Science & Technology Studies

Conceptualising Doing Things

Edwin Schmitt — 2025-02-15

What happens when academics, who “conceptualise research questions”, and community groups, which aim to be “doing things”, collaborate? Building on STS research about collaboration, we focus on the collaborative experiences of three teams of academics and community groups to address environmental justice. Our research reveals a tension between the way two sets of actors understand the purpose and mode of science within environmental justice collaborations. We explain this tension by exploring the motivations of the academics and community group managers and by how team members arrived at a shared understanding of collaboration itself. Our findings reveal that the purpose and mode of science within the collaborations that unfolded can best be understood not as conceptualizing research questions or doing things, but rather as “conceptualizing doing things.” Recognizing this merged understanding of science could be beneficial in enhancing and accelerating the work of community group-academic collaborations labouring together to address environmental justice challenges.

Standardising Patient Engagement in Drug Development

Claudia Egher — 2025-02-15

Initiatives to increase patient engagement in drug development have recently been accompanied by growing calls for standardisation due to considerable uncertainties about how to best perform patient engagement and use it in drug marketing applications. We focus on materials developed by the Patient Focused Medicines Development (PFMD), a multi-stakeholder group founded in 2015, to investigate what these materials seek to standardize on patient engagement in drug development and what visions of patient engagement are being constructed by them. We take a material-semiotic approach, whereby the materials analysed are seen as influential actors, which can work upon and transform issues of concern. The findings indicate that these materials seek to standardise a new beginning for the drug development trajectory, which they (re)locate to the patients’ needs and preferences, and long-term relationships between researchers and patients developed through specific methods. A new type of patient is thus envisioned, while researchers and patient organisations are ascribed more complex roles.

Pragmatic Progress and the Improvement of Medical Knowledge for Global Health

Manuela Fernández Pinto — 2025-02-15

The paper presents an epistemological argument on the crisis in medical knowledge today, first identifying a fundamental problem of the crisis, i.e., the epistemic gap, and then introducing the concept of pragmatic progress as a tool for understanding what is needed for pharmaceutical research to solve pressing epistemic and public health problems. This (new) analysis can contribute to identifying at least one mechanism needed to close the epistemic gap in current medical knowledge, which in turn could serve as a criterion for filtering current and future proposals. In order to do this, first, I show that the drug market has led to a significant epistemic gap between the knowledge needed to address pressing public health issues and the knowledge produced following the demands of the global market. Second, using the notion of pragmatic progress, I suggest a reading of the crisis in medical knowledge, which emphasizes the problems that clinical research is set to solve. Then I present two alternative ways to restructure medical research to fulfill this aim, illustrating how each can be implemented through real-world examples. The last section addresses a possible objection to the argument and exemplifies how the criterion can be used to filter undesirable proposals.

Evolutionary Psychology and the Naturalization of Gender Inequalities

Julien Larregue — 2025-02-15

This article explores the uses of evolutionary psychology in a corpus of 29 articles published by the online magazine Quillette. We show that while they openly rely on a rationalist, descriptive stance, Quillette contributors actively promote a range of normative views on science and the social world, including gender inequalities, with the stated goal to question the so-called “left-wing” and “blank slate” orthodoxies. In so doing, this magazine participates to the development and diffusion of a conservative meritocratic frame that strongly resembles the self-legitimizing discourses put forth by socially dominant groups, only in a naturalized form.

Calvert Jane (2024) A Place of Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention and Collaboration

Conor Douglas — 2025-02-15

Matzner Tobias (2023) Algorithms: Technology, Culture, Politics

Lukas Griessl — 2025-02-15