Introduction: Shifting Attention

2021 ◽  
pp. 016224392110588
Author(s):  
Rebecca Jablonsky ◽  
Tero Karppi ◽  
Nick Seaver

In recent years, attention has become a matter of increasing public concern. New digital technologies have transformed human attention materially and discursively, reorganizing perceptual practices and inciting debates about them. The essays in this special issue emerged from a set of panels focused on attention at the 4S conference in New Orleans in 2019. They are all, in various ways, concerned with shifts among attention’s many meanings: between payment and care, instinct and agency, or vulnerability and power. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) sensibilities, these pieces examine how scientific and technical actors are invested in theorizing and capturing attention, while simultaneously engendering new forms of care, resistance, and critique. At a moment where the attention economy appears to be in transformative crisis, this collection maps a set of incipient directions that ask us to pay attention to not only attention itself but also to the many sociotechnical settings where experts and publics are shifting attention’s meaning and value.

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Stacey ◽  
Lucy Suchman

Written as the introduction to a special issue of Body & Society on the topic of animation and automation, this article considers the interrelation of those two terms through readings of relevant work in film studies and science and technology studies (STS), inflected through recent scholarship on the body. Drawing upon historical and contemporary examples, we trace how movement is taken as a sign of life, while living bodies are translated through the mechanisms of artifice. Whereas film studies has drawn upon work ranging from production history to semiotics and psychoanalysis to conceptualize the ways in which the appearance of life on the cinema screen materializes subjectivities beyond it, STS has developed a corpus of theoretical and empirical scholarship that works to refigure material-semiotic entanglements of subjects and objects. In approaching animation and automation through insights developed within these two fields we hope to bring them into closer dialogue with each other and with studies of the body, given the convergence of their shared concerns with affective materializations of life. More specifically, an interest in the moving capacities of animation, and in what gets rendered invisible in discourses of automation, is central to debates regarding the interdependencies of bodies and machines. Animation is always in the end a relational effect, it seems, while automation implies the continuing presence of hidden labour and care.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Roger Andre Søraa ◽  
Håkon Fyhn

Sustainability has become a critical issue, calling for new conceptualizations of both problems and solutions. This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies,  explore the concept of “Crafting Sustainability”. Sustainability is a hot topic in contemporary scholarly debates, with methodological, theoretical, and conceptual contributions from a wide array of research areas, also from Science and Technology Studies. Craft on the other hand has been less of a focal point, although all humans relate to craft on some level.


2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Malitsky

This article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue and explores in depth three concepts integral to the links between science and documentary: unity, indexicality, and reality. After outlining how and why the ‘scientific’ has been conceived as a problem in scholarship on documentary, the author offers an alternative framework based on recent scholarship in science and technology studies. This model seeks to account for the value of critiques of scientific approaches while recognizing the ways in which scientists have developed methods of image management that maintain the usefulness of their evidence while simultaneously recognizing the contingency of their truth claims. The author proposes that a conception of indexicality as both trace and deixis provides one tool for understanding the multiple strategies that scientists employ to figure reality.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arianna Borrelli ◽  
Alexandra Grieser

As an introduction to the case studies collected in the current special issue, this review article provides a brief, and by no means exhaustive, overview of research that proves to be relevant to the development of a concept of an aesthetics of knowledge in the academic study of religion and in science and technology studies. Finally, it briefly discusses recent work explicitly addressing the aesthetic entangle-ment of science and religion.


Author(s):  
Jim Berger

This chapter seeks to define technology, explore various views of technology, including feminist and afro-centric perspectives, and to identify the cultural dimensions of technology and their impact on adults as learners. I explore the viewpoints of several philosophers and researchers in the field of science and technology studies and use these to show how technology is embedded with cultural values. I propose using a cultural studies model to define various ways to study technology and its impact on adult learners and draw from these to propose ways of examining technology and users, and a means of researching the many “moments of intersection” between technology, adult learners and facilitators.


2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 567-574
Author(s):  
Matthew Shindell

This is an introduction to a special issue devoted to the black box metaphor in science and technology studies (STS). The author briefly addresses the history of the metaphor and its use in the STS community and provides commentary on four papers contributed by Elizabeth Petrick, Rodolfo Alaniz, Caitlin Wylie, and Valentina Marcheselli.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Asdal ◽  
Gro Birgit Ween

<div>This special issue of the Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies is interested in how nature, in different versions and forms, is invited into our studies, analyses, and stories. How is it that we “write nature”? How is it that we provide space for, and actually describe the actors, agents, or surroundings, in our stories and analyses? The articles in the issue each deal with different understandings of both the practices of writing and the introduction of various natures into these. In this introduction to the issue the editors engage with actor-network theory as a material semiotic resource  for writing nature. We propose to foreground actor-network theory as a writing tool, at the expense of actor-network theory as a distinct vocabulary. In doing this and pointing out the semiotic origins to material-semiotics we also want to  problematize a clear-cut material approach to writing nature.</div>


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 3-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Osborne

This article situates current debates about transdisciplinarity within the deeper history of academic disciplinarity, in its difference from the notions of inter- and multi-disciplinarity. It offers a brief typology and history of established conceptions of transdisciplinarity within science and technology studies. It then goes on to raise the question of the conceptual structure of transdisciplinary generality in the humanities, with respect to the incorporation of the 19th- and 20th-century German and French philosophical traditions into the anglophone humanities, under the name of ‘theory’. It identifies two distinct – dialectical and anti-dialectical, or dialectical and transversal – transdisciplinary trajectories. It locates the various contributions to the special issue of which it is the introduction within this conceptual field, drawing attention to the distinct contribution of the French debates about structuralism and its aftermath – those by Serres, Foucault, Derrida, Guattari and Latour, in particular. It concludes with an appendix on Foucault’s place within current debates about disciplinarity and academic disciplines.


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