scholarly journals Legal Pluralism and Science and Technology Studies: Exploring Sources of the Legal Pluriverse

2022 ◽  
pp. 016224392110696
Author(s):  
Bertram Turner ◽  
Melanie G. Wiber
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
Technological Transformation ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
Normative Order

In introducing the contributions to this special section, we explore the links between social and juridical concepts of normativity and science and technology. We follow the Legal Pluralism challenge to the notion of state law as the sole source of normative order and point to how technological transformation creates a pluralistic legal universe that takes on new shapes under conditions of globalization. We promote a science and technology studies (STS)-inspired reworking of Legal Pluralism and suggest expanding the portfolio of legally effective regimes of ordering to include the normativity generated by materiality and technology. This normativity is amply demonstrated in the case studies included in the papers which make up this special section. We conclude that the inclusion of approaches developed in STS research helps analytically to overcome what we view as an incomplete law project, one unable to deal with the technicized lifeworlds of a global modernity. The contributions to this special section illustrate that technomaterial change cannot be understood without recognition of the role of normative impacts, and conversely, the legal pluriverse cannot be understood without recognition of the normative role of techno-material arrangements.

scholarly journals Symmetry as a Guide to Post-truth Times: A Response to Lynch

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-411
Author(s):  
Steve Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Truth Condition ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Symmetry Principle ◽  
Technology Studies

Abstract William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’.

scholarly journals Discursive Contextures of Science: Euro/West-Centrism and Science and Technology Studies

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Prasad
Keyword(s):  
Network Theory ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Embryonic Stem ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Knowledge And Practice

Science and Technology Studies (STS) by the very act of showing the multiplicity, contingency, and context-dependence of scientific knowledge and practice, provincialized modern science. Postcolonial interventions within STS have pursued this goal even further. Nevertheless, Euro/West-centrism continues to inflect not only scientific practices and lay imaginaries, but also sociological and historical analyses of sciences. In this article, drawing on my own training within STS – first under J.P.S. Uberoi, who was concerned with structuralist analysis of modernity and science, and thereafter under Andy Pickering, when we focused on material agency and temporal emergence and extensively engaged with Actor Network Theory - I emphasize the continuing role of Euro/West-centric discourses in defining the “self” and the “other” and in impacting epistemological and ontological interventions. More broadly, building on a concept of Michael Lynch’s, I call for excavation and analysis of discursive contextures of sciences. In the second section of the article, through a brief analysis of embryonic stem cell therapy in a clinic in Delhi, I show how with shifting transnational landscape of technoscience certain discursive contextures are being “deterritorialized” and left “stuttering.”

scholarly journals It’s Important to Go to the Laboratory: Malte Ziewitz Talks with Michael Lynch

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Ziewitz ◽  
Michael Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Blow Up ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Laboratory Studies ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Social Studies Of Science ◽  
Origin Stories

Why would anyone still want to go to the laboratory in 2018? In this interview, Michael Lynch answers this and other questions, reflecting on his own journey in, through, and alongside the field of science and technology studies (STS). Starting from his days as a student of Harold Garfinkel’s at UCLA to more recent times as editor of Social Studies of Science, Lynch talks about the rise of origin stories in the field; the role of ethnomethodology in his thinking; the early days of laboratory studies; why “turns” and “waves” might better be called “spins”; what he learned from David Edge; why we should be skeptical of the presumption that STS enhances the democratization of science; and why it might be time to “blow up STS”––an appealing idea that Malte Ziewitz takes up in his reflection following the interview.

scholarly journals Reimagining the Big Data assemblage

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395171881819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Carter
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Data Analytics ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Big Data Analytics ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
New Ways Of Working ◽  
Considerable Success

Recent work on Big Data and analytics reveals a tension between analyzing the role of emerging objects and processes in existing systems and using those same objects and processes to create new and purposeful forms of action. While the field of science and technology studies has had considerable success in pursuing the former goal, as Halford and Savage argue, there is an ongoing need to discover or invent ways to “do Big Data analytics differently.” In this commentary, I suggest that attempts to produce new ways of working with Big Data and analytics might be hindered by how science and technology studies-influenced scholars have conceptualized assemblages. While these scholars have foregrounded objects’ relations within existing assemblages, new materialist philosophers draw attention to properties of objects that transcend those relations and might indicate opportunities for more creative or generative uses of Big Data and analytics.

Law, Science, and Technologies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertram Turner ◽  
Melanie G. Wiber
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Legal Pluralism ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Normative Power ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Governance Institutions

Over the past twenty years, scholars in both anthropology and law (L) have found the approaches and concepts in Science and Technology Studies (STS) useful to understand techno-scientific transformations of the world. Legal scholars recognized that new scientific discoveries and technology interfered in the processes of routinization of social practices, creating new norms and influencing law. In the legal approach to STS, however, the focus has been on the law of the state and/or law deriving from the production of global governance institutions. Meanwhile, the encounter between anthropology and law has always had to take into consideration normatively effective mechanisms of social ordering that were not conventionally identified as law. Thus, the adoption of an STS perspective in legal anthropology was more open to exploring the normative power invested in other domains, such as the built environment, technologies, and inventories of knowledge and convictions such as religion. While L and STS are viewed as mutually constitutive of modernity, anthropological studies of legal pluralism (LP) have focused in recent years on multiple normative orders generated by world-making initiatives, including the normative power of technology under the influence of neoliberalism. In this contribution, then, we bring together law, science and technology studies, and legal pluralism to explore how normative orders are affected by materiality, technology, and scientific knowledge. In discussing the intersection of these three knowledge regimes, we find particularly useful concepts coming out of Actor Network Theory such as co-production, translation, boundary objects, and infrastructure.

scholarly journals Theorizing power in political ecology: the 'where' of power in resource governance projects

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helene Ahlborg ◽  
Andrea J Nightingale
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Rural Electrification ◽  
Societal Change ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Resource Governance ◽  
Social And Economic Development

Power and politics have been central topics from the early days of Political Ecology. There are different and sometimes conflicting conceptualizations of power in this field that portray power alternatively as a resource, personal attribute or relation. The aim of this article is to contribute to theorizations of power by probing contesting views regarding its role in societal change and by presenting a specific conceptualization of power, one which draws on political ecology and sociotechnical approaches in science and technology studies. We review how power has been conceptualized in the political ecology field and identify three trends that shaped current discussions. We then develop our conceptual discussion and ask explicitly where power emerges in processes of resource governance projects. We identify four locations that we illustrate empirically through an example of rural electrification in Tanzania that aimed at catalyzing social and economic development by providing renewable energy-based electricity services. Our analysis supports the argument that power is relational and productive, and it draws on science and technology studies to bring to the fore the critical role of non-human elements in co-constitution of society – technology – nature. This leads us to see the exercise of power as having contradictory and ambiguous effects. We conclude that by exploring the tension between human agency and constitutive power, we keep the politics alive throughout the analysis and are able to show why intentional choices and actions really matter for how resource governance projects play out in everyday life.

scholarly journals The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 693-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Staša Milojević ◽  
Cassidy R. Sugimoto ◽  
Vincent Larivière ◽  
Mike Thelwall ◽  
Ying Ding
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
And Diffusion

scholarly journals An Interview with Professor Sheila Jasanoff: on Lessons from Science, Technology, and Society

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Chang ◽  
Manas Shaarma ◽  
Kushal Seetharam
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Public ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Policy Review ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
Policy Field

MIT Science Policy Review spoke with Professor Sheila Jasanoff about her pioneering work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), the role of the public in policymaking, and some of the important lessons and recommendations drawn from her work in STS. She is the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she founded and directs the STS Program. Her work exploring the role of science and technology in law and public policy has been internationally recognized and the insights she shared are sure to benefit scientists interested in entering the policy field. This interview was edited for clarity.

Revitalizing science and technology studies: A Marxian critique of more-than-human geographies

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 360-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martín Arboleda
Keyword(s):  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Labor Process ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Technology Studies ◽  
Complex Interactions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Subject

This article revisits Marx’s philosophy of history with respect to technological change, outlining some elements for the elaboration of a research agenda for materialist studies of science and technology. I argue that dominant thinking on the subject has been insufficiently attentive to relations of production and to the constitutive role of practical, transformative activity. The article suggests that a focus on class relations not only foregrounds the eminently open and contested nature of technology but also renders into view the multiplicity of actors and agencies involved in the making of natures. I draw from a subterranean strand of Marxist theorists of technology to develop a more-than-human approach to political agency through an interrogation of the complex interactions between human and machine in the everyday, experiential practicalities of the labor process. On this basis, the article contends that foregrounding the class preconditions for an alternative scientific praxis should assert itself as the starting point and horizon of a materialist Science and Technology Studies.

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