Paper long abstract:

First proposed around 1993, the ontology has taken the database world by storm. In that year, Thomas Gruber, an informational scientist, wrote: "The term [ontology] is borrowed from philosophy, where an ontology is a systematic account of Existence". Informational scientists were quick to adopt the term and the idea: an ontology is a vocabulary wedded to formal logic. Outsiders raised eyebrows. Why use a word with such a heavy load of philosophical connotations? Yet, the term is surprisingly apt. It goes straightforwardly "back to Aristotle" and after a short while, the term received the approval of professional philosophers, such as Barry Smith who in 2002 launched the Basic Formal Ontology Project, with many applications in the neurosciences and other biomedical sciences. Smith's background is in Aristotelian realism, combined with analytical philosophy.

From a conceptual point of view, the ontology has obvious advantages for users (i.e. "domain scientists"), yet one would expect that it also has important limitations. In principle, domain scientists might become enabled to revise existing structures of ontologies. Yet, in many cases, scientists suspect that curators will control ontologies. A particular taxonomic logic would structure the theoretical and experimental practices in the sciences. Will non-ontological structures for databases be a way out for scientists? I suspect their possibility on the basis of the existence of various "paradigms" within taxonomy: the deductive-hierarchical, the intuitive-pragmatic, the baroque and the typological approaches to taxonomy.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is based on the on-going observation of the development of open source software (DataSHIELD) to facilitate secure data analysis in the biomedical sciences. DataSHIELD is a technology that offers an alternative to the traditional means by which data is shared by cohort studies for meta-analysis. It is foremost a technical response to the ethico-legal problem of sharing data about individual participants in the studies.

Existing ethical and legal discussions about data sharing are often given in terms of concepts such as privacy and confidentiality. In the early stages of development however the technological 'solution' that DataSHIELD offers was shown to transform concerns with privacy and confidentiality into concerns with technological security (Murtagh et al 2012).

This presentation will examine how, as the DataSHIELD technology continues rapid development, its implementation and infrastructure is shaped by concerns with data security and access control. The presentation will briefly discuss the way the DataSHIELD technology addresses the ethico-legal problems of data sharing, but primarily examine the new ways that DataSHIELD changes how those issues arise and how they are framed in terms of technological security and access control.

Paper long abstract:

The term 'internet-user' is not a homogeneous one, and survey findings consistently demonstrate this in terms of different levels of digital engagement which in turn reflect 'offline' socio-economic and demographic differences. However, the social processes linking digital engagement with the cultural beliefs that people hold regarding personal information disclosure and the trust accorded to both corporate and state digital service providers, is much less well understood. This paper present the findings of a qualitative study of internet users, retirees and the unemployed living in an ethnically-mixed inner city district, frequently associated with either limited levels of digital engagement or outright digital exclusion. The study explores the challenges of mediated communication faced by these groups and emergent cultures of digital use.

Paper long abstract:

While laboratory ethnography successfully engages in the question of social construction of scientific facts it has paid much less attention to applied sciences and the social construction of technologies. Further, it treats the laboratory as an isolated place focusing only on scientists as main actors. This perspective is inadequate when it comes to an ethnographic study of a security research project, namely the development of a full body scanner. I will show that such a research project depends heavenly on the merging of civilian and military sectors, corporate and state interests. These dependencies constrain the everyday work at the laboratory via the project as an institutional form. Although the rethorics accompanying projects in security research highlight partnership, equality and cooperation projects put actors in very different positions. While the scientists are sceptical or uninterested towards the promises made by state officials or company managers, there is a structural dependence especially on corporate interests. Still, my ethnographic research raises some doubt, whether security research produces new security technologies. The ressources provided don't suffice, enterprises aren't too intrigued to participate in a public research program and to engage with its bureaucracy. Could it therefore be that security research programs are not about new products in the first place but rather about generating legitimations for a new market?

Paper short abstract:

City planning means drawing together disparate materialities and concerns. Plans then serve as communication interfaces to align and establish a complex set of socio-technical problems. On basis of these insights I discuss "heterogeneous design" as a rule of thumb for participatory planning.

Paper long abstract:

Maastricht, the Netherlands, refurbishes its industrial heritage for creative industry purposes. My case study on two planning projects scrutinizes the chances for this process to involve local subcultures. One is a deadlocked controversy about a particular edifice; the other has overcome most local resistance by means of participatory efforts. In both cases, actors employ diverging visions of post-industrial future. The contrasting insights allowed for general conclusions about the challenges of transforming the city's cultural political economy by means of citizen participation.

Drawing on interview and document research I will make two arguments:

First, the interaction between the parties involved boils down to a twofold challenge for participatory efforts, a paradox, which seems applicable to other planning processes. While both projects clearly are subject to a certain pressure to homogenise a suitable plan, a variety of local concerns urge the evolving plan to remain negotiable. Correspondingly symmetrical research yields the following results: planners already engage as translators of diverse knowledges while plans serve as communication interfaces to align and establish a complex set of socio-technical problems. In fact, they are used as "trials of strengths", as a capacity to challenge or expand political consensus. More generally, the observed practices are attempts to cope with the gradual expertization of planning processes as well as the interpretative unruliness of visualizations.

Second, "heterogeneous design" may serve as an operational paradigm of socio-technical planning endeavors. From this perspective sound planning requires a constant iteration between technical and social design.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is about the writing of an evaluation report of the Dutch mission in the Southern Afghan province of Uruzgan. The report silently claims to be a piece of writing that simply communicates the results of evaluation research into the state of affairs in Uruzgan. This is made possible by the effacement of the efforts that went into its making: the report has no explicit author and there are no traces of the constitution of the text and the infrastructural hazards of writing in Afghanistan. Drawing on work and fieldwork as an evaluator trainee for an Afghan research organization in 2010/11 this paper will discuss this transparency and effacement. Bringing together work on authorship, format and infrastructures I will address the socio-material work that goes into the production of a text unsettling established distinctions between the author, the text, and writing infrastructure.

Paper long abstract:

The entanglements of science and other human endeavours in the intellectual ecosystems of contemporary societies have been given detailed treatment in much recent STS literature. The attention, however, is usually directed at expertise emanating from the more traditional and established scientific disciplines (i.e. natural and engineering sciences), biomedicine or forms of social science that generally have a pronounced quantitative dimension (e.g. economics). The specificity of sociology as a purveyor of knowledge has, curiously enough, animated little interest among science studies scholars.

This paper explores a number of challenges and complications that an STS project can face in trying to elicit and articulate the views of sociologists working in a post-Soviet context (Latvia). I argue that, in addition to being confronted by considerable internal heterogeneity vis-a-vis political and metaphysical commitments, a significant problem is the friction between academically related disciplinary cultures whose surface similarities obfuscate differences in both professional and theoretical outlooks. Furthermore, while some of these differences are due to the specificity of sociology as an object of study, others, I argue, stem from my respondents' understanding of the relationship between STS and sociology. The paper is based on my interviews with Latvian sociologists (and my experiences thereof) as part of my PhD at Lancaster University.

Paper long abstract:

How to care for something that is ugly? How to care for something that is a bad? How to care for something that you might want to get rid of altogether? And more complicated so, how to care for something that is an absent presence, or, a potentiality? In short, how to care for race?

I am not quite sure whether these questions can be answered in general, or even for race. So, I will shift my focus from race as an object of care, to method as an object of concern. Drawing on work of Jeannette Pols and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, I will ponder a position of care for race, and attend to our modes of knowing this object. However our modes of knowing race are rather restricted. We have come to know it as either a pre-given biological fact hidden in the body, or as a social construct devised in our collectives minds. Or again, as a mixture of both. These positions assume that we know what it is. Especially if we take into account that the question: what is race?, is hardly ever raised. In my view we have hardly begun to understand this unruly and wild object called race. Drawing on examples from forensic identification, in this paper I explore methods that help us to study race as a nature-culture assemblage. I will argue that such 'performative' method invite us to engage with our objects in their various guises. They thus might even give hints about how to care for them.

Paper long abstract:

Recent research has argued that emotion does (e.g. Pickersgill, 2012) and should (e.g. Silverman, 2012) play a central role within scientific knowledge production. Within animal research, emotional relationships between individual researchers and nonhuman research subjects, for example, have been cited as a means of countering asymmetrical power relations in laboratory contexts, providing the foundation for crafting complex, co-shaped ethical relations (Haraway, 2008). These approaches foreground somatic relationships between the actors involved in research and challenge instrumental approaches to knowledge-production in order to expose tensions within the formal ethical frameworks that legitimise these approaches (Greenhough and Roe, 2011).

This paper problematizes such valorizations of 'love' through an examination of the historical consolidation of beagles as the standard dog for use in laboratory research. Beagles came to be positioned at the centre of the animal research laboratory, in part, because their 'merry disposition' makes them amenable to forming relations with researchers. Beagles, therefore, illustrate the vulnerability of 'love' to instrumentalization and exploitation within scientific practice. This case-study thus opens questions about whether 'love' can still act as a meaningful foundation for ethics within scientific knowledge production, which unsettles asymmetrical power-relations, and - if so - what can be done to guard against its instrumentalization?

Paper long abstract:

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains the most disease endemic region worldwide. The great need for, and insufficient access to healthcare services and medical innovations is often the difference between life and death in this region. The increasing shift of clinical research activities from Europe and North America to lower-resourced countries found within the SSA region provides hope for addressing many neglected tropical diseases - through access to medical innovations, resources and increased research capacity - for populations with limited healthcare options. However, it is often the case that the local populations hosting research activities have little input in the types and design of research international organizations are interested in supporting. Research participants in particular are not afforded a voice in the governance of research, how products of research are distributed, how research objectives are developed and the processes used to achieve these goals. The lack of attention paid to these concerns exposes a gap in our ability to understand what a responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework may look like in the context of international clinical research. This paper attempts to contribute to closing this gap by exploring these concerns through ethnography and in-depth interviews. It elicits multi-stakeholder perspectives and expectations on what they consider to be RRI and what is required for the co-construction of a RRI framework, fruitful for both science and society. This works draws on the empirical data I have collected from clinical trial stakeholders in the course of two years of fieldwork in Ghana and Tanzania.

Paper long abstract:

How do life experiences affect the body, brain and behaviour? The means by which social factors, such as poverty, become somatically embodied is poorly understood. The emerging field of epigenetics promises to bring a new wealth of evidence to help understand these processes. Epigenetics involves molecular mechanisms that translate social-environmental information into altered patterns of gene regulation and provides a paradigm for understanding "how the social gets under the skin". It is an emerging domain within post-genomics that crosses the boundaries between biological, medical and social science and is being constructed within a series of epistemic niches. This paper analyses new scientific discourses, ontological shifts and changing normative regimes around one of these sites: studies of the link between socio-economic status and inequalities in health. Epigenetic mechanisms are now seen as important in mediating the persistent link between deprivation and poor health. A number of socio-technical dynamics are involved, including: a) the creation of new hybrid forms of biosocial knowledge; 2) the destabilisation of established boundaries between the body and its environment; 3) The constitution of what might be called the 'epigenetic body' characterised by new chains of causality in terms of disease aetiology, changing temporalities that extend across generational, and a flattened molecular ontology in which social categories like food, class, and gender are increasingly reconceptualised in terms of their molecular effects on the body. In conclusion, some reflections will be made about how epigenetics may provide a rationale for new forms of intervention that target particular social groups.

Paper long abstract:

Considered the gold standard of evidence-based research, the methodology of

Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) is the procedure par excellence for establishing whether a particular medical or health intervention is safe and efficacious. To do so, the intervention must be isolated from other coexisting factors on the basis of which it can be statistically evaluated. If it is found 'efficacious' by the RCT, social scientists may then be enlisted to address challenges by co-existing factors to the 'everyday life' effectiveness of the intervention. Thus the distinction between 'efficacy' and 'effectiveness' upon which RCTs rest, makes available a specific centre-periphery mode of multidisciplinarity. By focusing on a case study of conflicting results generated by four multi-site RCTs which found an HIV prevention pill to be efficacious in men but only in some women and attributed to dosing failure by those in which it did not work, we review the way in which the RCT notion of 'efficacy' creates a disciplinary boundary and a particular understanding of what it means for a pill to 'work'. Although the constraints generated by this epistemological approach provide statistically significant data from which to take guidance, the disciplinary boundary itself delimits and, indeed, may be argued to skew the nature of this guidance. Drawing on the work of Francois Jullien, Isabelle Stengers, A.N. Whitehead and pragmatists, William James and John Dewey, we propose a reconstruction of the concept of 'efficacy' mindful of the centre-periphery mode and constitutive of new possibilities that may come from interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement.

Paper long abstract:

A few weeks before the publication of psychiatric manual DSM-5, in April 2013, Director of the NIMH Thomas Insel wrote in his blog that the patients suffering from mental disorders deserve better than a manual which validity is inadequate because not solidly founded on genetics and neuroscience. Widely publicized on the web, Insel's post advocated a new method introduced in 2009: « NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system ». RDoC aims at accelerating the translation of knowledge from basic research to clinical practice. Translational psychiatric neuroscience is at the heart of European and US research policies and deserve close attention from a social studies of science and medicine perspective because, I will argue in this paper, it is part of the new sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009) of contemporary mental health systems. In this paper, I will study the needs, promises and critiques that translational neuroscientists face when dealing with mental disorders as an object of study. Drawing on expert interviews of clinicians-researchers and on a review of the literature on RDoC, I will explore the narratives of the future, and how the translation gap or lag appears in these narratives, together with its solutions (transforming diagnosis, better interdisciplinarity, knowledge brokering…). This paper proposes a sociology of translational psychiatric neuroscience which maps the envisioned futures incorporated in today brain science.

Paper long abstract:

In an STS-informed empirical research I explore how scientific knowledge is produced in today's computational neuroscience. Therefore, my case in point for the computerized modeling of cerebral functions is the Blue Brain Project (and the emerged Human Brain Project), located in Lausanne (Switzerland). The project claims to be not an artificial intelligence (AI) project. At the same time it tries to reverse engineer the whole human brain in a supercomputer with a bottom-up approach.

Social scientists have described computer simulations as an epistemic practice with a new quality of artificiality and as a way of "experimenting with theories" (Küppers/ Lenhard). Simulations use the language of physics and mathematics to describe the epistemic object. According to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, "nature itself" (in a technological and scientific sense) only becomes real as a model.

As in the "situated epistemology" (Kay 2001) of cybernetics and AI, todays neuroscience and cognitive science develop new ideas of how to meet the challenges of the complexity of the brain. My paper deals with the question, how the constellation of a brain simulation can be epistemically active, especially when it comes to new data driven approaches? Do computer simulations have special capabilities in an epistemic process to call them the third pillar of science next to theory and experiment? Or has science already reach the 4th paradigm, proposed by the computer science optimist Jim Gray?