Scholarly Works, Science, Technology, and Society

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Research articles, presentations, and other scholarship

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Infraestructuras de conexión y gobernanza de internet: digitalización, códigos y desigualdades desde el Sur global
Rosa, 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.
Citation Politics: The Gender Gap in Internet Governance
Rosa, 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.
(Re)Writing Gender in Internet Histories: Introduction to special issue on Gender in Internet and Web History
Fortunati, 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.
Computational thinking and gender imbalance in computer science
Abbate, 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.
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.
Introduction: The future is disabled
Shew, Ashley (MIT Technology Review, 2025)
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.
Fair Plastics: Advancing Industrial Decarbonization through Equitable Social Innovations
Breslau, Daniel; McMillan, Colin; Schmid, Sonja; Tsou, Tsung-Yen (The Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech, 2024-08-19)
Industrial decarbonization is an absolute and immediate requirement in the context of global climate change. Producing the basic materials that constitute the infrastructure of our modern societies (e.g. steel, cement, plastics) is the most significant source of industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, compared to areas such as electricity generation and ground transportation, where clear technological solutions for decarbonization have emerged, decarbonizing industry may follow any number of potential pathways. The Fair Plastics workshop brought together a group of experts and stakeholders from industry, government, research organizations, and environmental and community groups to discuss each group’s views of the significant obstacles and potential pathways of decarbonizing ethylene production. Industry representatives focused on technical pathways to ethylene decarbonization. While requesting infrastructure for electricity, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide, they emphasized the need for regulatory standards, carbon pricing, and government intervention to support the transition to decarbonization. Government and academic researchers assessed the existing pathways and highlighted carbon contributors other than ethylene, such as the steel and cement industries. The group also highlighted the economic challenges of the entire plastics lifecycle, noting the difficulty in reducing reliance on low-cost natural gas and the lack of replacement materials for ethylene-derived products. Environmental and community groups also took a lifecycle perspective and stressed the importance of addressing not only ethylene production, but also upstream and downstream activities to mitigate environmental and health impacts. They advocated for source reduction and greater industry accountability to ensure environmental justice for communities affected by petrochemical pollution. The report concludes that achieving ethylene decarbonization requires coordinated efforts across technical, social, and policy dimensions, with a focus on sustainability, innovation, and equity for affected communities.
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.
From citizen social science to citizen bureaucraft: an ecology of social justice activism in Singapore
Haines, 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.
Performing Radical Vulnerability to Teach STS in Singapore
Haines, Monamie (Society for Social Studies of Science, 2024)
The MOPR Saga and the Politics of Manipulation in U.S. Electricity Markets
Breslau, 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.
Redes compartidas de tseltales y zapotecos: Los caminos hacia un internet pluriversal
Rosa, Fernanda R. (CARGC Press, 2022)
Shared Networks: The Paths of Latin-Centric Indigenous Networks to a Pluriversal Internet
Rosa, Fernanda R. (University of Illinois Libraries, 2021-09-15)
This research paper examines the emergence of shared networks in Tseltal and Zapoteco communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico): internet first mile signal-sharing practices that articulate interconnection infrastructure and coexistence values to extend the internet to areas where the services of existing larger internet service providers are unsatisfactory or unavailable. In the case studies analyzed, indigenous people become internet codesigners by infrastructuring for their own local networks and interconnecting to the global internet. The paper argues that a hybrid materializes at the level of network interconnection when comunalidad, or the way of these communities, supported by unlicensed frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, towers, radio antennas, houses rooftops, routers, and cables meet the values of the internet service providers and their policies. Shared networks are a result of what these arrangements both enact and constrain, and the evidence of vivid struggles of Latin-centric indigenous networks towards a pluriversal internet.
Pluralistic Collaboration in Science and Technology: Reviewing Knowledge Systems, Culture, Norms, and Work Styles
Halfon, Saul E.; Sovacool, Benjamin (SAGE, 2022-10-10)
This paper challenges the language of “interdisciplinarity,” suggesting “pluralistic collaboration” as a better alternative. Interdisciplinarity, team science, and transdisciplinarity frame academic and problem-focused collaborations narrowly, overemphasizing epistemology, downplaying extra-disciplinary divides and nonacademic collaborators, and either ignoring or psychologizing individual-level phenomena. We first paint a picture of the tensions and divides that exist in pluralistic collaborations, in three dimensions—epistemic, cultural, and normative—using a series of literature reviews to simultaneously map and extend these dimensions. We then introduce and explore a fourth dimension—academic work styles. Individual level considerations of collaboration in the literature generally rely on psychological types. We explore what a more sociologically oriented approach to individual dynamics within collaborations would look like by identifying and exploring four general academic work styles: isolationist, imperialist, pragmatist, and pluralist. We conclude by emphasizing and reflecting on pluralistic collaboration. Pluralism exists along a range of dimensions, and pluralizing or homogenizing different dimensions (pluralizing pluralism) can produce diverse effects on the outcome of interdisciplinary collaboration. While we thus advocate for pluralism along a greater range of dimensions when addressing complex problems, we suggest that over-pluralization can be a problem.
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.
How To Get A Story Wrong: Technoableism, Simulation, and Cyborg Resistance
Shew, 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.
Autoconstruction of the Media City: Tracing the Routes of Electronic Devices in the Global South
Prieto-Nanez, Fabian (2023-02)
The invention of the “underclass”: a study in the politics of knowledge [Book review]
Breslau, Daniel (Routledge, 2023-01-04)
A book review of The invention of the “underclass”: a study in the politics of knowledge, by Loïc Wacquant (Polity, 2022).
From community networks to shared networks: the paths of Latin-Centric Indigenous networks to a pluriversal internet
Rosa, 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.

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