Science & Technology Studies

Antti Silvast — 2024-02-15

The first edition of Science & Technology Studies, then named Science Studies, became available in 1988. Over the past 35 years, the journal has established itself as a prominent international publication, experiencing significant growth in publication volume, manuscript submissions, and readership. This editorial commemorates these achievements and reflects on the journal's evolution. A key aspect of this exploration is our journal's role in the Open Access movement, which both enhances transparency and offers new tools for the analysis. The sections delve further into the topic of the scholarly impact of STS, starting with a discussion of impact factor metrics followed by insights from our Editorial Team. The paper then utilizes the extensive archives of the journal and the capabilities of new tools to explore reader engagement with our publications. The editorial concludes with a discussion of our way forward into the next years and decades.

“Should We Stay or Should We Go now?”

Karen Kastenhofer — 2024-02-15

In this paper we focus on a special feature of science and technology studies: the trajectories of our engagement with ‘emerging technosciences’. Many of us entertain close links to a particular group of scientists; our scholarly careers and identities build around thematic specialisations, trans-field collaborations and convivialities. But more often than not, such engagement does not last a whole career. With every new technoscientific hype, scholars are pressed to ‘move on’, to disengage from one field and re-engage with another. It thus seems warranted to explicitly reflect on the temporal patterns of dis/engagement and to look at possible ramifications for individuals, collectives, and the innovation system at large. To inform such reflection, we opted for a mixed-methods approach, tracing patterns and moments of dis/engagement across various disciplines based on scientometric analysis, individual archaeologies of engagement, a qualitative survey, and a focused discussion among fellow scholars from the social sciences and humanities as well as the sciences. Our analysis brings distinct dis/engagement patterns to the fore, relating to disciplinary affiliations as well as career stages. In our conclusion, we discuss the relevance of these findings for science and technology studies scholars and technoscientists as well as for contemporary innovation regimes more generally.

Questions and Explanations in Sociology

Judit Gárdos — 2024-02-15

This is a study of an action research project conducted in one of the biggest university departments for sociology in a Central Eastern European capital during the first half of the 2000s. The paper shows that researchers’ images of society have a strong impact on social scientific methodology, scientific explanations and narratives. I offer an example of how realist approaches to science and technology studies can be used in a field study and discuss the benefits and limitations of such an endeavor, which I define as an interpretive and explanatory social scientific work. The analysis shows ways in which latent knowledge structures influenced the wording of a questionnaire used in the research, the types of data that were gathered, and how the data were interpreted. These knowledge structures include notions concerning local policy discussions, different social policy traditions, and images of a Roma minority struggling with the effects of structural poverty and prejudices.

University Campus Living Labs

Sophie Nyborg — 2024-02-15

Universities and their changing role in society is a source of perennial debate. In this article, we examine the emergent phenomenon of University Campus Living Labs (UCLL), the set of practices by which universities use their own buildings, streets or energy infrastructure as experimental settings in order to support applied teaching, research and co-creation with society. While most existing studies of UCLLs focus on them as sustainability instruments, we explore the UCLL phenomenon from an open-ended and fresh angle. Using living labs in five European universities as exemplary cases, we demonstrate the breadth and variability of this emerging phenomenon through five analytical dimensions to unpack the multiple forms and purposes that UCLLs can have. We furthermore consider aspects of inclusiveness and situatedness of living lab co-creation and testing and what the UCLL phenomena may come to mean for the continuously changing university, calling for future studies to substantiate these aspects.

Prasad Amit (2023) Science Studies Meets Colonialism

Aysel Sultan — 2024-02-15

Bruun Maja Hoejer, Hasse Catherine, Hoeyer Klaus, Wahlberg Ayo, Douglas-Jones Rachel, Kristensen Dorthe Brogaard and Winthereik Brit Ross (eds) (2022) Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology

Sally Wyatt — 2024-02-15

The Valuable Plurality of the Citizen Sciences

Michiel Van Oudheusden — 2024-02-15

Citizen science is a multilayered concept. Although it is generally understood as a form of public engagement with science and technology, it can take various forms, with widely different roles for citizens. Despite this vastness, a “contributory” strand of citizen science dominates the field, which formally limits citizens’ roles to those of data gatherers for professional scientists or experts. This has led critics to argue that citizen science is not as inclusive, socially transformative, or democratizing as its advocates claim, and to appeals by scholars, practitioners, and policymakers for more dialogue and deliberation in all stages of citizen science processes. In this piece, we share our reflections on these questions drawing on our experiences as participant observers in contributory citizen science projects in various parts of the world. Responding to the above critiques, we illustrate how such projects can have emancipatory potential in terms of impacting policy agendas, inciting behavioral change, and engaging hard-to-reach societal groups. We argue that the future of citizen science lies in pluralizing the citizen sciences by experimenting with various modes of democratic representation, participation, and deliberation.