Science & Technology Studies

Climate Change Assessments, Publics and Digital Traces of Controversy

Laurie Waller — 2023-02-15

Recent scientific assessments of climate change have shifted towards evaluating solutions for removing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CDR). This paper reports a participation experiment in which we involved an interdisciplinary group of researchers in mapping issues relating to two CDR approaches: afforestation and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). We describe the responses of individual researchers when presented with visualisations aggregated from posts about afforestation and BECCS on the platform Twitter. We then compare the researchers’ responses with a qualitative analysis of a subset of the Twitter data. The analysis highlights challenges the researchers experienced in identifying issues and relating these visualisations to their own research on afforestation and BECCS. We discuss the prospects for bringing experimental approaches to mapping issues, publics and participation into closer relation with science and technology assessments. The paper concludes with reflections on the value of qualitative traditions of STS research for digital controversy analysis.

Living Well with a Healthy Weight

Piotr Maron — 2023-02-15

This article troubles the intervention of the Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator from the National Health Service (NHS) website (www.nhs.uk) through a situated experiment involving my body. Specifically, it demonstrates how the assemblage of online location, the BMI calculator, and my male body are entangled in generating political effects for my healthy eating, healthy weight and wellbeing. By exploring the NHS website’s online intervention tool, I present how evidence-based repertoires allow the production of collateral realities of my body governed by my BMI result.

This provokes a discussion about how different effects of numbering governance are possible through applying care-based intervention practices and through a situated intervention. One response to the outcomes of this analysis might be the possibility to change the logics and mechanics of an Internet-based intervention from exercising specific, fixed and standardised norms to more carefully enacting care as situated and relational.

Surveillance, Discretion and Governance in Automated Welfare

Louisa Well — 2023-02-15

Several scholarly studies and journalistic investigations have found that automated decision-making in welfare systems burdens claimants by forecasting their behaviour, targeting them for sanctions and surveillance and punishing them without revealing the underlying mechanisms driving such decisions. This article develops an analytical framework combining three areas of concern regarding automation: how it might introduce surveillance and social sorting, how it can entail the loss of human discretion, and how it requires new systems of governance and due process. This framework steers investigations into whether and how automated decision-making welfare systems introduce new harms and burdens for claimants. A case study on automation processes in Germany’s unemployment benefit service’s IT system ALLEGRO applies this approach and finds that this system does allow for broad human discretion and avoids some forms of surveillance, such as risk-assessments from historic data, though it nevertheless increases surveillance of claimants through sharing data with external agencies. The developed framework also suggests that concerns raised in one area – whether loss of human discretion, surveillance, or lack of due process – can be mitigated by attending to the other two areas and urges researchers and policy-makers to attend to the mitigating or reinforcing factors of each concern.

Relationality, Individuality and Entanglements of Helping in the Context of a Touristic Vaccine Trial

Katriina Emilia Huttunen — 2023-02-15

This article explores the idea of relationality and distributive agency in the context of a clinical vaccine trial. The diarrhoea vaccine trial was conducted in Western Africa, but as a unique element, recruited Finnish adults as trial participants, who travelled to the trial site to West Africa. Engaging with previous research on clinical trials in the global South that has emphasized the relationality and social embeddedness of Southern trial subjects, this article argues for an enacted social-material relationality of any research subject. As the vaccine trial under study transformed into practices and ideas of helping, the analysis illustrates forms of relational subjectivity and distributive agency by focusing on the notion of helping. The analysis is based on the trial participants’ accounts and practices, and draws on qualitative interviews (51) and ethnographic observation conducted between 2017 and 2019 at the trial site in West Africa.

Dimbath Oliver (2022) Oblivionism. Forgetting and Forgetfulness in Modern Science

Bart Penders — 2023-02-15

Tupasela Aaro (2021) Populations as brands: Marketing national resources for global data markets

Brígida Riso — 2023-02-15