Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society
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Browsing Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society by Content Type "Article - Refereed"
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- Aesthetics of Otherness: Representation of #migrantcaravan and #caravanamigrante on InstagramRosa, 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.
- Citation Politics: The Gender Gap in Internet GovernanceRosa, Fernanda R.; Anastácio, Kimberly; de Jesus, Maria Vitória; Veras, Hemanuel Jhosé A. (Elsevier, 2024-06-01)This article proposes an informed debate on the politics of citation in internet governance (IG), focusing on gender. To this end, we use the Bibliographic Reference Index (BRI) to examine the prominence of female and male names in the IG references. The BRI is based on an action research process (“pesquisa-ação”), in which authors fill out information about their citation practices. The aim is to promote self-reflection on authors’ selection of references whilst collecting bibliographic data. We applied the BRI to 1113 citations from 35 papers published in the Proceedings of the Brazilian Internet Governance Research Network (REDE) throughout 2017–2021. Results show that male-gendered names were cited more than double the number of times of female-gendered names (47% vs. 20%). To situate these results vis-à-vis global IG, we analyze the gender gap in the curriculum of IG schools and courses, by applying the index to an Internet Governance Forum compilation of 22 IG syllabi and course programs, comprising 96 references and the names of 217 IG experts worldwide. Results show that female names authored only 19% of the syllabi readings and materials featured vs. 29% by men. Also, the gender rate among experts is 63% vs. 37% in favor of men. Based on the structural gender inequalities that we have found in global and local IG contexts, we recommend interventions to increase the conscious engagement with bibliography and syllabus preparation on two fronts: 1) we recommend the application of the BRI to IG syllabi and course programs to monitor and reduce the gender gap; and 2) we provide a citation diversity statement that IG scholars can add to their publications in order to promote self-reflection about their knowledge production and add transparency to the politics of citation in IG.
- Code Ethnography and the Materiality of Power in Internet GovernanceRosa, 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.
- Collaborative Workshops for Community Meaning-Making and Data Analyses: How Focus Groups Strengthen Data by Enhancing Understanding and Promoting UseAllen, 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.
- Combating Racialized and Gendered Ignorance: Theorizing a Transactional Pedagogy of FriendshipOlson, 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.
- Computational thinking and gender imbalance in computer scienceAbbate, Janet E. (2025-01-06)The percentage of female computer science majors is lower today at U.S. schools than in the 1980s, despite decades of effort by concerned computer scientists and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Researchers have addressed a variety of possible reasons, ranging from the lack of female role models, to sexism on campus and in the workplace, to conflicts between work and motherhood. More recently, efforts to attract women have focused on the content of computer science as a factor deterring women. In particular, recent studies have proposed that the subject will be more appealing to underrepresented groups — especially girls — if teachers emphasize “computational thinking.” The idea that computer science has its own special way of thinking, which can both appeal to women and be transferred to non-computing fields, has been a subject of enthusiasm but also debate among computer education experts. This paper explores the implications of the claim that teaching computational thinking can help undo the gender imbalance in computing, and what this says about computer science itself.
- Cost-Effectiveness of Risk-Stratified Colorectal Cancer Screening Based on Polygenic Risk: Current Status and Future PotentialNaber, 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.
- Cradle of a revolution? The industrial transformation of Louisiana's lower Mississippi riverAllen, 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.
- Cyborg-Technology RelationsShew, 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.
- Disabled Dimensionalities: Normative expectations' impacts on disabled perceptions and spatialitiesBlanchard, 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.
- The element of the table: Visual discourse and the preperiodic representation of chemical classificationCohen, B. R. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
- Emotions and Narrative SelvesHardcastle, Valerie Gray (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003-12)
- Exposing the myths of household water insecurity in the global north: A critical reviewMeehan, Katie; Jepson, Wendy; Harris, Leila M.; Wutich, Amber; Beresford, Melissa; Fencl, Amanda; London, Jonathan; Pierce, Gregory; Radonic, Lucero; Wells, Christian; Wilson, Nicole J.; Adams, Ellis Adjei; Arsenault, Rachel; Brewis, Alexandra; Harrington, Victoria; Lambrinidou, Yanna; McGregor, Deborah; Patrick, Robert; Pauli, Benjamin; Pearson, Amber L.; Shah, Sameer; Splichalova, Dacotah; Workman, Cassandra; Young, Sera (2020-11)Safe and secure water is a cornerstone of modern life in the global North. This article critically examines a set of prevalent myths about household water in high-income countries, with a focus on Canada and the United States. Taking a relational approach, we argue that household water insecurity is a product of institutionalized structures and power, manifests unevenly through space and time, and is reproduced in places we tend to assume are the most water-secure in the world. We first briefly introduce "modern water" and the modern infrastructural ideal, a highly influential set of ideas that have shaped household water provision and infrastructure development over the past two centuries. Against this backdrop, we consolidate evidence to disrupt a set of narratives about water in high-income countries: the notion that water access is universal, clean, affordable, trustworthy, and uniformly or equitably governed. We identify five thematic areas of future research to delineate an agenda for advancing scholarship and action-including challenges of legal and regulatory regimes, the housing-water nexus, water affordability, and water quality and contamination. Data gaps underpin the experiences of household water insecurity. Taken together, our review of water security for households in high-income countries provides a conceptual map to direct critical research in this area for the coming years. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Human Water
- From community networks to shared networks: the paths of Latin-Centric Indigenous networks to a pluriversal internetRosa, Fernanda R. (Routledge, 2022-07)This article examines, with ethnographic lenses, the emergence of shared networks in the Tseltal and Zapoteco communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico). 'Shared networks' are first-mile signal-sharing practices that articulate interconnection infrastructure and values of coexistence to, in the cases studied, extend the internet to areas where the services of existing larger internet service providers are unsatisfactory or unavailable. It argues that by infrastructuring their own local networks and interconnecting to the global internet, Tseltal and Zapoteco people are effectively internet codesigners, building Latin-Centric Indigenous networks and shaping internet governance from below. When comunalidad values, supported by unlicensed frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, towers, radio antennas, houses' rooftops, routers, and cables, intersect with the values of the internet service providers and their policies, hybrids emerge. Shared networks are a result of what these hybrids enact and constrain, as well as evidence of the vivid struggles for a more inclusive and pluriversal internet.
- GAFA's information infrastructure distribution: Interconnection dynamics in the global North versus global SouthRosa, Fernanda R.; Hauge, Janice A. (Wiley, 2021-12-14)We analyze public points of interconnection of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple (GAFA) in the global North versus the global South to determine the degree to which their location preferences differ, if at all. We find that there is a statistically significant difference in GAFA locating in the global North versus the global South—a difference based on a country's wealth, specifically as given by per capita GNI. Approximately 38% of countries classified as global North have a GAFA public point of interconnection, while 16% of those classified as global South do. Apple has approximately 92% of its presence in the global North, followed by Amazon (82.5%), Facebook (73%), and Google (72%). Our findings suggest that competition and antitrust policy discussions of digital platforms should include information on the dynamics of interconnection infrastructure distribution, and for that, such information must be available. We also assert that a global consideration of the digital platforms market is necessary.
- Ideology and the Clamshell Identity - Organizational Dilemmas in the Antinuclear Power MovementDowney, Gary L. (University of California Press, 1986-06)This ethnographic study examines the role of ideology in the development of organizational dilemmas in the Clamshell Alliance, an anti-nuclear protest group active in New England during the late 1970s. In 1977, the Alliance received national recognition for its use of consensus decision making and nonviolent civil disobedience during a highly publicized two-week incarceration following an attempted occupation of the Seabrook nuclear plant. But over the next few years, sharp internal disagreements developed over the use of these strategies, leading ultimately to a factional split. I extend theory from symbolic anthropology to integrate the analysis of ideology into the study of resource mobilization without sacrificing the latter's emphasis on rational calculation. My analysis shows that the Alliance's anti-nuclear ideology established an egalitarian identity for the group which structured both the initial selection of strategies and later efforts to modify them.
- Infraestructuras de conexión y gobernanza de internet: digitalización, códigos y desigualdades desde el Sur globalRosa, Fernanda R.; Portugal, Mario; Gomez Baeza, Francisca; Pareja, Roberto (2024-06-03)La siguiente entrevista fue realizada por los tres coeditores del presente número, con el objetivo de conocer más a fondo a Fernanda Rosa, las motivaciones que inspiran su trabajo intelectual y su visión respecto de la digitalización en Nuestramérica y las implicancias que esto tiene para la vida de sus habitantes. El trabajo de Fernanda Rosa constituye un puente entre las discusiones técnicas sobre la infraestructura de interconexión del internet y justicia social para discutir sobre diseño y gobernanza del internet desde una posicionalidad del Sur global. Utilizado un método de su autoría definido como etnografía del código, una perspectiva transdisciplinar basada en los estudios de ciencia y tecnología, estudios feministas y decoloniales, su trabajo describe la infraestructura de circulación de información en internet, con una aproximación desde la justicia y políticas públicas. Sitúa al lector en el contexto indígena y Latinoamericano para problematizar las desigualdades en el acceso a la infraestructura del internet y en la circulación de datos digitales en el sur global.
- Internet interconnection infrastructure: lessons from the global SouthRosa, Fernanda R. (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, 2021-11-02)This article examines the formation of the first internet exchange point (IXP) in Mexico amid the implementation of telecommunication reforms and asymmetric regulations in a market with low level of competition. An IXP is defined as a shared interconnection facility and a key internet governance arena where players with myriad goals and functions mesh in interlaced technical and political dynamics. The study shows how data centres, passive infrastructure and autonomous system numbers play a critical role that stand out in the context of lack of infrastructure in Mexico. The paper argues that the challenges for an IXP to become stable in such a context in the global South is a result of IXP imagined affordances and the way that infrastructure, the telecommunications incumbent, its competitors, the state regulator, and the IXP operator interact, keeping the initiative in a fragile equilibrium.
- "Liberal Education Has Failed": Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s AmericaWisnioski, Matthew H. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
- Made in Brazil: Conspiracy Theory and the Flow of Information in One-to-One Whatsapp ConversationsRosa, Fernanda R. (Universidade Federal da Bahia, 2021-10-21)This essay aims to shed light on the multiple and complex ways that information flows among individuals in times of intense use of digital platforms. Based on actor-network theory, it unveils largely unknown communication processes about the controversial death of the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, Teori Zavascki in 2017 that occurred in closed conversations in which the author was part. Analyzing primary data, the essay discusses the signs of authority that allow for non-verified or fiction pieces to circulate as if they were news pieces, enabling conspiracy theories to take form. The essay defends that mutual responsibility in building the narrative with peers within a likeminded groups, and “translation” processes in which sender and information merge their characteristics to create trust are important factors to understand this phenomenon. Furthermore, in discussing news as cultural artifacts, the essay also raises reflections of the limits of framing this phenomenon as fake news, which artificially oppose what is “real” and “fake” disregarding cultural dynamics at stake.