Paper long abstract:

The conduct of "Secret Science" in the defence field has generated distinctive cultures, institutions and organisational forms that have structured the selection of sources of scientific and technological knowledge and processes of engagement with the wider world (Balmer, 2012; Reppy, 1999). This paper will consider some of the issues that arise when the boundary between secrecy and openness is renegotiated.

"Zones of interaction" (Cloud, 2001) have always existed between civilian and military institutions with complex engagement between government defence research establishments, companies and some academics. However, the last two decades have seen increasing efforts by the military to increase engagement beyond the traditional institutions of Secret Science. We explore the tensions and challenges that are arising as the military seek to engage with an agenda of 'openness' as well as hitherto peripheral or so-called 'non-traditional' sources of science and scientific advice.

We show how this has prompted debates over the appropriate limits to opening-up; how to open-up; sharing and transparency of scientific needs, strategies, results and intellectual property; and mechanisms of engagement as well as those who should be engaged, and those who should be excluded. The paper draws on interviews undertaken with officials responsible for S&T in the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) as well as scientists in academic, intermediary and industrial organisations that are supplying S&T to the MOD. We focus on two contrasting fields of application (missiles and mental health) that have very different knowledge bases, mechanisms of engagement and degrees of openness to wider scientific communities.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation examines the historical erasure of the South African Apartheid era biological and chemical weapons programme. It will offer an account of the processes associated with limiting the regard for the programme within international diplomacy as well as by life scientists and professional science associations in South Africa. In relation to both, consideration will be given to how this offensive programme has been set aside within historical memory; a story that raises questions about the productive lures of secrecy and the ways in which attempts to reveal result in concealment to form a complex dynamic over time. A goal will be to ask how the recognition of such absences today through STS can be translated into analysis that is practically relevant. The presentation draws on twenty years of experience of Chandre Gould investigating this programme (including through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) as well as a set of interviews conducted in 2013-14 through a UK Economic and Social Research Council funded project.

Paper long abstract:

What accounts for differences in matters of non-concern across different national contexts? In this paper, we consider how policy communities in the United States and United Kingdom are explicitly attending to some concerns regarding the governance of synthetic biology, and are turning other issues into matters of non-concern. Can variables such as institutional structures, funding mandates, political cultures, sensitizing events, and rhetorical strategies — traditionally matters of focus for analysing matters of concern — also help to account for the production of non-concerns? We explore this question through two case studies: first, the distribution of synthetic seeds from a crowd-sourced Do-It-Yourself biology (DIYBio) campaign in the US, and second, the case of a British journalist who was able to mail-order a genetic fragment of the smallpox virus. In the US case, we ask how it was that what, from a British perspective, might be seen as an opportunity to conduct proactive citizen engagement about the governance of DIYBio led instead to the government considering such effort as unnecessary. In the UK case, an event that would be seen in the US as an example of a failure in biosecurity preparedness was quickly determined to be adequately handled by existing governance mechanisms. Our focus is on exploring the adequacy of analytic tools traditionally employed to study the co-production of knowledge and social order to instead address the co-production of non-knowledge and social order.

Paper long abstract:

How political is the development of security technology? STS has opened the black box of wider science and technology processes but has had less to say about security. Security studies has engaged with Science and Technology largely as finished products, already developed devices and their possible use and misuse. This disciplinary divide tends to enact a clear cut between the socio-technical world of the laboratory and the socio-political world of security policy and practice. Our question, then, is how do these two worlds and their issues merge and emerge together?

Issues of risk; uncertainty; and success or failure permeate both worlds; but how do they cross the boundary between them? This paper draws on in depth multi-sited ethnographic research on the development of a handheld CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiation, Nuclear and Explosives) detector for border guards. The EU funded Handhold project consists of 9 partner institutions (including academic research institutes, SMEs, and end-users) across 5 European countries. We follow this process by tracing issues of risk, uncertainty, and the nature of success and failure. While these types of issues (and their silencing) permeate both the laboratory and the world of security practice, we seek to identify how they emerge across these worlds, and how they shape those worlds. In doing so we address when, where and how issues of security politics appear in the lab? How is that politics distributed, settled, silenced, or postponed? How do these issues and non-issues shape the development processes of security technology?

Paper long abstract:

With the advances in neuroscience in the 21st century, there is an increased risk that this research could be used for non-peaceful purposes by state or non-state actors. The latter issue is generally referred to as the dual-use problem, which has created a debate among scientists and security experts about the duties and responsibilities of researchers. While this discussion predominantly discusses issues arising from microbiology research, it has not created much interest in the neuroscience community. In order to spark a debate, a project on how to improve ethics education for neuroscientists was carried out which led to the development of an open access, on-line 12 lectures module. While the project delivered this practical tool, it also raised questions about emancipation as well as power and its emergence. The paper analyses how the discussion of the issue of dual-use has led to a power struggle between security experts and the scientific community on what is acceptable when publishing scientific results. While this dissensus is primarily one-sided, security questioning science, the project and the module aimed to provide a counter-narrative by enabling science to question and point out deficits within the security arena.

Paper long abstract:

Nuclear safety is multinational, national, organizational, technical and systemic by nature. Especially after the Fukushima accident safety issues gained momentum and led to an upgrading of nuclear safety standards by the IAEA. The emphasis has been on strengthening preventive measures against external hazards, enhancing nuclear emergency response and strengthening safety culture, so that safety should be given top priority in leadership and management within nuclear facilities. The paper addresses similarities and differences in safety assumptions among Finnish nuclear safety regulators and nuclear industry operators by looking at key concepts such as safety, safety culture and risks as boundary objects, which connect different experts and professionals and provide common space for discussion and dialogue. At the same time the paper focuses on how these concepts also separate experts and professionals who may have very different understandings of substantive issues. Empirical materials consist of revisions of the IAEA safety standards and national nuclear safety standards, interviews with nuclear safety regulators belonging to different subunits of organizations and having different educational background and working experience, as well as operators of nuclear industry. Method of analysis is content analysis. The objective of the study is to get an understanding of different assumptions and contents related to the concepts of safety, safety culture and risks among regulators and operators of nuclear industry, as well as of patterns of thought which may affect safety culture and the implementation of safety.

Paper long abstract:

Health debates form a public arena where the role of scientific and technological developments is often discussed. Obesity is a good example for such debates, as it touches on a variety of scientific concerns. It is however not only presented as a public health issue, but wide scale societal weight-gain often appears as epitomizing what is perceived as modern decay. The framing of obesity as a public health issue ties into broad discourses about societal change, unwanted developments and future collective problems. Fears of dystopic obese futures are accompanied by accounts of better and more active pasts. Such narratives show how temporal narratives play an intrinsic role in what becomes shaped as a concern, and what not. As Barbara Adam (2003:60) has argued, time often forms a "deep structure of taken-for-granted, unquestioned assumptions". Investigating how such temporal narratives inform citizens´ relations to the social world and shape concerns, and equally importantly, non-concerns in everyday life gives insight in how problems are constructed, understood and picked-up. Drawing on focus-group data from the larger research project "Perceptions and Imaginations of Obesity", conducted under the lead of Ulrike Felt, this paper traces concerns about pasts, futures and changes. It draws on investigations of expectations, anticipations and their performativity and applies conceptual thinking from STS studies on time to an interactive and situated practice. The paper wants to explore time and temporal sense-making in practices of talking and negotiating, in order to see how phenomena become collective matters of concern and non-concern.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years the relevance of ethics to the governance of techno-scientific advancement has been increasing at a growing pace in a variety of fields, from biology to data mining and processing, from nanotech to geoengineering. Research projects are regularly required to take in consideration ethical aspects. Ethics councils spread. Bio-nano-info-ethics books and journals flourish. Public engagement in deliberative processes is typically expected to elicit the ethical dimensions of innovation.

The rise of ethics, however, has been counterbalanced by a decline of politics. Ethics councils replace politically-oriented institutions, as the original US Office of Technology Assessment. Ethical debates themselves are generally handled through standardizing metrics, which expunge positions deemed incompatible. 'How' replaces 'whether or not' or 'for the benefit of whom'. The latest EC framework, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), allegedly aims to address also the later aspects, yet the predominance of an ethical concern is evident, beginning with the label itself.

In short, we are confronted with a sustained 'politics of ethics' (Felt & Wynne 2007). Yet the issue remains largely neglected within STS scholarship, and the situation may even worsen in the future. This, I will argue, for two reasons; two 'side effects' of otherwise valuable trends, one methodological, the other theoretical: 1) the growing relevance of ethnographic, practice-oriented approaches; 2) the turn away from epistemic deconstruction and towards an ontology of thingness and corporeality as ethically-charged, liberating processes of becoming.

The paper is theoretical and draws on analysis of recent academic and policy literature.

Paper long abstract:

An extensive body of literature reflects on how the situatedness of fieldwork affects our research outcomes. Yet, surprisingly, while covering the many dimensions of 'how' research is done, the 'what' is usually not discussed. Few studies reflect on the craft of constructing units of analysis, on the co-creation of the matter of concern and what problems of method the researcher might run into.

This paper aims to make a methodological contribution to the follow-the-actor approach in both interpretative and material-semiotic studies of politics. The argument is developed by reflecting on the authors' engagement in two research projects. These projects studied real-world experiments in crime control and sustainable development. Experiments are sites par excellence where objects of interest are instable. We discuss three methodological problems we encountered: 1) informants were not always fully committed to their projects. This had consequences for the motivations and rationalities we attribute to them; 2) the projects we studied shifted, beginnings and endings changed, and various sub-projects seemed to develop; 3) doing real-time research had consequences for how we made our objects hang together.

In both cases, units of analysis changed meaning and form as they became subject to contestation, reconfiguration and revision. Rather than brushing aside these uncertainties and power conflicts, we argue that uncertainties and conflicts experienced by the researcher might be productive in re-constructing the agency of informants and their emotional upheavals when they reconsider their involvement in the experiments under study.

Paper long abstract:

One fortuitous side-effect of transnational or 'global' infrastructures for the production of scientific knowledge and technological development is that they stimulate the spread of STS teaching. A case in point is Singapore, a country that made an international splash soon after the turn of the millennium by tying part of its economic fate to research and development in the biosciences, and where since then an STS community has been steadily gaining momentum at the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological University.

This talk connects to the track's theme by asking: How does STS get taught? What are the presumptions and priorities of those who teach STS, and with what consequences for what is, and is not, identified as of concern, interest and relevance to students and societies?

The talk speaks to such issues by offering a view from the trenches. Reflecting on six years of teaching STS at the National University of Singapore, first in the Department of Sociology and now at Tembusu College, I use the notion of STS as (an) 'un-discipline' to comment on the possible place for and potential of STS in educating undergraduates in Singapore. The broader aim of the talk is to stimulate discussion on the purpose and configuration of STS education in different contexts and parts of the world.

Paper long abstract:

Shortly before the publication of his Laws of the Markets, a foundational text in the social studies of finance (SSF), Michel Callon argued that a "passionate attention to the performative dimension of economics should replace the vain denunciation of its limits" (Callon & Latour 1997). This edict has been faithfully heeded as SSF has proliferated into a field concerned with the production of prices, the organization of financial knowledge, and the coordination of both trading rooms and "world" markets. SSF is not apolitical per se, and some leading practitioners (MacKenzie 2009) have called for a greater attention to the politics of market design. Yet the field is often explicitly anti-critical, rejecting "denunciatory" critique for fine-grained investigations of the material practices by which economic theories are translated into market agencies. Both the moral-political and scientific "correctness" of economic models and materials are considered non-questions to the extent that they are able to contribute to a calculative assemblage which, regardless of its fragility, performs financial markets. Looking back at the 2008 crisis, denunciations of the limits of economics have proliferated, mobilised by external critics and leading practitioner-academics, and entering into calculative practices "in the wild." Some have agitated for a more "realistic" rooting of economic models in the sciences of complexity which govern other "natural" processes; others have pressed for a more "human" economics upon which to build a more humane economy. This paper examines how far the ontological commitments and methodological orientations of STS-SSF scholars themselves render these debates as non-issues.

Paper long abstract:

It is generally agreed upon in STS that assisted reproductive technologies (ART) have various implications for and provide challenges to societies and that ethics is pivotal to its governance. Many studies show that bioethics has become a framing through which life itself is apprehended and through which policies and practices are and should be legitimized. However, little attention has been paid to how ART are constructed as ethical topic and what this entails. This paper seeks to address this gap and investigates the ways by which certain matters of ART are rendered (non)issues by framing them as ethically problematic. Using data from my PhD project which researches the debate on the current regulation of ART in Austria I look at how, by whom and under what circumstances assisted reproductive technologies are constructed as an ethical topic. Different actors enact different objects of concerns in the debate. I want to pay particular attention to the absences that emerge in these practices. As will be shown, enacting certain matters in ART as ethical concerns influences how these concerns are organized in terms of how and by whom they can be presented as well as how they emerge as present or absent in the debate. Hence, I do not take an ethical framing for granted but aim to unravel how bioethics influences the ways issues are rendered either as (ir)relevant or as (non)debatable.

Paper long abstract:

As extension of the parliament, the participatory devices try to achieve the democratic utopia, that is, the full participation of the political body. In that sense, paradoxically, they are both the affirmation and the negation of the parliamentarian logic on the grounds of representation. How that paradox is settled? Who becomes a legitimate political actor? Through a qualitative study on why people do not participate in such instances, carried out in Catalonia, we present an analysis of the construction of categories of non-participants ("ghosts") by responsible technicians of participation ("ghostbusters"). At the same time, we explore in a symmetrical way how non-participants make sense of their absence from the devices of participation ("containment units") and contextualize the recruitment strategies ("traps"). In the first place, we conclude that for the success of the mechanism it is necessary to invoke "ghosts", which means, paradoxically, that the non-participants must be present despite their absence in order to legitimize the process and shape the identity of those who participate. Secondly, the strategies of inclusion/exclusion deployed by the "ghostbusters" allow for the dispositive to work administrating the problematic tension of politic representation -if everyone took part in it, it would not be a political work. This way, the participatory devices are constituted in apparatuses of capture of (present) participants as well as of (absent) non-participants, that dispute not only what is the public and the issue, but also what is democracy.

Paper long abstract:

The paper aims at presenting the emergence of a legal protection for whistleblowers in France in the domains of health and the environment. The enactment of such a legal protection for whistleblowers has been warmly promoted by NGOs and social scientists involved in the democratization of scientific choices and strongly influenced by STS. The paper proposes a socio-legal history of this evolution. It highlights a dynamic interplay between social mobilization and legal categories.

The paper focuses on three main aspects. First, the paper shows how the promoters of a legal protection had to reshape their project to fit into the existing legal system as it was heading its way to the Parliament. The civic mobilization for the protection of whistleblowers had to cope with an entirely new set of references including legal technicalities and to leave aside more critical or radical discourses. Second, the paper stresses the overriding impact of legal technique on the design of a protection for whistleblowers. The already existing legal protection for whistleblowers in other domains, such as discrimination and corruption, plays an important role. In France, the protection against discrimination works as a model for posterior legal developments. Even if discrimination is not at stake, the legal design enacted for discrimination is hardly escapable. Third, the paper focuses on the role of legal scholarship, as an epistemic community, in the unification of a legal notion of "whislteblower" in French law, leaving the idiosyncratic history of each legal trend unseen.

Paper long abstract:

The 'participatory turn' in STS has resulted in growth of arrangements designed to consult and make decisions on techno-scientific matters of public concern. In their form of 'deliberative procedures', these arrangements are opening up to the heterogeneity of voices and perspectives. However, are they open to the heterogeneity of modes of solidarity? We study this issue following Laurent Thevenot's approach to what he calls "regimes of engagement". The data used in the research come from an ethnographic approach to a Citizen Conference on ICT and older people held recently in Spain. The analysis of the ways participants and organizers deal with personal worries and testimonies expressed during the Conference shed light on the tensions between intimate and public forms of engagement. We intend to prove how the procedure's architecture orients people to some engagement formats, constituting others as matters of non-concern. In particular, the arrangement seems to be more attentive to 'civic' solidarities; thus organizers and participants deploy visible efforts on shifting the engagement far from familiar attachments, intimate places and personal convictions. As a result, an absence of concern on ‛private issues' is produced, and the Citizen Conference becomes a 'public space' oppressive for familiar experiences. The outcomes of our analysis call for a major integration of a plurality of engagement formats in participatory experiences and procedures.