Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We explore the relations between molecular and bacteriological microbiology through the lens of “cultures of culturing” and “cultures without culturing.” We argue that microbiology is characterised by differentiated evidentiary pluralism that position molecular microbiology as perpetually new.

Paper long abstract

Molecular microbiology has been a rapidly developing field since the 1930s. However, molecular-based techniques aimed at substituting culture-based practices of bacteriological microbiology remain to be framed as novel, emerging and insufficiently trustworthy. We examine the relations between the molecular and bacteriological microbiology through the lens of “cultures of culturing” and their emerging counterpart: “cultures without culturing.” Pure culture as a technical procedure and an epistemic ideal is stabilised in classical microbiology. To culture a microorganism is to render it visible, controllable, and demonstrable. The rise of molecular phylogenetics and environmental sequencing destabilised this evidentiary regime. Through genetic analysis, microbiologists described vast microbial lineages without cultured representatives. These developments have generated what we term “cultures without culturing”: epistemic formations in which phylogenetic placement, and ecological recurrence operate as sufficient warrants for microbial existence. Yet, this epistemic foundation of molecular microbiology, despite, for instance, offering faster methods of bacterial identification and clinical diagnostics, is often framed as novel and epistemically inferior to classic cultures.

Drawing on discourse analysis of publicly available sources (including methodological and review papers, editorials in leading microbiology journals, and e.g. debates surrounding Candidatus taxa) we analyse how evidentiary authority is constructed across culture-based and molecular approaches. We argue that contemporary microbiology is characterised not by a simple culture-to-molecular paradigm shift but by differentiated evidentiary pluralism. We show how cultures of culturing have established enduring epistemic frame with knowledge and technologies coming out of cultures without culturing being seen as perpetually new, and thus perpetually requiring demonstrations of trustworthiness.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This panel explores how the (re-)emergence of bacterial vaccine development has been accepted as a partial solution to the problem of antimicrobial resistance. It offers a comparative review of two key empirical case studies, tracing the political and institutional work that surrounds this field.

Paper long abstract

Against the backdrop of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a global health threat undermining existing antibiotic drugs, vaccine technology has (re-)emerged as an alternative partial solution. This paper scrutinizes the conditions, events, and developments that generated a renewed interest in bacterial vaccines as a response to AMR, and the emerging ecosystem that surrounds vaccine research and development. It argues that the recognition of AMR has led to a recalibration of epistemic repertoires that actors in the field have developed to communicate and justify the relevance and investability of the bacterial vaccines field.    

Despite known scientific difficulty in the development of bacterial vaccines, and many laboratory failures over the past 25-years, the WHO has increasingly called for more investment and research into bacterial vaccine development, which has led to a steep increase of candidates in the vaccine pipeline.

This paper draws on qualitative data derived from document analysis, participant observation at three biomedical conferences, and expert interviews.  It examines the trajectories of bacterial vaccine development since 2000, and the financial stressors, the compounding political influences, and the specific disease targeting that has led to laboratories highlighting one disease as their priority over another. Comparing acute bacterial vaccines for diseases on the WHO’s priority pathogen list and vaccines meant to address tuberculosis, this paper situates these examples within sharpening disease ecosystems by exploring the development of the corporate infrastructures and institutional cultures that lead to vaccine development, and by reflecting on the histories of these fields in relation to the broader AMR discussion.  

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This presentation analyses the emergence of forensic psychiatry as a medico-legal field in Taiwan. Drawing on Social Worlds/Arenas theory and situational analysis, it shows how specialist certification shapes psychiatric expertise through struggles over legitimacy, authority, and jurisdiction.

Paper long abstract

What kinds of expertise are required to make “madness” legible to the law? In Taiwan, a series of high-profile criminal cases has intensified public attention to the relationship between mental illness, criminal responsibility, and psychiatric expertise in the courtroom. At the same time, forensic psychiatry has recently undergone institutional consolidation through the establishment of a specialist certification system by the Taiwan Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. This presentation takes the emergence of this qualification regime as an empirical entry point for examining the evolving relationship among psychiatry, law, and society.

Drawing on two years of qualitative research and informed by Social Worlds/Arenas theory and situational analysis, the presentation maps the heterogeneous actors, discourses, and institutional arrangements through which forensic psychiatry is being constituted as a subspecialty. In doing so, the paper examines how forensic psychiatry is assembled and institutionalised as an emerging medico-legal field through struggles over legitimacy, authority, and professional jurisdiction. Professionalisation is therefore approached not as a straightforward outcome of technical differentiation but as an ongoing socio-epistemic process in which expertise is negotiated across interacting social worlds, including courts, psychiatric practitioners, psychologists, professional associations, and wider publics.

Engaging Michel Foucault’s reflections on the governance of deviance, the presentation suggests that the certification system functions as a site where psychiatric knowledge, legal rationalities, and societal anxieties about unpredictable violence are aligned and contested. The Taiwanese case thus illuminates how emerging medico-legal fields take shape through institutional work, epistemic politics, and struggles over authority.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We analyze how the interplay between energy systems researchers and the Swedish Energy Agency shapes the notion of “energy-relevant” social science research in Sweden. This notion is used to secure legitimacy and funding but also to police the boundaries of Swedish energy systems research.

Paper long abstract

Our research focuses on how funding agencies and notions of societal relevance can influence the development of scientific fields. Recently, scholars have paid renewed attention to how ideas about societal relevance can reconfigure the relationship between science and policymaking. Rather than viewing societal relevance as a property that research either has or lacks, emphasis has been placed on how actors engage in different practices to make scientific research relevant. Relevance is thus something that is done or enacted.

Reconfiguring an emerging field to focus on enacting societal relevance can be one way to gain legitimacy as well as access to funding. This process depends on interactions between researchers and actors in a variety of institutional settings. In this presentation, we focus on how the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA), a publicly funded sectoral agency and research funder, together with researchers in the transdisciplinary field of energy systems research shape the notion of “energy-relevant” social science. By interviewing prominent scholars in Sweden, research managers at SEA, and directly observing peer review panels, we explore the rhetorical repertoires drawn upon to assert or dismiss claims to societal relevance. These dynamics influence which research projects are ultimately carried out and thus shape the subsequent direction of the field’s development. We argue that these processes are best understood through a framework that combines insights from co-production with ideas about different institutional logics.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how data-intensive biomedicine takes shape as a scientific field. Drawing on laboratory ethnography and 22 interviews, it shows how programming languages become sites where expertise, authority, and disciplinary boundaries are negotiated in the formation of this emerging domain.

Paper long abstract

“All biology is computational biology” has become a recurrent motto in contemporary life sciences. Far from simply describing a methodological shift, this claim signals the consolidation of an emerging field—“data-intensive biomedicine” (diB) —at the intersection of biology, bioinformatics, and computer science.

Public agencies and scientific foundations are investing in computational infrastructures and large-scale data platforms contributing to the institutional consolidation of diB. Yet beneath this infrastructural expansion lies not the flattening of experimental practices into purely computational research environments, but rather a struggle over the epistemic identity of this emerging field.

Actors from different disciplinary backgrounds compete to define the expertise, authority, and intellectual foundations of this expanding domain. Professional jurisdictional claims intersect with epistemic questions about what counts as legitimate knowledge, credible expertise, and proper ways of doing biology in computational environments.

This paper investigates these dynamics through laboratory ethnography and 22 qualitative interviews with bioinformaticians, computational biologists, and computer scientists. It focuses on programming languages as key sites where expertise, authority, and professional identity are negotiated in research practices.

Rather than neutral technical tools, programming languages embody epistemic orientations, ontological assumptions, and practical affordances that shape how biological problems are approached and solved. Commitments to particular coding languages and computational philosophies function both as markers of professional identity and as epistemic resources through which actors claim credibility, distribute authority, and organise divisions of labour.

Broadly, the paper shows how scientific fields stabilise through socio-technical negotiations over tools, practices, and expertise.

Scientific field formation; Boundary work; Biomedicine; Programming languages.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I follow the stabilization of complexity science through the study of the CSH in Vienna. I focus on scientists’ perspectives and valuations to understand how they navigate the ‘epistemic’, ‘structural’, and ‘affective’ (Turner et al., 2015) tensions inherent to emerging interdisciplinary domains.

Paper long abstract

Despite having existed as a scientific label for roughly four decades, complexity science never institutionalized into a discipline and has instead been described as a ‘quasi-discipline’ (Williams, 2012) or as a ‘scientific platform’ (Li Vigni, 2021). In order to follow this idiosyncratic example of disciplinary and institutional rearrangement, I carried out empirical work at the CSH in Vienna. I relied on document analysis, interviews, and participant observation, and specified my research focus on the perceptions and valuations of scientists working there. Through my research, moreover, I have attempted to trace the history and organization of the CSH from its foundation in 2015 until today and tried to make sense of how this trajectory is influenced by academic and societal expectations.

Overall, I found scientists at the CSH to experience and struggle to navigate many of the tensions that characterize emerging disciplines and interdisciplinary fields – including ‘epistemic’, ‘structural’ and ‘affective’ dimensions (Turner et al., 2015). I also found the CSH to be largely in continuity with complexity science – specifically with the dominant current associated with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) – but to also introduce elements of novelty – in particular with respect to the articulation of societal relevance. Finally, I found the institutional flexibility and ‘disciplinary porosity’ (Williams, 2012) of complexity science to be perceived as both a challenge and an opportunity by scientists at the CSH, who often struggle to ‘feel at home’ in complexity science but still construct their identity in opposition to academia.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

We analyse efforts to “make” crop genome editing African as the formation of a new scientific field. Drawing on Gieryn’s boundary work and interviews in Ghana and Kenya, we show how the field of African crop genome editing is discursively and institutionally constructed and contested.

Paper long abstract

How do new scientific fields take shape when actors seek to make them “local”? We examine efforts to make crop genome editing African as a process of field formation within crop biotechnology. The development of genome editing in and for Africa is often framed as technological diffusion—the uptake of a neutral, pre-formed tool. We show instead that African actors actively redefine what crop genome editing is and what it should become for Africa through discursive and institutional practices.

Our analysis draws on 26 semi-structured interviews with molecular plant scientists and breeders involved in crop genome editing in Ghana and Kenya. As genome editing becomes institutionally established, Ghanaian and Kenyan researchers are not simply adding a new technique to an existing field. They negotiate which crops, infrastructures, training pathways, funding arrangements, and problem framings should constitute legitimate crop biotechnology in their contexts. In doing so, they reshape the boundaries, priorities, and authority structures of the field itself.

Analytically, we mobilise Thomas Gieryn’s concept of boundary work as a productive lens for studying field formation. Boundary work foregrounds the discursive and institutional labour through which actors demarcate domains, attribute legitimacy, and stabilise authority. By shifting attention from technological diffusion to field reconfiguration, the paper offers an empirically grounded account of how crop biotechnology is rearticulated in practice, and how struggles over localness shape the institutional and epistemic trajectory of an emerging scientific field.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Using participatory cartography, this paper analyses sustainability research communication not as an auxiliary practice, but as part of the infrastructural work through which sustainability research is assembled, negotiated, and oriented as a field-in-the-making.

Paper long abstract

Sustainability research is characterised by its problem-oriented, transdisciplinary ambitions and its entanglement with societal values, futures, and publics. Distinctions between the production and communication of scientific knowledge therefore become blurred. This paper takes that dissolution as its point of departure, asking how sustainability communication participates in the assembly of sustainability research as a field-in-the-making.

The paper analyses a process in which a diversity of sustainability researchers, communicators, educators and other actors collaboratively developed a visual map of sustainability research communication in Denmark. The map emerged through three iterations in which workshop discussions informed successive versions, which were reintroduced as objects of reflection and negotiation. This analysis approaches the evolving map as an infrastructural artefact, focusing on three cartographic moves: (1) the reconfiguration of theory and practice from bounded domains to navigable relations, (2) the emergence of ethics as a compass for orientation, and (3) increasing reflexivity toward the map itself. In this way, the paper traces shifting imaginaries of coordination, authority, and legitimacy which point toward changing ways of inhabiting an uncertain epistemic space - rather than disciplinary consolidation.

The paper argues that empirically grounded accounts of sustainability research field formation require attention to communicative infrastructures and actors. In this sense, mapping functions as infrastructural fieldwork: a situated practice that both reveals and participates in processes of assembly and negotiation. It thus makes visible how sustainability research itself is held together through communicative infrastructures.

Keywords: sustainability research; science communication; field formation; infrastructuring

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Using a symmetric STS lens, this paper shows how Italian pro–vaccine-choice RKCs do not reject science but enact an alternative model of “pure science”. Through marginal experts, independent research, and experiential evidence, they reshape scientific authority from the margins.

Paper long abstract

Building on the STS commitment to analytical symmetry, this paper argues that understanding the making and unmaking of scientific fields requires examining how epistemic frameworks developed at the margins of institutional science become actionable, credible, and trustworthy for specific publics. Rather than focusing solely on the emergence of formally recognized disciplines, it investigates how contested knowledge communities attempt to reconfigure scientific authority itself.

Drawing on 18 months of digital multi-sited ethnography and 21 in-depth interviews with members of Italian pro-vaccine-choice Refused Knowledge Communities (RKCs), the paper analyzes how these actors do not simply reject institutional biomedicine but actively strive to enact an alternative model of scientific inquiry. Rather than positioning themselves as “anti-science,” they mobilize scientific credentials, methods, and formats to materialize a vision of science imagined as independent from political and economic interests and responsive to lay concerns. Empirically, this effort takes shape through three interrelated practices: (1) elevating marginal scientists as icons of epistemic integrity; (2) producing independent research that adopts conventional scientific formats, including sequencing studies and citizen-driven immunological projects; and (3) integrating experiential knowledge into evidence-making processes.

What emerges is an aspirational model of “pure science” that reworks established norms of objectivity, independence, and participation. By tracing how this alternative vision is materially enacted and socially legitimized, the paper contributes to debates on field formation by showing how scientific authority is not only institutionally consolidated but also reassembled from the margins through the redefinition of credibility, authority, and trust.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a new culture of objectivity. Drawing on multi-year fieldwork with archaeologists and others developing and using 3D digital methods, with a focus on manipulation and interaction, we show how enduring epistemological problems generate novel solutions.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a new culture of objectivity. Building on and extending Daston and Galison's framework of epistemic virtues, we show how contemporary archaeological practice is developing a form of objectivity that incorporates manipulability, navigability, and relationality without abandoning scientific representation. Drawing on multi-year fieldwork with archaeologists and others developing and using 3D digital tools, we analyze the ways that scientists use new imaging technologies to learn about the past, and to show others what they have learned. We follow archaeologists as they bring computers into the field and later reproduce that field on their computers, and argue that methodological responses to cultural shifts in the discipline have allowed archaeologists to enroll technological innovations in attempts to address persistent anxieties about subjectivity. Contrary to suggestions that manipulability might signal a move away from representation, we find that new technologies enable researchers to foreground both manipulability and representational fidelity simultaneously. By tracing this emergent culture of objectivity, we show how enduring epistemological problems generate novel solutions and illuminate the role of digital reconstructions in both scientific and public contexts.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Drawing on de la Bellacasa’s (2012) thinking with care, the emergence and development of political ontology is traced. In doing so, western and non-western traditions of thought and practice are put in dialogue.

Paper long abstract

The ontological turn does not leave unaffected a variety of fields, including anthropology, philosophy, and science & technology studies (STS). However, in its margins a particular field developed: political ontology. The emergence and development of political ontology as academic field constitutes the focus of this paper presentation. First, political ontology’s thought and main scholars are presented. Second, following de la Bellacasa’s (2012) thinking with care, political ontology’s development is traced by putting into dialogue central figures and their thoughts and by rendering explicit intellectual inspirations, institutional connections, and personal influences, i.e. by mapping instances of mutual engagement, interdependencies, and prolongations. Doing so, the field’s emergence and development is linked to the ontological turn in anthropology, philosophy, and STS. Through this emerges an understanding of how political ontology emerged and stabilised, and the political, social, cultural, and institutional processes that facilitated this. Political ontology is shown to be developed from the concern that Western scholars fail to engage with theorisations in the non-West while non-Western scholars easily consider Western thought inapplicable to their contexts (Escobar, 2018). The crossing over of West non-West contexts renders the development of political ontology politically and epistemologically interesting, demonstrating how modern science is brought into continuous dialogue with de/postcolonial science. Finally, contemporary dynamics in political ontology are presented, articulating present-day questions, scholars and institutions, reflecting upon the theoretical, institutional, and personal connections that seem to organise and shape the field’s further development.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Digital Research Infrastructures are reshaping science beyond a paradigm shift. Focusing on astronomy and the SKAO, we introduce the notion of “Infrastructure of Becoming” to analyse how epistemic virtues are continually renegotiated through symbolic, material, and ideological forms of agency.

Paper long abstract

Across domains, from radio astronomy to AI-driven sciences, scientific inquiry is being reconfigured by large-scale digital research infrastructures that reorganise practices to address societal challenges. We examine the cultural tensions this generates by focusing on astronomy, a historically pioneering field that continues to drive major technological innovation (Daston, 2023). Our case is the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), a transnational radio telescope under construction in Australia and South Africa. SKAO reflects key shifts: from individual to global collaboration, laptop analysis to distributed cloud computing, and local interdisciplinarity to multi-institutional consortia. Its unprecedented data volumes mean astronomers lose direct access to raw data – deleted after initial processing – raising tensions around professional identity, curiosity, epistemic trust, communication, access control, and scientific reproducibility (Durán del Fierro et al., 2024).

Existing frameworks in STS and philosophy – virtue ethics, capability approaches, and responsible research and innovation – address issues of epistemic trust and responsibility (Ratti & Graves, 2025; Vallor, 2021) but fall short in addressing the dynamic negotiation of social agency within infrastructural change. We propose the notion of “Infrastructures of Becoming” (IoB) as an alternative epistemological lens: socio-material spaces where epistemic practices, technologies, data flows, and scholarly contexts co-constitute evolving scientific subjectivities (Zehner & Durán Del Fierro, 2024). Through IoB, we theorise three forms of agency negotiation: symbolic, material, and ideological. We argue these negotiations (re)organise power relations and illuminate how scientists respond differently to change – how they resist, accommodate, and transform cultural practices within digitally driven research environments.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

I explore the rise of ciliary cell biology, focusing on the primary cilium’s transformation from a marginal cell structure to a key cell-signaling agent. I show how narrative framings of biological agents can unite stakeholders, mobilize resources, and help consolidate new scientific fields.

Paper long abstract

My contribution examines the emergence and institutionalization of ciliary cell biology, a burgeoning field within biology. It focuses on the narrative framing of its central biological agent—the primary cilium—and the role it played in advancing the field. Once dismissed as a ‘useless evolutionary remnant,’ this minuscule, hair-like structure protruding from the membranes of most eukaryotic cell types has been recast as a ‘hotspot for signal transmission.’ Cell biologists now recognize its crucial role in cell communication and in the development of treatments for conditions known as ciliopathies.

Through participant observations combined with in-depth ethnographic interviews with key figures—patient advocates, professors, and researchers in the UK and Germany who have followed this field’s evolution over the past 25 years—I demonstrate that the narrative of the primary cilium’s vindication has been a powerful driving force. This story has united patient communities and researchers behind the shared goal of advancing basic research and addressing the needs of ciliopathy patients. For patient communities, it provided a sense of identification with a marginal physiological structure; for researchers, it channeled the potential to highlight previously marginal agents within the framework of discovery.

The case of the primary cilium illustrates how compelling narratives serve to assemble stakeholders, mobilize resources, gain institutional legitimacy, and consolidate new scientific fields. By examining this process, my study sheds light on the relationship between scientific storytelling, patient advocacy work, and institutional support in shaping the trajectories of biomedical inquiry.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This article analyzes how microbiomedical companies institutionalize microbiome science by blending new scientific repertoires with familiar cultural frameworks, translating complex lab knowledge into everyday practices and understanding while sacrificing some of its radical epistemic claims.

Paper long abstract

Growing recognition of human–microbe interdependence has produced a major epistemic shift in understandings of the body and the self, reframing humans as homo microbis--complex biomolecular networks constituted through ongoing human–microbe relations. This reconceptualization carries significant political implications, as microbes are recast as active agents in domains such as sociality, economic behavior, and racial identity. Capitalizing on these developments, a rapidly expanding microbiomedical industry has been offering products and services that claim to optimize symbiotic human–microbe relationships. These companies have been criticized for their careless representation of microbiome science and overstating its potential for improving consumers' health and quality of life. In this article, we draw on an extensive analysis of the public discourse of 25 microbiomedical companies to argue that such a distortion of microbiome science is an integral part of its social institutionalization process. Focusing on the commodification of microbiome science, and drawing on the sociology of culture, we show how companies respond to epistemic instability by blending emergent scientific repertoires with established cultural frameworks. In this process, companies discard the "homo-microbis" model but retain the agentic--and politically consequential--role of microbes across multiple life domains. This hybridization enables firms to embed the new scientific paradigm within familiar systems of meaning and value, and to recruit their consumers into the often-laborious practical production of microbiomedical knowledge itself. We argue that this process facilitates the translation of microbiomedical science from specialized laboratory procedures into everyday social routines and a broader public understanding.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

How do new scientific fields actually come into being? Examining synthetic biology's emergence in Australia, this paper reveals field formation as messy coordination work involving translating interests, building alliances, and negotiating legitimacy under uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines field formation as an ongoing practical accomplishment, focusing on the work required to hold a field together as a viable object of research, investment, and policy attention. Through an in-depth empirical analysis of synthetic biology in Australia, it traces how an emerging scientific field is stabilised under constrained and competitive policy environments. Synthetic biology provides a particularly instructive case, combining epistemic ambiguity over whether it constitutes a distinct field with strong policy interest in its transformative potential.

Drawing on ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews with scientists, research leaders, early-career researchers, and policy actors, the analysis traces the development of synthetic biology in Australia from its early emergence through distinct initiatives, its consolidation through alliance formation and community building, and subsequent institutionalisation and legitimation work. The analysis shows how field formation depends on sustained negotiation and alignment work across multiple levels, including how interests are translated across institutional settings, how alliances are strategically aligned, how legitimacy is mobilised through intermediary organisations, and how coordination is sustained in the face of uncertainty and competition.

The paper reveals the limits of retrospective explanations of field formation and highlights the implications for understanding science and innovation policy as a negotiated and locally configured process rather than assuming coordination follows from shared epistemic commitments or clearly defined innovation trajectories.