Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society
Permanent URI for this collection
Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship
Browse
Browsing Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society by Content Type "Article"
Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Autoconstruction of the Media City: Tracing the Routes of Electronic Devices in the Global SouthPrieto-Nanez, Fabian (2023-02)
- 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.
- The Dilemma of Case Studies Resolved: The Virtues of Using Case Studies in the History and Philosophy of ScienceBurian, 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.
- From citizen social science to citizen bureaucraft: an ecology of social justice activism in SingaporeHaines, Monamie (SAGE Publications, 2024)This article theorizes citizen knowledge production from a non-Western, nonliberal locale by examining why social movement-oriented citizen science is not practiced in the soft authoritarian context of Singapore. While environmental injustice arguably does exist in the city-state, citizens and residents are nor responding by producing undone science. In fact, seldom does the environment, science, and technology figure as the object of activism, let alone social injustice claims. Drawing on interpretive documentary analysis of interviews, news reports and auto-ethnography, this article argues that science and technology are guarded by tacit “out-of-bound” markers—or OB markers that constitute the norms of acceptable criticism. These OB markers are socially maintained by, and coproduced alongside, the twinned practices of elitism and meritocracy in Singapore, where the academic elite constitute critical voices, and as such, must navigate their credibility and privilege with the state, thereby foreclosing more radical forms of activism. As a consequence, elite Singaporeans practice citizen social science in areas of the environment, race and migration. Further, I show their standards and practices of evidencing and scientific communication can be construed as ‘citizen bureaucraft,’ where they cite the state to hold a kintsugi mirror to injustices it perpetuates. This article describes an ecology of social justice activism centred on Singapore’s primarily Bangladeshi migrant construction workers during the pandemic to show how citizenship is coproduced with citizen knowledge production in more authoritarian contexts, and how the coercive state responds.
- How To Get A Story Wrong: Technoableism, Simulation, and Cyborg ResistanceShew, Ashley (2022-03)For this paper, I will first share with you what we take to be the wrong stories out there about disability - narrative arcs we’ve inherited from tropes through various media as well as highlight the dangers of disability simulation to address these. Next, I’ll talk about better stories, more authentic narratives we might give about technology and about disability. Third, I’ll talk about social responsibility in the context of disability narrative, before ending by talking about cyborg-cripborg-disability expertise and knowledge with a reflection on cyborg expertise during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Introduction: The future is disabledShew, Ashley (MIT Technology Review, 2025)
- The MOPR Saga and the Politics of Manipulation in U.S. Electricity MarketsBreslau, Daniel (2023)Recent sociological literature treats market manipulation as a product of the interaction of innovative trading practices with activities of market policing. Its definition is not independent of the construction of devices to detect it, and regulatory means for sanctioning and correcting it. This paper builds on that work by analyzing the political process through which those devices, and market manipulation itself, are defined. It examines a protracted struggle to define a particular form of manipulation in wholesale electricity markets in the U.S. From 2006 to 2021, the definition of “buyer-side market power” and the preferred mechanism for detecting and mitigating this particular form of market manipulation, the Minimum Offer Pricing Rule (MOPR). Analyzing filings and orders in regulatory proceedings before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, internal documents tracing deliberations within PJM, the largest wholesale electricity market in the U.S., supplemented by interviews with regulators, stakeholders, and economic experts. This contention takes the form of a “valorization struggle,” in which actors with different relative endowments of the many types of properties wield what influence they have to shape the market rules in a way that will convert those holdings into sources of revenues and competitive advantages relative to other market participants. The successive redefinitions of this type of market manipulation, as coded in the instruments used to detect and mitigate it, track the evolving power relations within the field. The paper considers the ways that, in this case, the politics of market manipulation mediate the politics of climate.
- (Re)Writing Gender in Internet Histories: Introduction to special issue on Gender in Internet and Web HistoryFortunati, Leopoldina; Edwards, Autumn; Abbate, Janet E. (Taylor & Francis, 2025)This special issue aims to illuminate women's contributions throughout history by using gender as a critical lens in internet historiography and challenging the dominance of male-centered narratives. In the introduction, we contextualize the socio-cultural moment in which this issue was conceived and outline its dual focus. First, we reconstruct women’s contributions to the history of the Internet. Second, we examine gender identity and the role of LGBTQ+ communities within this history. Our approach is guided by two perspectives: understanding gender identity as a site of political mobilization and situating the Internet within the broader digital world. We also advocate for future directions that emphasize decolonizing and expanding Internet historiography.
- Redes compartidas de tseltales y zapotecos: Los caminos hacia un internet pluriversalRosa, Fernanda R. (CARGC Press, 2022)
- Transmobility: Possibilities in Cyborg (Cripborg) BodiesNelson, Mallory Kay; Shew, Ashley; Stevens, Bethany (University of Toronto Libraries, 2019)This creative, experimental contribution blends written words and sketches depicting our crip bodies engaging with various mobility technologies, including crutches, walkers, prosthetic limbs, and manual and power wheelchairs. By picturing and describing our crip bodies with varieties of technologies that we use, we use these pictures and corresponding narratives about disabled bodies in technology to tell a larger story about the constitution of disability with technologies, as well as the modes of mobility available to disabled bodies. Our visual and narrative elements serve to argue that disabled bodies have a wider array of mobilities and ways of being than are afforded to non-disabled bodies. We resist super-crippery and insist on cripborgery. Crip bodies are taken as sites of possibility, adaptation, and creative reflection.