Department of Science, Technology, and Society

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  • 404 Not Found: Quantitative Methods in Disability Studies
    Blanchard, Aurelian; Blanchard, Enka; Shew, Ashley (SAGE, 2024-11-04)
    Disability is sometimes theorised as existing between the world (including social norms and infrastructure) and the person (who gets labelled disabled in a ‘misfit’ between the world and them). Disability is often enacted through data systems and infrastructures and the history of disability studies reflects a fight against such systems. In this paper, we examine the fraught relationships between disability studies and data science — from institutions and historical marginalisation to current practices of policing and surveillance. We critique the resulting preeminence of qualitative methods in disability studies as one impediment to translating disability studies to data scientists and to effective policy-making. We then address hopeful movements to crip data studies, looking at work on AI and disability bias, crip technoscience, counterventional research, and cripped data.
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    Aesthetics of Otherness: Representation of #migrantcaravan and #caravanamigrante on Instagram
    Rosa, Fernanda R.; Soto-Vasquez, Arthur D. (Sage, 2022-01)
    This article examines the representation of the migrant caravan on Instagram showing how an aesthetics of otherness has prevailed in this representation. Aesthetics of otherness is the result of the interaction between platform users' selections and platform affordances that creates a gap between the marginalized other and the user. Based on a qualitative content analysis of posts with the hashtags #caravanamigrante and #migrantcaravan, this research reveals that the two hashtags form parallel, although not alike, communicative spaces where migrant caravan representation is mostly mediated by professionals and organizations interested in promoting their own work and not by the migrants themselves. Despite this trend, users posting with #caravanamigrante were less likely to hijack the intent of the public, more likely to reference reasons for migration, and overall less likely to employ the aesthetics of otherness, which point to the possibility of circumventing the role of the platform in shaping the representation of marginalized people and social justice movements.
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    Choices and Challenges 2014: Intellectual Property in the Digital Age
    Choices and Challenges (Virginia Tech, 2014-02-27)
    The Choices and Challenges Forum brochure includes a schedule of events held Feb. 17, 2014, at the Lyric Theatre and Graduate Life Center at Donaldson Brown.
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    Choices and Challenges 2019: Self-driving Cars in the New River Valley
    Choices and Challenges (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-04)
    The Choices and Challenges Forum brochure includes a schedule of events held April 4, 2019, at the Inn at Virginia Tech. This event seeks to explore the choices we still face and the challenges raised by the potential presence of self-driving cars on our roads and in our lives. While most thinking about and planning for self-driving cars has focused on urban environments, the New River Valley’s mixture of small town and rural communities offers a unique opportunity for exploring a range of questions. Will these vehicles interfere with our privacy? Are they safe, for passengers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and others? Will they undermine existing public transportation options, or expand public transportation into new communities? Will they increase or decrease transportation accessibility for poor communities, the elderly, and the disabled? Will they shift patterns of vehicle ownership? Will they improve traffic or create new problems? Will they require new regulations, and if so, by whom and of what sort? Are they ultimately good or bad for our environment, our communities, and our personal lives? Our Choices and Challenges forum will bring together internationally-recognized experts and the public to discuss these and other important questions.
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    Choices and Challenges 2020: Technology & Disability: Counternarratives
    Choices and Challenges (Virginia Tech, 2020-03-27)
    The Choices and Challenges Forum brochure includes a schedule of events held March 27, 2020, at the Inn at Virginia Tech. Popular culture often depicts disabled people as the recipients of technology - or people who should be hopeful for such development. At this event, we’ll hear from disability community members and allies about different ways we might think about people, technologies, disability, and institutions. The stories we tell are about technology and the human condition. We’ll hear about resistance, pride, optimism, and anger. We seek conversations that take seriously the voices of disabled people in regards to assistive technologies, inclusive education, and accessible environments.
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    Code Ethnography and the Materiality of Power in Internet Governance
    Rosa, Fernanda R. (Springer, 2022-09)
    The purpose of this article is to discuss an ethnography of code, specifically code ethnography, a method for examining code as a socio-technical actor, considering its social, political, and economic dynamics in the context of digital infrastructures. While it can be applied to any code, the article presents the results of code ethnography application in the study of internet interconnection dynamics, having the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as code and two of the largest internet exchange points (IXPs) in the world as points of data collection, DE-CIX Frankfurt, and IX.br Sao Paulo. The results show inequalities in the flows of information between the global North and the global South and concentration of power at the level of interconnection infrastructure hitherto unknown in the context of the political economy of the internet. Code ethnography is explained in terms of code assemblage, code literacy, and code materiality. It demonstrates the grammar of BGP in context, making its logical and physical dimensions visible in the analysis of the formation of giant internet nodes and infrastructural interdependencies in the circulation information infrastructure of the internet.
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    Code Switch: Rethinking Computer Expertise as Empowerment
    Abbate, Janet E. (Virginia Tech, 2016-05-06)
    Claims that technical mastery of computing and new media will provide a route to economic success for oppressed groups have become ubiquitous in American public discourse. From commercial enterprises like Codecademy, to grassroots nonprofits like Black Girls Code, to state mandates for computer science in public schools, learning to code has been positioned as a quick fix for structural disadvantage. But such claims fail to locate coding within larger discourses about race, gender, and capitalism that constrain its liberatory potential. This paper unpacks “code” as a keyword: a socially powerful term with multiple, contested, historically contingent uses. I will ask: How does the discourse around coding construct competence and authority—and does it tend to preserve or challenge technical expertise as a white male preserve? How is the current meaning of “code” derived in part from related keywords such as “STEM,” “diversity,” “innovation,” or “computational thinking”? What are the historical roots of the coding movement, and how do computer education projects of the 1960s reveal alternate possibilities for programming as an empowering practice? To what extent have women and minorities involved in coding efforts been able to define their own goals, priorities, and definitions of expertise and success?
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    Collaborative Workshops for Community Meaning-Making and Data Analyses: How Focus Groups Strengthen Data by Enhancing Understanding and Promoting Use
    Allen, Barbara L.; Lees, Johanna; Cohen, Alison K.; Jeanjean, Maxime (MDPI, 2019-09-11)
    Community-based participatory research is a growing approach, but often includes higher levels of community engagement in the research design and data collection stages than in the data interpretation stage. Involving study participants in this stage could further knowledge justice, science that aligns with and supports social justice agendas. This article reports on two community-based participatory environmental health surveys conducted between 2015 and 2019 in an industrial region near Marseille, France, and focuses specifically on our approach of organizing focus groups to directly involve residents and community stakeholders in the analysis and interpretation process. We found that, in these focus groups, residents triangulated across many different sources of information—study findings, local knowledge, and different types of expert knowledge—to reach conclusions about the health of their community and make recommendations for what should be done to improve community health outcomes. We conclude that involving residents in the data analysis and interpretation stage can promote epistemic justice and lead to final reports that are more useful to community stakeholders and decision-makers.
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    Combating Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transactional Pedagogy of Friendship
    Olson, Philip; Gillman, Laura J. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013)
    The article explores the problem of epistemological ignorance. Drawing on the literature of feminist epistemology, in particular the epistemologies of ignorance, it theorizes white ignorance and male ignorance and how it is possible to gain consciousness about one's ignorance, as well as how to be responsible for what one does not know. The article explores ignorance as unconscious habits that inform our mental schemas, our social interactions, and our physicality. It identifies and analyzes these habits of ignorance, drawing on our experiences as team teachers (one a philosophy professor, and the other a professor of women's studies and literary studies) who co-taught an interdisciplinary doctoral seminar in feminist epistemology. It describes and illustrates the pedagogical and scholarly processes that led us to view epistemology as a practice of inquiry that combats ignorance by demanding an inclusive partnership across traditional and counterhegemonic approaches to knowledge. The article claims that a transactional pedagogy of friendship makes possible the disruption and rehabituation of epistemic habits of ignorance, moving inquirers in the direction of more inclusive, reliable, and responsible knowledge.
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    Cost-Effectiveness of Risk-Stratified Colorectal Cancer Screening Based on Polygenic Risk: Current Status and Future Potential
    Naber, Steffie K.; Kundu, Suman; Kuntz, Karen M.; Dotson, W. David; Williams, Marc S.; Zauber, Ann G.; Calonge, Ned; Zallen, Doris T.; Ganiats, Theodore G.; Webber, Elizabeth M.; Goddard, Katrina A. B.; Henrikson, Nora B.; van Ballegooijen, Marjolein; Janssens, A. Cecile J. W.; Lansdorp-Vogelaar, Iris (2020-02)
    Background: Although uniform colonoscopy screening reduces colorectal cancer (CRC) mortality, risk-based screening may be more efficient. We investigated whether CRC screening based on polygenic risk is a cost-effective alternative to current uniform screening, and if not, under what conditions it would be. Methods: The MISCAN-Colon model was used to simulate a hypothetical cohort of US 40-year-olds. Uniform screening was modeled as colonoscopy screening at ages 50, 60, and 70 years. For risk-stratified screening, individuals underwent polygenic testing with current and potential future discriminatory performance (area under the receiver-operating curve [AUC] of 0.60 and 0.65-0.80, respectively). Polygenic testing results were used to create risk groups, for which colonoscopy screening was optimized by varying the start age (40-60 years), end age (70-85 years), and interval (1-20 years). Results: With current discriminatory performance, optimal screening ranged from once-only colonoscopy at age 60 years for the lowest-risk group to six colonoscopies at ages 40-80 years for the highest-risk group. While maintaining the same health benefits, risk-stratified screening increased costs by $59 per person. Risk-stratified screening could become cost-effective if the AUC value would increase beyond 0.65, the price per polygenic test would drop to less than $141, or risk-stratified screening would lead to a 5% increase in screening participation. Conclusions: Currently, CRC screening based on polygenic risk is unlikely to be cost-effective compared with uniform screening. This is expected to change with a greater than 0.05 increase in AUC value, a greater than 30% reduction in polygenic testing costs, or a greater than 5% increase in adherence with screening.
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    Cradle of a revolution? The industrial transformation of Louisiana's lower Mississippi river
    Allen, Barbara L. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006-01)
    This article provides an overview of the petrochemical industry's transformation of Louisiana's Lower Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans from the early 1900s to the present. First there is a broad discussion of why the industry choose this location for development. The focus is then on a historical understanding of how the conditions for the environmental justice movement came to exist. These include: patterns of early land ownership with both race and class implications; early, systematic denial of employment to African Americans, willful lack of industry oversight on the part of regulators; and tax and development schemes that depleted local community coffers and services.
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    Cultivating intellectual community in academia: reflections from the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN)
    Burch, Karly; Gugganig, Mascha; Guthman, Julie; Reisman, Emily; Comi, Matt; Brock, Samara; Kagliwal, Barkha; Freidberg, Susanne; Baur, Patrick; Heimstaedt, Cornelius; Sippel, Sarah Ruth; Speakman, Kelsey; Marquis, Sarah; Arguelles, Lucia; Biltekoff, Charlotte; Broad, Garrett; Bronson, Kelly; Faxon, Hilary; Frohlich, Xaq; Ghosh, Ritwick; Halfon, Saul; Legun, Katharine; Martin, Sarah J. (Springer, 2023-05)
    Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). This is paired with insights from 21 network members on aspects that have allowed STSFAN to thrive, even amid a global pandemic. Our hope is that these insights will encourage others to cultivate their own intellectual communities, where they too can receive the support they need to deepen their scholarship and strengthen their intellectual relationships.
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    Cyborg-Technology Relations
    Shew, Ashley; Earle, Joshua (TU Delft OPEN, 2024-11-08)
    We advocate for a philosophizing of cyborg-technology relations that takes account disabled technology users. First, we sketch out how tech-driven ableism (“technoableism”) is present in most discourse about technology, and then address how ableism has shaped accounts of disability in philosophy more broadly too. We examine this in historical and media context, then turn to what an unapologetic disability-forward approach to cyborg-technology relations looks like, and what it means to listen to the cyborgs we know and love. This work draws from the interdisciplinary field of disability studies and STS work on crip technoscience. We situate this work mostly within North American media and history of disability and Silicon Valley boosterism on tech, but accounts of technology and of disability are not unique to these locations.
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    The Dilemma of Case Studies Resolved: The Virtues of Using Case Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science
    Burian, Richard M. (MIT Press, 2001-12)
    Philosophers of science turned to historical case studies in part in response to Thomas Kuhn's insistence that such studies can transform the philosophy of science. In this issue Joseph Pitt argues that the power of case studies to instruct us about scientific methodology and epistemology depends on prior philosophical commitments, without which case studies are not philosophically useful. Here I reply to Pitt, demonstrating that case studies, properly deployed, illustrate styles of scientific work and modes of argumentation that are not well handled by currently standard philosophical analyses. I illustrate these claims with exemplary findings from case studies dealing with exploratory experimentation and with interdisciplinary cooperation across sciences to yield multiple independent means of access to theoretical entities. The latter cases provide examples of ways that scientists support claims about theoretical entities that are not available in work performed within a single discipline. They also illustrate means of correcting systematic biases that stem from the commitments of each discipline taken separately. These findings illustrate the transformative power of case study methods, allow us to escape from the horns of Pitt's ?dilemma of case studies?, and vindicate some of the post-Kuhn uses to which case studies have been put.
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    Disabled Dimensionalities: Normative expectations' impacts on disabled perceptions and spatialities
    Blanchard, Enka; Shew, Ashley (OpenEdition, 2022)
    As humans, we are expected to interact as fully functional 3D manipulators who can observe, handle,and act in three spatial dimensions. This is how users are considered in the design of many products and spaces. Ableism often gives people the perception that disabled people are inferior at manipulating, imagining, and navigating the world. We contest this perception using both our own experiences as disabled manipulators and narratives from other disabled people that speak to this presumption as limited imagination and consideration. In this theoretical contribution, we analyze the consequences of ableism in how spaces — digital, physical, imaginary in science fiction, present in practice and material configuration — operate in the way we think about the material and virtual world.
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    Does America Need More Innovators?
    (MIT Press, 2019-04)
    Corporate executives, politicians, and school board leaders agree—Americans must innovate. Innovation experts fuel this demand with books and services that instruct aspiring innovators in best practices, personal habits, and workplace cultures for fostering innovation. But critics have begun to question the unceasing promotion of innovation, pointing out its gadget-centric shallowness, the lack of diversity among innovators, and the unequal distribution of innovation's burdens and rewards. Meanwhile, reformers work to make the training of innovators more inclusive and the outcomes of innovation more responsible. This book offers an overdue critical exploration of today's global imperative to innovate by bringing together innovation's champions, critics, and reformers in conversation. The book presents an overview of innovator training, exploring the history, motivations, and philosophies of programs in private industry, universities, and government; offers a primer on critical innovation studies, with essays that historicize, contextualize, and problematize the drive to create innovators; and considers initiatives that seek to reform and reshape what it means to be an innovator.
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    Emotions and Narrative Selves
    Hardcastle, Valerie Gray (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003-12)