Technology has played a central role in development programming since the inception of development assistance. Recent development organizations, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, believe technological innovation can improve development outcomes. Development ethics, a field of study focused on the ethical questions posed by development policies and practices, has yet to fully appreciate the ethical dimensions of the science and technology. Addressing this important research and policy gap, we contend that science and technology studies (STS) offers important insights that (...) can be used in combination with development ethics to influence development policies and practices. Utilizing a case study of a private development program in Uganda, we illustrate how STS offers important insights for understanding how a sociotechnical ensemble placed pressure on already scarce water resources. Two dimensions of STS scholarship, the power asymmetries of technological development and the incomplete or partial nature of technoscientific knowledge, are examined and help us to understand how sociotechnical ensembles in development increase the likelihood of the emergence of publics who are negatively impacted by sociotechnical ensembles in development programs. Leveraging STS insights, we argue for the importance of situated ethics—a pragmatic approach to ensuring responsiveness to the emergence of these publics. (shrink)

The roles digital media-technologies play in raising public issues relating to emerging technologies and their potential for engaging publics with science and policy assessments is a lively field of inquiry in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This paper presents an analysis of controversies over proposals for the large-scale removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CDR). The study combines a digital method (web-querying) with document analysis to map debates about two CDR approaches: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) and afforestation. In (...) the first step, we locate actors using the web to engage with BECCS and afforestation and map their alignments in relation to competing framings of CDR. In a second step, we examine the devices deployed by UK-based actors to evidence and contest the feasibility of BECCS and afforestation. Our analysis shows that policy distinctions between “natural” and “engineered” CDR are used flexibly in practice and do not map neatly onto actor engagement with BECCS and afforestation. We highlight the predominance of cross-cutting techno-economic expertise and argue that framings of CDR as a solution to governing climate change may contribute to public disengagement from climate policy processes. The paper reflects on methods for studying controversies, publics, and issues emerging around processes of technoscientific assessment. (shrink)

In 1979, the Council of the European Communities declared its intention to ban battery cages for laying hens; one year later, everything about the ban is forgotten. During this preparatory year (1979-1980), all that happened is the publication of scientific reports, that is, attempts at producing knowledge as a basis for and justification of the ban decision. This paper aims at understanding to what extent ignorance and doubt were produced instead. By examining the reports, I demonstrate that there are three (...) interrelated levels of ignorance production: (1) the missions given by the Commission to scientists were ambiguous, (2) questions inherent to animal welfare sciences, such as the significant variability of their measures and results, lead to a systematic standardization, and (3) the battery cage works as a techno-scientific promise and an “obligatory passage point” where scientists and industry meet. Disciplinary identity issues therefore lead scientists to adopt a double standard about the welfare of laying hens. (shrink)

Medicine is often criticized in science and technology studies (STS) for its dominating measuring practices. To date, the focus has been on two areas of “metric work”: health-care workers and metric infrastructures. In this article, I step back into the training of clinicians, which is important for understanding more about how practices of measurement are developed. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch medical school to look at how a ubiquitous and mundane tool––measuring tapes––is embodied by medical students as (...) they learn to coordinate their sensory knowledge. In doing so, they create their own bodies as the standard or measure of things. Unpacking educational practices concerning this object, I suggest that tracing the making of measuring bodies offers new insights into medical metric work. This also speaks to the growing interest in STS in sensory science, where the body is fashioned as a measuring instrument. Specifically, two interrelated contributions build on and deepen STS scholarship: first, the article shows that learning is an embodied process of inner-scaffold making; second, it suggests that the numerical objectification of sensory knowing is not a calibration to “objectivity machines” but rather to oscillations between bodies and objects that involve sensory-numerical work. (shrink)

This article is about clothing inventions, material participation, and acts of citizenship. I explore how pioneering Victorian women at the turn of the last century inventively responded via clothing to restrictions to their (physical and ideological) freedom of movement. While the bicycle is typically celebrated as a primary vehicle of women’s emancipation at that time, I argue that inventive forms of clothing, such as convertible cycling skirts, also helped women make claims to rights and privileges otherwise legally denied to their (...) sex. I ask: Do clothing inventions create possibilities to act differently? Can they be thought of as wearable technology, and in what ways do they (and their invention) enact political concerns? Might convertible cycling skirts be considered “acts of citizenship?” Throughout, I mobilize concepts of multiplicity, in-betweenness, and ambiguity to make a case for the relevance of clothing research for science and technology studies. (shrink)

This article analyzes local algorithmic practices resulting from the increased use of time-lapse (TL) imaging in fertility treatment. The data produced by TL technologies are expected to help professionals pick the best embryo for implantation. The emergence of TL has been characterized by promissory discourses of deeper embryo knowledge and expanded selection standardization, despite professionals having no conclusive evidence that TL improves pregnancy rates. Our research explores the use of TL tools in embryology labs. We pay special attention to standardization (...) efforts and knowledge-creation facilitated through TL and its incorporated algorithms. Using ethnographic data from five UK clinical sites, we argue that knowledge generated through TL is contingent upon complex human–machine interactions that produce local uncertainties. Thus, algorithms do not simply add medical knowledge. Rather, they rearrange professional practice and expertise. Firstly, we show how TL changes lab routines and training needs. Secondly, we show that the human input TL requires renders the algorithm itself an uncertain and situated practice. This, in turn, raises professional questions about the algorithm’s authority in embryo selection. The article demonstrates the embedded nature of algorithmic knowledge production, thus pointing to the need for STS scholarship to further explore the locality of algorithms and AI. (shrink)

Documents, in particular identity cards, mediate relationships between individuals and institutions. Their materiality matters and actively impacts how states govern populations and their movements. In this paper, I examine one such object, the Romanian identity card. Focusing on its temporality and agency, I explore how objects and technological procedures enact race. In Romania, people without an address or proof of residence—many of them members of segregated Roma communities living in deep poverty—can only receive a temporary identity card, the Carte de (...) Idenititate Provizorie (CIP). CIP holders do not enjoy full citizenship and are deprived of various rights, such as the right to travel without a passport within the European Union. They are also exposed to heightened surveillance as they must apply annually for a new CIP. Starting from the material object of the CIP, I explore how race comes into being as a relation at the intersection of various temporalities that are folded into the rules and bureaucratic practice entailed in its issue. I offer the concept of “permanent temporality” to analyze how racialization occurs in practices of governing people and their movement in Europe. (shrink)

Our review essay contributes to the long-standing and vibrant discussion in science and technology studies (STS) on methods, methodologies, and theory–method relationships. We aim to improve the reflexivity of research by unpacking the often implicit assumptions that imbue research conduct and by offering practical tools through which STS researchers can recognize their research designs and think through them in a new way. To achieve these aims, we analyze different compositions of theories, methods, and empirics in three different STS approaches—actor–network theory, (...) the biography of artifacts and practices, and ethnomethodology—by employing the concept of a theory–methods package (TMP). A selection of theoretical cornerstone texts and case studies in infrastructure research from each tradition serves as our material. Our findings point, first, to differences between the TMPs of the reviewed approaches and to the internal diversity of theory–method relationships in each approach. Second, we found some intriguing similarities between the approaches and discuss potential complementarities of their theory–method fits. (shrink)

This article uses the case of “social impact bonds” (SIBs) to explore the role of social science methods in new markets in “social investment.” Pioneered in the UK in 2010, SIBs use private capital to fund social programs with governments paying returns for successful outcomes. Central to the SIB model is the question of evaluation and the method to be used in determining program outcomes and investor returns. In the United States, the randomized controlled trial (RCT) has been the dominant (...) method. However, this has not been without controversy. Some SIB practitioners and investors have argued that, while this may be the perfect tool, the need to grow the SIB market demands a more pragmatic approach. Drawing from a three-year study of SIBs, and informed by Science and Technology Studies (STS)-inspired work on valuation and the social life of methods, the article explores RCTs as both a valuation technology central to SIB design and the object of a micropolitics of valuation which has impeded market growth. It is the relationship between, and the politics of, evaluation and valuation that is a key lesson of the SIB experiment and an important insight for future research on “social investment” and other settings where methods are constitutive of financial value. (shrink)