating emerging around these socio-technical assemblages. In so doing, we hope to explore how the conventions, constraints and accumulation strategies of digital platforms, of data-driven innovation and of those invested in them both enact food futures and participate in ordering present day food cultures, materialities and practices.

Contact: j.brice@lse.ac.uk

Keywords: Food, digital, financialisation, data, eating

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

66. Flows and overflows of personal health data

Mary Ebeling, Drexel University; Tamar Sharon, iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen; Niccolò Tempini, University of Exeter, Egenis

With the explosion of digital technologies that generate massive sets of personal data, from internet networks and big data infrastructures, to wearable devices and sensors, many actors see the analytical potentials of these collections for healthcare and medical research and knowledge production. These data circulate across domains, amongst different types of actors – e.g. academic scientists, corporations, non-profit organizations, individual data subjects, and patient groups – and according to different logics of exchange – e.g. donation, sharing, commodification, and appropriation (Ebeling 2016; Sharon 2018; Tempini and Teira 2019). The promises for the increased circulation of health data are many, including: greater patient empowerment, better population health, and improved interoperability ensuring continuity of care, as well as less health-specific outcomes such as national economic growth. But so are its potential harms, including risks (e.g. privacy breaches), epistemic uncertainties (e.g. questions of data quality and algorithmic transparency), disruptions to existing research standards and protocols (e.g. the conduct of clinical trials), as well as wider concerns regarding the generation of profit based on donated or otherwise publicly available personal health data, and the emergence of new power asymmetries and conflicts of interest between data subjects, data users, and new data intermediaries.

This track invites papers that explore the complex dynamics of the increasing circulation of health data. In particular we seek analyses asking not only how benefits are construed and by whom, and what harms may result, but also what frameworks currently exist for governing flows and what alternative frameworks might be imagined.

Contact: n.tempini@exeter.ac.uk

Keywords: Personal health data, circulation, value, data practices, governance

Categories: Big Data

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

70. Governing Reproductive Bio-economies: Policy Frameworks, Ethics and Economics

Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University; Vincenzo Pavone, Consejo Superior Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); Cathy Herbrand, De Montfort University

Reproductive bio-economies, i.e. economies that are built around reproductive tissues, cells and processes, are largely consolidated economies, which have seen considerable growth in terms of treatment cycles, technologies, revenues, actors, and countries. Since the first IVF birth, reproductive bio-economies have expanded to include a range of stakeholders including: clinics, legal firms, donors and surrogates, intermediaries and agencies, gamete and embryo banks, investment funds, research institutions and public health care systems, in a global network worth billions of Euros. Amidst this expansion, questions about the policy and governance of reproductive bio-economies become a matter of considerable interest.

A consideration of regulatory systems that govern reproductive technologies raises questions about how bio-economies emerge within different national and supranational contexts, how and if they challenge existing governance arrangements and how existing or new policy frameworks contribute to their re/shaping. An exploration of the regulation of reproductive bio-economies allows for improved understanding of how “moral regimes directed towards reproductive behaviours and practices are fully entangled with political economic processes” (Morgan & Roberts 2012), and allows consideration to be given to the distribution of actors and affects within different moral frameworks and regulatory formations.

This panel therefore welcomes contributions on:

–              Policy actors, configurations and policy change in the context of reproductive bio-economies

–              Interactions of public policy with private medicine

–              Local/global medical regulation

–              Questions of quality and safety, conflicts of interest and informed consent

–              The regulation of different valuation practices and commercial actors

–              Questions of under or over regulation

Contact: nhudson@dmu.ac.uk

Keywords: IVF, reproductive technologies, tissue economies, bioeconomies

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

71. Grassroots Innovation: Hacking, Making, Hobby, Entrepreneurship

Chen-Pang Yeang, University of Toronto; Wen-Ching Sung, University of Toronto

A hallmark of our emerging world is that the general public obtains not only access to modern technologies but also the knowledge, means, and incentives to generate new products and applications from them.  While self-made inventors populated history, do-it-yourself and technological explorations outside big companies, government, and academia nonetheless become a social movement with conspicuous collectives, information channels, and media coverage.  Today, hackers work on open-source, free-access software and firmware for fun and profit.  Makerspaces spread everywhere for the cause of sharing manufacturing, participatory design, recycling and reuse, nurturing start-ups, or community building.  Made-in-garage is a common myth in high-tech.  “Mass innovation” or “STEM for everyone” is promoted by the states around the globe.  In this panel, we welcome various approaches and perspectives to make sense of this phenomenon of grassroots innovation.  We ask: What are its connections to the longstanding traditions of technical hobbies?  Which organizational and managerial platforms do grassroots innovators introduce that influence the development of new technologies?  What is the nature of the tension between non-profit and commercial, between amateur and professional, in these activities?  How do the hackers’ and makers’ political actions intertwine with their technical innovation?  While hacking and making are seemingly global, what are their major differences in different countries and regions, especially between the affluent North and poor South?  How does grassroots innovation reconfigure the current technological landscape?  What are the roles of the state and capital in shaping grassroots innovation, and how is such shaping grappled from below?

Contact: chenpang.yeang@utoronto.ca

Keywords: innovation, hacking, makerspace, technical hobby, entrepreneurship

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

90. Inquiries into the Global

Nassima Abdelghafour, Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation; Felix BOILEVE, CSI MinesParisTech; Evan Fisher, CSI, Mines-ParisTech; Vololona Rabeharisoa, CSI Mines ParisTech

As STS scholars increasingly focus on “global” objects (the climate, the economy, health, poverty, migrations…), we invite contributions reflecting on the construction of such objects. Since the early contention that no object of study can be confined within nation-states (Braudel, Wallerstein), authors have argued that there are global flows, assemblages, scapes, that can only be captured with a wide-angle lense. While this move has curbed “methodological nationalism” (Glick-Schiller, Wimmer, Sassen), it has also taken for granted that the “global” is bigger than the “local” – prompting Latour’s response that  “no place can be said to be bigger than any other.” Another concern is that scholars might superimpose their own constructions over the actors’ actual concerns, better captured through extended single-sited fieldwork. As a possible answer, Marcus suggests that the global is an emergent phenomenon, resulting from the ethnographer’s circulation from one site to another. However, in such multi-sited ethnography, the only relevant inquiry is that undertaken by the ethnographer.

In this track, we are interested in those inquiries and epistemic infrastructures embedded in the activities of NGOs, supranational agencies, philanthrocapitalist foundations, political ecology movements, multinational corporations, extractive industries, global health actors… – that order global spaces. If “global” is used as an indigenous category, then, how do the informants define and perform the “global” dimension to their practice? How do they measure and qualify the extension of the global? How do we, STS scholars, articulate the actors’ inquiries on the global with concepts from the literature (technological zones, networks, assemblages, friction…)?

Contact: nassima.abdelghafour@mines-paristech.fr

Keywords: global, epistemic infrastructure, globalization, ethnography, topology

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

96. Living In The Laboratory: Experimental Zones And The Labification Of Everything

Arzu Sedef, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna; Thomas Buocz, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna; Brice Laurent, Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Mathieu Baudrin, CSI-Ecole Des Mines De Paris; Sebastian Michael Pfote

Notions of “laboratories,” “experimentation,” and “zones of exception” are presently gaining wider currency, far beyond the traditional confines of S&T and the narrow focus on lab science. From evidence-based policy-making using controlled trials, to living labs, test beds and regulatory sandboxes, all the way to design labs, urban labs, policy labs, social innovation labs, and legal labs – experimental approaches are being deployed across countless social and political settings. These labs promise to tackle social problems more inclusively, playfully, innovatively, and effectively, while at the same time invoking elements of scientific rigor, controlled experimentation, and the promise of scalability. They frequently lower regulatory burdens and overtly enrol populations into the making and testing of immature technologies, suggesting that business as usual will not produce the right solutions and that the effects of these experiments can be contained and tested before releasing them onto society at large.

This track aims to scrutinize the ongoing “labification of everything” in processes of social, political, and technological change. Building on STS traditions in lab studies, technical democracy, public engagement, and the politics of innovation, we especially invite papers asking:

– How are lab-like settings deployed across diverse settings?

– What does it mean to live in, or be exposed to, experimental settings?

– How are livelihoods, rights, and responsibilities affected by it?

– How do localized zones of exceptions challenge/reconfigure/test the state and the law?

– Which/whose problems are labs supposed to solve? Which problems do they create?

– How do labs contest/reconfigure/stabilize socio-technical orders, redistribute power and affect (in)equality?

Contact: sebastian.pfotenhauer@tum.de

Keywords: Experimentation, Living labs, Laboratory, Technical democracy, Policy

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Science Communication/Public Engagement

107. Marxist STS

Johan Söderberg (Göteborg University), Maxigas (Lancaster University), and Davide Orsini (Mississippi State University)

The historical roots of STS go back to Marxism. Many of the issues currently being debated in relation to technology and science begun as debates in-between Marxist intellectuals, notably concerning the status of science and ideology critique. By returning to this history and to Marxist theoretical resources, new insights can be gained when addressing STS questions. This panel invites presentations exploring the Marxist roots of STS as well as new, theoretical work broadly inspired by Marxism.

Contact: johan.soderberg@sts.gu.se

Keywords: Capitalism, Ideology, Critique, Marxism, Class

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

111. Money for nothing?  Science between Markets and Politics

Paolo Parra Saiani, Università degli Studi di Genova

Many factors influence a scientist’s choice of research problem: past interests and training, serendipitous yet consequential encounters with new collaborators, expertise, or information, institutional context or disciplinary culture; commercial opportunities, pressures, and commercially related policies can change the composition of scientific research and the choices that guide it. As stated by Agger, “research agendas reflect what gets funded”, so it is no surprise that searching for external funding is having an impact on the research agendas of individual faculty members, as research is being pursued based on donors’ interests. Bourdieu stated that “There is no scientific choice – choice of area of research, choice of methods, choice of a publication outlet, or the choice […] of quick publication of partially verified results (as over later publication of results that are thoroughly checked) – that does not constitute, in one or other of its aspects, a social strategy of investment aimed at maximizing the specific profit, inseparably political and scientific, provided by the field, and that could not be understood as a product of the relation between a position in the field and the dispositions (habitus) of its occupant” (1991: 9-10).

This session wants to contribute to the STS discussion on freedom in science, but also to its accountability. In times of “neo-liberal scientism” (Daza: 2012) or ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Rhoades: 2004), what are the trends in science? Priority will be given to empirical works, based on qualitative or quantitative techniques, that analyze the development of science (in the broad sense: biology, economics, political science, sociology, etc.).

Contact: paolo.parra.saiani@gmail.com

Keywords: science and politics, marketization of universities

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Engineering and Infrastructure

112. Moralizing the data economy

Thomas Beauvisage, Orange Labs; Mary Ebeling, Drexel University; Marion Fourcade, University of California, Berkeley Dept. of Sociology; Kevin Mellet, Orange Labs

The new economy of data operates digital traces and tracking tools at scale, combined with the use of big data and AI technologies. Data are turned into valuable assets and tradable products, and injected into market and organizational infrastructures and practices in various industries, such as marketing, health, finance or transportation.

The industrialization of data has raised a series of concerns about its legitimacy or its morality. Data practices are disputed from a wide variety of grounds: privacy concerns; the emergence of a surveillance society; discrimination and filter bubbles; consumer manipulation; rise of new monopolies. As a reaction to these critics, new regulations (such as the GDPR in Europe) are put in place, and the players of the data economy themselves have come to incorporate moral considerations and discourses in their practices. All these views on how data should or should not be used for business and market purposes draw the boundaries of a new moral economy of data.

This panel aims to bring together empirical or theoretical contributions that explore the various facets of the moral economy of data. We particularly – though not exclusively – welcome contributions on the following topics: protest movements and civil resistance to the emerging data economy; new regulatory regimes around personal data that are held by public administrations or by corporations; the rise of market intermediaries dedicated to the moralization of the data economy; changes inside organizations and justifications surrounding the economization of data.

Contact: kevin.mellet@orange.com

Keywords: data, privacy, assetization, economization, moral economy

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Big Data

118. Networks, platforms and the form of the socio-technical

Lizzie Richardson; James Ash, Newcastle University

The relationship between society and technology has long been approached through networks. Networks have been used variously as a method, as a rhetorical device for understanding the form of social relations and as an analytic of social form. In STS, the study of the materialisations of networks has been a key focus, where the network functions as a metaphor that enables the tracing of material socio-technical relations. As the metaphor of the network has grown in popularity, particularly with the rise of digitalised ICTs, network language and representation have been increasingly used by people to articulate their relationships with one another, such that analysis and phenomenon of networks can become indistinguishable.

How do platforms and their social relations sit with this complex history of networks? To date, platforms have mainly been approached as a phenomenon, rather than as a metaphor or an analytic for social form. Yet, formally platforms build upon but also are, in important ways, distinct from networks, most notably through their “programmable space” that can be made to perform differently according to how external networks engage. So just as networks indicate the importance of form for understanding the socio-technical, the platform must also be approached as a device that describes social forms or heuristic for understanding the form of social relations. How can platforms be approached as material and social organisational arrangements beyond the platform as a company? This might incorporate empirical investigation of named platforms, but also includes broader materialisations of the social forms of platforms.

Contact: e.richardson@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: Networks, platforms, social form, ICTs

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Information, Computing and Media Technology

130. Organizing Technoscientific Capitalism: Assets, Rents, and Values

Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School; John Grant Gardner, Monash University, Australia; Kean Birch, York University

Technoscientific capitalism is organized through the configuration of technological products, platforms, and data, as well as the configuration of capitalist practices like accounting, corporate governance, and valuation logics. As a result, technoscientific capitalism entails organizational dynamics and inter-organizational relationships that often get obscured within STS debates about the supposed ‘neoliberalization’ of society and science. In this panel, we want to explore how assets, rents, and values are made through this configuration of technoscience and capitalism. There are many possible analytical and empirical avenues and questions to explore here: How do managerial practices and collaborations underpin the transformation of things into assets? How do organizational epistemologies and resources manifest as different forms of rentiership? And how do public-private logics and frameworks produce specific forms of socio-economic values? Overall, we are concerned with examining how diverse processes of assetization, rentiership, and valuation open up and/or close down alternative futures and political possibilities.

Contact: jbv.ioa@cbs.dk

Keywords: assets, organizational dynamics, rents, technoscientific capitalism, values

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

139. Public data repositories in the global health data economy

Ilpo Helén, University of Eastern Finland; Aaro Tupasela, University of Helsinki

During the past decade, digital health data has been highlighted as an asset with multiple values. This is due to many developments that have facilitated the emergence of global health data economy. Biomedical research has been impregnated by datafication; precision medicine has engendered great expectations and widespread activities; and corporations dominating the cyberspace like Google, Apple, Facebook and IBM have become increasingly interested in health-related digital data. At the same time, masses of health-related personal and population data exist and are continuously sourced in data reservoirs maintained by public authorities in different countries, especially in Europe. Now, national governments have shown an increased interest for wider and more intense utilization of health data reservoirs to facilitate biomedical research and personalized medicine, to improve clinical practices, and to boost innovative business in biomedicine and ICT. In addition, a number of projects to improve cross-border interoperability of these databases are under way in the EU and elsewhere, and transnational pharmaceutical and ICT corporations appear eager to engage in ‘collaboration’ for sourcing public health data. Discussion of this track will concentrate on the prospects, roles, purposes, and actual management of data sourcing by public authorities in the context of evolving global health data economy. We call for papers, first, about policy and technical rationales and practices that attempt to integrate collection, storage, circulation and uses public data with global health data economy, and, second, about problems and contestations related with such efforts of integration and collaboration.

Contact: ilpo.helen@uef.fi

Keywords: Health data sourcing, public databases, health data economy, data-driven health care

Categories: Big Data

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

142. Rare Disease Policies: From Exceptionalism Towards a ‘New Normal’?

Conor Douglas, York Univeristy

The emergence and consolidation of rare diseases as a distinct area of public health policy since the 1980s has been extensively studied. STS researchers have documented the establishment of this distinct policy domain and the associated orphan drug policies as the result of negotiations, struggles and collaborations between patient organizations, biomedical communities, public authorities, and the pharmaceutical and biotech industry. Yet, interpretations differ as of the transformative effects of these partnerships. Some stress the role of patient organizations as a decisive driver for R&D policies in domains that had long been neglected. Critics argue that it is a form of exceptionalism which is being “gamed” by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry by “slicing” common diseases into multiple rare diseases in order to occupy highly profitable niche markets.

This debate is still highly relevant against the backdrop of high drug prices. What is more, the advent of personalized medicine, digital medicine and ‘advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs)’ potentially means an increasing ‘orphanization’ of common diseases. This leads to questions about new business models in pharmaceutical commercial and non-commercial innovation, about (un)affordability for citizens, about regulatory policies and about inclusive health care insurance systems. Where rare disease and orphan drug policies -once considered “exceptional”- stand in this landscape is worth further exploration.

These outstanding questions make expanded and deepened STS analysis of rare disease policies necessary. The panel invites contributions from different national and regional contexts and varying intellectual perspectives.

Contact: cd512@yorku.ca

Keywords: rare diseases, rare disease policy, pharmaceutical innovation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

143. Recruitment and Evaluation Practices in Academia. Global Changes and National Traditions

Marie Sautier, University of Lausanne/Sciences Po Paris; Julian Hamann, Leibniz Center for Science and Society

This panel aims to bring together scholars whose work studies the transformations of academic recruitment practices, against a backdrop of globalisation dynamics and national traditions.

Major contemporary shifts, such as the casualization of academic work (Courtois and O’Keefe 2019), the changing governance of universities (Whitley and Gläser 2007), and the internationalisation of research (Geuna 2015) have reshaped the ways academic communities and actors produce research, and flow across national academic systems. While such questions have been addressed in STS perspective (Laudel 2006; Gläser and Laudel 2016), little is known about how academic recruitment and evaluation are affected by such shifts and increasingly transformed across time and space in such contexts (Hamann 2019; Musselin 2005). We deem scholarship on academic recruitment to be of particular importance because of the relevance hiring has for academic recognition and visibility as well as for the allocation of resources and power.

Building on the 2019 4S panel on the transformation of academic trajectories, we offer to extend the discussion by focusing more specifically on evaluative practices of recruitment across a variety of national, disciplinary, and institutional contexts.

We welcome original contributions addressing the following questions:

–              How are evaluative practices of recruitment and promotion configured and transformed across national, institutional and disciplinary environments?

–              How do these practices circulate across spaces at a time of growing individual mobility, increased international collaboration but also increased competition for resources and reputation?

–              What are the implications of recruitment policies and evaluation practices in shaping disciplinary labour markets, both nationally and internationally?

–              How may individuals applying for a position abroad navigate across national characteristics and international convergences in academic recruitment?

We invite contributions that address these questions either in specific countries and historical contexts or in a comparative perspective. In addition, we welcome papers that theoretically or empirically question the implications of global changes and convergences in shaping the production of research and the building of academia as a more diverse and inclusive landscape.

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Courtois, Aline, and Theresa O’Keefe
 2019     ‘Not One of the Family’: Gender and Precarious Work in the Neoliberal University. Gender Work and Organization 26(4): 463–479.


Geuna, Aldo, ed.
 2015              Global Mobility of Research Scientists: The Economics of Who Goes Where and Why. In Global Mobility of Research Scientists. The Economics of Who Goes Where and Why. Academic Press. Oxford: Elsevier.


Gläser, Jochen, and Grit Laudel
 2016  Governing Science: How Science Policy Shapes Research Content. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 57(1): 117–168.


Hamann, Julian
 2019  The Making of Professors: Assessment and Recognition in Academic Recruitment. Social Studies of Science.


Laudel, Grit
 2006         The Art of Getting Funded: How Scientists Adapt to Their Funding Conditions. Science and Public Policy 33(7): 489–504.


Musselin, Christine
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Whitley, Richard, and Jochen Gläser, eds.
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Contact: marie.sautier@unil.ch

Keywords: Academia, search committees, recruitment, evaluation practices, globalisation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

161. Socializing the automation of flexible residential energy use

Sophie Adams, University of New South Wales; Declan Liam Kuch, UNSW; Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark – DTU; Marianne Ryghaug, Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU); Roger Andre Søraa, NTNU

As renewable energy generation becomes more integrated and embedded in communities, users are increasingly called upon to participate in the active planning, ownership and management of smart energy systems. A key vector of this participation is the automation of home batteries and of significant loads such as air conditioners, heat pumps, water boilers and electric vehicles, which is seen as essential to relieve pressure on the grid during high-demand events such as evening peaks and particularly hot or cold weather. Automation and digitalisation are also facilitating the emergence of new ‘energy communities’ and peer-to-peer trading of energy generated by prosumers at distributed sites. In this session we ask: How are residential energy users and prosumers imagined by incumbent energy providers, policy makers and regulators as agents of automation? What new valuations of the forms of energy use that inhibit or support load flexibility are being created through markets, regulations, technology and policy? How is automation invoking new collectives, as well as reconfiguring and diminishing current ones? What does automation mean for the increasing focus on empowering citizens and ‘energy communities’ in Europe and other parts of the world? In posing these questions we seek to move energy planning discourses beyond the terrain of atomistic economic actors operating within markets by insisting on the socio-technical character of energy systems and mapping indiscernible actors in these automated systems.

Contact: s.m.adams@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Energy, automation, public engagement, transitions

Categories: Energy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

175. The (In)Visible Labour Of Translation: Creating Value In Translational Medicine

Rachel Faulkner-Gurstein, King’s College London; Clémence Pinel, University of Copenhagen; David Wyatt, King’s College London

Substantial public and private investments have been funnelled into building the infrastructure of translational medicine which, according to proponents, offers huge potential for advances in health and for economic growth. Such potential, however, is predicated on a variety of labour practices. It is performed by many different categories of worker, from research nurses to data scientists, in various settings and locations. This labour is highly uneven, and often unnoticed or unseen by policymakers and the public. In this panel, we focus attention on the labour that facilitates and underpins translational medicine as a key feature of life sciences research and the bioeconomy.

We are keen to explore the ways in which labour is understood, organised, and valued—including interrogating the hierarchical and gendered arrangements within which various stratified forms of labour take place. We want to question how such structures enable some practices to be rendered invisible and devalued, while some are highly privileged, prestigious, and valuable. We are equally interested in exploring if and how variously situated categories of workers contribute to the production of knowledge through their support, administrative, or care practices.

We invite papers from various disciplinary, empirical and theoretical perspectives to question what it takes to produce valuable knowledge in contemporary translational medicine. This panel contributes to the growing body of STS scholarship on the bioeconomy and translational medicine, as well as literature exploring the constitutive role of care in the production of knowledge and value.

Contact: david.wyatt@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: labour, care, value, translational medicine, bioeconomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

179. The changing landscape of genetic databases: Blurring boundaries between collection and practice

Rafaela Granja, Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS); Gabby Samuel, King’s College London /Lancaster University

In recent years, the collection, analysis, processing, and use of genetic data has grown massively, leading to the establishment of large DNA databases in both the health and forensic arena. More recently, and due to the increasing number of companies offering direct-to-consumer genetic tests, there has been a significant increase of recreational genetic databases. Coupled to this expansion, we have been witnessing a blurring of boundaries between previously distinct kinds of genetic collection and genetic practice: some genetic databases are being used beyond the purpose for which they were originally intended, for example, recreational DNA genealogy databases are being used for criminal investigation purposes.

The future may rest not on further building and expanding mass databases, but rather on the collation of existing genetic information and the exploitation of its potential. In a time of data abundance, it is therefore important to understand how such data is being conceived and appropriated by a wide range of actors, including policymakers, researchers, private companies and citizens.

We invite both theoretical and empirical contributions that critically engage with the social, ethical and techno-political dimensions posed by the blurring of boundaries between different types of genetic databases. Specifically, we aim to explore which social actors and epistemic cultures have been playing the leading role in the establishment and regulation of databasing systems, what values and social norms have underpinned this, and/or what ethical and social principles, such as privacy, consent, altruism, solidarity, and reciprocity are taken into account when considering genetic databases.

Contact: r.granja@ics.uminho.pt

Keywords: genetic databases; recreational genealogy databases; health; forensic

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

181. The Era of Voice: STS and Emerging Healthcare Activism around Science, Politics and Markets

Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin; Théo Bourgeron, University College Dublin; Sonja Erikainen, University of Edinburgh

Fostered by social media and the development of transnational social movements, new forms of activism have emerged. People once silenced can now easily find others in similar conditions, build connections and speak up. These movements affect the fields of science, regulation and markets by catalyzing public attention and provoking increased political and commercial engagement.

In the medical domain, publics increasingly coalesce into activist groups and articulate their concerns and interests around all sorts of issues, including clinical practices, research priorities, pricing levels, pharmaceutical regulation, and policies around socio-environmental exposures.

We want to investigate how the healthcare landscape is reshaped by the unprecedented capacities of voice and activism in a reflexive way, by scrutinizing the engagements of STS in this process: we seek submissions that demonstrate the potential roles of STS in analyzing renewed healthcare activism, in engaging with activists, and possibly in doing activism.

We welcome papers from theoretical and empirical perspectives, critically engaging with these and related issues:

–              The transformative power of voice in medical practice, research, markets and policies

–              Voice in the medical domain from a historical and global perspective

–              Extended capacities of voice provided by social media: pros and cons

–              The voices that, for structural or contingent reasons, remain unheard

–              The range of medical issues that fail to catalyze activism

–              Neoliberalism and activism

–              STS in the era of voice and of healthcare activism: from roadmap to research activism

–              STS and activists: forms of reciprocal engagement

Contact: ilaria.galasso@ucd.ie

Keywords: voice, healthcare activism, research activism, healthcare markets, social media

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

183. The In/Visibility of Value and Relevance in the Evaluation Society

Jochem Zuijderwijk, Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands; Tjitske Holtrop, Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands

In many organizations the evaluation of professionals and their work now relies on specific managerial accounting techniques and technologies of making value and relevance visible. Across companies and institutions people (including academics) express unease and critique over the way they and their work are made visible to the organizations and actors on which they effectively rely for their income, future and careers.

This panel seeks to bring together empirical and theoretical investigations into the way work and workers in various organizational, professional and socio-cultural contexts are made visible to, and consequently valued by, others and themselves. We welcome any contributions pertaining to one or more of the following dimensions of what we call the in/visibility of value and relevance:

1. Organizational (in)visibilities: Which and in what way are values made (in)visible within specific organizations, and with what consequences? How do organizational values relate to policy ambitions or individual merit?
2. Professional (in)visibilities: How is value and relevance made (in)visible in specific professions and specializations, and how might this conflict with or otherwise relate to policy, organizational, or individual values, needs and desires?
3. (In)visibility of diversity: What do age, gender and ethnicity mean for the efforts of actors to be(come) visible and valuable within organizations, and what forms of struggle remain invisible within organizational policy discourses on diversity?

We especially welcome contributions that can connect these dimensions, or seek to bridge the gaps between more policy-oriented studies, critical perspectives, and local empirical investigations into professional cultures, norms and practices.

Contact: j.b.zuijderwijk@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: Visibility, worth, evaluation, organizations, diversity

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

192. The tacit governance of decision-making in knowledge production

Ruth Falkenberg, University of Vienna; Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna; Ruth Müller, MCTS TU München; Lisa Sigl, Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice, University of Vienna

Decisions in knowledge production practices are made on different levels and in different situations: in funding streams, evaluation procedures for proposals and careers, but also in everyday research practices. In the past decades, concerns have been raised that under conditions of hyper-competition for funding and careers, decisions in knowledge production are increasingly dominated by these competitive dynamics and researchers’ focus may shift away from questions of societal relevance. Similarly, it has been questioned which kinds of researcher subjectivities and valuations are privileged within such conditions.

Recent STS research has contributed to understanding how different aspects (such as (e)valuation practices, funding structures, temporalities, subjectification processes) come to matter in such decisions and what kinds of knowledge are made possible or unlikely within specific situated arrangements. This panel wants to foster a debate on how these aspects play together in tacitly governing knowledge production.

In particular, this panel invites papers that discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different analytical dimensions such as valuation, subjectification, or temporality for studying decision-making practices in knowledge production. It also invites contributions that consider the potentially performative character of such analytical dimensions, as well as the added value of combining different analytical dimensions. The panel encourages reflections on questions such as: On which levels should we study decision-making in knowledge production? What decision-making processes are accessible for investigation, and what decisions tend to stay unavailable for scientific studies and public scrutiny? Which methodological approaches allow studying the complex entanglements of aspects involved in decision-making in knowledge production?

Contact: maximilian.fochler@univie.ac.at

Keywords: valuation, subjectification, time, knowledge practices

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Other

206. Value in Biomedicine

Katharina Kieslich, University of Vienna; Saheli Datta Burton, King’s College London; Katharina Theresa Paul, University of Vienna; Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna; Gabby Samuel, King’s College London /Lancaster University

The frequency with which the concept of ‘value’ is used by policymakers, practitioners, insurers, researchers, managers, and patients to justify, question or promote new interventions underlines that its applications and definitions are a contemporary phenomenon, yet there is little understanding of what value is. We invite both empirical and conceptual papers that use biomedicine and health care as platforms through which to empirically address or reconceptualize understandings of value. The question of value, we expect, is particularly salien in areas such as genomics, health technology assessment (HTA), artificial intelligence (AI) and value-based pricing (VBP), but also public health. We ask: How are practices, ´things`, and processes made valuable in biomedicine and health care? What continuities and changes in understandings of value can be discerned? Who gets to define value in contemporary democracies, and how are these understandings of what (treatment, technology, data point etc) is valuable inscribed into sociotechnical infrastructures? What social practices and technologies are involved in these practices? What criteria and measurement tools are used in different contexts (organizational settings, policy contexts, etc)? How are ethical, moral, and economic norms involved and what role do appeals to ‘value’ have for the emergence of new solidarities? In this panel, we welcome both conceptual and empirical papers on the subject of value, and encourage speakers to reflect on the impact of their research on policy and practice.

Contact: katharina.t.paul@univie.ac.at

Keywords: value, biomedicine, data, health care, policy

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

210. ‘What is the worth of a Nature-paper when the climate is in crisis?’

Thomas Franssen, Centre for Science & Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University; Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna; Sarah de Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Ruth Falkenberg, University of Vienna; Lisa Sigl, Research Pla

Researchers across the world increasingly feel the need to engage with the current climate crisis and change the practices of science. For instance communities gradually move to more web-based forms of conferencing to reduce co2-emission. Also, there is increasing critical scrutiny of the growing carbon footprints of big data centers worldwide. Scholars increasingly ask, is what we do worth it in the current climate crisis?

But how do these new practices relate to dominant forms of organization and valuation in science? How, when and under which conditions do new forms of knowledge production become possible? Do mission-oriented funding programs allow researchers to engage differently with their work and have broader impact? Or is much work funded just “mainstream as usual” with a rhetoric bow to climate relevance? Can interdisciplinary approaches speak better to the climate crisis? And if so, how do they fare in current structures of valuing scientific outputs and careers?

This panel asks how the climate crisis reconfigures (the governance of) science, when eventually not only fields that address current environmental challenges, but all research communities will be affected by it. We invite studies of these reconfigurations and the new frictions that emerge when the earth is given increasingly more agency to determine whether certain decisions (choosing a research question, booking a flight, submitting a research proposal) are warranted. Potential subthemes include, but are not limited to, effects on valuation practices (what is valued in and about research) and academic subjectivities (what kind of researcher should one be).

Contact: t.p.franssen@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: climate crisis, valuation practices, science governance, academic subjectivities, scientific practices

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

Environmental/Multispecies Studies