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- Convenors:
-
Danah Boyd
(Microsoft Research)
Janet Vertesi (Princeton University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to examine the role that institutional arrangements play in shaping science and technology by interrogating what happens when institutions are threatened or collapse.
Long Abstract:
Institutions have lifecycles but they are also actors within complex sociotechnical arrangements. When institutions collapse or disintegrate (or are strategically undermined), scientific and technical projects that depend on or are entangled with institutions are also threatened. Institutions, after all, are organizational infrastructure that help create the conditions for a range of science and technology efforts. Studies of sociotechnical failures often highlight the organizational conditions that make "normal accidents", legitimacy crises, and disasters possible. Meanwhile, sociologists often note how "permanently failing organizations" allow sociotechnical projects to persist despite weaknesses in specific organizations. There is also a wide array of scholarship that emphasizes how scientific advancements and technical innovation are made possible through particular institutional arrangements. But what happens to scientific and technical work when institutions breakdown? In this panel, we invite contributions that investigate how the conditions created by collapsing institutions affect scientific and technical work. How might the fall of governments or the disintegration of the administrative state affect work related to climate science, statistics, or nuclear energy? What happens to complex technical systems when corporations go bankrupt or take extreme actions to avoid such an outcome? How do fiscal pressures and reputational risks facing higher education affect the knowledge production process? How is the future of scientific and technical projects affected by supply chain collapses or geopolitical rearrangements of institutions? In other words, if certain institutional arrangements create the conditions for scientific and technical work, how should we think sociotechnially about the meltdown of institutional configurations? And, to these ends, what might a sociotechnical vision of maintenance and repair look like that accounts for institutional arrangements? With this panel, we hope to learn from those interrogating the entanglements between science/technology and institutions at the moments when the latter are under duress.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Dominika Czerniawska (Leiden University) Richelle Boone (Leiden University) Simcha Jong
Short abstract:
Scientific sanctions imposed on Russia in 2022 significantly affect institutional ties in the nuclear fusion community. Withheld collaboration exacerbates pre-existing trends and leads to multi-polar networks. The stabilising role is played by the global institution -- ITER.
Long abstract:
Sanctions imposed on Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine threatened the institutions upholding the research collaborations in the nuclear fusion community. Nuclear fusion is a rare case where the field development relies on big science instruments and their facilitating institutions – most notably the experimental-reactor-under-construction ITER. Close political, institutional, and scientific bonds have provided the nuclear fusion community with many opportunities to grow and may enhance the community’s resilience to political tensions in some instances. However, at the same time, they may render the community more vulnerable in others.
Our study examines the impact of such changes employing a novel method combining network and document analysis. Using statements by governments and scientific institutions, we built a model depicting policies for research collaboration with Russia after the invasion, showing a spectrum of reactions ranging from restricting [e.g. EU] to encouraging collaboration [e.g. China]. Using this model, we constructed and analysed bibliometric networks to discover collaboration trends and compare pre-sanction and post-sanction collaboration structures.
We identify three pre-sanction trends: (1) weakening collaboration between the US and Russia, (2) growing in-house capacity of China, (3) collaboration becoming less international. We show that the sanctions exacerbate the trends and lead to the combined effect of multi-polarization, but the collaboration network is kept together by ITER. Our study illustrates how institutions facilitate collaboration networks but also constrain them. The collapse of institutional bonds creates an opportunity for new collaboration structures and, therefore, new research strategies in a field.
Oriol Barat Auleda (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) Joan Moyà-Köhler (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Short abstract:
This presentation aims to explore how institutions reconfigure their technoscientific work through living labs (LL). Focusing in the health field, we describe how institutions use LL to drive towards openness, new knowledge production methods, institutional evolution and interaction changes.
Long abstract:
Institutions serve as the foundational infrastructure of modern societies and their knowledge production system; however, they are increasingly facing greater risks of collapse meeting the changing needs of contemporary society and the rapid advancement of technology. These challenges have forced institutions to seek new ways of producing knowledge and engaging with their externality. In this context, living labs emerge as innovative solutions to reconfigure institutions from their traditional system, characterized by large and closed structures, towards spaces of greater openness and adaptability.
We situate ourselves in the heatlh field to illustrate this phenomenon. Through the mapping of a total of 86 health living labs in Europe, 15 interviews conducted with different living lab managers and participants, and alongside ethnographic research within a hospital-based living lab, this research illustrates the emergence of living labs as tools for the establishment of new approaches of scientific and technical work within the health domain. In contrast to the conventional attributes of institutional models, which often prioritize disciplinary technologies and restrict movement, we draw upon the concept of "extitution" to describe institutional changes towards aspects such as control, movement, and participation.
We situate living labs as a means of extitutionalisation, which encompasses instruments and methodologies capable of creating new ways of (co)producing knowledge, thus fostering institutional openness and reconfiguration. Consequently, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how health institutions evolve through living labs in response to sociotechnological changes, ultimately shaping and changing their interactions with both internal hierarchy and external associations.
Jayshree Sarathy (Columbia University) Danah Boyd (Microsoft Research)
Short abstract:
We study Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (RDCs), exploring how scientific work is shaped by efforts to repair the RDC system. We find that efforts to democratize RDCs ignore key dynamics of data access (e.g. relationships), undermining the expansion of high-quality knowledge production.
Long abstract:
Recent legislation in the U.S. (e.g. the 2018 Evidence-Based Policymaking Act) aims to democratize access to public-sector data, with the aims of advancing equity and transparency and facilitating policy-relevant research. But in the face of legal, fiscal, and reputational uncertainty, efforts to streamline statistical infrastructures may undermine the scientific work they support.
In this project, we consider Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (RDCs), which are secure enclaves that offer access to sensitive data from multiple agencies. A network of RDCs operates across the country, enabling researchers to apply for access and conduct multi-year analyses. The application process is notoriously long and mysterious (“like a speakeasy,” according to one informant), requiring guidance from administrators who provide informal, iterative feedback.
Through interviews with civil servants, administrators, and researchers, as well as analysis of public meetings, documents, and (un)successful research proposals, we explore how knowledge production is affected by efforts to reconfigure the RDC system. We find that: (1) relationships and status networks shape not just access to data, but data work itself, (2) painful bureaucratic processes help manage risk and visibility, and (3) RDCs engage in deep boundary-work between science and policy, which shapes understandings of scientific merit and expertise. Efforts to democratize access (such as the web-based Standard Application Process portal, which limits the capacity of administrators to guide proposals) hinders all three of these dynamics. In attempting to repair the seemingly-broken RDC system, open-data initiatives may accelerate institutional collapse, and in turn, threaten the very goal of expanding knowledge production.
Gabriel Medina-Kim (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Short abstract:
In a case study of computer engineering in transition, a community developed a heuristic for systemic change. “Speaking the unspeakable” initiated healing and equity through feeling as engineering work. But desire for alternative expertise may reify engineering's gendered social/technical divide.
Long abstract:
This presentation presents emergent findings from participatory action research with a community of faculty, students, and alum enacting systemic change in a nascent department of computer engineering. Located at a public university in the United States, this department is uniquely positioned to articulate different visions of computer engineering amidst multiple far-reaching transitions within the university. However, attempts to actualize equity in computer engineering are still bound by organizational histories as well as expressions of race and gender.
Not only did the community set an objective to “speak the unspeakable,” but having “difficult conversations” emerged as an on-the-fly heuristic for evaluating the efficacy of systemic change during conflict. Synthesizing participant observation, interviews, and autoethnography, this presentation analyzes “the unspeakable” and its leverage for systemic change.
The “unspeakable” indexes a traumatic past and an optimistic future. Its definition is connected to shared experiences of trauma that came from previous organizational arrangements and experiences of engineering culture. “Speaking the unspeakable” indexes (1) the desire to heal, and (2) a willingness to break from dominant engineering culture. However, such a praxis risks reifying a gendered social/technical divide. Speaking about feelings became a crucial form of work that contrasted engineering work, but it also produced the need for expertise in caretaking. Women and social scientists became responsible for facilitating, “managing feelings,” and ensuring everyone’s safety (albeit as a praxis of caretaking). While caretaking provides inroads for critical interventionists, its contradistinction to the trauma of engineering culture risks reifying a gendered social/technical divide.
Christophe Heger (DZHW - Deutsches Zentrum für Hochschul- und Wissenschaftsforschung)
Short abstract:
I use a representative survey of researchers in Germany to show that those who perceive bias in grant peer review tend to also be more open to the introduction of lotteries into science funding decisions.
Long abstract:
In the current debate on the possible introduction of lotteries in research funding decisions, two potential advantages have played central roles: First, that lotteries could have the potential to exclude human bias in peer review decision, and second, that they could produce legitimate funding decisions with much fewer resources.
Time and money notwithstanding, both of these promises fundamentally address a legitimacy problem. This is arguably because the empirical evidence for systematic biases in peer review has generally been interpreted as an issue of legitimacy for the funding system. However, the idea of lotteries in funding decisions arguably goes even further: rather than a reform aimed at reestablishing trust by reducing opportunities for bias, they actually open up a revolutionary new way to reach decisions in science funding that categorically excludes bias.
In the end, it is researchers themselves who will apply for and see their scientific proposals funded, or not. They are the ones who will review, who will contribute to the outcome of a panel, who will decide on proposals’ inclusion in a lottery pot. However, there are yet few empirical study that focusses on scientists’ attitudes towards science funding decisions, the potential benefits of the introduction of lotteries and the relative importance they attribute to bias in the existing system. As a consequence, I use a representative survey of researchers in Germany to find out whether those who perceive bias in peer review tend to also be more open to the introduction of lotteries into science funding decisions.