Paper long abstract:

I would like to focus on joint Sino-French engineering schools. Having spent three months of ethnographic immersion there and realised 60 interviews on the field, my presentation will share a global perspective about what it draws for science and technology in China as seen for the future by fieldwork actors. Those schools are presented as elite schools to train some of the best engineers the country would need tomorrow. A precise and systematic analyse of discourses about what could and should the future be like will be projected on the fieldwork data first conclusions.

This way, I will try to show such elite international institutions brings or even embody promises about science and technology, promises that their graduate engineers will meet tomorrow's challendes and that they will be able to shape the world at the advantage of China.

We will highlight the interaction of discourses with everyday constraints and practical issues materiality gives. That's why the key challenge of this presentation will be to observe on the field how actors actually articulate discourses and everyday acting through big and little contrainsts that shape what they actually do. Thus, we will enter the concrete stage of the fabrication of so called 'bicultural elite engineers'. To what extend do promising discourses play an autonomous game? How do they get tranfered and so transformed through material enaction? What effect does it have on the dynamic of promises that preceded and launched such elite engineering schools projects?

Paper long abstract:

A growing number of experts aim to grasp futures in both academic and practice-oriented settings. They can all be called 'futurists'. Due to a lack of transparency it is hard to distinguish these futurists as clearly defined profession. In theory everyone, also charlatans, can be part of the profession. The main objective of my paper is to shed light on the broad scope of practices adopted worldwide and how the futurist practices can be understood in their social contexts.

In this paper I will rely upon the insights gained by in depth interviews of 30 representative futurists from different parts of the world. The interviewees are founding fathers, icons and prizewinners, as well as promising newcomers that have already gained some reputation. Their knowledge production will be explored from the perspective of the sociology of professions. This theory offers analytical concepts to reflect upon practices of these futurists. The main themes of the interviews are professional histories of the interviewees, their definition of a futurist, their membership of professional communities and the context of their knowledge production. The interview method adopted is the social constructivist approach. This means that the data are generated by letting the futurists construct their own practices during the interview.

The paper will deliver a broader view on practices of futurists. The analysis will reveal the diversity of their practices and explain why this is the case. However, the paper will also make plausible why they can all be called futurists.

Paper long abstract:

The inclusion of heterogeneous actors into practices of knowledge production has become increasingly important in STS debates as well as in science policy and research practices in recent years. Starting with debates about Mode 2, Post-Normal Science or the Triple Helix model more recently issues concerning more inclusive forms of knowledge production have been addressed in the context of 'responsible innovation'. A central goal in these debates is to think about new ways of producing knowledge in order to deal with the 'grand challenges of our time' (Lund Declaration). The demand for knowledge about potential future developments is thereby linked to imaginations about collaborative ways of producing knowledge. One way of doing so is by transcending common boundaries between science and society and to include heterogeneous actors into processes of knowledge production.

My talk builds on material gathered in a case study of the Austrian funding scheme proVISION that focused on transdisciplinary sustainability research. Exploring 'futuring' practices in transdisciplinary research projects I am interested in the simultaneous production of various forms of anticipatory knowledge and social, epistemic and moral re-orderings of science-society relations. This means exploring questions concerning the mutual constitution of research practices and particular knowledge producing communities as well as entities like 'science' and 'society'. Additionally I am interested in performances of inclusion and exclusion and in the particular futures that are produced in the situated research settings of transdisciplinary sustainability research.

For doing this analysis I draw on interview transcripts, ethnographic observations, program documents and related policy documents.

Paper long abstract:

Processes of scientific change have been analysed using a variety of approaches within STS and allied fields. Often, empirical accounts of the success of new fields and new communities are provided to evidence theories of change. We usually hear less about characteristics such as stumbling and failure in these processes. In this paper I investigate the tenuous character of socio-technical change using the case of synthetic biology in the UK. From 2007 to date, a multi-sited ethnography tracing the emergence of the ostensibly new field has yielded insight on the mundane and everyday aspects of certain forms of change. From that corpus of data, a picture of a determined yet precarious field is evident, one that is actively constructing futures, with heavy political oversight.

What roles do institutional and individual motivations play in the pursuit or otherwise of future-building in the synbio case? what are the implications of organisational forms and research policy on the success (or not) of building a stable field? The paper contributes to ongoing theorising and evidence-gathering around the emergence and maintenance of new scientific fields and communities.

Paper long abstract:

As a concept, the scientific discipline seems to have gone out of fashion in STS. Concepts such as research fields, epistemic cultures, etc. have taken its place. While disciplines are only in rare cases theorized and employed as conceptual referents for empirical studies, the notion of discipline still occurs in passing. Typically, talk of disciplines refers to them in plural, emphasizing what happens across their boundaries or what separates one discipline from another. Thus, it seems to be difficult - or perhaps undesirable - to get rid of the notion of discipline altogether although scholars argue that current research occurs predominantly in more muddled and heterogeneous fields that do not fit neat categorizations. Is discipline nothing but a foil? If so, what would be appropriate concepts that can take its place? If not, what epistemic weight does discipline carry? How can it be rendered productive to better understand the development of novel research fields? This paper will first review concepts of scientific discipline that have been put forward throughout the decades. It will then explore the case of nanotechnology to address the question of how this emerging field of research can be characterized in terms of disciplines or related concepts. The paper draws on a qualitative study, conducted by the author and a small team, investigating how nanotechnology is configured as a novel research field in Swiss academe. The results will be placed in the context of recent work on the (inter)disciplinary constitution of nanotechnology by Bensaude-Vincent, Marcovich, Shinn, etc.

Paper long abstract:

Translational research has become an important impetus in contemporary biomedical science and represents a route to making futures for knowledge, communities and objects. The translational agenda initially focused on moving knowledge from laboratory to clinic: from 'bench to bedside'. This linear idea has been critiqued from within and from outside medicine and the processes are recognised by some as more complex. Translational research can be understood as a response to post-genomic accountability in science and as spurred by globalisation and capitalism (Rajan & Leonelli, 2013). The use of 'translation' has also been broadened, partly by technosciences outside of medicine, wanting to make future use of knowledge. In the UK context funding bodies are creating specific mechanisms for funding 'translational research'.

Synthetic biology is an emerging technoscience applying design principles to biology with the aim of modularising and simplifying the engineering of life. This paper analyses data gathered while 'following' synthetic biologists in the laboratory and in their wider work. One notable element in synthetic biology's vision of translation, apparent in the Roadmap for the UK (2012), is a focus on 'industrial translational' rather than clinical. The paper outlines the ways in which translational research is defined and made 'doable' in synthetic biology.

The main argument is that translational research represents one type of future that shapes, and is itself reshaped, by local research practices which in turn lead to the materialisation of an object embodying these futures.

Paper long abstract:

When the term 'systems biology' began to spread its wings within the life sciences around the turn of this century, the suggestion to introduce systems theory to biological research was not without antecedents. Scholars like Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Robert Rosen stand for an 'early' systems biology approach; but the character of current systems biology is also heavily influenced by recent developments. After a period of breakthroughs in molecular biology and the production of -omics data, a 'new' systems biology is currently being institutionalised via interdisciplinary research centres (e.g. in the US, the UK and Germany), the formation of collaborative networks on a national (e.g. HepatoSys and the Virtual Liver Network in Germany) and international level (e.g. within the EU funding initiatives SysMO and ERASysBio). Drawing on empirical material (in-depth interviews with systems biologists in Austria, Germany and the UK and participatory observation in University courses and at conferences), I will address the following questions:

- How homogeneous is the 'new' systems biology?

- Is there a uniting aspect among current systems biologies? How could we characterise it?

- How are the various systems biologies positioned towards the ideal models of 'pure'/ 'basic' or 'applied' research?

- Is systems biology to be understood as a paradigm, a theory, a methodology, an approach, a set of practices or a discursive strategy?

Discussing these fundamental aspects is deemed to be of paramount importance for (re)positioning technoscience governance and technoscience assessment.

Paper long abstract:

Supramolecular chemistry (SMC), at the interface between chemistry, physics and biology, is a research domain which has grown considerably in the last 40 years.

Jean-Marie Lehn was the first to lay its foundations and formalise its concepts, in a seminal article published in 1978. This work (especially the synthesis of cryptands performed in his laboratory ten years earlier) earned him the 1987 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which he shared with Charles J. Pedersen (DuPont) and Donald J. Cram (UCLA).

The proposed paper aims to describe the conditions for the emergence of the paradigm of supramolecular chemistry and a research speciality at the University of Strasbourg (France), where Lehn spent the better part of his career. Based on a fieldwork carried out in 2011-2012 completed with an historical analysis, I will list a number of social processes that led to the emergence of this specialty, which found its place thanks to its conceptual developments and encouragement towards openness, rather than confinement.The task that Jean-Marie Lehn and his colleagues embraced was to develop a multidisciplinary chemistry where barriers disappear but where chemistry remains central.This illustrates the "new disciplinarity" put forward by Marcovich and Shinn (2011). I will look also to the legacy of this field of knowledge through a organizational study of the chemistry department, as it is configured today. Following Centellas et al. (2014), I argue that robust disciplinary boundaries may also support, rather than impede, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation.

Paper long abstract:

Nanotechnology, unlike physics or mechanical engineering, is rarely considered to be its own discipline. Some campuses house nanotechnology research within a particular department, while many others have nanotechnology research scattered across departments with varying degrees and mechanisms of interdisciplinary collaboration. What unifies this group of people is that they all found different ways to understand, manipulate and/or create matter at the nanometer scale. In an interdisciplinary collaboration between engineering and ethics PhD-students we map the current state of the nanotechnology community at UC Berkeley. We show that engineers and scientists have very diverse membership in this community, and one may wonder whether we can speak of a nanotechnology community at all, or rather some loosely interlinked collection of faculty. One important function of a community is giving moral guidance, for instance by developing ethical standards and norms. The ad-hoc nature of the nanotechnology community, with its fluid boundaries and indistinct membership, makes this a significant challenge. We evaluate what this means for the attribution of responsibility to these groups. Considering the benefits of membership of this community, e.g. in terms of funding, we argue that it is critical for the community to develop some form of shared understanding of its moral responsibility. It may seem unfair to directly hold engineers responsible for activities in a distant part of the community, considering individuals' limited capacity-to-act. However, there may be an obligation to actively build a nanotechnology community, at least if we want to deal with any emerging issues of nanotechnology responsibly.

Paper long abstract:

Energy has been increasing in prominence as a key policy arena for the EU. Sustainability, security and commercial concerns have been used to justify large-scale investment and have materialised into legally binding commitments for EU countries. One such example lies with the initiatives for the increasing adoption of biofuels. However, first-generation biofuels have fallen out of favour due to issues around land use and energy yields, instead being replaced by 'advanced' biofuels towards fulfilling the same policy goals. Recently, strategies for biofuel production have started envisioning the tailoring of organisms for specific purposes (rather looking for the most appropriate naturally occurring organisms) and synthetic biology is increasingly called upon to make that tailoring possible.

In this work, I explore how synthetic biology is being positioned in the European Union's framework programmes to attain policy goals. I do so through an empirical study of a collaborative research project aiming to produce of microbial biofuels funded under FP7 and the policy context in which it is unfolding. In particular, I probe why bigness is the solution to making synthetic biology work and what kind of expertise is being recruited; the role industrial partners are playing in the research project; and how visions of the future promoted by the Horizon 2020 framework are impacting on how the partners develop the research project and how the community grows.

Paper long abstract:

Future Earth is a 10-year international research initiative on global environmental change (GEC) for sustainability that was launched in June 2012, merging several existing international GEC research programmes. Key features planned for its fully operational phase (from early 2015) include: an emphasis on integrated research across disciplines spanning natural and social science, the humanities and engineering; the co-design and co-production of research with stakeholder groups including funders, policy makers, civil society, and the media; and the initiative's global scope.

In its work towards institutional and disciplinary integration, Future Earth exemplifies (calls for) shifts in knowledge production and research communities towards overarching programmatic themes and 'anti-silo' collaboration across boundaries. But how Future Earth's role as a global, integrated, unified platform might be reconciled with, enable, or foreclose multiplicities of everyday and particular forms of knowledge and research practices, visions and pathways for the future remains to be seen.

Based on initial results of a qualitative case study of Future Earth (using documentary analysis, in depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation), this paper will explore how GEC and sustainability research futures are articulated and performed at research governance and project levels in Future Earth; the role of practices and devices such as research agenda-setting exercises and their outputs; the forms of inclusion and exclusion enacted in attempts to define and engage the Future Earth community; and the role of STS ideas on science and society in these processes and developments.

Paper long abstract:

In order for any community to emerge or be cultivated, associations have to be made. Yet, forming associations is not an easy task as they are never introduced into an 'empty world' (Mol 2010); other linkages always already exist. Hence a community may only be configured through associations that are knit in favourable ways across a multitude of heterogeneous entities (such as people, practices, ideas, tools and technologies) and, in doing so, replace existing ones (Latour 1988). This paper investigates how—and in which ways—membership and communal knowledge is configured, by looking at the ordering and configuration of a Web-based community as a performance of associations.

The research is based on a three year ethnographic study of ePractice: a large-scale, Web-based European Commission initiative that was meant to be(come) a European 'community of practice' for eGovernment. As such, 'community of practice' was not used as an analytical concept (e.g. Lave & Wenger 1991), but rather as a prescriptive term that designated a desirable objective. The paper argues that membership is not solely being performed through participation in a work or knowledge practice, but through the producing and consuming of community accounts and their continuous (re)configuration. In doing so, the notion of configuration draws attention to the 'imaginaries' and 'materialities' that technologies 'join together' (Suchman 2012) and to the 'agential cuts' (Barad 2007) that intra-actively produce community, its members and knowledge. The organisation of togetherness is reflected in the way these cuts are enacted.

Paper long abstract:

Synthetic biology provides an interesting case for analysing the challenges and difficulties to organise debates about emerging sciences - and the role of STS therein. French public authorities have called for a "real" and "transparent" dialogue between science and society and call for a "serene", "peaceful and constructive" public debate. A Forum of Synthetic Biology was therefore launched to offer a space of "open and pluralistic" debate in order to favour an "enlightened and constructive" discussion. Both natural as well as social scientists sat on the organizing committee.

However, the first debate organised in the scope of this Forum was interrupted by a group of protesters and the Forum has been suspended since. To understand the protests and critiques made I draw on the distinction between "divisible" and "indivisible" conflicts (Barthe, Hirschman). On the one hand, the Forum of Synthetic Biology considers itself as a space of dialogue and debate where people can deliberate and negotiate. It is a space of divisibility - a space to which STS scholars actively contributed. On the other extreme, the protesters were "indivisible" in their criticisms. They condemned the practices, objectives, products, institutions, and debates to do with synthetic biology. Even the sociologists involved have been criticised as "sociologists of acceptability". This begs the question, then, whether STS scholars who are involved in synthetic biology are inevitably in favour of "divisible" conflicts?

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes the strands of change encountered by technoscientific communities highlighted in the call for papers, namely 'top-down' research strategies and 'anti-silo' desires, as dilemmatic to individual researchers. Top-down research strategies are dilemmatic because researchers are expected to fulfil expectations from funding bodies and evaluation committees, but also from the academic community. Anti-silo desires are dilemmatic because interdisciplinary work is sometimes framed positively, but sometimes as not as rigorous as discipline-based work. Under these conditions researchers have to negotiate their identities in order to be taken as rigorous, coherent, accountable and responsible, addressing different groups' demands. This paper draws on concepts from narrative-discursive analysis (Taylor & Littleton, 2006), including ideological dilemmas (Billig et al., 1988), canonical narratives (Bruner, 1990), and trouble positions (Wetherell, 1998) to explore the identity work of researchers from a British university engaged in interdisciplinary projects such as zooarchaeology, mathematical neuroscience, bioinformatics, and STS. Researchers were interviewed between 2012 and 2013 about their careers and their experiences with interdisciplinary work. The findings suggest that some researchers achieve rigour, accountability and responsibility distancing themselves from what is identified here as the 'canonical narrative of the single discipline specialist' while others try to adhere to it. Furthermore, different ideological dilemmas are identified and named here as 'openness and rigour' dilemma, 'effort and reward' dilemma, 'individualism and collectivism' dilemma, and 'equality and expertise' dilemma. The canonical narrative and the ideological dilemmas create some 'trouble positions' that researchers may or may not be able to repair in their accounts.

Paper long abstract:

Increase of accessibility for 3D Printing, embedded systems or technical knowledge were the main reasons for the recent growth of makers, hackers or tinkering communities. Technological squats, hackerspaces or fab-labs (fabrication laboratories) are founded and developed all over the world. They develop different forms - from open scientific centres, through NGOs and social innovation hubs to independent, underground collectives.

This paper will be a summary of exploratory phase of participant observation and interviews of those communities done in Poland in 2014. It will discuss geographical constraints, different origins and selected projects done in the Polish DIY communities. The paper will also highlight historical actor-networks that are summoned as allies by DIY groups.

Information from the field will be discussed using science circulation model developed by B. Latour and other findings from STS. Results will show how DIY structures mobilize knowledge, became autonomous, relate with governments and public. This preliminary analysis will show similarities and differences in formal and non-formal science and technology groups in Poland.

Paper long abstract:

FabLabs, Hackerspaces and Makerspaces are community-based workshops that enable people to access versatile digital design and fabrication technologies; and join together in collaborative projects where they can make practically anything they wish. These physical spaces are networked through social media to other workshops and to on-line resources, such as open designs, code, training, and discussion forums. Workshop members meet up at regional and international events. Many cities around the world have or are opening community-based workshops. Some are self-organised, grassroots initiatives; others are linked to universities and other institutions. Many view themselves as part of different maker, hacker and autonomist movements.

Drawing on an in-depth literature review on grassroots digital fabrication and a conference workshop (including academics and practitioners), this paper examines three critical issues associated with developments in grassroots digital fabrication: sustainability, inclusivity, and creativity. Some advocates have argued that community-based digital fabrication workshops address issues of environmental sustainability and social justice, including issues of democracy and inclusivity, topics of sustainable production and consumption, and debates of more creative, skilling technologies. In the light of little current social science literature on the topic, such claims are still highly speculative. Research activity must be attentive to these critical issues confronting grassroots digital fabrication. After all, innovation as an activity involves risks and uncertainty, is destructive as well as creative, and whose appropriation of benefits can exclude certain social interests.

Paper long abstract:

Governments generally but particularly in the UK now emphasize the importance of stronger scientific evidence to support policy. In the UK, this commitment is partly reaction to high profile policy debacles where departments were unprepared for significant events that had serious economic, social and political consequences. Recently, calls for the creation of larger scale government supported programmes in the mould of the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project have been made to address new, complex scientifico-social issues. In the EU, large scale programmes aimed at "grand challenges" are underway, directed at large scale socio-technical problems with global public good characteristics. This paper considers how two major government departments in the UK engage with science to generate evidence for policy. We use newly available bibliometric data from the Web of Knowledge to investigate for the first time publicly identified science supporting the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and Department for Food, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Specifically, we examine characteristics of the knowledge generating communities that support policy in these two departments, to show where research is being carried out and by whom, the extent of simultaneous funding by other funding bodies, and the extent to which policy knowledge results from international participation and the permanency of such communities. Surprisingly, we observe that much policy relevant research funded by DEFRA is highly international in terms of the collaborations that undertake it. Publicly acknowledged MOD research, while less international in terms of performance and simultaneous funding, is also more international than might be expected.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we focus on the current emergence of synthetic biology (SB) as a techno-scientific fields (TSF) whose ambition is to apply engineering principles to biology. The process of emergence of synthetic biology has to be analyzed as a socio-technical one, where cognitive and social processes are intertwined and which involve: 1- cumulative building of techno-scientific networks, through which new ideas are put into practice, related to new entities, instruments, experimental practices, modeling, etc. 2- cumulative building of the social dimensions of the field: boundaries, positions of actors related to their capital, etc.3- management of the interactions between the scientific field and its environment.

We claim that it is possible to analyze this process with a scientometric approach designed to follow a process of structuration (Giddens 1984). This approach is inspired both by actor network theory which is adapted to catch local processes of stabilization in fluid situations and by theories of emerging fields which pay attention to the emergence of new structures. This leads us to use the analysis of the dynamics of socio-semantic networks to study the co-construction of emerging structures (boundaries, core sets, stratification, etc.) and cognitive norms (core concepts, ideas, instruments, etc.). We also focus on the key role of "institutional entrepreneurs" that goes typically beyond the scientific community, and involves diverse dimensions of research and innovation policies: safety regulation, IPR's, "ethical" dimensions, etc.

Paper long abstract:

The plethora and heterogeneity of data in systems medicine have caused a change in approaches to data handling and processing. To digitally store data generated from different biological processes and to link different databases from disparate sources, new methodological and conceptual approaches have become necessary. Hence, methods and methodologies from high-performance computing and informatics have been applied to develop extensive ICT infrastructures in different medical domains. These infrastructures are supposed to provide secure access to the increasingly growing databases and to make data standardized, integrated and communicable. By using ICT infrastructures, medical researchers have the advantage to easily connect and collaborate within the emerging interdisciplinary communities (Leonelli/Ankeny 2012). However, in spite of their meaning to organizing and finally doing systems research, ICT infrastructures are often regarded not as being part of the original research processes.

In contrast to this, we hypothesize that ICT infrastructures are not merely service facilities to support research activities, but enable and restrict doing systems research at the same time. Based on a case study in systems cancer research, we will argue that the understanding and modeling of biological systems is profoundly shaped by ICT technologies and their underlying conceptualizations. Additionally, individual scientists and research institutions cede the responsibilities of the activities associated with standardization, integration and management of data. As the systems medicine communities basically rely on the use of ICT infrastructures, these computational architectures are promised to become new, powerful formations for knowledge production and knowledge producer communities at the same time.

Paper long abstract:

Clinical trials have gained much authority in establishing the safety and efficacy of drugs, medical appliances and medical procedures. Furthermore, along with the rise in numbers, clinical trials have been moving outside of Europe and North America to other settings. In this paper I draw on the social worlds/arenas framework, advanced by such scholars as Susan Leigh Star, Adele E. Clark and Joan Fujimura, to analyse what has happened after the practice of clinical trials arrived to a Russian research centre at the beginning of the 1990s. Using interviews with various actors involved in preforming trials at the centre, documents analysis and participant observation, I show how clinical trials conduct becomes a boundary process. This process enfolds at the intersections of the participating social worlds of investigators, patients, industry, healthcare professionals and regulatory authorities, which come to form a relatively stable arena. I examine how clinical trials conduct reorders social worlds by enabling novel relations, commitments and ways to meet needs of different actors in the trial arena, thus, allowing for continuous production of biomedical knowledge.

Analysing trials conduct through social worlds/arenas framework allows to reveal the complex, often locally specific relations and arrangements between multiple social worlds. It, thus, helps show how and why various kinds of work in science and technology are done. It also brings attention to the diversity of socio-political circumstances including differences in power and resources underlying the globalising clinical research enterprise.