Paper short abstract:

In this paper I delve upon the case of "Robot Scientists" being developed in a British University to discuss how the future of science is being imagined and constructed by scientists.

Paper long abstract:

In the last few years, "science automation" - that is, the automation of scientific processes - has been portrayed as the inevitable future of the scientific endeavour. The ways that such automation will take place is up for grabs - partial or total automation; only the "technical", "mechanical", or "mathematical" aspects of science, or science as a whole. But what is generally agreed by the scientific community is that this new wave of the "scientific revolution" is here to stay.

Based in a year of participant observation in a laboratory dedicated to the development of a "Robot Scientist", in this paper I discuss how current technology is seen, by the scientists I worked with, not as a finished product, but as a promise and proxy of future technologies to come. Current Robot Scientists are valued not for what they can actually do at the moment, but rather for the potential future(s) they represent.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the conduct of a clinical trial of a bacterial vaccine in Benin, West Africa. The future vaccine is imagined as a novel technology to survive the post-antibiotic world.

Paper long abstract:

Antibiotics have made it possible for people to live longer, healthier lives. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), however, is an increasing problem, and the World Health Organization has described it as the next big global health disaster. This concern has generated a quest for alternatives to antibiotics in order to survive the world where antibiotics are no longer available to cure common infections and prevent contamination during everyday operations.

The ethnographic focus of this paper is a clinical trial of a bacterial vaccine conducted in Benin, West-Africa. The vaccine is presented as innovative technology that would circumvent the use of antibiotics in the treatment of diarrhoea in the future. The case study demonstrates how the quest for alternatives to antibiotics not only pushes global health researchers towards new scientific discoveries, it also forces scientific communities to restructure their core practices regarding research tools, ideas of evidence, efficacy, and expertise.

Studying the vaccine as an emerging technology necessitates a post-human analysis that foregrounds the objects of the vaccine – the microbes. Therefore, for anthropologists, the changes urge us to conceptualize microbes despite their metaphorical and methodological invisibility. Such analysis shows how microbes are vital and malleable, rather than stable and contained and this liveliness captures the gist of the problem – given the magnitude of the changes ahead, a post-antibiotic world is nearly impossible to imagine.

Paper short abstract:

Working with experimental audio-visual data and ethnographic description, we examine how assembled and reassembled notions of time, futures and innovation are imagined and mobilized in everyday laboratory practices in a cutting edge synthetic biology collaboration.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we draw on experimental audio-visual data to examine and represent concepts of time, future and innovation in a synthetic biology collaboration. Synthetic biology has emerged as a space of techno-scientific futures. Such spaces are fundamentally undefinable, becoming associated with limitless potential to address a range of critical global challenges from antimicrobial resistance to the secure production of bio-fuels. As the synthetic biology community continues to evolve it is moving from the space of possibility to the realization of large-scale industry-academic collaborations, where technological promises are brought to mainstream market production. It is in this context of a national industry-academic project that we examine notions of time, future and innovation in the everyday practices of synthetic biology.

Working with ethnographic descriptions and laboratory videos, we examine how assembled and reassembled notions of pasts, presents and futures are used to situate everyday experimental practice. Drawing on anthropological discussion around the assemblage of the contemporary, we consider how existing imagery of engineering and design are re-purposed toward the future of sustainable 'green' bio-production. Such futures involve planning and practices which evoke different kinds of tempo and temporal spaces. Thus, we re-examine innovation, moving away from a focus on speed and progress to acknowledge the other forms of time and tempo which are critical to the process of experimentation in future oriented cutting-edge science.

Paper short abstract:

This study explores what happens when algorithms are designed to take on tasks in the arena of physical rehabilitation.

Paper long abstract:

As human life becomes increasingly entangled with digital technologies, algorithmic systems are becoming a significant part of everyday life. The delegation of tasks to algorithms and their ability to make decisions without (or with little) human intervention has been characterised as a process of algorithmic authority, where algorithms increasingly shape 'who we are and what we see'(Steiner 2012). This paper engage with the concept of algorithmic authority by way of analysing the complex, practical and affective processes through which algorithmic authority is created, negotiated and sometimes broken down. The study is based on an ethnographic exploration of the design and implementation of a smart phone application for the promotion of home-training for patients who have undergone hip replacement surgery in Denmark, and explores what happens when algorithms are designed to take on tasks in the arena of physical rehabilitation. I argue that the tendency among scholars to center on algorithms as the main actor producing authority, may overlook the dynamic material, social and affectual relations involved in the process of producing and maintaining algorithmic authority over time.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the potentials of biosensing technologies in the construction of new methods and conceptualisations of ethnographic fieldwork. We draw on two projects conducted with children in Manchester, UK: one focusing on urban sound art and the other on local air quality and climate change.

Paper long abstract:

Sensor technologies are becoming ubiquitous elements of everyday life, as we find them increasingly embedded in environments (movement, sound, temperature, air quality sensors) and worn on bodies (heart rate, electro-dermal activity, acceleration, body temperature sensors). The rapid integration of these technologies into human life processes suggests that the near future will hold a convergence of the biological, the digital, the sensual, and the social. This paper explores the potentials of biosensing technologies in the construction of new methods and conceptualisations of ethnographic fieldwork. How can sensor technologies expand the purview of ethnography beyond the narrow bandwidth of the human senses? How might these technologies enable new forms of ethnographic participation and social imagining? We address these questions through two projects conducted with children and young people in Manchester, one focusing on urban sound art and the other on local air quality and climate change. These projects involved the experimental use of wearable biosensors and environmental sensors in conjunction with GoPro body cameras, sound recording equipment, and social interventions in public space. Rather than seeing these technologies as prosthetic extensions of human perception and consciousness, we are interested in how sensors can physically and directly mediate the sensorium and render access to sensory data beyond the limits of human language and cognition. Our speculative experiments with these technologies gesture towards future possibilities for ethnographic fieldwork that plugs directly into the biosensory intensities and fluctuations of social bodies in real time and space.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores absence as a speculative mode of investigation in futures-focused ethnographic research and considers how the magic of absence might help us imagine emergent technologies operating between the magical and the mundane.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores absence as a speculative mode of investigation in futures-focused ethnographic research. In particular, it considers how the magical labour of absence can help us imagine technologies that do not yet exist. In the vein of critical autoethnography, the paper discusses the author's experiences of grief following the death of her absent father and her encounter with the magic of absence saturated with personal loss, memory, identity, and hopes for the impossible. The author recounts how her search for a past that never was led her to envision new technologies (i.e. smart technologies, medical technologies, cyborg and human enhancement technologies, and web mapping/navigation technologies) operating between the possible and the impossible and the past and the future. Weaving in threads of the author's diaries, poems, short stories, and fieldnotes with archival research and analysis of the social and political conditions of her home country of Poland, the paper considers the intricate ways that our technological futures are made and remade through the fears, longings, and hopes of personal and social absences. Finally, the paper argues that absence must be taken seriously as an ethnographic method, as it might help us research and intervene in technological futures by challenging the dualities of the magical and the mundane and, ultimately, the very categories of absence and presence.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the potential selves enacted through technologies for self-enhancement. By exploring three technologies engaged by people in contemporary Denmark; substances, spirituality and self-tracking we explore the development of their future imaginaries as they occur in the present.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the potential selves enacted through technologies for self-enhancement. It does so by exploring three different technologies engaged by people in contemporary Denmark; substances, spirituality and self-tracking. Inspired by works on 'technologies of the self' (Foucault 1988), 'technologies of optimization' (Rose 2007), 'enhancement technologies' (Hogle 2005) and 'potentiality' (Høyer & Taussig 2013) we analytically explore the kinds of future selves imagined and enacted in the relation between people and these three emerging technologies.

The use of psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and Ayahuasca, has for some become a manner of overcoming addictions and various health conditions, while others use the substances to become more efficient and energetic - professionally and privately. Likewise, spirituality and spiritual techniques such as meditation, silent retreats, mediumship, clairvoyance, healing etc. are used as media for exploring the self kinesthetically, sensorially, cognitively and emotionally in order to enhance such selves both privately and professionally. Lastly, using self-tracking technologies - wearables, smartphone-apps, tablets and computers - people assess and represent the value of their lives through data and seek to enhance personal health and well-being.

Through these three examples we discuss technologies as intricately connected to the imagination (Sneath et al 2009). By focusing on how actions in the present enact future imaginaries of potential selves, we show how technologies and imaginaries of the self mutually constitute and develop each other when questing for "better selves".

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the production of visual documentation and archives during conflict provides a lens through which to explore emerging technologies as part of political, economic and social struggles.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that the production of visual documentation and archives during conflict provides a lens through which to explore emerging technologies not only as a matter of human technical capability, but also as explicit part of political, economic and social struggles. How does attention to disruption help us understand the emergence of technologies, particularly in relation to archives? The paper builds on critical conceptualisations of technologies as imagined, emplaced and future-oriented (Fanon 1959; Tsing 2005, 2015; Moores 2005, 2012, Mollerup 2015).

Targeted persecution of photographers and lack of access for professional photojournalists are engendering NGO-driven development of cutting-edge software automatically preventing facial recognition in visual documentation, verification methodologies and platforms that allows for automated verification and ethical use of images from conflict zones. Meanwhile, frequent power cuts in war-torn Aleppo, restricted access to electricity during revolutionary sit-ins in Egypt and limited internet access in both places invoke the use of outdated diesel generators, the physical transportation of vast visual archives on hard drives and deftly rewiring of electricity from lampposts to enable makeshift charging stations and revolutionary street cinema.

The paper is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with video activists and archivists in Egypt, interviews with local photographers from Aleppo and media development NGO workers, empirical investigation of the legal framework regulating work of civil society and collaborations with activists and NGOs.