Situating Technology: Confrontations over the Use of Sonar among Turkish Fishermen and Marine Scientists

2003 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ståle Knudsen
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Ethnographic Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Fishing Practices

AbstractSince its introduction in the Turkish fisheries in 1980, use of the fish finder device sonar has been a controversial issue among fishermen and between fishermen and scientists. Most fishermen claim that sonars scare away or kill fish while local marine scientists contend that sonars have no such effect. What can study of this conflict tell us about the use of advanced technology in regions of the world far away from the metropolitan production of such technologies? In this ethnographic approach to a study in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) the fishermen's use of and the scientists' research on the sonar are surveyed. The article discusses the degree to which the adoption of sonar in the Turkish fisheries has resulted in a standardization of fishing practices—not only technologically, but possibly also in the way the fishermen perceive the hunt. Some theoretical arguments on how people relate to technology are reviewed and a phenomenologically inspired perspective advanced. It is argued that too much attention on finding the "Truth"—in this case whether the sonar is harmful to fish or not—diverts attention from more fundamental issues, such as what kinds of change sonar has brought to the social relations of production.

Following the Fukushima Disaster on (and against) Wikipedia: A Methodological Note about STS Research and Online Platforms

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 938-964 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Moats
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
English Language ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Lay Knowledge ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Online Platforms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fukushima Disaster ◽  
Digital Research ◽  
Research Tools

Science and technology studies is famous for questioning conceptual and material boundaries by following controversies that cut across them. However, it has recently been argued that in research involving online platforms (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), there are also more practical boundaries to negotiate that are created by the variable availability, visibility, and structuring of data. In this paper, I highlight a potential tension between our inclination toward following controversies and “following the medium” and suggest that sometimes following controversies might involve going “against platforms” as well as with them. I will illustrate this dilemma through an analysis of the controversy over the coverage of the Fukushima disaster on English language Wikipedia, which concerns boundaries between expert and lay knowledge but also the social and technical functioning of Wikipedia itself. For this reason, I show that following the controversy might mean making use of less formatted and less obvious data than Wikipedia normally provides. While this is not an argument against the use of automated digital research tools such as scrapers, I suggest that both quantitative and qualitative researchers need to be more willing to tweak their approaches based on the specificities of the case.

scholarly journals The Floating Ampersand: STS Past and STS to Come

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Jasanoff
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Technology And Society ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
External Relations ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

STS has become a discipline in the sense that it offers new ways to read and make sense of the world. It remains an amalgam, however, of two linked yet separate lines of inquiry, both abbreviated as STS. Science and technology studies refers to the investigation of S&T as social institutions; science, technology and society, by contrast, analyzes the external relations of S&T with other institutions, such as law or politics. This essay reflects on the implications of this ambiguity for institutionalizing STS as a field of its own, drawing on the author’s experiences in building STS at two universities.

scholarly journals A critical analysis of information society conceptualizations from an STS point of view

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduard Aibar
Keyword(s):  
Information Society ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Technology And Society ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Social

Science and Technology Studies (STS) have developed over the last four decades very rich and deep analysis of the interaction between science, technology and society. This paper uses some STS theoretical and methodological insights and findings to identify persistent misconceptions in the specific literature on ICTs and society. Technological deterministic views, the taken-for-granted image of technological designs, the prospective character of many studies that focus mainly on potential effects, a simplistic view of uses and users, and an uncritical distinction between the technical and the social, are discussed as some of the most remarkable theoretical flaws in the field.

The ‘enigma’ of Richard Schultes, Amazonian hallucinogenic plants, and the limits of ethnobotany

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merlin Sheldrake
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Local Varieties ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Subject

This story is about the twentieth-century ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001), and his research on hallucinogenic plants. Ethnobotany can contribute directly to science and technology studies in that the discipline makes cultural ways of knowing its scientific subject. Ethnobotanists must learn about plants through people, and are not able to conceal their interactions with indigenous informants and other ethnobotanists. I focus on an ‘enigma’ that Schultes presented, concerning the peculiar ability of indigenous Amazonians to distinguish between local varieties of vine that he was unable to tell apart, notably those used to prepare the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca. The enigma describes a complicated and irresolvable question thrown up at the uneasy intersection between different ways of knowing about the world, and shows how modern scientific travellers might navigate – or fail to navigate – the uncertain passage between them. Together with Schultes’s accounts of his own non-ordinary states of consciousness elicited by ayahuasca, and his writings on the Victorian botanist Richard Spruce, I chart an epistemological gulf between Schultes’s modern scientific cosmology and that of his Amazonian informants. In describing his inability to learn about the ayahuasca varieties from Amazonians, Schultes’s enigma traces the very limits of the ethnobotanical discipline and reveals the fragility of the processes by which scientific naturalists might impose categories such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

scholarly journals Science and Democracy Reconsidered

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Joseph Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Construction ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Normative Commitment ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociological Society ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
Social Construction Of Science

To what extent is the normative commitment of STS to the democratization of science a product of the democratic contexts where it is most often produced? STS scholars have historically offered a powerful critical lens through which to understand the social construction of science, and seminal contributions in this area have outlined ways in which citizens have improved both the conduct of science and its outcomes. Yet, with few exceptions, it remains that most STS scholarship has eschewed study of more problematic cases of public engagement of science in rich, supposedly mature Western democracies, as well as examination of science-making in poorer, sometimes non-democratic contexts. How might research on problematic cases and dissimilar political contexts traditionally neglected by STS scholars push the field forward in new ways? This paper responds to themes that came out of papers from two Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Panels on Science and Technology Studies in an Era of Anti-Science. It considers implications of the normative commitment by sociologists working in the STS tradition to the democratization of science.

scholarly journals What could happen when action research meets ideas of sociomateriality?

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2-2019) ◽  
pp. 99-112
Author(s):  
Stephen Allen ◽  
Judi Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Potential Significance ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Organisational Research ◽  
Change Material

Action research in its various forms highlights the interactional and relational ways in which research and knowledge become socially produced with people, with intentions of positively transforming realworld relations. In parallel, there is a growing interest in organisational research informed by the field of Science and Technology Studies, about the potential significance of matter to understanding how processes of researching interact with the world. By experimenting with connections to debates about sociomateriality, this paper explores what implications there might be for understanding and performing action research, especially given that action researchers are often values-oriented and attached, and acknowledge that they want to change material issues.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Legal Studies ◽  
The World

The introductory chapter presents the major themes of the book. After exploring a series of vignettes in which human and nonhuman reproduction or replication operate together to produce a nostalgic, yet effective, mode of mass democratic political engagement, it goes on to defend the book’s primary claims: that biopolitics need not be dead to scholarship, that embryos and alphabets are politically vital in remarkably similar ways, and that nostalgia is neither a purely human state nor politically enervating as a mode of engaging with the world. In the process, this chapter begins to situate the book’s conclusions within the scholarly fields with which it engages: feminist theory, political theory, science and technology studies, bioethics, and legal studies.

scholarly journals Re-negotiating Exhibitionary Practices and the "Digital" Politics of Display: The Case of the MTL Urban Museum App

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana-Maria Herman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Digital Display ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Digital Politics

In this paper, I employ a sociotechnical approach (drawn from science and technology studies) to reconstruct how the McCord Museum’s MTL Urban Museum App was re-made. I take into account both the social and the technical, and consider the human and the nonhuman, which allows me to chart the roles of heterogeneous actors in re-making the App and in re-negotiating the Museum’s display practices. In doing so, I explore and point to the politics of this 'digital' display:  What actors were involved in its re-making? How did they participate in decision-making processes? What are the implications of the negotiations made? The analysis reveals: 1) how the re-making of the App redistributed tasks associated with exhibitionary practices by displacing them across unexpected actors both inside and outside the Museum, 2) how some aspects of design can become ‘non-negotiable’ or ‘irreversible’, and 3) how the re-negotiation of display practices established unanticipated ‘gatekeepers’ in the Museum’s display practice. Thus, this study sheds light on a “digital” case of the ‘politics of display’ (Macdonald, 1998). 

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