ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Governance and Public Policy

3. AI through an education perspective: concerns, potentials, and trade-offs

Rodrigo Barbosa e Silva, Stanford University; Ana Carolina Goes Machado, Stanford University

Educators, policymakers, and civil society have attempted to address the complex phenomena behind the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence. Several educational systems currently use AI to promote personalization, adapt content to different learning styles, and to understand student characteristics. These AI applications have raised ethical concerns, such as data protection, fairness, and equity. Should we allow data processing on learner behavior, history, and actions? What biases does AI mirror, and how do these biases affect students?

We are interested in ways that Science, Technology, and Society practitioners can interpret and act on AI developments for  improving student educational achievement when considering the risks and social concerns. Paraphrasing Paulo Freire, how can we have an educational system as a practice of freedom, when taking into account the latest (ab)uses of AI in education and society at large?

National strategic plans, universities, social movements, and organizations around the world have begun to create specific programs to take steps towards an understanding of AI as a matter of public concern. Historically, STS scholars have warned of potential benefits, trade-offs, and risks of technologies. We invite submissions on AI as it applies to education and policy including but not limited to:

Emerging issues

Data fairness and equity

Ethical aspects of commercial platforms in Education

Power relations, control, and agency

International trends: how different countries address freedom, control, classification, and critical thinking

Public policy on AI and Education

Engagement in civil society and policymaking at large amidst the dynamics of “alternative facts” in AI?

Contact: rodrigo7@stanford.edu

Keywords: education, artificial intelligence, public policy, critical pedagogy

Categories: Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Governance and Public Policy

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

11. Assessing Policy Mechanism of “Avoiding Group/Community Harm”

Shirley Sun, Nanyang Technological University

This panel seeks to examine the principle of “avoiding group/community harm” and assess whether this research ethics policy mechanism is adequate to prevent/reduce harm for the minority populations/groups. Because of their position in society, some groups may be at risk of experiencing harm from research.  For example, the usage of race and ethnicity in human genome variation studies has been demonstrated to be problematic (Benjamin, 2009; Bliss, 2011; Duster, 2015; Hinterberger, 2012; M’Charek, 2013; Tallbear, 2013).  Nonetheless, such usage persists.  For example, the National Human Genetic Research Institute (NHGRI) is engaged in race/ethnicity-labeled population genomic research and funds projects such as “National Cooperative Study of Hereditary Prostate Cancer in African Americans”, and “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder among Hispanic Children”. Such projects are also shaping the future of precision medicine.

The problem of potential harm to human subjects at the group level is typically handled by resorting to the research ethical framework of “avoiding group harm”. In practice, researchers typically seek local ethics board review, hold consultations with concerned group(s), disclose research results ahead of time, and ensure benefits are made available to the groups.  Nonetheless, de Vries et al. (2012) has shown that if genomic research is conducted on groups that are already experiencing stigma and discrimination, such studies still impose greater harm than good on these groups. 

Given de Vries et al. (2012)’s finding, it is important that we paying attention to hidden harms to groups, instead of thinking that the policy mechanism has addressed the problem.  Historical, contemporary, theoretical and/or empirical papers on how members of groups may be vulnerable in research and identify strategies that stakeholders can take are all welcome.

Contact: hlsun@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: Group harm, minority population, special population, vulnerability, race/ethnicity

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Race/Racialization/Indigeneity

16. Building digital bioethics: Transformations in theory and applied practice

Mustafa Ibraheem Hussain, University of California Irvine; Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University; Stephen Molldrem, University of California, Irvine

Technologies that facilitate the collection and use of electronic health data have increasingly become the tools used to diagnose conditions and administer services. Digital transformations are at the centre of scholarly critiques of power imbalances in healthcare, partly because developments in digital biomedicine have been accompanied by data misuse scandals and genuinely new bioethical problems. Just as scientific advancements and concomitant human rights violations in clinical research and practice led to the development of bioethics in the 20th century, the turn toward the digital in healthcare is giving rise to new transdisciplinary trends in the theory and practice of contemporary bioethics (e.g. Klugman et al., 2018).

In this open panel, we aspire to deepen conversations between theoretical and applied approaches in bioethics, and call for contributions aimed at “building digital bioethics.” Inspired by the work of critical bioethicists (see “bioethics of the oppressed” by Guta et al., 2018 and Benjamin, 2016), we solicit contributions in keeping with the STS commitment to centering  subaltern perspectives, and to bioethics’ grounding principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice (Belmont Report, 1976). How can emancipation and self-determination become possible in an area in which individual control is often reduced to check-box “consent”? Who is the digital bioethicist? What are digital bioethics? We welcome submissions including, but not limited to, the following:

Digital bioethical imaginaries and controversies

Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, and queer positions in bioethics

The ethics of consent and data (re-use)

Governing digital biomedicine

Counter-hegemonic practices

Organizational transformation

The assetization of health data

Contact: mihussai@uci.edu

Keywords: Bioethics, Data, Governance, Health, Biomedicine

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

17. Building Digital Public Sector

Marta Choroszewicz, University of Eastern Finland; Marja Alastalo, University of Eastern Finland

Public institutions across Europe and beyond are investing effort and money to intensify data collection and the use of data-analytics across various welfare domains for reasons of efficiency and cost-effectiveness. New data-driven technologies transform public services in many ways and at many levels, from transactional situations to management and knowledge production practices. Public sector has countless experiments under way with its business partners to forge and deploy data processing infrastructures and technologies to enable data-driven decision and policy making. The shift toward automated decision-making challenges the traditional relationship between the state and its citizens, and possibly leads to a variety of tensions and inequalities. Nonetheless, we still know little as far as how new data-driven future of public services aligns with the mission of public sector based on democratic values and provision of social security to citizens.

This panel will focus on how data-analytics and AI systems are changing the existing welfare institutions and reshaping of welfare provision. The panel welcomes empirical, theoretical and methodological papers, though we are particularly keen to see ethnographic contributions that include, but are not limited to: 1) particular examples of use and implementation of data-analytics in public sector; 2) the activities and reasoning related to translation of social practices, public services and existing infrastructures into a data-driven mode, 3) collaboration between different groups of professionals across sectors involved in creating of data-drivenness, and 4) the power of data-analytics to allocate resources and thus enable or hinder citizens’ social participation.

Contact: marta.choroszewicz@uef.fi

Keywords: digital public sector, data-analytics, data-driven technologies, automated decision-making, inequalities

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

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

21. Challenges of surveillance technologies in police and criminal justice systems

Sara Matos, University of Minho; Filipa Queirós, University of Minho; Aaron Amankwaa, Science & Justice RIG, Northumbria University; Ryanne Bleumink, Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam

Over the past decades, threats of terrorism and organized crime, changes in crime pattern and the nature of legal issues, as well as irregular migration, have been used to legitimize major investments in technological surveillance mechanisms. These mechanisms create regimes of state regulation, surveillance and social control while simultaneously stimulating a culture of data collection and the construction of large information systems. This expansion of surveillance technologies raises major questions about their implications in both police practices and criminal justice systems. So far, the academic debate has been addressing how the use of these surveillance mechanisms may, on the one hand, enhance public security objectives, such as the resolution of crime, and on the other hand pose threats to citizenship and human rights, such as privacy, data protection, and presumption of innocence. The latter scholarship addresses how these technologies contribute to injustice, increased suspicion, and the criminalization of minority populations. Aiming to address democracy, citizenship, transparency, effectiveness/efficiency and accountability issues in the operation of surveillance technologies, this panel welcomes contributions that critically engage with governance patterns for surveillance mechanisms such as, but not exclusively, forensic DNA databases, phenotyping technologies, familial searching, big data, facial recognition systems and predictive policing within different national civic epistemologies. Particularly, how these surveillance mechanisms contribute to policing and criminal justice outcomes and reshape our lives and notions of democracy and citizenship. The original contribution of this panel is the generation of a balanced and research-informed framework to help address the challenges of surveillance technologies.

Contact: filipaqueiros@ics.uminho.pt

Keywords: surveillance technologies; civic epistemologies; policing; democracy; citizenship;

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Governance and Public Policy

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

22. Charismatic Technology: Promises and Perils

Francis Lim

In the last few decades scholars have intensified efforts to analyze and assess the deep connections between technology, society and human subjectivity. For example, David Nye’s (1994) work on the ‘technological sublime’ analyses the profound transformations of our relationship to technology in the present age, while David Noble (1999) argues that technology has become like a religion due to people’s faith on its role for human progress. Francis Lim (2009) proposes the concept of charismatic technology to describe ‘a feature of technology that inspires intense, and often unquestioned, confidence and optimism in it as the pre-eminent means for the improvement of our general quality of life’. The societal embedding of charismatic technology crucially involves the actions of powerful ‘technological clergy’ (e.g. scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, policymakers, state leaders, and intellectuals) which hold strong faith in technical solutions to humanity’s most challenging problems. The attraction of charismatic technology and the efforts of technological clergy have resulted in advances in technical solutions in diverse domains and fields such as medicine, biochemical sciences, artificial intelligence, big data, economy, environmental protection, ‘smart cities’, etc.

This panel seeks papers offering critical analyses on the political, cultural and economic circumstances that enable certain technologies to inspire strong belief in their powers, and how the technological clergy’s profound faith in technology such as strong AI, big data, precision medicine, quantum computing, etc., may result in new social configurations and inequalities, new challenges in governance, and deep moral dilemmas for humanity.

Contact: fkglim@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: charismatic technology, theory, governance, social justice, inequality

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

25. Citing the South: Infometrics and Open Science for Sustainable Development in the Global South

Julian David Cortes Sanchez, School of Management, Universidad del Rosario; Diana Lucio Arias, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana

Tangible and intangible knowledge exchange within the Global South (GS) is becoming increasingly important. A sustainable knowledge exchange agenda within the GS may consider the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Despite the setbacks, knowledge stock (KS) such as research articles and patents, is consistently increasing in the GS by the thousands. Both the (digital) access and the appropriation of KS by society is crucial for achieving the SDGs. However, several concerns may arise regarding these complex tasks: How to integrate that KS and societies’ access to it to the design and evaluation of STi policies at the micro-macro levels? How open is the access to KS related to the SDGs for communities in the GS? Is this KS responding either to local necessities or instrumentally to a global agenda?  What is the current impact and collaboration of the KS related to the SDGs produced by/within the GS? Which is the impact and influence of funding agencies, and corporate-academic collaboration in research related to the SDGs in the GS? Methods and analytical frameworks form Infometrics (Webo-Cyber-Biblio-Sciento-metrics) enable to gain insights over those and other inquiries. The aim of this open panel, therefore, is to debate around the production, structure, access, appropriation, and impact of the KS related to the SDGs and its positive, collateral or null effects in national socio-technical systems and national/international institutions, all above analyzed within the framework of South-South cooperation.

Contact: julian.cortess@urosario.edu.co

Keywords: Infometrics, Open Science, SDGs, Science Governance, Global South

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

27. Collective Forms Of Governance: Rethinking The Role Of Civic Engagement With Science & Technology In Epistemically Fragmented Societies

Madeleine Murtagh, Policy, Ethics & Life Sciences Research Centre, Newcastle University; Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna; Alessandro Blasimme, ETH Zurich

Western democracies are facing harsh criticism for their alleged inability to meet their own standards of inclusivity and justice. Against the backdrop of rising inequalities within and across societies, dissatisfaction with the rituals and symbols of representative democracy is mounting. A pronounced anti-establishment rhetoric is eroding the institutional culture of democracy, its reliance on scientific and other established sources of knowledge, and the credibility of expertise and competence. Consequently, collective decision-making about complex sociotechnical options (such as genome editing, access to sensitive personal data for research and care, and climate change) is increasingly taking place within a legitimacy void. Resistance to a Western normativity, both in the Global South and Global North, demands alternative modes, reference points, spaces of decision making.

In this panel we ask: How might we deploy collective forms of governance in epistemically fragmented and diverse societies? What role can civic engagement – understood as the involvement of publics in the governance of science and technology within and outside of the traditional institutions of representative democracy – play in producing democratically legitimate decisions on complex sociotechnical matters? What practices of public deliberation can enhance the quality of science and technology governance? Can civic engagement be an antidote to the political manipulation of public opinion? We do not assume civic engagement to be an unproblematic ‘good’. Rather we encourage critical reflection and engagement with these questions to ask what can be or might be the effects of such civic engagement? Particularly, looking beyond the precepts of a Western sensibility.

Contact: madeleine.murtagh@newcastle.ac.uk

Keywords: collective governance, governing science and technology, diversity, normativity

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Science Communication/Public Engagement

35. Decentring datacentres: their politics, energy, waste and epistemics

Stefan Laser, Ruhr University Bochum; Estrid Sørensen, Ruhr University Bochum; Laura Kocksch, Ruhr University Bochum

Data centres have gained attention in STS for their politics of territoriality and geographic location (Vonderau 2016 & 2019, Maguire & Winthereik 2019). We seek to extend the focus to the material configurations of data centres by discussing them as situated spaces of high resource consumption and excessive waste production, of contested politics and of knowledge production.

Half of the information and communication industries’ greenhouse gas emissions comes from data centres (Belkhir/Elmeligi); roughly 1,5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Millions of gallons of water are used to keep data cool (Hogan 2015). Energy Humanities (Szeman &Boyer 2017) and Discard Studies (Lepawsky 2018) urge us to reflect on how such excesses are formed and maintained, by which actors and through which practices.

Data centres are important actors in configuring common resources: electricity, water, heat and knowledge. Nonetheless, they are hidden away and hardly accessible (Hogan &Shepard 2015). How are the politics of data centres made visible, and how can data centres be turned into a matter of democratic debate and regulation? This question is relevant both on state and industry level, as it is in workplaces where practices are increasingly shaped by the configurations of data centres.

Even though knowledge production of both corporate ‘data scientists’ as well as university scientists and researchers increasingly depend on data centres for both storage and data processing, little literature exists on the epistemic effects of data centre configurations.

We invite papers submissions addressing the political, ecological and epistemic entanglements of data centres.

Contact: laura.kocksch@rub.de

Keywords: data centres, data practices, ecologies, waste, infrastructure

Categories: Energy

Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

37. Democracy in the making

Jan-Peter Voß, Berlin University of Technology; Jason Chilvers, University of East Anglia

What is democracy? It is no news that democracy is an “essentially contested concept” (Connolly). We explore how this can be translated into a practice-oriented approach. We start by taking any democratic practice to be centred on a particular way of articulating the demos and how it wants to govern itself. This entails the construction of the people as a collective subjectivity. In practice, this works by making “representative claims” (Saward). If accepted such claims generate political authority and become performative in actually constituting the people as a collective with shared will and agency (Latour, Disch). But how specifically is this done in practice? And which are the broader arrangements or “hinterlands” (Law) that shape “felicity conditions” (Austin)? These questions lead into the machinery of doing liberal-representative democracy through party competition and elections, but they symmetrically bring into view practices of stakeholder negotiation, citizen deliberation, street rallies, and other radically different forms of representing the people through opinion mining in digital data or performative-aesthetic interventions. Enacting specific “political imaginaries” (Ezrahi) in a wider “ecology of representation” (Rosanvallon) they jointly constitute “the demos multiple” (cf. Mol). A next step for STS is to reconstruct the dynamics of different democratic practices in the making by tracing entanglements with specific “epistemic cultures” of democracy and their practices of theorizing and experimentally engaging with them (Knorr Cetina). Ultimately, the question is how realities of democracy, along with the political authority they generate, are shaped through specific sciences and technologies of democracy.

Contact: jan-peter.voss@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: sciences and technologies of democracy, performativity, political representation, public engagement

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

42. Digital Technologies in Policing and Security

Simon Egbert, Technische Universität Berlin; Nikolaus Pöchhacker, MCTS, Technical University of Munich

Recent and globally disseminated technologies and processes of data analysis and computational science – mainly in reference to terms (and myths) like big data, algorithmic decision making and artificial intelligence – have transformed many processes of knowledge production in the field of domestic security practices. With predictive policing as one of its currently most prominent representatives, the data-driven production of (prospective) knowledge has now also affected the security systems at every level – from policing to criminal justice, from border control to counterterrorism policies. Different predictive models include generating risky spaces – like PredPol; risky individuals – like Chicago’s ‘strategic subject list’, EU-border risk assessment system EUROSUR and US’ Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System; or calculating the recidivism risk of convicted offenders in order to inform the sentence decision – like COMPAS. Thus, regardless of whether suspects or spaces are objects of (predictive) knowledge production, or if recidivism risk scores for convicted offenders are generated, in the end, these practices are increasingly characterized by a socio-technical interwovenness with digital data production and algorithmic technologies. This calls for an exploration of the sociotechnical dynamics involved in the co-construction of risks, (in)justice, (in)security and technological development. Correspondingly, this panel seeks to ask how STS can provide analytical tools for grasping the entanglement of technology and society involved in the development and implementation of digitally mediated knowledge production in policing, criminal justice, border control and other fields of security by presenting globally disseminated case examples as well as theoretical approaches on the digitalization and datafication of policing and security practices.

Contact: simon.egbert@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: policing, criminal justice, security, legal technologies, digitalization

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Governance and Public Policy

44. Digitalizing Cities and Infrastructures

Sulfikar Amir, Nanyang Technological University

This panel focuses on urban digitalization defined as a techno-institutional transformation of cities in which information technology and digital platforms become the principal infrastructure and the basis for providing essential services to residents. In many cities around the world, urban digitalization is taking place through projects initiated by both city governments and private companies. It is manifested in the organized utilization of various digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Internet of Things that transform a wide range of public sectors, including transportation, finance, security, food, and healthcare. The increasingly adopted concept of “Smart City” exemplifies how city governments across Asia are taking the efforts to digitalize their governing operation. This is coupled with a rapid growth of digital-platform companies such as Uber, Lyft, Alibaba, Grab, Gojek, Ola, DiDi, etc. that provide vital services in ride hailing, food delivery, and electronic payment. While it signifies progress, the growing trend of urban digitalization raises a compelling question: What are the impacts of digitalization on citi resilience and vulnerability? This question is highly relevant in times when cities are growing more vulnerable than ever to disaster and crisis. The panel aims to critically examine the impact of urban digitalization on city resilience. Specifically, it probes how digitalization of public services affects city capacity to respond to crisis and disturbance. This panel invites scholarly works, which shed light on the ways urban digitalization turns into a new structure shaping social life in the city.

Contact: sulfikar@ntu.edu.sg

Keywords: Urban Digitalization, Cities, Resilience, Vulnerability

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

Governance and Public Policy

45. Dilemmas in advisory science

Kåre Nolde Nielsen, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway; Sebastian Linke, University of Gothenburg; Petter Holm, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway

Interfaces between advisory science and policy are subject to a number of practical and theoretical dilemmas, inviting continuous empirical attention and conceptual refinement.

   One such dilemma concerns the separation between the respective bodies in charge of providing advice and of using it in decision-making. A close association between these bodies ensures that scientific advice is useful. However, the association can also be too close, as this may undermine the reality as well as the external perception of objective advice and legitimate decision-making.

   Another dilemma concerns accountability, e.g. when scientific advisory processes are opened up for participation by interest groups, lay experts and citizens. While there are substantive and normative reasons for stakeholder participation in the provision of relevant knowledge, this may challenge accountability and credibility of the advice.

   A third dilemma concerns tensions between complexity and transparency. Supported by model development, rising computing power and data availability, scientific advice increasingly draws on integrated model frameworks that aim to account for interactions between multiple factors. While promising more comprehensive assessments, the advice based on highly complex models may become difficult to explain and understand.

   This open panel invites studies about the relationships between scientific advice and decision-making with a particular emphasis on practical dilemmas faced by various actors at different levels (local, national, global), the steps taken to address them as well as conceptual developments on science-policy interactions.

Contact: kare.nolde.nielsen@uit.no

Keywords: Advisory science, science-policy interactions, lay expertise

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

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

52. Dying at the Margins: Emerging Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying

Philip R Olson, Virginia Tech; Natashe Lemos Dekker, University of Amsterdam; Jesse Peterson, KTH Stockholm

This session seeks to explore socio-ecological networks of the dying and dead that exist at the margins. The borders between life and death are sometimes unclear. Death may get interrupted, delayed, or come undone, disrupting culturally shared norms and expectations surrounding death and dying. We acknowledge such disruptions as material and discursive; that is, bodies, minds, geographies, stories, technologies, and more act to challenge human perspectives on how people, animals, plants, or things ought to die and where and how the dead ought to be laid to rest. Suddenly, what seemed coherent no longer is, in the breakdown or dissolution of that which is dying but also in the way one orders worlds and afterworlds.

This session aims to identify and develop ways to explore and establish connections between dying and death from perspectives that refute a nature/culture binary—to ask questions such as: What boundary work takes place to construct and maintain the categories of alive, not-alive, dead, dying, and undead for places, objects, and beings? How do states and processes of acquiescing to, existing in between, manipulating, or overcoming life and/or death affect normative assumptions about dying and death? What might it mean to reconfigure human understanding of death to a more ecological frame that accommodates more-than-human lives and/or deep time? How might the memories, spirits, or spiritualities related to the dead and dying limit, expand, or explode a material-discursive frame? How do such challenges alter ethical approaches or values attached to dying and death?

Contact: prolson@vt.edu

Keywords: Death and Dying, Environment, Vital Boundaries, Worlds and Afterworlds, Ethics and Policy

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

53. Editing future life and biotechnological utopias/ Bio-political materialization and potentialities of CRISPRcas9

Eva Slesingerova, Masaryk university

We are inhabiting multiple bio-political potentialities, futures echoing ideas of life-as-it-could-be. This panel analyzes biotechnological not-only-human networks, their utopian and dystopian potentialities in the context of recombinant DNA technologies. For fifty years, assorted technologies for human genome editing and recombinant DNA have been used. The current applications of genome editing on human germlines have provoked significant attention and raised a number of ethical and legal questions as well. Specifically considering CRISPR/Cas 9 technology, the rhetoric about revolution, new promises, new breakpoints for humankind, also fears and concerns have emerged recently. Speaking about CRISPR/Cas9 and the media frenzy, anthropologist Kirksey (2016) referred to “emergent 21st century biotechnology dreams,” noting that “science fictions and fantasies are quickly becoming facts with CRISPR” which he described as “a gene editing technology that is opening up new horizons for the human species.” Miscellaneous futurities, as material-semiotic reconfigurations, biotechnological utopias, media hypes, are present in the topics of the current genome editing technologies. We meet to bring together various views on questions like:

–              What kinds of biotechnological utopias, spaces of hope and hype, visions, also fears and concerns we face today in the context of human genome editing technologies?

–              Which social and political issues are mirrored and created by these technologies? How they stratify groups of potential patients?

–              What modes of de/politization are involved in the context of editing genome technologies? What kinds of new social control, hierarchies, exclusion, domination but also care, social inclusion can genome editing technologies help accomplish?

Contact: eslesi@fss.muni.cz

Keywords: editing genome, biotechnological utopias, techno-fantasies, biopolitics, CRISPR-Cas9

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

63. Fakes and legitimacy reordering

Cristina Popescu, EHESS – Centre d’Etude des Mouvements Sociaux

“Fakes” come in multiple forms and shapes. With the new career of the “fake news”, and the “crisis of objectivity”, the discussions on truth, validity, legitimacy became a new impulse and developed a new, transdisciplinary profile: philosophy, social sciences, economics, but also science and technology studies, approach this topic at different levels and with different results.

The session draws on this multiple approaches to the question of fakes, and yet tries to go beyond a simple recollection of paradigmatic approaches and argumentative constructions. Far more, the contributions should aim at a comparative perspective on different modes of valuation, which are implied in producing fakes across different realms of the social life. The session welcomes contributions which look at practices of classification and categorization, but also at typical ways of thinking about normative representation of actors dealing with phenomena of ascribing and assessing worth to things, people, or institutions. How are fakes produced within the new imaginative regimes at work in our societies? Which are their consequences? And which strategies do the policy actors deploy during this acute period of legitimacy reordering? These are a few questions the session intends to answer.

Contact: cristina.popescu@ehess.fr

Keywords: fake news, truth, legitimacy, valuation, imaginative regimes

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

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

76. Hegemony, counter-hegemony and ontological politics

Andrzej Wojciech Nowak, Philosophy Institute Adam Mickiewicz University; Christian Nold, University College London; Krzysztof Abriszewski

STS often seem far from some direct actions that implicitly articulate political aims. The problem was directly addressed by H. Collins discussing the waves of STS, their primary vision of science, and the social function of experts. It has become all the more urgent when political measures were globally taken to discredit or block scientific expertise – climate change being an example as well as the anti-vaccine movements.

Yet there is a question: How do researchers ‘do’ politics with STS theory and methods? Is there any need for STS to engage with insurgent politics outside of parliamentary framings? (We believe there is.) Can we do that effortlessly? Or do STS have to combine ‘fire and water’ and bring together ontological analysis with politico-ethical sensibilities?

Our aim is to recognise the ontological politics embedded in practices, rituals, things, technologies and artefacts in order to intentionally give them an emancipatory direction. Yet this is not enough. One needs to ask how to establish and enact the policies we want by installing, using, or performing these technologies, objects, artefacts. Only this will bring a political and ethical dimension. We need not politics by other means, but direct political actions, as we need not just the third wave of STS – that would stabilise science anew –  or even a fourth wave, that would stabilise democracy anew in this turbulent time. We welcome contributions both theoretical and empirical, that show examples of using STS to support social movements or engage in political and artistic activities.

Contact: andrzej.w.nowak@gmail.com

Keywords: ontological politics, hegemony, counter-hegemony, insurgent politics

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

81. How can STS support a multiplicity of practices in Citizen Science?

Christian Nold, University College London; Alexandra Albert, UCL

Citizen Science is a field of growing interest for governments and social science researchers. The current situation of increased EU funding means Citizen Science is being put under pressure to professionalise, add quality and evaluation criteria. Furthermore, there is an increasing pressure to define what is Citizen Science and what it is not. One effect of this might be the exclusion of practices based around activism, art and situated knowledge that have previously been the core of citizen-led practices, and yet are being pushed to the fringes in this move to professionalisation.

STS has often uncritically supported this technocratic logic of utility and empowerment via Citizen Science. The logic of utility aims to make science cheaper by outsourcing scientific labour to the public, while at the same time claiming scientific involvement creates empowered citizens. Yet there are few actual empirical studies of impacts of this utilitarian logic on participants or what empowerment might mean in practice.

This panel asks:

What activism, art and situated knowledge practices should be seen as citizen science and how can they benefit from being framed as Citizen Science?

How can STS researchers actively support a multiplicity of Citizen Science practices?

What STS approaches can be used to expand the scope of citizen science?

This session is looking for papers that combine empirical and theoretical engagements with Citizen Science.

Contact: christian@softhook.com

Keywords: Citizen Science, Public Engagement, Art, Activism, Situated Knowledge

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

83. Identification, Datafication, Citizenship

Richard Rottenburg, University of the Witwatersrand; Alena Thiel, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

The proliferation of (biometric) identification technologies across the globe – especially in Africa, South Asia and Latin America – is nested in profoundly new aspirations for the rationalization and even automation of political decision making in public-private governance. Building on interoperability-based data infrastructures, states and financial institutions, among many other organisations concerned with the surveillance of individual behaviour, subscribe to the idea that digital “data doubles” (Bouk 2017) circulate between previously disconnected registers, allowing thus the “datafication” (von Oertzen 2017) of new, previously unobserved areas of life, and thus ultimately the creation of new “human kinds” (Hacking 1995). The panel explores continuities and discontinuities of socio-technical configurations that have led to connecting recent innovations in identification technologies with the production of quantitative knowledge for decision making. While this happens in conventional state administrations and “global administrative apparatuses” (Eriksen 2012), the panel pays particular attention to the merging and blurring of these realms in largely privatized epistemic centres where tech giants radically transform quantitative data collection and the production of statistics through the development of learning algorithms. The by now classical analysis of statistical knowledge production as in “governance by numbers” (Rottenburg 2015) and the implications for “digital citizenship” (Isin and Ruppert 2015) needs to be revisited in the light this transformations. The panel seeks empirical contributions that examine how these developments play out in concrete settings in the Global South.

Contact: alena.thiel@ethnologie.uni-halle.de

Keywords: Biometrics, identification, quantification, digital citizenship

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Big Data

84. Inclusion in scientific communities

Jochen Glaser, TU Berlin; Nelius Boshoff, Stellenbosch University

The original conception of scientific communities by Robert Merton, Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi implied the idea that all members of scientific communities equally participate in the production of scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, science studies have uncovered many constraints that limit the participation of researchers in the knowledge production processes and decision processes of their scientific communities. Examples include constraints based on gender, ethnicity, access to means for research, or non-mainstream approaches in research. At the international level, several scientific communities have begun a discussion about a North-Western dominance in the selection of topics and approaches. In addition to these constraints, which could be considered endogenous to scientific communities, political decision produce constraints by limiting access to resource, imposing secrecy, or restricting travel and other forms of communication and collaboration.

The purpose of this open session is to explore the potential of studying these phenomena from a perspective of researchers limited inclusion in (or exclusion from) their scientific communities. We suggest considering inclusion as the way in which researchers participate in knowledge production and decision processes of their scientific communities, and to look at mechanisms that constrain inclusion from a comparative perspective. How are opportunities to participate in knowledge production and decision-making distributed in international scientific communities? Whose participation is restricted, and in which ways? What mechanisms restrict inclusion? How does the inclusion of researchers, national scientific communities, and world regions in the international production of scientific knowledge change historically?

Contact: Jochen.Glaeser@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: Inequality in knowledge production, resource distribution, international mobility, gender, North-Western Dominance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

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

91. Institutionalization and social appropriation of RRI: A remaining challenge?

Raúl Tabarés, Fundación TECNALIA RESEARCH & INNOVATION; Vincent Blok, Wageningen University & Research; Mika Nieminen, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland; Robert Braun, Institut für Höhere Studien Vienna

Since 2013, the EC has pushed a devoted strategy to foster the embracement of RRI across the whole Horizon 2020 FP. This effort has allowed to develop a generous body of knowledge, experiences and networks around the concept with the determination to promote a significant change in European R&D. However, with the   conclusion of FP8 and the beginning of FP9 at the forefront, it´s time to reflect about how RRI has effectively permeated different institutions across the EU and outside of it. On the one hand, New HoRRIzon project has shown that the institutionalization of RRI in research organizations is still a challenge. On the other hand, other projects (e.g. RRI practice, RIconfigure) have indicated ways forward to mainstream RRI. That duality demands to explore what are the remaining challenges towards its full implementation.

In this panel we would like to explore how RRI has been diffused all over the last 7 years in Europe with the help of questions such as: Which challenges face RRI throughout the EU territory   ? What characteristics have shaped RRI diffusion? What drivers can lead the RRI paradigm towards its institutionalization? Which best practices can be shared and transferred across the continent?  

We welcome submissions from different fields of academia (political science, philosophy, sociology, social psychology, anthropology and STS of course) that want to share their findings  about this timely policy episode. We also welcome papers from different stakeholders engaged in this topic such as research funders, policy makers, science communicators and citizen associations.

Contact: FARAONDEMETAL@GMAIL.COM

Keywords: open science, stakeholder engagement, ethics, STI policy, innovation ecosystems

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

92. Integrating Stakeholders From the Beginning – But (How) is that possible?

Andreas Bischof, University of Technology Chemnitz; Arne Maibaum, TU Berlin

A central mean of STS is to integrate diverging perspectives on science and technology within scientific discourses, as well as integrating non-academic actors in such projects and processes. In recent years, this mission has been adopted by funding agencies and further scientifc communities. The aim to intensify interdisciplinary cooperation with other academics and transdisciplinary cooperation with stakeholders from practice has come to the fore, such as in the EU funding governance concept „Responsible Research and Innovation“ and other modes of „Post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaboration“ (Balmer et al. 2016).

The questions what does it take to intervene, and whom a specific research constellation wants to speak to and act with, are normative, dynamic and often cannot be answered in a single solution that remains the same throughout the process. The session acknowledges this difficulty and focusses therefore on the very beginnings of (academic and non-academic) stakeholder integration. How do we, can we and should we (re)organize our methods and practices to integrate different stakeholders in the very beginning? How do we rethink and remake ways of integrating and recognizing the needs and inputs of others in early stages of research processes?

The session seeks to discuss past and ongoing efforts of user-centered design or participative research, as well as other forms of outreach activity that aimed at integrating stakeholders in academic contexts. Furthermore we welcome reflections on practices and methods of interdisciplinary cooperation focussing the very beginnings of such projects.

Contact: andreas.bischof@phil.tu-chemnitz.de

Keywords: integration, stakeholders, participation, methods, beginning

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Governance and Public Policy

93. International Scientific Collaboration: Knowledge Infrastructures and the Role of STS Scholars

Simcha Jong, Leiden University; Richelle Boone, Leiden University

International scientific collaborations play an increasingly important role in efforts to address global challenges. This gives rise to numerous questions about the structures of international scientific collaborations, and about how these are changing scientific work.

Which forms of international scientific collaboration can we for instance identify? And how are these collaborations situated within the broader context of scientific endeavour? What do we know about the social, organizational and political dynamics of international scientific collaborations? What kind of stakeholders are for example involved in these collaborations? And which organisational frameworks do they for instance employ to deal with specific coordination challenges tied to international scientific collaboration? What are scientists’ practical experiences with international scientific collaboration? And how do these relate to the way their work is organized?

How could the social, organizational and political dynamics of international scientific collaboration be studied best? Which methods should be employed? Last but not least: what might be ideas to improve knowledge infrastructures and international scientific collaboration? And what could and/or should be the role of STS scholars in a process of designing knowledge infrastructures and/or facilitating international scientific collaboration?

Contact: rboone470@gmail.com

Keywords: International Scientific Collaboration, Knowledge Infrastructures, Global Challenges, Science Organization, Role of STS Scholars

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

94. Interrogating institutional strategies that aim facilitating knowledge coproduction and co-innovation of agri-food systems.

OSCAR A. FORERO, AGROSAVIA; SOAS-UK; Juan Carlos Martinez Medrano, AGROSAVIA, Colombia; Erika Vanessa Wagner-Medina, AGROSAVIA, Colombia

During the last decade of the 20th century STS of agri-food sector interrogated the wisdom of focusing in technological solutions as the way to solve the problem of unsustainable agri-food systems. Twenty years later the problem continues unabated: “The food production and supply chain consumes about 30 percent of total end-use energy globally, and contributes to over 20 percent of total annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions” (sic.) (FAO 2017).   The STS critique of inadequacy of research institutional settings to confront such problem has contributed to socio-political mobilisations calling for institutional reforms. For instance, STS research has revealed how the most promissory technologies such as GMO felt short of expectations, whilst allowing research institution to capture financial resources that could have been used more effectively, particularly in developing countries where GCC negatively affects agri-food systems more severely. Following such critique, public and private research institutions began reforms aimed to facilitate knowledge coproduction and co-innovation. Have such political reforms, and changes in institutional changes made any difference in terms of developing territorial innovation systems (TIS) that incorporate local knowledge and agency of territorial actors? This panel welcomes presentation of research that interrogates effectiveness of political reforms and/or changes of institutional settings that aim to lead research for knowledge co-production and co-innovation of agricultural systems as a main adaptation strategy to GCC.

Contributors of this session will present research that discusses how policy and/or institutional reforms consider issues of ‘ethics of innovation’, ‘whose agency?’, ‘which knowledge counts? ´ ‘responsible agricultural innovation’ and related.

Contact: of1@soas.ac.uk

Keywords: Agri-food, territorial innovation systems, institutional reforms, knowledge coproduction

Categories: Food and Agriculture

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

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

97. Locating & Timing Governance in STS and Universities

Knut H Sørensen, NTNU, Dept. of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture; Sharon Traweek, UCLA

For generations universities have been institutions of higher education and research. Now they are expected to contribute to local and global economies by commercializing research and spurring innovation, while addressing grand social challenges like climate mitigation and social disparities. They also must engage successfully in mass higher education and outreach with a variety of publics. This means that universities now occupy a strategic place in re/shaping society by circulating research and knowledge through teaching and professional expertise. Meanwhile universities have become subject to increased auditing practices and austerity policies, locally and globally. Universities turn to experts in branding and commodification for strategies in defining and representing their work as successful.

STS provides resources for understanding such dis/continuities in the making and circulation of knowledge while the study of universities in dynamic ecologies is vital to addressing unexamined assumptions in STS about the relationship between research, teaching, and society, as well as the governance of that relationship. We invite papers that address how universities engage with the changing:

– fragility and resilience of university cultures.

– demands for rapid intellectual, social, and economic contributions to society;

– work life and agency of academics

– relationship between teaching, research, innovation, and outreach;

– intersectional issues in knowledge making, teaching, outreach, funding, and society;

– political economies of research, teaching, funding, and outreach;

– campus infrastructures from software and budgets to buildings and transportation;

– and increasingly complex web of relationships among universities glocally through rankings, MOUs, satellite campuses, academic mobilities, etc.

Contact: knut.sorensen@ntnu.no

Keywords: Universities, Higher education, Auditing, Neoliberalism, Resilience

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

100. Lost in the Dreamscapes of Modernity? Theorizing Agency, Multiplicity, and Scale in Sociotechnical Imaginaries

Alexander Wentland, Technical University of Munich

Over the past decade, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries has emerged as one of the leading frameworks in STS to explain the co-production of societal futures vis-à-vis science and technology (S&T). This perspective has aided the analysis of persistent patterns and problems of the modern technoscientific world, while avoiding grand narratives and theories of society. It has provided helpful insights into why great changes might happen rapidly or attempts to remake the world fail despite great effort. Much of the current literature has employed the framework to compare technological development across nations, regions, and cultures beyond obvious natural, economic, or social disparities. Despite widespread and productive use, a number of questions have come to the fore that complicate the further theorizing and empirical application of this framework. For example, how can we explain not only the emergence but also the shifting and changing of imagined futures? How do we deal with the coexistence of concurrent sociotechnical imaginaries and, furthermore, the overlapping of imagined communities at scales such as the nation-state along with transnational zones and specific places? How can entrepreneurial agents resonate with diverse cultural currents and possibly create entanglements between seemingly unrelated discourse arenas and disparate life worlds? This panel invites contributions that tackle these challenges in generative ways, including theoretical papers, conceptually rich case studies, and comparative analyses, but also presentations that expand this discussion towards the realm of activism, design, and artistic work.

Contact: alexander.wentland@tum.de

Keywords: sociotechnical imaginaries, co-production, multiplicity, agency, scale

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

105. Making science in public: Studying science communication and public engagement

Sarah Davies, University of Copenhagen; Noriko Hara, Indiana University; Maja Horst, University of Copenhagen

Science communication and public engagement with science are key mechanisms by which scientific knowledge is mediated, negotiated, and transformed. Over the past decades, STS research has outlined the ways in which science and society are co-produced through public communication activities and catalysed a shift towards dialogue and engagement in science communication practice. More recently, issues of representation, exclusion, and contestation have risen to the fore in discussions of science in public, as well as concerns about public (dis)trust in expertise, the dizzying impacts of social media, and debates about science’s role in political activism and resistance.

This open panel invites paper proposals that analyse such ways that science is represented, transformed, contested or negotiated in public venues. Papers may explore, for instance, citizen science; science and technology-related activism; science in social media; science in museums; deliberative experiments; popular science writing; science blogging; sci­art activities; news media; or science comedy – as well as the myriad other sites and mechanisms by which science is done in public. We invite critical analysis of these sites and mechanisms. For example, papers might analyse the constitution of publics and knowledges within particular science communication activities; discuss affective or temporal regimes of public engagement with science; or give accounts of experimental practice that show how STS might contribute to doing science in public in just, generous, and collaborative ways. In particular, any analysis that showcases the significance and agency of STS in examining diverse public engagements with science is welcomed.

Contact: sarahrachaeldavies@gmail.com

Keywords: public engagement with science, science communication, STS, democratisation of science

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

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

116. Negotiating independence in academic careers

Grit Laudel, TU Berlin; Ed Hackett, Brandeis University

Scientific communities expect their members to act as intellectually independent peers who autonomously formulate problems and contribute solutions to the community’s knowledge. The realities of knowledge production often deviate widely from this fiction. Intellectual independence is gained and maintained by negotiating multiple interdependencies, and is unevenly distributed among collaborators and over the course of an academic career. Early career academics must gain independence from those who supervised them as doctoral students and postdocs, a process that often includes negotiations about ideas and research objects taken from one laboratory to the next. Researchers in many fields must negotiate their aims and later contributions with collaborators. Technicians and other collaborators in essential supporting roles may never gain the same independence as researchers.

The negotiation of independence takes place in organisational settings that guarantee varying degrees of formal autonomy to researchers at different career stages and in different roles, which do not always translate into actual independence. Actual independence is also shaped by national science policies and modes of resource distribution as well as authority relations in international scientific communities.

The independence academics want, need, and can achieve thus varies between researchers with different career goals and aspirations, between organisational environments, between national science systems, and between fields of research. Independence also varies strongly by gender and minority status, over time and by career stage. We invite colleagues addressing any aspect of negotiating independence during the academic career to speak in these sessions.

Contact: grit.laudel@tu-berlin.de

Keywords: academic careers, independence, collaborations, supporting roles in research

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

117. Negotiating knowledge of harm through affects, embodiment and trust

Anna Durnova, Institute of Sociological Studies/ Faculty of Social Sciences; Venla Oikkonen, Tampere University

The value of self-orientation – a central component of modern social orders especially in the global North – maintains that individuals may shape collective action through autonomy, plurality and protest. Yet, debates on health-related phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy or refusal of cancer screenings suggest that these widely accepted ideas are linked to institutionalized models of knowledge production. When individuals or communities question recommended medical procedures through other kinds of epistemic frameworks, such as embodied experiences or non-institutional knowledge production, the right to autonomy and protest is often questioned. The panel addresses health or technology-related debates in order to understand how ideas of harm, trust and legitimate knowledge are established and challenged. While, in general, patient participation in decisions on health measures is increasingly accepted, experiences and conceptualizations of harm impacting these decisions have not been given enough attention. Yet they open questions of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and ‘trust’. We are interested in situated negotiations of knowledge, through which harm gets framed and possibly legitimized, and we pay special attention to affects, embodiment and trust. We welcome both theoretical papers contributing to STS conceptualizations of harm and empirical papers analyzing current negotiations of harm in health, technology or security. Possible questions include: How are knowledges of harm regulated, debated and contested in health, technology or security? What happens to knowledge, if we approach harm through affects and embodied experiences? In what ways is knowledge of harm a gendered and intersectional issue? How do STS scholars engage in these debates?

Contact: anna.durnova@univie.ac.at

Keywords: affect, body, harm, health, knowledge, trust

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Governance and Public Policy

119. New Multiples in STI policy? Understanding the entanglement of concepts, practices and identities

Tim Flink, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Martin Reinhart, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Barbara Hendriks, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Cornelia Schendzielorz, Deutsches Insitut für

In the wake of incessant reforms pertaining to the role and function of science, technology and innovation (STI) in society, the 21st century has seen a multiplication of new STI concepts, some of which are challenging the seemingly stable understandings, practices and conceptions of scientific knowledge production and their technological utilization. How do these new concepts, e.g. responsible research and innovation, grand/societal challenges, frontier research, translational research, science diplomacy, mission-oriented research and innovation, emerge? (How) do they relate to each other, and what narratives are they embedded in? What and who are their drivers? How and by whom does their articulation take place, rather top-down or bottom-up? Whom do they include and exclude and when? Do they just legitimize policymakers or (when and why) do they translate into practices and identities of actors from the science system. How are they different from ‘old’ concepts that bridged or delineated science and non-science? This panel invites contributions that assess the role and interrelation of new STI concepts and is open to single case studies, comparative conceptual works, longitudinal analyses that put new concepts in historical perspective as well as studies that investigate into practice and habitus formations in relation to new concepts.

Contact: timotheus.flink@googlemail.com

Keywords: Concepts, semantics, rhetorical studies, discourse analysis, grand challenges, RRI, translational medical research, science diplomacy

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

124. ‘Not doing’ in times of crisis: agency and the urgency of pause and restraint

Simon Cohn, LSHTM; Annelieke Driessen, London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine

Agency and action are considered to be inherently interlinked. And, by definition, they are commonly used in combination to define what an actor is. But the problem is, through narratives that stage action as positive, urgent and productive, forms of non-doing and absences (of people, actions, matter, ideas) tend to be conceived, by default, as negative, unimportant or simply as failings. As a consequence, at a time of ecological and political crises, important calls to “act now”, non-action (e.g. to consume less, reduce our use of resources, or not participate) can often emerge as paradoxical imperatives.

This panel invites ethnographic engagements that not only describe but think with such delays, pauses, restraints, hesitations, inactions, and silences. The papers will collectively explore their traces and effects, and how they might contribute to theoretical discussions on agency, ontology and methodology.

We welcome contributors to address questions concerning the making and unmaking of absences, about alternative enactments, and the role they can have constituting change and shaping the otherwise. We thereby hope to generate a conversation that will enrich the STS vocabulary of  ‘agent’, ‘action’ and ‘practice’, and question any fixed binary between absence and presence by extending existing conceptualisations such as ‘absent-presence’ and ‘active-passive’.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

* deliberate ways of not doing (something)

* absences (of people, actions, matter, ideas)

* acts that make non-acts possible

Contact: annelieke.driessen@lshtm.ac.uk

Keywords: agency, absences, method, action, practice

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

129. Ordering knowledge in uncertain times: STS perspectives on the reinvention of the literature review

Bluemel Clemens, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Arno Simons, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Alexander Schniedermann, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies

In the age of post-truth and declining trust in scientific institutions, we witness novel ways of constructing, aggregating and presenting evidence in the sciences. New instruments for ordering and presenting knowledge, such as guidelines and novel databases are established aiming at substituting existing forms of knowledge – not always without friction.  The literature review appears to be one of the arenas where legitimate ways of knowing and presenting evidence are negotiated. Practices of reviewing the scientific literature are manifold; they vary historically and across disciplines.

Recent trends in some disciplines towards “systematic reviewing” (SR) and its positioning in discourses of “evidence-based practice”, “knowledge transfer” or “reproduction crisis”, have sparked a transforming debate about the epistemic role of the literature review. Systematic Reviews entered various scholarly realms and reordered promises and fears about what counts as a legitimate way of generating evidence.

What can STS contribute to current debates about the role of reviewing? The panel invites contributions that address questions, such as these:

What different forms of reviewing can be found, how have they changed, and how do they relate to each other? How do new forms reposition or replace established ones?

To which goals, values and problematizations are these forms linked? How do they relate to broader discourses?

How do they impact scientific practices and the relation of science to society? How does reviewing change the production of scientific knowledge and how does it relate to broader configurations of power-knowledge, such as the science-policy nexus?

Contact: bluemel@dzhw.eu

Keywords: reviewing practices, systematic review, evidence-based practice, knowledge-power relations

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

132. Performative Futures: Fighting Reification Inertias through Open Anticipations

Sergio Urueña, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU; Hannot Rodríguez, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU; Andoni Ibarra, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

Science and technology practices are crucially shaped by representations of the future. Expectations, socio-technical imaginaries and techno-visions are constitutive elements in the de facto epistemic-political governance of research and innovation. Some science and technology scholars (e.g., van Lente, 2006; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015; Konrad and Palavicino, 2017; Lösch, 2017) as well as certain research policy frameworks (e.g., technology assessment, anticipatory governance, RRI) have emphasized this performative character of futures by approaching it as an object of responsibility. This intellectual endeavor has been especially fruitful in relation to the visualization and critique of existing reification inertias. That is to say, the frames, regulations, commitments, feelings and so on, orienting and constraining (i.e., reifying, or closing-down) the processes, outcomes and ends of research and innovation practices.

This panel aims to explore the theoretical and practical possibilities of developing interventive, anticipatory resources that are capable of instrumentalizing the future in more open, inclusive and reflexive ways.

Some potential questions include:

• To what extent are anticipatory narratives and practices within research and innovation policy systems open, inclusive and reflexive?
• What constraining/enabling roles do socio-technical expectations, imaginaries and techno-visions of the future play in research and innovation practices?
• What potentials and limits do anticipatory methods (e.g., scenario-building, science-fiction prototyping, technology roadmapping, etc.) display with regard to reflexivity and de-reifying dynamics?
• How is/ should the epistemic-political quality of open anticipatory practices be enacted and/or assessed?
• What role and relevance does anticipatory governance display in relation to more recent policy frameworks such as RRI and “Open Science”?

Contact: sergio.uruena@ehu.eus

Keywords: Futures, Anticipation, RRI, Scenarios, “Open Science”

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Science Communication/Public Engagement

133. Peripheral States: Public Uses and Misuses of Big Data Technologies

María Belén Albornoz, FLACSO Latin American Social Studies Faculty; Henry Chavez, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador

In September 2019, an 18-gigabit database was found stored in an unsecured server in Miami containing about fifty data points of private and some very sensitive information on every Ecuadorian citizen. As the growing list of private data leaks (Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc.), the Ecuadorian episode launch the alarms, but nothing indicates real changes in the near future.

Though, there is a feature in the Ecuadorian case that opens a new range of questions on the problems and risk of the rise of the big data technologies. Unlike other similar massive leaks of information, the data exposed in this case was collected by different public agencies whose objectives and technological capacities are now in doubt.

For the last ten years, governments, especially in peripheral states have followed the technological path imposed by the giants of the new digital economy without having the time of reflecting and regulate the side effects of the production and accumulation of such amount of private and sensitive information. Moreover, many of them has fallen in the temptation of building (buying) mass surveillance systems to better control their citizens without having a real control over the technology they are using.

This open panel aims to bring together scholars from different parts of the world to discuss the paths and approach governments from south and north are following in the adoption of big data technologies, their uses and misuses.

Contact: balbornoz@flacso.edu.ec

Keywords: big data, peripheral states, data leaks, surveillance systems, privacy

Categories: Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

Engineering and Infrastructure

135. Politicization of Sociotechnical Futures: Prerequisites and Limits

Paulina Dobroc, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; Andreas Lösch, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)/ ITAS; Maximilian Roßmann, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)/ ITAS

STS-research on expectations, imaginaries and visions has shown that imaginaries of sociotechnical futures, the promises and fears associated with them, increasingly influence processes of sociotechnical innovations and transformations. In various societal contexts — e.g., research politics, scientific collaborations, parliamentary debates, social movements — these imaginaries serve as visionary resources and capacities to legitimate decisions, coordinate practices, steer developments, raise awareness for specific problem-solutions etc. For this purpose, futures are getting politicized. The objects of politicization materialize in a variety of forms (e.g., terms, symbols, metaphors, narratives, artifacts, traditions, organizations). We assume that both, the specific characteristics of the societal context (e.g. power constellations) and of the forms (e.g., discursive narratives or prototypes) are conditions for the politicization. For example, it makes a difference, if promises of openness are part of hacker practices or part of parliamentary debates about Open Government. At the same time, an in-vitro-burger may serve as an object of politicization differently in the context of 3D printing development compared to public controversies on nutrition transition.

We invite theoretical and empirical papers from the broad spectrum of STS-scholars to discuss and to elaborate questions such as:

• How the interplay of contextual constellations and forms shape the processes of politicization?
• What are prerequisites and limits for the politicization of futures (e.g., for the success of visioneers) related to different contexts and forms?
• How processes emerge from specific contexts and forms of futures that change the sociotechnical futures and how context- and form-specific politicizations of futures result in processes?

Contact: paulina.dobroc@kit.edu

Keywords: Sociotechnical Futures, politicization of futures, power constellations, analysis of visionary dynamics, context and matter

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

Other

137. Proliferation, dispersal and (in)security: towards new vocabularies for the debate between STS and critical security studies

Annalisa Pelizza, University of Bologna and University of Twente; Claudia Aradau, King’s College London

In recent years, an emerging debate between the social studies of technology and critical security studies has interrogated the materiality of security artefacts, questioned identification techniques for (in)security production, investigated how data systems shape legal expertise and regulatory dynamics. This debate has focused attention on the entanglements between the performativity of infrastructures – especially infrastructures for data production and body tracking – and the alleged obduracy of institutionalized agency.

Yet the debate seems to have reached a halt in questioning the material and institutional legacies of modernity. We suggest that such halt is due to the need to revisit our analytical vocabularies. On the one hand, the interplay between data infrastructures and institutionalized actors has received ambivalent consideration in STS. However, the current crisis of socio-technical infrastructures for population management, alterity processing and border controlling highlight the need to engage with long-term continuities and discontinuities. On the other hand, critical security studies have limited their conceptualization to security devices and paid less attention to infrastructural entanglements and the ontological boundaries of security actors.

In order to overcome these limits, we propose to introduce two terms in the debate: proliferation and dispersal. “Proliferation” is here conceived specifically in relation to the chains of action and mediators that intervene in the security relationship. “Dispersal” captures the spatio-temporal distribution of things and people and the partial connections and dis-connections that reproduce (in)security. These two terms prompt us to re-engage questions of multiplicity, heterogeneity and performativity at the intersection of STS and critical security studies.

Contact: annalisa.pelizza2@unibo.it

Keywords: security studies, population management, alterity processing, proliferation, dispersal

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

Governance and Public Policy

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.

—-


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
 2005          Le Marché Des Universitaires, France, Allemagne, Etats-Unis. Presses de Sciences Po. Paris.


Whitley, Richard, and Jochen Gläser, eds.
 2007             Changing Governance of the Public Sciences. In The Changing Governance of the Sciences: The Advent of Research Evaluation Systems Pp. 3–27. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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

146. Reexamining Narratives within Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Wouter Van de Klippe; Ingeborg Meijer, Leiden University; Ralf Lindner, Fraunhofer ISI; Roger Strand, University of Bergen; Erich Griessler, Institute for Advanced Studies; Anne Loeber, University of Amsterdam

Reexamining narratives within Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)

Keywords: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Societal responsibilities of researchers, social inequality, Policy, Governance.

While Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is ostensibly an orientation point for efforts to make research and innovation more societally responsive, there exist contentious narratives framing RRI which both open and close forms of scholarly work.

These narratives include envisioning RRI as…

1. an intervention to command and control researchers and innovators to become more responsive to their negative societal impacts;
2. a tool to coerce citizens into becoming more acquiescent in their support for research and innovation;
3. an intervention to facilitate the development of novel forms of collaboration between representatives from diverse sectoral, disciplinary, and societal perspectives to align research and innovation with broader societal needs;
4. a policy concept which is self-serving and aims develop its own network of practitioners and supporters to sustain itself.

We invite contributions to this panel to explore questions such as: 

• What scholarly work do these narratives either open or close?
• What other narratives are present within RRI?
• Which actors are ultimately served by these narratives and how can or should this be changed?
• How are these narratives reflected in funding schemes / science policy documents?
• What does knowledge production with the aim of addressing societal concerns resemble through each of these narratives?
• What forms of knowledge production have been systematically excluded within these narratives?
• How do these narratives either encourage or discourage engagement with social movements and/or social justice struggles?

Contact: w.van.de.klippe@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), Social Responsibilities, Policy, Governance, Narratives

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

152. Science Technology & Innovation (STI) Roadmaps and the SDGs

Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management; Caleb Muyiwa Adelowo, National Centre for Technology Management, Nigeria

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) progress reports, index and dashboards are open to the public after four years of sustainable development (SD) programme. Some countries (especially those in sub-Saharan Africa) remained backwards. With 17 goals and 169 targets; SDGs are multidimensional and ambitious. It’s hard to achieve by 2030 without development of science, technology and innovation (STI). Despite challenges new technological innovations widen gaps for STI laggards. This panel intends to throw lights on impacts of rapid technological changes on attainment of SD? Rapid technological change disrupts markets, exacerbate social divides and raise normative questions.  However, big data; machine learning; artificial intelligence; robotics; block-chain; 3D printing; nanotechnology; satellite & drone technologies, e.t.c can bring transformation of economies. We also need to know how developing nations can build STI capacities to deploy these transformative technological innovations. How can we use these disruptive technologies (as indicators) to monitor progress or lack of local actions in poor-performing countries? STI Roadmaps for SDGs are meant to speed up process of developing new or adapting existing solutions to meet SDGs and targets by 2030. What kinds of STI policies or roadmaps will help countries lagging behind without appropriate socio-technological systems or transitions? How can nations use regional and global partnership to develop STI capabilities? What are the roles of global STI communities? Can there be co-production of STI roadmaps for SDGs and how can we harness grassroots innovations to achieve SDGs? This panel contributes knowledge to STS on how sustainability science is shaping the emerging world.

Contact: ejim_kings@yahoo.com

Keywords: Sustainable development, Science, technology and innovation, sustainable development goals, disruptive technologies, technological change

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

156. Situating antimicrobial resistance (AMR): locations, spaces and borders

Catherine Marijke Will, University of Sussex; Alena Kamenshchikova, Maastricht University; Cristina Moreno Lozano, University of Edinburgh; Iona Walker, University of Edinburgh

‘Antimicrobial resistance’ (AMR) is increasingly figured as an international priority through activities by the World Health Organisation and European Union among others. A prominent slogan ‘bacteria do not respect borders’ also draws attention to the apparently global nature of the issue. In response, this panel calls for papers that situate the policies and practices of AMR – exploring how the issue and responses are framed in different institutions and locations; in different national contexts though stewardship or infection control policies and regulations; and in border regions and spaces like airports. Papers might address emerging practices for screening, surveillance, quarantine and antibiotic use in different contexts and cultures, or experiences of groups including ethnic minorities, immigrants and those with different infections.

In ethical terms it is suggested that AMR is often understood as a site of tension between the individual needing treatment in the short term and a collective interest in preserving antibiotic efficacy in the longer term, but this does not hold for all situations. In clinical medicine as in other social practices people do not have equal abilities to claim and receive treatment. Others become the focus of additional surveillance and control through the notion of potential risk. When and how are people’s vulnerabilities acknowledged or ignored in relation to antibiotic use or stewardships, and which groups are more affected by interventions? We invite scholars to discuss how AMR is shaping actions in specific locations, and how multiple framings co-exist or relate below the appeal to international standards or solutions.

Contact: cristina.moreno@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance, national policy, biomedical standards

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

157. Situating Co-creation: Innovation between Local Specificity and Scalable Standardization

Anja Kathrin Ruess, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich; Federica Pepponi, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich; Kyriaki Papageorgiou, ESADE Business & Law School; Ruth Müller, MCTS TU

Co-creative practices, bringing together diverse actors in the innovation process to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, seem to be flourishing across academia, industry and society. Prospective users are increasingly engaged upstream, invoking the fundamental value-proposition of co-creation, namely to tailor innovation processes to the needs, values, and political cultures of user-communities with the hope that these will lead to more legitimate and sustainable outcomes. However, co-creation faces challenges such as the scalability of context-specific solutions as well as the definition of the user-community problems to address or the imagined user-communities as such.

In this panel, we are interested in exploring the situated nature of co-creation by looking at the particular shape it takes in specific social, cultural and institutional contexts. We invite contributions that address questions such as:

– How do conceptualizations of ‘the local’ shape innovation processes and outcomes?

– How can situatedness be theorized in the context of co-creative innovation practice?

– If effective and desirable innovations are context-specific, how can we harness their benefits for other settings without losing their socio-cultural embeddedness?

– When and how could co-creation be standardized and scaled-up? Are there specific domains or fields where context matters less than in others and where co-creation can be homogenized and deployed at scale?

– How are co-creation practices stabilized in specific contexts and when are these exercises deemed fit to travel towards other socio-cultural contexts and/or technological domains?

Contact: anja.ruess@tum.de

Keywords: co-creation, innovation, situatedness, scaling

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Engineering and Infrastructure

Science Communication/Public Engagement

159. Social justice in Climate Adaptation Policies

Udo Pesch, Delft University of Technology; Neelke Doorn, Professor; Lieke Brackel, Delft University of Technology

As the effects of climate change become increasingly manifest, policies to cope with these effects are being developed at different territorial scales. These climate adaptation policies establish a role division in terms of who has to do what, with that settling questions about which parties are included and excluded, which parties are beneficiaries, victimized and forgotten are all embedded in such policies.

As such, climate adaptation policies confront us with strong queries about social justice, necessitating critical reflection. However, while there is a lot of scholarly attention for climate mitigation policies, the justice impacts of climate adaptation policies are hardly subject of study.

In this, two deeply interconnected issues are of major importance. First, as effective climate adaptation policies will have to cross territorial scales and concomitant jurisdictions, a plurality of partly overlapping communities is involved giving rise to contrastive justice claims.

Second, climate adaptation policies demand new kinds of solutions, which to a large extent are informed by scientific expertise. The way these science-based activities affect matters of social justice has not been addressed yet, as these seem to focus mainly on the effectiveness of policies instead of their legitimacy.

In its strong tradition of critical research, covering the interwoven character of scientific knowledge development, policy-making and societal impacts, STS provides a major platform to engage in discussions on social justice as they are instigated by climate adaptation policies. As such, this panel aims at authors presenting papers that relate to impacts of climate adaptation policies on social justice.

Contact: u.pesch@tudelft.nl

Keywords: Climate adaptation policies, social justice, resilience, responsibility, science-based expertise

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

162. Speculative Futures and the Biopolitics of Populations: Exploring Continuities and Discontinuities Across and Beyond Crisis Discourses

Mianna Meskus, Tampere University; Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen

Falling fertility rates, ageing populations, and the resulting strains on national economies and welfare systems engender headlines of national and international crises on a daily basis across the world. Simultaneously, the human population size has been problematized in terms of the ongoing climate crisis. Taking stock of these complex material legacies of modernity, this panel aims to bring together scholars whose work examines reproduction and/or ageing and how these broad yet intertwined phenomena figure as challenges for current governance in multiple ways. We are interested in how practices of science, technology and policy become enrolled in our demographically, economically and ecologically uncertain futures.

Imagining the future is increasingly speculative, meaning that there is an increase in the circulation of uncertainty-, risk-, and crisis-based models in attempts to make sense of where the world is heading. While visions of reproductive justice, successful ageing, care for the chronically and acutely ill, and ecological sustainability are in a state of flux, historical continuities are apparent as well. Biopolitical discussions revolve around questions such as, how should the vitality of populations be governed? Who should be allowed to reproduce? Is ageing an opportunity or a loss? What role does ‘nature’ play in furthering human wellbeing? We invite papers that examine how knowledge about demographic, ecological and economic futures are shaped by and/or escape notions of crisis. We especially welcome contributions from different parts of the world that examine concerns around falling fertility rates, ageing populations and the earth’s declining biocapacity.

Contact: mianna.meskus@tuni.fi

Keywords: reproduction, ageing, population, ecology, futures

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

163. States of Planetary Environmental Knowledge

Jenny Elaine Goldstein, Cornell University; Leah Aronowsky, University of Illinois

This panel explores the politics of planetary-scale environmental knowledge production. In convening scholars from across the methodological spectrum, we seek to ask: what, and whose, politics come into play when local knowledge is scaled up or planetary/global knowledge is localized? How is difference maintained or collapsed in the making and governance of global environmental knowledge? What forms of governance and/or infrastructure emerge out of planetary/global knowledge? Possible themes may include:

Geographies/spatialities of planetary environmental knowledge

How localized environmental knowledge is scaled up, aggregated, and/or made relevant at planetary and global scales

How models about the global environment are assembled

Questions of the planetary commons and climate governance

Experiments, simulations, and models for producing planetary knowledge

The limits of knowability, certainty, and quantification

Contact: goldstein@cornell.edu

Keywords: global, environment, knowledge, planet

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

167. STS Perspectives on Innovation: Significance and Agency in Emerging Worlds

Alan Irwin, Copenhagen Business School; Jane Bjørn Vedel, Copenhagen Business School

There is now a well-established story of STS and innovation studies working at some distance from one another, with innovation scholars sometimes calling for a closer relationship with STS in order to repair this division. However, there have always been good examples of STS scholars working across both fields – and contributing to each. At the same time, there is a growing strand of STS research which addresses innovation in terms (for example) of imaginaries, co-production, responsibilities, transformations and incumbencies. Very often, such research challenges the universalistic claims made for innovation and instead stresses the contingencies, multiple possibilities, interruptions, emergences and contexts within which specific innovations are enacted. Themes of innovation cultures, futures, regenerations and democratic engagement are also important here.

This open panel invites contributions from STS scholars whose work addresses the broad topic of ‘innovation in emerging worlds’. We welcome empirical studies exploring innovation in specific contexts but also those which seek new conceptual possibilities regarding the relationship between STS and innovation. What place can – and should – the study of innovation play within STS?

Contact: ai.ioa@cbs.dk

Keywords: Innovation, co-production, democracy, futures, emerging worlds

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

169. STS, Technoscience and How Discontinuation Matters

Peter Stegmaier, University of Twente; Pierre-Benoit Joly, Lisis; phil johnstone, SPRU, University of Sussex

Abandonment of technologies and socio-technical systems occur not infrequently. The social construction of technology, everyday use, innovation management, technical maintenance and governance of technologies and socio-technical systems have preferentially been associated with advancement and innovation. Discontinuation is, at most, discussed as regime change, innovation setback or failure—as if advancement and innovation was the only direction in which socio-technical development and its governance would go. In STS there important studies addressing the issue of ending directly, like Aramis in France (Latour 1992), or studies that can, in retrospect, be seen as descriptions of technologies that were, after all, abandoned, like the “male pill” (Oudshoorn 2003). Script analysis may offer another lead, e.g., when Akrich and Latour (1992) are referring to ‘de-inscription’, Geels and Schot (2007) to ‘de-alignment’, Kuhn (1962) to ‘paradigm shift’, or Utterback (2003) to ‘product and manufacturing discontinuities’. The empirical cases are legion, though. However, it is crucial to see how socio-technical systems, technological regimes, or technologies are (or have been) disappearing or are being brought to an end.

For the purpose of focusing more specifically on discontinuities, we invite the following angles:

1. To re-read relevant STS publications and reconstruct their insights on technology abandonment, as abrupt or incremental processes, by purposeful action or inaction (neglect), as well as rather system- or actor-network-level destabilisation.
2. It would be welcome if the more theoretical considerations were also informed by recent or historical empirical case examples.
3. Equally welcome are empirical studies showing the broad spectrum of STS scholarship that can tackle discontinuation in specific case studies.
4. The intertwining of discontinuation and operating discontinuation from a governance, public policy, corporate management, NGO, and citizenship point of view would complete the picture.

This empirical research based on the discourse analysis of policy documents, aiming at building a grounded theory of discontinuation.

Contact: p.stegmaier@utwente.nl

Keywords: Discontinuation, divestment, socio-technical systems, governance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Energy

Food and Agriculture

171. Sustainable mobility in urban cities in Africa

Emmanuel Ejim-Eze, Institute of Engineering, technology and innovation Management; Deborah Ogochukwu Ejim-Eze, Foundation for Sustainability Science in Africa/ Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) cities face unprecedented crisis of passenger and freight movement. African cities seem to have the least mobility when compared with cities in other climes. Several studies indicate that low mobility leads to low productivity, widens inequality gaps; affecting the poor, women, children and the elderly disproportionately.  Lack of public mass transits exerts pressure with damages on Africa’s road infrastructure. This raises road maintenance budgets. Consequently high freight cost also increases cost of goods and affects competitiveness.  Informal motorized transport in SSA remains the resilient mobility mode for residents, providing employment and serving local political interests. This para-transits in SSA are now crowded with commercial motorcyclists. This chaotic form of mobility have thrived under urban sprawl challenges with congested streets, big pot-holes restricting traffic flows, reckless driving, extortion and violence from security officers and street touts. Consequently the vehicles easily wear out contributing to high emission of dangerous gases (health hazards), and deaths of passengers due to accidents.

How can cities in SSA improve living conditions of its populations by meeting mobility needs in a sustainable manner? Secondly, what kind of institutional arrangements and governance systems can integrate land-use and transport planning?  How does urban mobility strategy affect decisions pertaining to residential, employment and service locations?  How can cities integrate other non-motorized transport modes (walking & cycling) into sustainable mobility plans? This panel hopes to contribute knowledge on how sustainable mobility can help to lower poverty, inequality, and reduce climate change impacts &improve standard of living in SSA

Contact: ejim_kings@yahoo.com

Keywords: Sustainable mobility, transportation, cities, sub-Saharan Africa, inequality

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Engineering and Infrastructure

172. Taking Data Into Account

Burcu Baykurt, University Of Massachusetts Amherst

As ubiquitous data technologies seep into public services, news feeds, schools, workplaces, political campaigns, and urban living around the world, the effort to hold them accountable has become a topic of public concern. From computational audits to citizen activism, from public shaming of companies to policy proposals, activists, academics, journalists, technologists, and lawmakers have been trying to account for these emergent systems that appear to be inscrutable. Using the analytical tools of STS, this panel seeks to unpack how these automated, data-driven technologies become “accountabilia – objects mobilized to enact relations of accountability” (Sugden 2010; Ziewitz 2011). How does computational legibility inform the politics of government accountability? What work does the concept of accountability perform in popular and expert conversations? What are the new devices that mobilize, shift, and maintain existing processes of accounting and accountability? What would creative methods of mapping the distribution of accountability look like in emergent data-driven organizations? This panel invites both theoretical and empirical papers that examine the ways in which accountability is forged and put in practice through automated, data-driven systems. Of particular interest are practices and perceptions from the global south; those that attend to the racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic consequences of accountability regimes; and explorations of new possibilities that are invested in critical race theory, queer-feminist, postcolonial and social-justice based perspectives.

Contact: bbaykurt@umass.edu

Keywords: accountability, governance, algorithms, big data, policy

Categories: Information, Computing and Media Technology

Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

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

184. The Life of Numbers: Models, Projections, Targets and Other Enumerations

Tim Rhodes, Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW; Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney

Numbers are afforded life through their entanglements in situated practices. While numbers are often depicted as transcending contexts, this Panel appreciates numbers as relational beings. This orientates us towards exploring how and what numbers become, what they do, and the material effects they make through their implementations, appreciating enumerations as ‘evidence-making interventions’ (Rhodes & Lancaster, Social Science and Medicine, 2019). 

This Panel explores numbering practices as forms of anticipation and governance. Enumerations are afforded a power-of-acting through models, projections and targets which shape the present in relation to imagined futures. This is apparent in the field of global health, where mathematical models and numerical targets are shaping agendas, including as nations strive to achieve futures in which diseases might be eliminated. Enumerations are also key to the making of futures in relation to science, technology, environmental management, and climate. Reflecting on how numbers do their work in different policy, science and implementation sites, this Panel asks how the governing work of numbers – especially through models and modes of projection – is made-up in practices, with particular affects, inviting speculative thinking on the possibilities that enumerations can afford as well as on the futures they might close down.

We invite papers seeking to trace the life of enumerations, in action, in practices, as matters of method, affect and ethicopolitical concern, across different sites of policy, science and implementation. We are especially interested in health, including in relation to disease control, climate, and environment, but also economics, social policy, political science, and technology.

Contact: k.lancaster@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Numbers, Governance, Futures, Implementation, Models.

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

185. The Means And Ends of STS: What Role For STS In The Post-Truth Era?

Rob Evans, Cardiff University; Kjetil Rommetveit, University of Bergen, Norway; Martin Weinel, Cardiff University

One of the biggest changes since the 2016 4S/EASST conference has been the rise of so-called ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-shame’ politics. Exemplified by US President Donald Trump, but by no means limited to the US, politicians across Europe and Latin America appear less and less constrained by the scientific consensus or even their own previous statements. These events matter for STS. Assuming we want to contribute to social, epistemic or environmental justice, what role is there for a field whose methods emphasise the contingent and constructed nature of expertise when those in authority already act as if science is little more than another vested interest?

In this panel we invite papers and presentations that address this challenge in one of two ways. One approach is to focus on explicating the current political crisis and, in particular, the role of science and/or technology in facilitating or resisting it: big data, mainstream and social media, and the work of anti or pro-science groups are all possible ways into this topic. The other approach is to focus on STS itself and its relationship with social movements, expert advisory groups or democratic institutions. Here we are particularly interested in whether, and to what extent, STS can move from an observer to a more active role – to ‘intervene and be relevant’ as the conference theme puts it. In plenary we will take up the reflexive challenge and explore how normative aspirations can mesh with the complexities of contemporary technology and politics.

Contact: evansrj1@cardiff.ac.uk

Keywords: Expertise, Democracy, Post-Truth, Epistemic Injustice, Populism

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

194. They’re Just Guidelines: Operationalizing AI Ethics

Anna Lenhart, University Of Maryland College Park / IBM Public Sector

2018 & 2019  have seen a surge of frameworks or guidelines that lay out principles of how Automated Decision Systems (ADS) can be developed and implemented ethically. The Private Sector, Multistakeholder Groups and Government Agencies have published guidelines covering principles of transparency/explainability, fairness/non-discrimination, accountability, safety/security and privacy (Algorithm Watch, 2019). Occasionally, these guidelines include the demand for AI be socially beneficial and protect human rights. Few include recommendations or examples of how to operationalise these principles.

Today, most major technology companies using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have agreed to comply with these guidelines. But has the development of ADS changed? What challenges still remain? This panel seeks to convene scholars from multiple disciplines who are interested in the operationalization of AI ethics and welcomes submissions exploring themes such as:

*Are AI ethics guidelines changing the way companies and universities educate/train their data scientists and AI developers?

*How are factsheets, fairness toolkits, scenario planning exercises, etc being used within industry? (Stories of success and barriers)

*How does corporate culture influence the oversight and enforcement of AI ethics guidelines?

*What responsibilities fall on executives compared to data scientists?

*How are traditional approaches to risk management being applied to AI & ML?

*How do AI ethics guidelines vary across sectors, domains and cultures? How do these variations influence guideline implementation?

Contact: alenhart@terpmail.umd.edu

Keywords: AI Ethics, Guidelines, Culture, Operations, Implementation

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

199. (Transnational) research infrastructures as sites of technopolitical transformations

Erik Aarden, University of Vienna; Zinaida Vasilyeva, MCTS, TU München; Oguz Özkan, MCTS Technical University Munich; Kamiel Mobach, University of Vienna

As large-scale collaboration in research and the shared use of data and machinery continue to expand, (transnational) research infrastructures grows increasingly significant for scientific practice and research policy alike. Next to scientific relevance, research infrastructures have long articulated broader political visions of progress and collaboration. Research infrastructures therefore provide a key site for STS to study sociotechnical transformations and related political imaginations across space and time. For this open session, we invite contributions that conceptualize (transnational) research infrastructures as simultaneously epistemic and political spaces that mutually shape one another.

Papers may discuss research infrastructures that include, but are not limited to, large machinery, shared databases and institutional networks. The material and institutional configuration of such infrastructures can range from large-scale, centralized laboratories to distributed networks enabling the circulation of bodies, materials and data. We invite contributions that consider a wide range of research infrastructures from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, social sciences and humanities, as well as other fields.  We are particularly interested in perspectives on the relations between, on the one hand, the perceived need to coordinate scientific facilities, infrastructures, resources and governance, and, on the other hand, questions of participation, rights and responsibilities, public legitimacy and anticipated public benefits. In what ways are research infrastructures not only expected to enhance scientific knowledge production, but also to produce, consolidate or advance political visions and social orders?

Contact: erik.aarden@univie.ac.at

Keywords: research infrastructures, transnational, technopolitics, collaboration

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Governance and Public Policy

Knowledge, Theory and Method

205. Unpacking the Foundations of the Current Biometric Moment

Michelle Spektor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ranjit Pal Singh, Cornell University

From unlocking smartphones to verifying financial transactions, from boarding airplanes to clocking in at work, and from issuing national IDs and passports as tools of data-driven governance, the use of digital biometric technologies that rely on fingerprints, facial recognition, iris scans, and other metrics have increasingly become part of everyday life in the 21st century. While the proliferation of biometrics-based digital identities might be new, the use of biometrics – techniques of measuring the human body – to identify and/or classify individuals and groups has a much longer history.

This open track panel explores how individuals, states, and institutions have used biometrics to define individual and collective identities transnationally, and how those subjected to biometric identification experience it, accept it, or resist it. By bringing together papers that address how biometric identification encapsulates politics of identity in both the past and present, the panel aims to illuminate how past biometric systems inform the technological and socio-cultural features of the current biometric moment. Broadly, it inquires into how biometric identification (re)configures relationships among and across citizenship, migration, borders, and national belonging; race, gender, class, and disability; policing, surveillance, and criminality; labor, bureaucracy, and imaginaries of technological progress; power, subjectivity, and the body; social security, national security, and global development. It welcomes papers that address how STS tools and concepts can be leveraged to unpack the ways conceptions of identity shape and are shaped by biometric identification infrastructures in the past, present, and future.

Contact: spektor@mit.edu

Keywords: biometrics, identity/identification, governance, citizenship, surveillance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Big Data

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

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

209. What happens when we all agree: Governing non epistemic controversies

Javier Guerrero, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano de Medellín; Jorge M Escobar, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano

The study of controversies has been a key topic within STS. The usual analysis of scientific controversies focuses on disagreements about facts, whether there is a fact or not, who established it first, or theories whether it is correct or not, who established it first. However, some contemporary scientific controversies do not seem to be about facts or theories: the different actors involved in the controversy agree on the facts, but the controversy persists. For example, the controversy about tolerable levels of pollution or the banning of products such as asbestos, as the actors agree on risks, harmfulness and the effects on economy. There is therefore no epistemic disagreement, but the scientific controversy over solutions or prohibitions persists. We have called this type of controversy non-epistemic controversies. The session looks for proposals dealing with examples of this type of controversy, what kinds of knowledge is produced in such controversies?, what keeps them open?, how to study such controversies?, what should be the role of STS in such controversies?, and consequences for the governance of science and technology.

Contact: jeguerreroc180@gmail.com

Keywords: Controversies, governance of S&T, non-epistemic controversies

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

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

211. What science, technology and innovation, for which transformations?

Carla Alvial Palavicino; Juan Felipe Espinosa, Universidad Nacional Andrés Bello; Arne Maibaum, TU Berlin; Zoe Robaey, WUR

We live in times of growing anxiety – something has to change! We need radical transformations! In many circles, problems and changes are handled in one distinct way: the call for innovation. We can innovate our way out of climate change, inequality, or many other societal challenges that affect us today. Very often, innovation is conflated with technology and market developments as the means to deliver products and services, which can become a means to control and economize new dimension of life.

At the same time, we are now aware that innovation is not only a solution, but also part of the problem. This has resulted in a call to reform the institutions of science and innovation, for example, under the name of Responsible Research and Innovation, Social Innovation, or Transformative Innovation. Do we fall into the same trap and search only for innovations when we embrace these labels? If innovation is also one of the sources of the problem, can we solve it with another type of innovation?

In this panel we want to bring in an interdisciplinary dialogue about what it means to transform science and innovation, and – if and how – can science and innovation contribute to larger-scale transformations. What historical and recent dynamics lead to this phenomenon? Are there new forms of doing science or achieving social progress that transcend this nexus? Are there new forms of knowledge e.g., from a perspective of the global south, queer or other formats that break the mold?

Contact: c.m.e.alvialpalavicino@uu.nl

Keywords: Innovation, transformations, policy, alternatives

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Other

213. Where is Care? (Un)Settling Place, Materialities and Imaginaries in the Making of Healthcare

Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management; Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management; Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Andrea Ford, University of Chicago; Martyn Pickersgill, University of Edinburgh

Where care is provided has become a prominent policy concern in many nations, as healthcare systems attempt to solve a variety of issues through spatial reorganizations. Siting care within specific spaces, be they urban or rural areas, ‘healing’ gardens or high-tech hospitals promises to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare provision. However, as geographers, STS scholars, and others have demonstrated, place is not ‘just’ a location on a map; places are imbued with affects such as feelings of (not) belonging and (un)safety, and shape and are shaped by multiple discourses of ‘good care’. It is these interrelations within care places that we wish to explore: we ask what and how materialities and imaginaries of care make and matter (for) the spaces of healthcare and what kinds of (care) places they engender

Building on STS work on place and the placing of care, this panel considers how healthcare spaces and places are (un) settled through preexisting and novel materialities and imaginaries. We seek empirical and theoretical contributions examining how the ‘where’ of care is (discursively, socially, materially) produced and productive of multiple ontologies of caring. We are particularly interested in the processes of place making for care, by which ‘countryside’, ‘city’, ‘region’ and ‘neighborhood’ co-constitute particular ways of doing, organizing and imagining care.

Contact: ivanova@eshpm.eur.nl

Keywords: care, health, place, imaginaries, materiality

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

216. Windows of Opportunity?: Critical Understanding of ELSI/ELSA at Different Moments

Koichi Mikami, Keio University

This panel explores how differently the idea of ethical, legal and social implications/aspects (ELSI/ELSA) is conceived at different moments and how this difference shapes the way in which scholars of social sciences and humanities collaborate with scientists and policymakers. While the mode of engaging with ELSI/ELSA of science and technology, that was put forward as part of the Human Genome Project, has been criticized, its legacy is still alive within some science and science policy communities, and in some instances it presents scholars of social sciences and humanities with an opportunity to work closely with scientists and policymakers. The challenge associated with taking up such an opportunity, however, is that the nature or the rule of collaboration tends to be defined by the scientists and policymakers, although it may be negotiated once the collaboration begins and through scholars of social sciences and humanities moving between different roles and ‘playing the Chameleon’ (Balmer et al. 2015). This panel invites papers concerning the relationship between scientists’ and policymakers’ conception of ELSI/ELSA and the role that scholars of social sciences and humanities are expected to play, that is, the shape of the window of opportunity for collaboration. While the assumption here is admittedly that there tends to be a power imbalance between scholars of social sciences and humanities and scientists and policymakers at the moment of entering collaborative relationship, papers examining the cases where scholars of social sciences and humanities are in the position to set the terms of collaboration are also welcome.

Contact: kmikami@keio.jp

Keywords: ELSI, ELSA, Post-ELSI, Collaboration, Power

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

217. Workshop on Experiments with Algo-governance and Future-Making: STS Scholars as Designers

Denisa Reshef Kera, University of Salamanca; Judith Christine Igelsböck, MCTS, Technical University of Munich; Galina Mihaleva, Nanyang Technological University; Tincuta Heinzel, Loughborough University; Hannah Perner-Wilson, Kobakant collective; Josef Ho

Participants will offer their algo-governance prototypes, scenarios & projects to the group for experiencing, modifying, experiment with and reflecting. We will create a Github page and a small booklet with examples of algo-governance experiments and prototypes that try to embed regulations into code and algorithms or show attempts to define standards, specifications, constraints for design, auditing, testing or certifying emerging infrastructures (blockchain, DLTs, machine learning, AIs, autonomous robots). The main problem with code-centered, rule-based systems promising automated and blockchain or AI-driven futures is their democratic deficit and ahistorical narrative of some deep structures (of human or social behavior and politics) behind the code that remains a black box even if it is “open source”. We would like to respond to this by experimenting and testing with alternatives to the algo-governance attempts to reduce the political and historical processes of deliberation and consensus-building into decontextualized game theory concepts or various proposals to crowdsource data and attitudes. Can we make the actual code of our future infrastructures more historical and contextual, open to political deliberation and engagement?  How to connect the conceptual and historical depths of the governance concepts and ideas with the flexible and experimental approaches of prototyping and testing?

Contact: denisa.kera@usal.es

Keywords: prototypes, design, blockchain, distributed ledger technologies, AIs, machine learning, governance-by-design, technological governance, algorithmic governance

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Knowledge, Theory and Method