Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Pursuing Transnational STS at ESOCITE/4S Joint Conference

Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

In this editorial, the ESTS editorial collective (EC) reports on various events it had organized at the 2022 ESOCITE/4S joint meeting held at the Universidad Iberoamericana-Puebla in Cholula, México. The EC hosted a journal “happy hour” meet-up and several roundtables on the “Politics of Language,” the challenges and opportunities for open research data in STS worlds, as well as a Managing Editor (ME) Roundtable collaborating with other OA journals. The EC also participated in a two-day pre-conference writing workshop for early-career researchers. Various events organized further the EC’s commitment to cultivating and supporting the development of transnational STS.

Evincing Offence: How Digital Forensics Turns Big Data into Evidence for Policing Sexual Abuse

Brian Rappert, Dana Wilson-Kovacs, Hannah Wheat , Sabina Leonelli — Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

A reader can expect the abstract, paper and keywords to discuss descriptions of evidence, classification schema, seizure rules and more generally the data frictions, constraints and limitations associated with the processing of digital forensic evidence involving children in England.

The widespread availability and use of digital devices both enables criminal acts and helps to detect them. The production and circulation of indecent images of children has been one area of crime that has transformed in recent years because of developments in modern communication technologies. Through in-depth ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with four police forces in England, this article examines the resources and labor required to turn digital footprints into evidence for the possession of indecent images. In doing so, our aim is twofold. One, we detail the formal and informal processes whereby large sets of data become discrete pieces of judicial evidence. A notable feature of these administrative and technical processes is that while criminal justice agencies often strive for linear investigations, such aspirations fail to acknowledge the messy interrelation of expertise and roles that underpin the transformation of digital devices into evidence. As a second aim, we seek to identify similarities and differences in the practices whereby evidence is constructed between digital and other areas of forensics. In particular, this analysis raises questions around the descriptive and normative adequacies of prevalent theories of objectivity for digital forensics.

STS Between Centers and Peripheries: How Transnational are Leading STS Journals?

Noela Invernizzi, Amílcar Davyt, Pablo Kreimer, Leandro Rodriguez Medina — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

In the context of increasing internationalization of the science and technology studies (STS) field, and reflections on post-coloniality and provincialization of STS, we examine to what extent a set of twelve leading journals of the field have published papers from different regions worldwide. In this exploratory work, based on information retrieved from the Web of Science for the period 2010–2019, we often use Latin America as an example, but reflect on peripheral regions of the field more broadly. Our findings show that the historical West-European–North-American centers of the field maintain their hegemony, dominating the discussions in leading journals. Some Latin American and East Asian countries gained some visibility in journals focused on scientometrics and science and technology (S&T) policy and innovation, whereas the journals specialized in the socio-anthropological studies of S&T are the less transnationalized. Our preliminary hypothesis to explain such sub-field variations is that these objects (scientific policy, innovation) and methods (scientometrics) seem to be more universal and consensual, facilitating transnationalization, while peripheral science, the preferred object of study for peripheral STS, has not attracted attention from leading journals. Emphasizing the relational character of centers and peripheries, we argue that the invisibilization of the academic production of certain regions of the world in leading journals makes this work peripheral.

Transnationalizing Critical Drug Studies

Nancy D. Campbell — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

This essay explores transnational STS as an analytic capable of recognizing the heterogeneities, pluralities, and relationalities of drugs—legal and illegal, products of agriculture or laboratory—as emblematic material-semiotic actors that move between global North, West, South, and East and into and out of bodies. Critical drug studies flourishes as a transdisciplinary knowledge project at the nexus of anthropology, history, sociology, political science, and other knowledge projects. This article situates critical drug studies in relation to the interdisciplinary knowledge project that is transnational STS and to postcolonial, postpositivist, and decolonial STS. The paper responds to the prompt offered by the organizers of a stream of papers in 2020—on “Transnational STS” for the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S): “What becomes visible when nation-state as the only analytic breaks down? What is the role of the nation-state with regard to education, research activities and the regulation of technologies in the contemporary period?” This article deals with the bifurcated regulation of drugs as technologies made legal or illegal by a global colonial, imperial, and nation-state-based regime that has made global drug policy since the early twentieth century. We are witnessing the reconfiguration of this regulatory system within and between nations—making a transnational analytic frame necessary for recognizing the relations facilitated by global drug policy.

Constructivist Paradoxes Part 2: Latin American STS, between Centers and Peripheries

Pablo Kreimer — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

There is a certain ‘failure’ in what we could call the modern development of the STS field over the past decade, i.e. a large number of studies—particularly empirical—that were deployed from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, one of their original and crucial objectives was to emphasize the local, situated, contingent character of the processes of production and negotiation of knowledge. However, these studies mostly concentrate on one part of the world, i.e. the most developed countries, precisely where modern science, commonly referred to as “Western Science,” developed. This limitation—surely intuitive or “natural”—has several consequences analyzed in this article. In summary, these limitations can be analyzed in terms of the objects of research (the various forms of knowledge) but also in terms of the theories and methods used to account for them. The aim is to discuss the construction of a double (or even triple) peripheral situation, which calls into question the old principles of symmetry and impartiality (Bloor 1976; Collins 1981): on the one hand, the peripheral character of the objects analyzed (i.e. science and scientific development outside Euro-America) and, in parallel, the peripheral situation of the communities of specialists who dedicate themselves to studying them. Connected to this, an additional question emerges: What are the theoretical frameworks and methodologies best suited to account for these objects in their respective contexts? Is it suitable to simply apply to these objects of study the same theoretical frameworks and methods commonly used to analyze hegemonic science? And last but not least, how to approach the (scientific, cultural, political) relationships between different contexts in a highly globalized world? This is the second of two parts: while in the first one I discuss the “failures” of the hegemonic paradigm in STS and its consequences in relation to non-hegemonic contexts, in this second part I focus on the problems raised by post-colonial approaches, on the “peripheral techno-science” as an object for STS scholars and, as a specific case, the development of STS research in Latin America and the dynamics of its specific agendas.

Brazil at COP26: Political and Scientific Disputes Under a Post-Truth Government

Lorena Fleury, Marko Monteiro, Tiago Duarte — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

Global climate negotiations were again in the spotlight at Glasgow’s COP26 meeting in November 2021, drawing attention to the urgency of the climate crisis and to the need to find long term solutions. While Brazil has been a protagonist of such negotiations for decades, since 2019 the country has abdicated its leadership role, adopting a reactive stance to the environmental agenda. This shift is illustrative of the centrality of scientific disputes in government projects in conflict in Brazil. Since the election of Jair Bolsonaro, attacks on science have gained strength and institutionalized a position largely critical to existing scientific consensus about climate and the environment in the government. Together with the dismantling of Brazil’s environmental regulations—put in place also by the Bolsonaro government—those attacks on science have strained both its local capacities to curb deforestation (the source of most of the country’s emissions) and deepened inequalities and injustices ingrained in Brazilian society. In summary, we argue that STS can participate in finding a way out of the current political and social crisis and resisting the dismantling of a once robust environmental governance framework by unpacking the centrality of scientific production in disputes over climate and the environment.

Promises that Don’t Work? COP26 and the Problems of Climate Change

Juan Layna, Leandro Altamirano — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0800

The 26th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26), hosted in Glasgow in 2021, reaffirmed the guidelines assumed in 2015 around the “Paris Agreement” (COP21). Many of these guidelines, which are aimed at building pathways to net zero carbon emissions, translate publicly into techno-scientific promises, such as the global development of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). However, these promises are also questioned in the mass media by several actors. Both promises and criticisms are based on scientific reports produced or evaluated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, dependent on the United Nations). In this sense, the set of criteria mobilized by the IPCC constitutes a framework for the debate. However, this framework generates a projection of the future based primarily on technical criteria that omit social plausibility and ignore the particular conditions of peripheral countries to achieve the proposed objectives. As a result, they ignore the relationship between peripheral (dependent) and core nation-states. This relationship implies, among other consequences, a lack of technological autonomy for peripheral countries that makes very difficult to modify their economic structures (increasingly primarized) in order to be able to operate changes in the fight against global warming. In this paper we analyze such reception and translation of climate change promises in Argentina.