Dismantling boundaries in science and technology studies

The politics of politicization: Climate change debates in Canadian print media

Politicization is frequently employed as an analytic concept to explain the relationships between politics and media coverage of climate change. However, relatively few works explore how different notions of politicization are mobilized by actors in media discourses themselves. This article does so via a framing analysis of climate change coverage in Canadian newspapers. I investigate how different relationships between science and politics are conceived and associated with varying positions on climate change. In particular, I examine a supposition in science and technology studies that the media remains committed to deficit models and thus uncritically reproduces the authority of science. Scientistic discourses exist but among a diversity of politicization framings. A key finding is that the strongest appeals to scientific neutrality are associated with climate skepticism. This casts light on the nuanced, strategic "politics of politicization" in climate change debates. A more fine-grained and reflexive approach to politicization discourses can help identify productive interventions.

Post-Truth and Education: STS Vaccines to Re-establish Science in the Public Sphere

Post-truth is a social condition that threatens the trust in science and people's critical thinking. This paper analyzes some of the educational responses to post-truth, claiming the potential contributions of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Some of the responses based on traditional epistemology, characterized as epistemological vaccines, are contrasted with some of the possible responses based on a more complex and interdisciplinary knowledge of science and technology. It is argued that epistemological vaccines, despite having an enormous value in fighting against post-truth, are insufficient to transform this social condition and its implications for science and technology. It is sustained that a social epistemology and, moreover, an expert interdisciplinary approach to the knowledge of science and technology, such as the one offered by STS, is required to consolidate stronger educational strategies, formulating STS vaccines, that could be useful as a counterweight to understand and deconstruct post-truth. Given that the STS academic field has developed a good account of how scientific facts and social trust in science are constructed, it also has the capacity to show how post-truth and alternative facts are constructed, unmasking for whom it is important that we decry science. The conclusion points toward the urgency to rethink the current influence of the STS field in the educational context to relocate the STS education.

Transparency in algorithmic decision-making: Ideational tensions and conceptual shifts in Finland

This article uses a theoretical and methodological framework derived from the political theorist Quentin Skinner and the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck to examine ideational and conceptual tensions and shifts related to the transparency of algorithmic and other automatic governmental decision-making in Finland. Most of the research material comprises national and international official documents and semi-structured expert interviews. In Finland, the concepts of ‘algorithmic transparency’ and other ‘transparency of automatic decision-making’ are situated amongst a complex array of legal, ethical, political, policy-oriented, managerial, and technical semantic fields. From 2016 to 2019 Finland’s Deputy Ombudsman of Parliament and the Constitutional Committee of Parliament pinpointed issues in algorithmic and other automatic decision-making with the consequence that at the turn of 2019 and 2020, the Ministry of Justice started moving towards the preparation of new legislation to resolve these issues. In conclusion and as expected, Finland’s version of the Nordic tradition of the public sphere with established legal guarantees of public access to government documents indeed has both important enabling and constraining effects upon resolving the transparency issues.

Introduction: From "The Popularization of Science through Film" to "The Public Understanding of Science"

Science in film, and usual equivalents such as science on film or science on screen, refer to the cinematographic representation, staging, and enactment of actors, information, and processes involved in any aspect or dimension of science and its history. Of course, boundaries are blurry, and films shot as research tools or documentation also display science on screen. Nonetheless, they generally count as scientific film, and science in and on film or screen tend to designate productions whose purpose is entertainment and education. Moreover, these two purposes are often combined, and inherently concern empirical, methodological, and conceptual challenges associated with popularization, science communication, and the public understanding of science. It is in these areas that the notion of the deficit model emerged to designate a point of view and a mode of understanding, as well as a set of practical and theoretical problems about the relationship between science and the public.

The proactive historian: Methodological opportunities presented by the new archives documenting genomics

In this paper, I propose a strategy for navigating newly available archives in the study of late-twentieth century genomics. I demonstrate that the alleged 'explosion of data' characteristic of genomics-and of contemporary science in general-is not a new problem and that historians of earlier periods have dealt with information overload by relying on the 'perspective of time': the filtering effect the passage of time naturally exerts on both sources and memories. I argue that this reliance on the selective capacity of time results in inheriting archives curated by others and, consequently, poses the risk of reifying ahistorical scientific discourses. Through a preliminary examination of archives documenting early attempts at mapping and sequencing the human genome, I propose an alternative approach, in which historians proactively problematize and improve available sources. This approach provides historians with a voice in the socio-political management of scientific heritage and advances methodological innovations in the use of oral histories. It also provides a narrative framework in which to address big science initiatives by following second order administrators, rather than individual scientists. The new genomic archives thus represent an opportunity for historians to take an active role in current debates concerning 'big data' and critically embed the humanities in pressing global problems.

Can the history of psychology have an impact?

In a recent issue of Theory & Psychology, Robinson, Danziger, and Teo raise a number of important questions about the current role of historiography in psychology. We concur that there have been genuine costs to the historian in psychology adopting the disciplinary norms and epistemic virtues of the professional historian. Building on recent developments in historiography, we suggest a number of avenues for exploring the relationship between history and psychology. Taken together they illustrate the possibilities of an “eventful psychology” attentive to historical time.

The history of science as oxymoron: from scientific exceptionalism to episcience

This essay argues that historians of science who seek to embody our oxymoronic self-description must confront both contradictory terms that define our common enterprise--that is, both "history" and "science." On the history/methods side, it suggests that we embrace the heterogeneity of our institutional arrangements and repudiate the homogeneous disciplinary model sometimes advocated by Thomas Kuhn and followed by art history. This implies that rather than treating the history of science as an end in itself, we consider it a means to a variety of historical ends. think of ourselves as a tool-making community, and jettison moralistic assertions of scientific exceptionalism. To do so, this essay argues--on the science/subject side--that xe rebrand the subject of our historical inquiry as "episcience," a neologism that stands in relation to "science" as the new field of epigenetics does to the old genetics. Episcience encompasses both the material activities of the relevant sciences and their "surround" (environment, milieu, Umgebung) to reframe knowledge making to include the material processes that put science "in play" and make its findings matter beyond science. The essay concludes that "the history of science" is an oxymoron that makes sense to the extent that its practitioners acknowledge that the history of science is important not just because science is important, but because its history is.

Towards a Trans-national Industrial Hazard History: Charting the Circulation of Workplace Dangers, Debates and Expertise

We argue that industrial hazards have remained an integral feature of the international and ‘global’ economy since the early modern period, and invite historians of science into the study of their history. The growth and dissemination of knowledge about these hazards, as well as the production and trade that generate them, continue to generate deep inequalities in just who is exposed to them, as illustrated by the shifting impact of the asbestos-related disease plague in the past half-century. Exposure levels in poorer countries have risen as those in affluent societies have fallen, the latter due as much to popular protest and media exposure as to scientific expertise. We suggest that the best way to understand the formation of knowledge about these hazards is not to return to the epistemological battlegrounds of the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s but to seek more interdisciplinary integration of the multifaceted ways that material bodies, environments and interests contribute to an understanding of such hazards and injuries. We propose the framework of ‘industrial-hazard regimes’ as an avenue into the ways in which knowledge about risks and dangers at work are created, translated and contested in different countries and times. While urging a return, in some respects, to the early models of ‘progressive enlightenment’ devised by radical commentators and pioneering historians of the industrial hazard in the early twentieth century, we would revise these early approaches, and also offer some sceptical commentary on the difficulties raised, more recently, by narratives of ‘heroic populism’ or ‘anti-science epidemiology’. The critical standpoints for which we argue recognize the diverse social and political identities and loyalties not only of past contributors to the controversies on industrial hazard, but also of historians of science and medicine themselves.

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History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro- and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.