Science & Technology Studies

Gender Segregation in the Borderlands of E-Science

Öznur Karakaş — 2024-09-15

This article draws on an ethnographic study of an e-science platform in Sweden to analyse how horizontal gender segregation across sciences plays out in e-science, a borderland in which sciences converge around state-of-the art computational technologies for scientific research. While the convergence of sciences in e-science has the potential to open a non-traditional trajectory to attract women to ICTs, we find that this potential remains untapped. Instead horizontal gender segregation is perpetuated through a) restricted mobility of women from scientific fields with higher gender parity to IT, b) gender friction negatively affecting women in cross-disciplinary e-science, c) a gendered developer/user divide permeating e-science collaborations under ‘the logic of domains,’ and d) perceived self-reliance in computational tool development across sciences acting as ‘gendered boundary work’ to strengthen the gendered hard/soft divide in sciences.

Back to the Present of Automated Mobility

Gisle Solbu — 2024-09-15

This article focuses on how car drivers domesticate technologies of automation and the way this might inform our understanding of potential shifts to a more automated mobility system. The current literature on automated mobility has mainly addressed drivers’ roles in terms of their attitudes towards—and acceptance of—an anticipated shift to high-level driving automation. In this article, however, we take a step back from expectations around automated mobility to explore the domestication of driving assistance technologies and systems already in use. The analysis is built on qualitative interviews with drivers of private cars in Norway. Based on our findings, we develop a typology of user-technology characterisations highlighting three themes of the drivers’ use (comfort, safety, and novelty) as well as two modes of engagements (modulation and non-use). Our analysis suggests that automation is likely to be an incremental and gradual process and that its eventual application depends on the specificities of the practices that it seeks to disrupt. Moreover, we argue that the governance of automated mobility needs to be attentive to the dynamic and unpredictable roles technology will have in processes of socio-technical change. In this context, we highlight the key roles of users in shaping processes of appropriation of both new technologies and broader innovations and argue that knowledge about technology domestication provides important insights to changes towards automation in our current mobility systems.

Ethical Plateaus in Danish Child Protection Services

Helene Friis Ratner — 2024-09-15

This paper analyses how controversies shape an emerging field of AI in Danish child protection services. In a context of high controversiality, we examine how algorithmic systems evolve in conjunction with changing ethical stakes. Empirically, we report a study comprising all Danish attempts (n=4) to develop algorithmic models for child protection services. These attempts were never fully implemented and have been either cancelled, paused or changed significantly since their outset. Combining Fischer’s (2004) notion of ‘ethical plateaus’ with insights from valuation studies, we propose that public controversies shape how organisations enact their algorithms as ethically ‘good’. Our findings demonstrate how valuations of ethically contestable algorithms involve the very distribution of agency across humans and algorithms, i.e., how much power and agency should be delegated to algorithmic models. In the case of Danish child protection services, this moves towards reducing their agency.

Pepper as Imposter

Ericka Johnson — 2024-09-15

Dutreuil Sébastien (2024) Gaïa, Terre vivante

Jeremy Rollin — 2024-09-15

Oreskes Naomi (2022) Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don't Know about the Ocean.

Adam Tamas Tuboly — 2024-09-15