Science & Technology Studies

Tracing Data Flows in Norway and Austria

Tone Druglitrø — 2024-12-15

The increased importance of datafication in different domains of society, and health in particular, has generated much attention in STS, specifically in the Nordic context. While much of this literature tackles newly emerging forms of data governance, we focus on a historically established and mundane data practice: that of recording vaccinations in vaccine registries. We mobilise the concept of data flows to compare the link between registry practices and governance in two countries: Norway – a data intensive welfare state - and Austria, which we label ‘data hesitant’. We ask: What is the role of registries in vaccination governance? How do data practices shape and reflect relations between citizens, health providers and the state? We show that the governance of immunity is interlocked with the material and political circumstances that make data flow. The paper makes visible the benefits of doing situated comparisons for better understandings of data practices across countries.

Who Knows What a Microbe is?

Marie Turner — 2024-12-15

Microbial products are becoming common alternatives for pesticides and fertilizers in light of the unsustainability of chemical products. What the microbes in these products are, though—that is, how they are enacted—varies across regulatory, research and development, and growing spaces, and that variation matters to how they are regulated. From document analyses, interviews, and ethnographic work with scientists, growers, and policy actors, we find that these microbes are epistemically uneven, sometimes with pinned-down identities, and sometimes with loosely woven textures with holes. Amid calls to tailor regulations specifically for these products, we suggest that regulations predicated on discrete identities and predictable and controllable functions will fail to account for all users’ experiences, and that regulation may need to learn to live with the lacy texture of microbes across contexts.

Developing AI for Weather Prediction

Przemyslaw Matt Lukacz — 2024-12-15

The question of how professional and lay communities develop trust in new technologies, and automation in particular, has been a matter of lively debate. As a charismatic technology, artificial intelligence (A.I.) has been a common topic of these debates. This paper presents a case study of how the discourses and principles of ethics of technology development—specifically, of A.I.— were mobilized to form trust among actors in the fields of computer science, risk communication, and weather forecasting. My analysis draws on sociology of expertise and the literature on ethics of A.I. to ask: how emerging networks of expertise use ethics to overcome mistrust in technology? And, what role does the institutionalization of those networks play in the process of trust formation? I situate this discussion on the NSF Institute for Research on Trustworthy A.I. The Institute is positioned as a mediating organization with the goal of increasing trust in this technology primarily the weather forecasting community, but also among the public. I show that first, to better understand how scientific and professional fields react to increased automation it is crucial to unpack the historical backdrop of how the professional identity of those experts has been shaped by a relationship with computer-supported modeling. To this end, I situate the discussion in the long-standing tensions between computer modelling and tacit knowledge in weather forecasting. Second, I argue that the means of establishing trust in A.I. propagated by the actors in the paper, which pair norms of explainability to sensitivity to professional intuitions and domain-specific conventions, rely on a series of “mutual orientations” (Edwards, 1996). I mobilize the concept of “mutual orientations” to describe the work of tailoring the ethics of A.I. to the specific requirements of weather sciences, but also to the vision of a national strategy of investment in this technology.

When Numbers Run Out

Baki Cakici — 2024-12-15

In the early 2000s, authorities in Sweden and Denmark recognised that their personal identification numbers were about to run out but followed different interventions to resolve the same issue. In this paper, I start from these cases to analyse personal identification numbers as methods for knowing and governing populations. I draw on two assertions from the study of methods within STS: Methods are performative, and they produce multiple objects and realities. I demonstrate how such identification numbers enact individuals and populations simultaneously, and I identify a fundamental tension between them: one emphasising the representational potential of the part and another favouring the coherence of the whole. I conclude that issues surrounding personal identification numbers in use across all Nordic countries can be traced back to a fundamental tension in addressing individuals that is impossible to resolve via technical fixes, although those interventions are crucial to keeping the systems operational.

Rouse Joseph (2023) Social Practices as Biological Niche Construction

Helen Ruth Verran — 2024-12-15

Schmidt Jan Cornelius (2022) Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity: Studies in Science, Society and Sustainability

Stefan Gammel — 2024-12-15