Transfer or Translation? Rethinking Traveling Technologies from the Global South

Technology flows are becoming increasingly diverse in the twenty-first century, calling for an update of concepts and frameworks. Reflecting on the inherent tensions of technology transfer, including its technocratic dreams, insensitivity to technological materiality, and narrow focus on certain human actors, we propose technology translation as a complementary conceptual framework to understand traveling technologies. Taking a socio-technical approach, technology translation views artifacts as socially shaped with distributed agency, which makes technology flows unstable and unpredictable. In so doing, we develop a typology to explain five technology flow scenarios, shedding new light on the mechanisms of technology traveling by foregrounding the role of translators. Last, we discuss the politics of translation and elaborate how technology translation opens new space to engage with the complexity and uncertainty of technology flows, especially in the Global South.

Divisible Governance: Making Gas-fired Futures during Climate Collapse in Northern Australia

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas “fracking” industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call “divisible governance.” Divisible governance—enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation—not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is both facilitated and regulated. Such governance regimes, we suggest, create felicitous conditions for governments to defer, forestall, or eliminate their accountability while regulating their way further and further into catastrophic climate change. Countering divisible governance begins, we suggest, by mapping the connections that it fragments.

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

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.

Identity in Postgenomic Times: Epigenetic Knowledge and the Pursuit of Biological Origins

As genetic knowledge continues to strengthen notions of identity in Euro-American societies and beyond, epigenetic knowledge is intervening in these legitimation frameworks. I explore these interventions in the realm of assisted reproduction—including adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy. The right to identity is protected legally in many states and receives due attention in public and private international law. Originating from the context of adoption, donor-conceived and surrogacy-born persons have recently demanded the same protections and focused on the right to genetic knowledge. This article explores possible implications of epigenetic knowledge on identity. I start by articulating the deep influence of genetics on the notion of identity, and how this unfolds in legal contexts. Next, I examine how epigenetic findings that stress the importance of seeing biological life as situated and embedded in environments can challenge how adoption, donor conception, and gestational surrogacy are experienced and understood. While I argue that epigenetic knowledge can reify identity with the same determinism underpinning genetics, it can also allow for more biosocial understandings of identity that consider history and experience as entangled with biology.

“Samples Are Precious”: Value Formations in the Potentiality and Practices of Biobanking in Singapore

Biobanking in Singapore is characterized by contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices, and different notions of what the (potential) value of storing samples and data for medical research is. Different biobanking efforts anticipate the production of public goods from stored materials in specifically situated ways. These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction, a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values. In exploring the extraction of potential value in relation to practice values, I propose the notion of value formations to account for the coproduction of and intersections between different forms of value(s) in scientific practices situated in particular social contexts. I trace value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Observations along this life span show the social and temporal complexity of value-making in biobanking in Singapore, pointing to the contextual specificity of how biobanking is understood as a public good.

Editorial Work and the Peer Review Economy of STS Journals

In this paper, we analyze the role of science and technology studies (STS) journal editors in organizing and maintaining the peer review economy. We specifically conceptualize peer review as a gift economy running on perpetually renewed experiences of mutual indebtedness among members of an intellectual community. While the peer review system is conventionally presented as self-regulating, we draw attention to its vulnerabilities and to the essential curating function of editors. Aside from inherent complexities, there are various shifts in the broader political–economic and sociotechnical organization of scholarly publishing that have recently made it more difficult for editors to organize robust cycles of gift exchange. This includes the increasing importance of journal metrics and associated changes in authorship practices; the growth and differentiation of the STS journal landscape; and changes in publishing funding models and the structure of the publishing market through which interactions among authors, editors, and reviewers are reconfigured. To maintain a functioning peer review economy in the face of numerous pressures, editors must balance contradictory imperatives: the need to triage intellectual production and rely on established cycles of gift exchange for efficiency, and the need to expand cycles of gift exchange to ensure the sustainability and diversity of the peer review economy.

One Pipeline and Two Impact Assessments: Coproduction, Legal Pluralism, and the Trans Mountain Expansion Project

Canada’s Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline project is one of the country’s most controversial in recent history. At the heart of the controversy lie questions about how to conduct impact assessments (IAs) of oil spills in marine and coastal ecosystems. This paper offers an analysis of two such IAs: one carried out by Canada through its National Energy Board and the other by Tsleil-Waututh Nation, whose unceded ancestral territory encompasses the last twenty-eight kilometers of the project’s terminus in the Burrard Inlet, British Columbia. The comparison is informed by a science and technology studies approach to coproduction, displaying the close relationship between IA law and applied scientific practice on both sides of the dispute. By attending to differing perspectives on concepts central to IA such as significance and mitigation, this case study illustrates how coproduction supports legal pluralism’s attention to diverse forms of world making inherent in IA. We close by reflecting on how such attention is relevant to Canada’s ongoing commitments, including those under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

An Interpretation of Value Change: A Philosophical Disquisition of Climate Change and Energy Transition Debate

Changing values may give rise to intergenerational conflicts, like in the ongoing climate change and energy transition debate. This essay focuses on the interpretative question of how this value change can best be understood. To elucidate the interpretation of value change, two philosophical perspectives on value are introduced: Berlin’s value pluralism and Dworkin’s interpretivism. While both authors do not explicitly discuss value change, I argue that their perspectives can be used for interpreting value change in the case of climate change and the energy transition. I claim that Berlin’s pluralistic account of value would understand the value change as an intergenerational conflict and therefore provide a too narrow and static ground for understanding ongoing value change. Instead, by exploring Dworkin’s standpoint in moral epistemology, this essay distills a more encompassing perspective on how values may relate, converge, overlap, and change, fulfilling their functions in the course of climate change and energy transition. This perspective is further detailed by taking inspiration from Shue’s work on the (re)interpretation of equity in the climate change debate. I argue that the resulting perspective allows us to see value change as a gradual process rather than as a clash between generations and their values.

Microbial Extractions: Sequence-based Bioprospecting, Augmented Promises, and Elusive Politics

In view of the end of the golden years of the Norwegian oil economy, ocean genetic resources are being advertised in policy environments as holding great potential for the future of the country. Microbes have increased in popularity as promising agents of the Norwegian new bioeconomy, as advances in gene sequencing technologies and genomics have made them more accessible. This paper examines the turn toward digital sequence data in bioprospecting to inquire about its political implications. It draws on a combination of empirical materials to describe the infrastructural work that goes into extracting microbes from their in situ locations in arctic and subarctic waters to in silico collections and databases. I argue that in that infrastructural work, microbes may become both more promising and more elusive public and political matters. As biodiversity is turned into data, bioprospecting appears as less dependent on material samples, which may ultimately render policy frameworks for biodiversity governance obsolete. The shift toward big sequence data in bioprospecting entails shifts in how promise is attributed to biodiversity, which life forms appear to be more promising, and how such life forms come to appear as public good.

Diversifying the Deliberative Turn: Toward an Agonistic RRI

In its “deliberative turn,” the field of science and technology studies (STS) has strongly advocated opening up decision-making processes around science and technology to more perspectives and knowledges. While the theory of democracy underpinning this is rarely explicitly addressed, the language and ideas used are often drawn from deliberative democracy. Using the case of synthetic biology and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), this paper looks at challenges of public engagement and finds parallels in long-standing critiques of deliberative democracy. The paper suggests that STS scholars explore other theories of decision-making and explores what an RRI grounded in agonistic pluralism might entail. An agonistic RRI could develop empirical research around questions of power relations in contemporary science and technology, seek to facilitate the formation of political publics around relevant issues, and frame different actors’ stances as adversarial positions on a political field rather than “equally valid” perspectives.