journal
Science & Technology Studies
EASST has launched its own international, peer reviewed, online journal Science & Technology Studies.
In response to the steady growth of our field EASST wishes to create a new strong international journal, which is also delivered as a membership benefit to members. The journal is a development of Science Studies, which has a 25 volume history of internationally peer-reviewed publications. The journal is under review to be included in social science citation index (SSCI) and is increasing its number of issues to three in 2013 and target four issues per year in the near future.
EASST members (and other subscribers) will have exclusive access to each new issue for a 4 month period. Members will receive an email with access details. All older content is open access – a principle of scientific publishing EASST wishes to endorse.
The journal has its own website at www.sciencetechnologystudies.org
Latest Issue: Science & Technology Studies: Volume 26 (1) 2013
- Editorial
- Anders Blok: Urban Green Assemblages: An ANT View on Sustainable City Building Projects (see abstract)
- Sampsa Hyysalo, Jouni K. Juntunen and Stephanie Freeman: Internet Forums and the Rise of the Inventive Energy User (see abstract)
- Torun Granstrom Ekeland and Britt Kramvig: Negotiating Terrains: Stories from the Making of “Siida” (see abstract)
- Kai Eriksson: Innovation and the Vocabulary of Governance (see abstract)
- Adrijana Šuljok and Marija Brajdić Vuković: Country Report – How the Croatian Daily Press Presents Science News (see abstract)
Abstracts
Urban Green Assemblages: An ANT View on Sustainable City Building Projects
Anders Blok
In this article, I sketch an STS-theoretical approach to world-wide growing concerns with urban climate risks and sustainable urbanism more generally in terms of what I call ‘urban green assemblages’. This approach draws inspiration from recent attempts to bring actor-network theory (ANT) closer to urban studies, infusing urban political economies with STS sensibility towards the contingencies of eco-socio-technical design and transformation processes. ANT, I argue, off ers a new ontology for the city, allowing the study of those concrete and plural sites at which urban sustainability is known, practiced, scaled, negotiated and contested, in heterogeneous and dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans. I explore the analytical potentials of this ANT urban ontology through a case study of how architects, engineers, and urban planners currently perform Nordhavn, one of Europe’s large scale sustainable city building projects, as a site of multiple matters of public-political concern with urban natures.
Keywords: Actor-network theory; Assemblage urbanism; Sustainable city-building
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Internet Forums and the Rise of the Inventive Energy User
Sampsa Hyysalo, Jouni K. Juntunen and Stephanie Freeman
While climate and energy policy voice concerns about citizen’s lack of improving their houses and heating systems, some citizens by far exceed the expectations. Our research on heat pumps revealed over a hundred inventions by citizen users in Finland alone, despite the technology being in many respects uninviting to modify. Users’ capacity to carry out these modifications owes much to their exchanges at userrun Internet forums, a new and proliferating type of setting. These online forums help otherwise dispersed and heterogeneous users to create a specific kind of learning space that helps some users to “grow inventive” even as the majority of users therein remain indifferent towards their specific projects. These findings open a discussion on how the actions of typically a small group of inventive users are embedded in and supported by the activities of a broader user base.
Keywords: User Innovation, Internet Forums, Renewable Energy
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Negotiating Terrains: Stories from the Making of “Siida”
Torun Granstrøm Ekeland and Britt Kramvig
In this article we develop some arguments from a research project where the researchers were also participants in the making of a multiplayer online game. The “Siida” project emerged as a challenge to the static and monolithic vision of Indigenous Saami culture and history. It seeks to create an arena for learning founded on new approaches to research-based historical pedagogy. This involvement became the grounds from where we could refl ect upon what design is all about. We will argue that in order to work, design needs to relate to the specifi cities of place and be located as multiple practices. As a methodological tool for the analysis of partial connections between actors’ knowledge practices, we put the concept of material boundary metaphor to work. We tell the ethnographic story of a complex media production as an on-going negotiation between knowledge and technical design.
Keywords: Designing, Material boundary metaphor, Saami culture
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Innovation and the Vocabulary of Governance
Kai Eriksson
Innovation has become a crucial part of the vocabulary of contemporary political governance and its conceptual equipment. As innovation has emerged as an ever-more significant political issue, the discourse on innovation has become intertwined with the notion of network. This paper argues that certain ontological elements inherent in this discourse tend to lose their openness when they are defined as policy-oriented concepts, and uses the innovation system concept as a case study to illuminate this. Insofar as innovation, the production of something novel, is the basis of contemporary economy, then political language has to strive both to attain what is new and, at the same time, to make it governable. It seems, however, that when a concept receives its political formulation, that is, when it becomes a means for governance, then the unifying process attendant to the production of a field of governance will replace the perspective of change. This essential tension is investigated in what follows through innovation policy as articulated mainly in the Finnish policy discourse.
Keywords: Innovation System, Governance, Ontology
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How the Croatian Daily Press Presents Science News
Adrijana Šuljok and Marija Brajdić Vuković
Research into media representations of science is widespread and well-established in scientifically and technologically highly developed countries. However, very little is known about the characteristics of media reporting of science in transition countries, which are only just beginning to recognize the importance of research into the relationship between science, the media and the public. In this study, using content analysis of the daily newspapers with the largest circulations in Croatia (Jutarnji list and Večernji list) we researched the quantity and quality of media reporting of science. We link them to the characteristics of the Croatian media (tabloidization, the erosion of professional criteria) and the wider social context from which they stem. Our findings have shown poor representation of science news in the daily press as well as a low level of trustworthiness, especially in reporting biomedical news.
Keywords: Science coverage, Media, Croatia
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Previous Issue: Science & Technology Studies: Volume 25 (2) 2012
- Editorial
- Céline Granjou and Isabelle Mauz: Expert Activities as Part of Research Work: The Example of Biodiversity Studies
- Séverine Louvel: The ‘Industrialization’ of Doctoral Training? A Study of the Experiences of Doctoral Students and Supervisors in the French Life Sciences
- Ericka Johnson and Cecilia Åsberg: Enrolling Men, their Doctors, and Partners: Individual and Collective Responses to Erectile Dysfunction
- Sarah Parry, Wendy Faulkner, Sarah Cunningham-Burley and Nicola J. Marks: Heterogeneous Agendas around Public Engagement in Stem Cell Research: The Case for Maintaining Plasticity