A Sampling of Sessions at the 4S/EASST Conference

The Globalization of Nature and Politics: Perspectives from STS

Miller, Clark; Scholz, Astrid; Long-Martello, Marybeth; and Iles, Alastair

Over the past two decades, novel conceptions of nature have prompted people around the world to begin to reevaluate foundational aspects of world order. The emergence of new ways of knowing and acting in the world has promoted skepticism toward the basic political concepts, values, and institutions underlying contemporary arrangements in international relations. In the biological sciences, for example, the reduction of life to manipulable, quantifiable codes of DNA base-pairs has given rise to deep-seated conflicts over the regulation of trade in agricultural and pharmaceutical biotechnology and scientific research on genetic diversity. In climatology and ecology, an opposite trend, the progressive depiction of nature as an integrated, global-scale system, has nonetheless catalyzed similar concerns about the need for planet-wide regulatory standards and agencies. In both cases, emergent debates have begun to transform, if not yet to abandon entirely, the idea of national sovereignty, the preeminence of nationalist forms of identity in global discourses of political representation, and the exclusive rights of governments to contribute to the formulation and implementation of global policy. These observations suggest a need to re-think scholarly understandings of processes of globalization. Conventional wisdom has typically portrayed globalization as the result of increasingly frequent and dense interconnections (social, technological, and other) among individuals and countries around the world. Such an approach tells us little, however, about how and why people come to see the world they live in (social and physical) as either universal (i.e., applies to everyone) or global (i.e., applies everywhere) in scope. Nor does it provide us with a means to productively investigate how and why people disagree about the degree or form taken by processes of globalization, nor why, in some circumstances, they continue to insist on the “local” character of key socio-technical networks, despite their clear interconnection with “global” phenomena. In these panels, we will explore these processes of globalization through a variety of STS-informed approaches to understanding linkages between scientific knowledge and political order. We will focus on the processes by which people construct knowledge that they consider “global” or “universal”, the role of experts and notions of expertise in these processes of knowledge-making, and the ways in which these new forms of knowledge are being connected up with the construction of new international institutions and the transformation of world politics. Key themes will include, for example, the emergence of “local knowledge” as a category in political discourse intertwined with novel assertions of social identity and legal standing, processes of commodification, and bureaucratic practices in international relations; debates about “informed consent” and “property rights” as sites in the reconstruction and renegotiation of local and global relations of identity, power, and authority; and the development of discourses and practices of standardization, naturalization, and ethics as competing and/or reinforcing processes in the stabilization and normalization of global and universal claims about nature in civil society. Approaches will include, among others: ethnographic studies of practices of knowledge-making and valuation; comparative studies of international policymaking; and historical and international relations studies of global scientific and policy development.

Wednesday, 10:30 - 12:00; 2:00-3:30; and 4:00-5:30

Disabilities, Subjectivities, Politics

Callon, Michel; Law, John; and Ingunn, Moser

This session will explore the relevance of STS work on disabled subjectivities and technologies for the character of politics and political participation. The assumption is that subjectivities are constructed and reshaped in collective political and technical action - and that these processes are often particularly evident for people who are ‘normatively disabled’. It is also that such processes of construction and reshaping have important implications for the character of politics, the political process and political participation. In particular, it may be that current liberal and social democratic models of the political process or political citizenship participation require examination in the light of changing regimes for handling disability and the subjectivities that these imply. The hope is that models of the person developed in STS may be helpful in this respect. The session will focus on the following questions: the changes in (or stability of) definitions of disabilities (including non-‘normative’ disabilities) and subjectivities as a result of new regimes of material and socio-technical intervention; the implications of these changes for reshaping practices of participation in politics, and the character of political processes; the character of the political models of the collectivity and the person embodied implicitly or explicitly in the design and use of assistive and interventionary technologies; the character of the political models embodied implicitly or explicitly in the organisation of voluntary and state material support for the disabled; and the political implications of the role of social science and STS involvement in the study of disabilities, assistive technologies and subjectivities.

Saturday, 9:00 - 10:30; 11:00 - 12:30; and 2:30 -4:00.

Borders, Technologies and identities

Pinch, Trevor; Rottenburg, Richard

In a global age and calls for a European State “without frontiers” it might be thought that national borders are withering away. However, increasingly globalization trends are accompanied by gross inequalities in wealth and life chances between neighboring nation states or between conglomerations of states. A rich country like the USA shares a border with Mexico – a comparatively poor country. Similarly West Germany in the EEC shares a border with Poland, not yet in the EEC. To facilitate globalization, borders must be places where goods and people can pass with ease. But at the same time nation states or the EEC must be able to identify and prevent passage of people and goods they deem as unsuitable to pass their borders or which require special sanctions to be applied - e.g. illegal immigrants or smuggled goods. Historically nation states have turned to technology to help in these tasks. Today’s borders employ an array of modern technologies to identify citizens and sniff out illegal goods and people. Borders present a fascinating site for doing Science and Technology Studies. They are a place where bodies, objects and technoscience meet. They are in effect “obligatory points of passage” where technoscience intervenes to construct citizenship and identity. In this session we will discuss historical and contemporaneous attempts to introduce new border technologies. We will explore how these technologies are used in practice and in particular the different ways that citizenship and identity get inscribed on people and objects.

Thursday, 4:30 -6:00

Emergent Technoscience, Emergent Ethics, Emergent Communities

Fortun, Mike

Technoscientific research communities co-evolve with technoscience, changing their goals, how they reproduce themselves and how they evaluate what their work means – for themselves as a professional community and for the societies in which they live. Papers on this panel will examine how researchers in three technoscientific communities — particle physics, stem-cell research, and human genetics – have co-evolved alongside their research, through new research practices, through the formation of new kinds of social relationships, and through new ways of thinking about ethics. Particular attention will be given to how researchers think about how ethics are entangled in a range of practices often not seen as inherently ethical – in the way experiments are designed and prioritized; in the way expertise is defined and shared; in the discourses through which scientific research results circulate beyond the laboratory. Different ethical discourses within a given research community will be highlighted, as will the ways emergent ethical discourses sustain or disrupt conventional understandings about trust, responsibility, and scientific authority. Papers will examine the local contexts in which new ethical discourses are emerging, as well as the broad social, cultural, political and economic trends that have brought new ethical dilemmas to the surface.

Wednesday, 4:00 - 5:30

Ethics, Inc.: Food - Health - Hope and the Public Culture for New Corporate Activism

Rajan, Kaushik Sunder, Dumit Joseph

In an era of genomics and information biology, bioethics has emerged as a term for redefinition as well as a terrain for contestation. In trying to understand the refiguring of bioethics and its multiple appropriations, this panel will address Ethics, Inc. not just as an abstract legitimizing concept, but as a legal entity and a social-cultural ideal that gets embodied in multiple forms, so that corporations and their products themselves become ethical rather than merely act on an ethical terrain. But where does the value of becoming ethical reside? Is ethics merely a response to a crisis of legitimacy or is it inherently a mode of surplus value generation? Purchasing a critique of Ethics, Inc. demands accounting for transnational citizenship (of both activists and of corporations) alongside nations and shareholders as co-stakeholders in the new ethical products. The papers on these panels combine historical and ethnographic analysis to study corporations, bioethics boards, and other forms of elite labor directly. Topics include genomics start-ups, biochemical acquisitions, bioprospecting and bioinformatics databasing, and public relations consulting. Using the conceptual framework of New Corporate Activism (Grefe and Linksy, 1995) to understand these strategies of ethical embodiment as strategies of collective action, these papers examine the difficulty of activism in a world of public relations, where “diversity management”, “democracy”, and “environmentalism” are investment strategies and competitive advantages in the global economy.

Thursday, 2:30 -4:00 and 4:30 - 6:00

Technoscience and the Agency of the Dead

Fleischmann, Ken

The dead have proven to be useful to the living and are granted agency within sociotechnical networks. The presentations in this session demonstrate the changing cultural significance and agency of dead bodies. For example, through organ donation, dead bodies can be used to sustain the living. Constructions of cause of death in murder cases can result in prosecution and incarceration of the guilty or innocent. With embryo fetoscopy, the killing of an acardiac fetus facilitates the survival of its twin. Dead bodies are also used to educate the living, both in museums and in classroom settings. Recent technoscientific innovations are changing the definition of death and the roles that dead bodies play in our society. New technologies for imaging dead bodies have the potential to transform medical education and practice. Innovations in sciences such as physiology and pathology facilitate organ transplantation and alter the forensic determination of cause of death. Thus, as we enter the 21st century, we must consider how developments in technoscience result in new forms of agency for the dead.

Thursday, 9:00 -10:30; 11:00-12:30

Radical Reflexivity: Is it all over now?

Ashmore, Malcolm

At the last joint society conference in Bielefeld in 1996, there was a sparsely attended session devoted to reflexivity, focused mainly on social-theoretic discussion. Since then, reflexivity has not featured strongly at STS conferences or in the field’s specialised journals. Is it then (at last; let’s breathe a sigh of relief) dead; at least in the ‘radical’ form represented by the work of the so-called ‘reflexivists’ in the late 1980s? Has it been domesticated (as Pollner has argued for ethnomethodology)? Or has it transmuted into something else? The authors of the papers in this session suggest different answers to these questions. Ashmore details some of the problems involved in researching a highly polarised (and polarising) public controversy, and suggests that reflexive textual strategies may be a solution to the enforced lack of distance such a phenomenon imposes on would-be symmetrical research. Cooper argues that attention to reflexivity is now less ‘visible’ than it was because of a general shift in emphasis in science studies from ‘representation’ to ‘performativity’, which has signalled a corresponding move from the representation of reflexive relations (as in ‘New Literary Forms’) to their embedded performance. Lynch’s paper suggests that so long as we remain fixated on our own (qua social scientists and STS scholars) degrees or levels of reflexiveness we will miss an understanding of the reflexivity adhering in the workaday worlds of actors, including, especially, natural scientists. Slack’s argument is a general critique of reflexive argumentation in science studies, from the point of view of a ‘hard-line’ reading of ethnomethodology. He suggests that the methodological irony built into STS practice (of all kinds) should be abandoned in favour of an understanding of reflexivity based exclusively on Garfinkel’s insights. Woolgar addresses the failings of 1980s reflexivity (its fixation with avoiding error and its inattention to audience) and suggests how an ‘interactive’, user-sensitive STS can be seen as its heir.

Thursday, 2:30 - 4:00 and 4:30 - 6:00

Objectizing Subjectivities

Jansen, Sarah; Mayer, Andreas

The classic dichotomy of object and subject has been challenged in many studies undertaken by anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and historians of science. In modern Western knowledge-based cultures, “subjects” are primarily composed in trials taking place in concrete sites such as the psychological laboratory, the clinic or the private practice of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. The forms of ‘objectizing’ human subjects in these trials also involve a number of non-human components which act in different ways: material things, instruments, machines, drugs, animals. A humanistic perspective on subjectivity conceives of such non-human elements only in a negative mode as an “alienation” or “objectification” of the subject. Instead, this session will experiment with different approaches: grounded in different case studies, the contributors aim at working out complex accounts of the various material and social compositions which are constitutive of such ‘objectized subjectivities’. They will explore how the (re-)writing of their accounts can inform conceptual redistributions of the subject/object dichotomy.

Saturday, 9:00 - 10:30 and 11:00 - 12.30

A History of the Future: Long-term shifts of cultural attitudes towards uncertainty and risk, 18th to 20th century

Lengwiler, Martin

Recent research on risk has ended in a paradox. The historical project on the “Probabilistic Revolution” (e.g. Daston, Gigerenzer, Hacking) observed a secular process that reduced uncertainty by the application of probabilistic models in science since the nineteenth century. However, recent sociological debates have stressed the notion of a “Risk Society”, characterised not by more certainty but by an ever increasing abundance of risks. An increase in risk research paradoxically seems to lead to an increase of public uncertainty about risks, too. Thus, some of the current public debates on risks have ended in a deadlock. The papers of this session avoid this paradox by relating a science studies perspective with social and cultural history approaches. It offers a long-term analysis of the shifts of social and cultural attitudes towards risk and uncertainty. Thus, the session provides a first step towards a history of the future, as grasped by individuals and societies. Three exemplary studies will examine the changing cultural meanings of uncertainty. The first study is focusing on motivations for the purchase of life insurance in 18th-century Germany, in the absence of a developed actuarial technology, the second on the social and institutional background of the rise of “insurance science” in Germany at the end of the 19th century, and the third on the changing patterns of risk behaviour at work and in leisure time in Switzerland after 1945. The session points out some of the long-term institutional and cultural effects of scientific probabilism, showing how over the past two centuries risk has become a part of our identities and cultural practices, thus deeply affecting contemporary societies and, of course, their future.

Wednesday, 10:30 - 12:00

Technomasculinities in Transition

Mellström, Ulf

This session deals with variations of technomasculinities. Thus, with a point of departure in studies which are concerned with how the relationship between gender and technology, more specifically technology and masculinity, are interrelated and constructed we highlight the complexity and diversity of different technomasculinities in transition. In the first case, the transvestite telephone is being examined. Drawing on some contradictory findings on masculinities and telephony this case claim that the telephone is less a purely feminine technology and more a male model dressed up in women’s clothes. Among other things this case also concludes that as the definitions of technology are being negotiated, and at times stabilised, through the negotiations within and between public and private spheres, so too are definitions of genders. In the second case, a gender gaze is brought to software engineers’ relationships with technology, their styles of work, their image and identities, and any symbolism in the technical content of their work. By presenting evidence from a pilot ethnographic study of software developers and their work, this case challenges any simplistic reading of the conventional equation between masculinity and technology. In the third case, which draws upon ethnographic work among car and motor mechanics, a certain form of hegemonic masculinity, based on an intimate embodied interaction with machines, is being discussed. In such a technomasculinity, machines are understood as a means of a performative and embodied communication enabling masculine homosocial bonding linkages.

Thursday, 9:00 - 10:30

Cross-boundary diffusion of S&T: a critical review of models in the context of globalisation

Jacob, Merle; Elzinga, Aant; Raina, Dhruv

Contemporary studies in the history and sociology of science as well as disciplines have converged on insights which question dominant frames for understanding and describing the global history of knowledge and culture. Parallel reinterpretations have taken place in disciplines like geography and anthropology, as well as in development studies. At a more general level the reorientation of conceptual frameworks may be linked to critique of a meta-theory of diffusion, one that traditionally informed most if not all areas of inquiry and endeavour some of its more notable exemplars include Rostow’s stage theory of development, Bell’s convergence thesis and George Basalla’s three stage model of the diffusion of Western science. Ongoing debate on the impact and significance of the diffusionist model is fragmented. Each critical discourse is largely separated from others, both in time and space. The proposed session is to bring together critical reviews of the model. It therefore invites contributions on the subject from different disciplinary points of view under the umbrella of the social studies science. The prime objective is to bring about greater coherence in an interrogation of the ongoing debate on diffusionist models of change in the light of recent developments such as globalisation.

Friday, 2:30 - 4:00