Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Standards, Pedagogies, and Celebrating the STS Infrastructure Award to ESTS

2024-12-19T13:06:56-08:00

Volume 10 comes in two parts, issue 1 and 2 published together. The double issue includes two Thematic Collections, “Standards and their Containers” and “Pedagogical Intersections.” It also includes two original research articles and an engagements piece. With this issue, ESTS also celebrates winning the Infrastructure Award 2024 awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).

Tracing the Displacement of Data Work in AI: A Political Economy of “Human-in-the-Loop”

2024-12-03T22:30:44-08:00

In this study, we trace the evolution of a data work team in an artificial intelligence (AI) startup in India. By bringing attention to data work, which is the indispensable work of preparing annotated datasets for training AI systems, conducted within a formal organisational set up, we underline: 1. how organisational approaches adopted to balance investor and client preferences shape work arrangements and spatial division of the data workers; 2. how relations between the data team and the ‘core’ technical team serve to invisibilise human labour in the production of AI; and 3. how increasing codification of data work leads to devaluation of data work within the organisation and deskilling of young data workers at large, making them vulnerable in choosing a meaningful career path of their choice. In tracing this trajectory of displacement of data workers employed in a formal sector, we show that the prevalent characterisation of data work as being invisible or precarious is not inherent to AI nor inevitable in its labour processes. Rather, it is produced through the specific embedding of AI production within the political economy of startup capitalism. Through this, we seek to recentre the discourse on AI and future-of-work away from deterministic projections of AI’s impact on work and towards the specific labour processes of AI and its implications for the skills and career trajectories of a young and growing workforce in the Global South.

Renewable Ruse: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains

2024-12-06T01:11:21-08:00

Rural communities in eastern North Carolina are responding to the emergence of bioenergy development as an extension of environmental injustices, rather than sustainable solutions to climate change as presented by state and industry actors. We examine how biomass and biogas development entrench logics of extraction, rather than transition, as they are built as extensions of pre-existing concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in a landscape prone to climatic fluctuations. Using a polyvocal approach to knowledge co-production that builds from multi-year collaborative ethnography, the co-authored text demonstrates a commitment to the value of environmental justice (EJ) leaders’ knowledge—to advance environmental analytics. We argue that despite its claims, bioenergy operates as a ruse of renewable energy: it is a technological sleight of hand, that deepens rather than mitigates exposure to socio-ecological harm. Discursively hinged to sustainability claims, biomass and biogas attempt to signify a temporal, moral, and technological breakaway toward a different kind of techno-social future when, in fact, there is no real rupture from the well-established export-driven, extractivist logics of production.

Storying Monocrop Infrastructure: A Conversation on Governance, Scale, and Failure

2024-12-06T01:08:53-08:00

Plantations have recently become the focus of renewed empirical and conceptual inquiry across the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Scholarship in this interdisciplinary space calls on us to reckon with industrial monocultures’ enduring role in shaping contemporary structural inequalities, dominant technoscientific regimes, uneven divisions of labor, environmental violence, and struggles for justice, recognition, and repair. This Engagement piece contributes to these emerging currents by bringing into dialogue two scholars conducting research on monocrop systems in Latin America (Kregg Hetherington as interviewee) and Southeast Asia (Sophie Chao as interviewer). Anchored in Hetherington’s concept of “agribiopolitics,” the interview approaches monocrops through the two interrelated themes of governance and failure. Governance brings us to consider the forms of control, management, monitoring, and accountability that undergird agribiopolitical regimes, the institutions, practices, and mechanisms that make them possible, and the structures of exclusion, oppression, and violence on which they often depend. Failure brings us to attend to the limits or tipping points of governance as system and process—it’s rough edges, its unexpected failings, its uneven distribution, and how failure can be both productive and an opportunity for flight. In reflecting on ways of storying monocrops otherwise, we invite theoretical and methodological dialogue around the form and effects of anthropocenic infrastructures more broadly across the fields of science and technology studies, anthropology, critical race studies, political ecology, agrarian studies, and the environmental humanities. This interview is a revised and expanded version of an Author-

Meets-Critic conversation that took place at the Society for Social Studies of Science, (4S) meeting in Cholula, Mexico, where Hetherington’s monograph, The Government of Beans, received the 2022 Rachel Carson Award.

[Intro] Collaborative Formations at the Intersection of Pedagogy, Engagement, and Research

2024-12-03T22:30:54-08:00

Science and Technology Studies (STS) pedagogies constitute a dynamic form of STS practice that occurs in formal and informal spaces, and in a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary programs with different goals and objectives. This thematic collection of articles in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS) turns an analytical gaze on the spaces, practices, artifacts, and interactions through which STS pedagogies are enacted. Specifically, it foregrounds pedagogical engagements that have emerged through “collaborative formations” such as STS labs, clinics, workshops, community-based projects, co-teaching and other multi-temporal, geographic, and/or organizational configurations. We delve into fundamental questions about what might constitute “STS pedagogies” more broadly and how STS teaching and learning might be understood in various ways. The articles included in the collection challenge the conventional separation between research and pedagogy, suggesting that STS pedagogical scholarship can disrupt hierarchical structures that prioritize research over teaching. We start by discussing what we understand as “STS pedagogies,” what STS pedagogical scholarship might look like, and how it relates to “collaborative formations.” We then describe the infrastructure established to facilitate thinking across the collaborative formations and the multi-year process to produce the manuscripts and their accompanying data artifacts. We hold that focusing on STS pedagogical practices can open new avenues of inquiry within the field of STS, enabling critical interventions and actions in various contexts.

Provocations from the ‘STS as a Critical Pedagogy’ Workshop

2024-12-20T02:53:18-08:00

This research article is a collaborative set of reflections and provocations stemming from the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded workshop on STS as a Critical Pedagogy, hosted online during the summer of 2021 by Shannon N. Conley and Emily York at James Madison University. The workshop occurred over four separate sessions, bringing together forty participants (including six undergraduate students who contributed as both facilitators and research assistants). Participants self-organized into panels, leading the workshop collective to engage a host of questions, challenges, methods, and practices related to STS and critical pedagogy. Questions included the following. What characterizes critical STS pedagogies? How are critical STS pedagogies enabled and constrained by our institutional and disciplinary locations? What makes STS pedagogies travel? How might we imagine STS pedagogies otherwise? How do our pedagogies shape our research and engagement in the world? How might we critically interrogate the boundaries between research, teaching, service, and engagement, and what becomes visible when we do so?

Feminist Theory Theater: Acts of Reading as Embodied Pedagogy

2024-12-24T01:21:36-08:00

This article introduces Feminist Theory Theater (FTT), an experimental reading practice developed by the co-authors. Described most simply, FTT asks a group of co-present readers to put a text “on its feet,” improvising and revising its performance as a mode of ongoing, embodied interpretation. The aim is not to settle on a consensus of what a text means or to work toward a finished performance. Instead of staging a single best performance, FTT invites texts-as-scenes to be interpreted and re-staged by any member(s) of the reading group. We offer FTT as a way to take up York and Conley’s (2019) proposal that the commitments of STS can and should be enacted in practices of pedagogy. Here, we present and analyze multiple scenes of FTT in action to consider the potentials and limitations of critical STS pedagogy. We include our earliest experiments developing FTT in Act I, reading Judith Butler with undergraduates in a university lecture hall in Act 2, and reading a syllabus with incarcerated students in a prison classroom in Act 3. We highlight the empirical ways that FTT resists interpretive closure, centering embodied reinterpretation, arguing that doing so re-embeds text in the world as a way for reading groups to revision both. However, this dynamic, non-teleological mode of reading causes trouble for lesson plans and “learning outcomes” that might support the institutional legitimacy of STS critical pedagogies. This contradiction hinges on the question of who and what teaches. We argue that this trouble is worth staying with as a practical contradiction to be grappled with in further research on and through STS critical pedagogies. We invite readers of this article to take up this question (and others) by trying with, reflecting on, and revising through the situated, open-ended mode of reading together that we call FTT. To that end, we present a free, printable zine, The Feminist Theory Theater Workbook, which can act as both a guide to a first attempt at doing FTT and an archivable trace of that reading.

(Self) Critical Pedagogy: Performing Vulnerability to Teach STS in Singapore

2024-12-03T22:30:53-08:00

As more and more STS positions open in different regions of the world, there is an increased transnational migration of scholars trained in one part of the world working in another. Yet, there is often little guidance for scholars on how to negotiate their positionalities in different cultural, political, and pedagogical expectations. In this essay, I reflect upon my three years at a major Singaporean institution of higher learning, teaching STS and social theory, by discussing how I articulated a fragmented identity and performed vulnerability through my different intersubjective roles—researcher, educator, mother, employer, Indian, American—to model the kind of critical thinking I wished my students to undertake. I focus on negotiating my American political sensibilities in the Singaporean context, when trying to teach race and technology in Singapore.

Spaceships and Poetry: Enlivening the Lab as a Site of Feminist Critical Pedagogy

2024-12-03T22:30:48-08:00

Whilst STS has long studied lab work, the past few years have also seen the introduction of labs as social formations for doing STS enquiry. But what kind of contributions to pedagogy, particularly in technical universities, can STS inspired university labs make? We respond to the need to more deeply understand how teaching may be practiced as a site of STS experimentation by describing the work of the ETHOS Lab, our critical feminist lab at the IT University of Copenhagen, as ‘enlivening’. Using three events from 2017–2020 as case studies, we identify both the use of space and shaping of time as integral to how we have sought to trouble knowledge production in our own environment, particularly by creating sites and situations where teaching and research cannot be separated. By showing how our Lab activities intervene in ways of knowing and doing within university hierarchies and cultures, we aim to contribute an analysis of the critical potential of STS lab work in technical environments, and recommendations from our situated evolving space of feminist praxis within an interdisciplinary IT University.

Teaching and Learning with Situated Data: Socio-Technical Pedagogy and Reform at the Community Data Clinic and Biological Computer Lab

2024-12-03T22:30:48-08:00

This paper reviews how situated data methods were used to critically engage students in sociotechnical case studies drawn from campus history and archives in courses developed under the Community Data Clinic and the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In contrast to conventional data practices—that have long been critiqued by feminist, critical race and decolonial STS scholars for conditioning researchers to adopt a disembodied, de-gendered, -raced and -classed “God’s eye view from nowhere” (Haraway 1988) in order to project claims to objectivity and universality, situated data practices underscore the need for acknowledging the kinds of epistemic violence that a reproduction of “seeing from nowhere” expands, including through accelerating trends in datafication on and off university campuses. Pedagogy around situated data cultivates instead more accountable research practices through acknowledging the specificity of data that researchers collect and the necessary partiality of any researcher’s ability to see and know. As I review here, too, situated data methods offer valuable lessons for teachers and scholars in critical data and STS fields working to preserve pluralist, human-centered approaches to data in the face of accelerating campus investments in industry-centered data science programs. Indeed, at a time when STS and critical data scholars are witnessing the rapid growth of data science programs on campuses that train students to uncritically meet the profit-driven demands of datafication driven largely by Big Tech companies, the adoption of situated data methods to revisit sociotechnical practice and STS’ own overlooked histories of innovation in intersection with counter-cultural politics in the US uncovers the richness of alternative resources. Such histories can highlight how sociotechnical change and infrastructural transformation are more than just the domain of industry sectors or elite knowledge institutions, especially when they involve justice-based reforms.

Teaching the Politics of Numbers with EthnoData: Ethnographic Experimentations through Statistics in Ecuador

2024-12-06T01:32:07-08:00

This essay discusses the development and use of EthnoData, a multimodal and multimedia digital platform designed to critically engage different publics with data production and circulation in Ecuador. Created by Kaleidos, a research center at the University of Cuenca, EthnoData combines ethnography and large datasets on violent deaths, femicides, hate crimes, and missing people to analyze and challenge the conventional authority of official statistical evidence. EthnoData is also a pedagogical tool to disrupt linear narratives of violent deaths. It provides a collaborative learning space that enables users to generate their own theorizations and stories, highlighting the politics of classification and the socioeconomic inequalities embedded in the quantification of violence. The paper illustrates the platform's capacities through three examples: an interactive classroom exercise, an ethnographic essay on data reclassification, and its use in a deportation hearing in the US. These examples underscore EthnoData’s role in exposing the power dynamics in knowledge production and the real-life consequences of statistical categorizations. By democratizing access to data, EthnoData engages users in a critical reflection to question and better understand the politics and limitations of data, pushing for deeper and more nuanced comprehensions of statistical realities and their political implications.

[Intro] Standards and Their Containers: Introduction to the Thematic Issue on Histories of Microbial Pathogens from the Colonial to the Postcolonial Eras

2024-12-03T22:30:51-08:00

Standards and infrastructures have become ubiquitous objects of study in STS. They are critical to the global work of microbiology. However, the role of early twentieth-century colonial, military, and capitalist expansion in the production of these infrastructures is underappreciated. Further, the role of microbial “resistance” in shaping and changing the global microbiological order needs better elucidation. This requires connecting the technical work done in laboratories across the world with the global processes that have shaped much of the twentieth century. The articles in this thematic collection cast light on neglected temporal and geographic areas of human-microbial interactions, explore new ways of (re)reading historical sources to reveal (post)colonial distortions of scientific practice and acts of resistance, and underline the need to trace microbes and associated biomedical interventions not only within laboratories, but also within wider human and non-human environments.

‘Worm Wars’: The Unravelling of the Randomised Control Trial Success Story

2024-12-06T01:34:43-08:00

What counts as evidence in global health? What happens when evidence is contested? This article concentrates on the ‘Worm Wars’, a public academic debate in 2015 on the effectiveness of health interventions to treat populations with parasitic worms, to assess how health interventions are appraised by different disciplinary perspectives. I discuss what happens when a success story about randomised control trials (or RCTs) – often hailed as the ‘gold standard’ of evidence adjudication – is contested but left unresolved. Questioning the prominence of RCTs through the unravelling of this evidence success story offers insights into how these forms of measurement are utilised in practice, first in the medical field and then more widely in economic development and global health policy. I address what a gold standard is within a hierarchy of evidence, as well as the standards that are imbued into RCTs by different disciplinary researchers, and the evidence requirements for health interventions in determining the impact of deworming medication. With the Worm Wars, I show how important measurement standards have become in defining and advocating for global health problems and what this means for the production of evidence.

Laboratory Hosts: Postcolonial Parasites, Growth Factors, and the Fabrication of a Molecular Gaze

2024-12-03T22:30:50-08:00

From the final decades of the nineteenth century onward, physicians and scientists trained in Europe’s colonial powers devoted considerable attention to the lives of parasitic organisms found in the bloodstreams of humans and other animal hosts. Initially, this work required direct access to blood freshly sampled from a host and was spurred by desires to reduce the incidence of so-called tropical diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness, which were especially prevalent in parts of the world that European powers had claimed as colonies. Soon, noting the successes of bacteriologists in cultivating pathogenic bacteria in sterilized glass containers, some researchers set out to domesticate parasitic protozoa, as well. By the early twentieth century, these investigators had codified recipes for culturing a range of blood parasites, dramatically increasing the mobility of these organisms between colonial and metropolitan laboratories. This essay explores a handful of the many meanings that researchers attached to parasites in vitro. As pathogens, these organisms stubbornly confounded colonial campaigns to staunch their spread between human and animal hosts, yet as laboratory organisms, they posed timely and tractable intellectual puzzles, such as how molecularly defined nutrients functioned in the broader metabolic contexts of living cells. This essay traces a genealogy of experimental practices that gave rise to laboratory hosts. By mimicking or supplanting the functions of living hosts’ bodies, laboratory hosts transformed blood parasites into experimental tools. In time, they additionally came to incorporate synthetic and manufactured ingredients, further alienating parasites from their former dependencies on hosts’ blood. Through these nutritional negotiations, researchers reimagined specific biological relationships as generic chemical ones, thus rendering parasites viable models of metabolic processes unfolding in a great many living things. While eliciting skepticism from some commentators, such chemical views of nature’s order grew enormously influential in midcentury biology and medicine. In examining a selection of the materials and techniques that made up laboratory hosts, this essay illuminates significant yet overlooked continuities between the practices of colonial era tropical medicine and postwar molecular life science.

Northern Normal: Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939–2000)

2024-12-20T04:13:44-08:00

Bacteriophage-typing – using bacterial viruses to identify bacteria at the species and strain level – was the gold standard technology underlying the rapid expansion of international surveillance for major bacterial pathogens after 1945. The microbiological networks, taxonomies, and culture collections produced by phage-typers underpinned important advances in scientists’ understanding of microbial diversity and infection control efforts. However, embedded geopolitics, extractive microbial sampling, and cultural biases also distorted typing efforts and resulting findings in favour of high-income countries. Northern Normal merges classic historical research on phage-typing archives and publications with spatial analysis using ArcGIS to reconstruct the origins, rise, and biases of international phage-typing. Focusing on typing efforts for Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (the cause of typhoid fever), it shows how (post)colonial phage-typing networks cemented the dominance of Northern microbiological hubs and led to an inverse reading of microbial prevalence and relevance. Whereas strains prevalent in the Global North were designated universal, those from endemic areas in the South were exoticized. The article tracks how taxonomic distinctions between ‘universal’ Northern strains and high-prevalence ‘exotic’ strains reinforced biosecurity concerns about the reimport of typhoid from Southern countries, led to the choice of non-representative strains to test typhoid vaccines, and facilitated growing neglect of typhoid at the international level. The article ends by reflecting on the persistence of (post)colonial microbiological infrastructures and resulting surveillance distortions in the genomic era.

“Actions Imposed by Circumstances”: The Colonial Origins of The Yellow Fever Vaccine Debate, 1940s–1970s

2024-12-03T22:30:51-08:00

Why did the French neurotropic vaccine against yellow fever remain in global use from 1945 to the early 1980s, despite mounting evidence that it could cause fatal encephalitis in small children? This paper investigates debates over the safety and efficacy of the French Dakar-strain vaccine at the World Health Organization (WHO) in the postwar years. French microbiologists argued for retaining the vaccine, citing millions of successful jabs in colonial Africa during World War II. Critics pointed to well-documented postwar cases of serious adverse effects, and the availability of a safer alternative – the Rockefeller 17-D strain. Investigating the WHO-s debate reveals how postwar decisions to retain the Dakar strain as an emergency option, next to the 17-D vaccine, were shaped by prewar epidemiological data. These, in turn were limited by colonial infrastructure and racialized logics of wartime vaccination campaigns. Though the vaccine was supposed to be used only as an emergency alternative, in practice, its ease of use in West African settings made it the default option during outbreaks for decades.

The Politics of Scheduling: Vaccination as Infrastructure, Spectacle, and Market in West Africa, 1960s–1980s

2024-12-03T22:30:51-08:00

Vaccination schedules negotiate the timing of interactions among bodies, vaccines, and pathogens. Yet they do more: they orchestrate the movement of vaccines through factories, business plans, injecting devices, fridges, vehicles, healthcare labour, kinship relations, policy models, government budgets, and so on. This article approaches vaccine schedules as standards that synchronise the varying entities – and interests animating these – that make up vaccination infrastructures broadly defined. What unfolds is an examination of the politics of schedule-setting and implementation, set-out in three debates concerning vaccination in West Africa during a time of fitful, contested expansion in both the delivery of immunizing technologies and the development of basic healthcare infrastructure. The first debate concerns rhythms of vaccination during the US-led and funded West African Smallpox Eradication and Measles Control Program (SEMCP) in the latter 1960s, revealing tensions among this programme’s technopolitical priorities. Two later debates, about the optimal age for measles vaccination, and the minimum total doses/visits required for full immunization, reflect broader contests, from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, over the ultimate goals of the ‘Expanded Programme on Immunization’ (EPI). These three debates provide insight into how multiple actors vied for control over how routine childhood vaccination was to be enacted and imagined in West Africa.

On Medical Standardisation in Times of Scientific Uncertainty: The Management of Flu Epidemics by the French Military Medical Service After the World Pandemic (1920s–30s)

2024-12-03T22:30:52-08:00

Using the example of anti-influenza struggle during the 1920s and 1930s, this article asks how the French armed forces health service developed and implemented standardised medical and prophylactic management to face it in times of uncertainty about the nature of the pathogen. The notion of standardisation is placed at the center of the analysis inquiring how exogeneous as endogenous knowledge, norms and practices combined to design the most robust prophylactic and therapeutic strategies possible and their limits. Standardisation is presented as a process of continuous improvement where progressive rationalization of prophylactic measures widely inspired by the Pasteurian school and the improvements in the medical management of influenza patients in a context of therapeutic trial and error required regular changes to standardisation. The article highlights how the proximity between military and civilian actors involved in the production of norms and standards enables us to observe a gradual alignment between medical theories, laboratory research, bedside clinics, preventive measures and treatments used with technical, bureaucratic and organizational systems for the benefit of public health policy.

Provocations from the ‘STS as a Critical Pedagogy’ Workshop

2024-12-19T22:39:52-08:00

The authors have identified a name change in the published article:

This Addendum relates to the following article: Shannon N. Conley, Emily York, Eleanor S. Armstrong, Marisa Brandt, et. al. 2024. “Provocations from the ‘STS as a Critical Pedagogy’ Workshop.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 103–133. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1927.

On page 103, the authors should include Kathleen Sheppard and Aubrey Wigner in the author list.

Northern Normal: Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939–2000).

2024-12-20T22:40:09-08:00

This Erratum relates to the following article: Kirchhelle, Claas, and Charlotte Kirchhelle. 2024. “Northern Normal: Laboratory Networks, Microbial Culture Collections, and Taxonomies of Power (1939–2000).” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 10(1–2): 292–336. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1445.

On page 311, in the main copy it should read: “This was particularly evident in the case of France. Closely aligned with the goals of French imperial and foreign policy (Moulin in Weindling 1995; Velmet 2020, 1–16), Pierre Nicolle’s Service des Bacteriophages aimed to type as many samples as possible from France and the Communauté Française (WHOA 2).”

On page 316, in the main copy it should read: “By contrast strains like phage types L1, L2, and E1 with similar prevalence in low-income areas on multiple continents but no occurrence in Europe were described ‘exotic’ or given regional labels like ‘Far East.’”