Track
abstract
“I
really must differ…still” – Pertinent disagreements for 4S
Disagreement
has figured prominently in the history of STS, as both a technique for and a
topic of empirical study. Moreover, many of the most important
contributions to STS have developed out of poignant debates – sometimes between
those who identify themselves as members of the community and sometimes
with those outside of it. As the field moves from a marginal and
precarious institutional position to becoming more well-established, a
danger is that the initial dynamism and questioning that characterised it
becomes lost.
This
session is aimed at renewing the study of disagreement by holding together the
role of disagreement in the development of science and technology with the
development of STS as an academic field. It seeks to ask of science and
technology as well as STS: Where and when does disagreements become
manifest? How are they resolved? If not resolved, how and why might
they disappear anyway? What are the ‘productive’ features of disagreement
and what are they productive for? How does effective disagree differ from
predictable and affected disagreements? Why do fields of study get
the profile of dispute they get? How does disagreement help form unity
within a community? How much disagreement is possible within
individual publications, presentations, conference sessions and fields while
still producing coherent scholarship? What are the alternative
possibilities for structuring dispute?
Track
organizers
Claes-Fredrik
Helgesson, Linköping University
Brian
Rappert, University of Exeter
Session
abstracts:
From
Political Action to Policy Relevance: Participation and intervention as a
fundamental STS-problem
Thomas
Kaiserfeld
Department
of Cultural Sciences at Lund University
Together
with many other academic specialities such as sociology or queer studies, STS
has its origin in political action. And as elsewhere, the problem of
participation and intervention has been debated within the STS-community from
the outset. More recently, however, calls for a “serviceable STS” has become so
prevalent and central that a “normative turn” has been identified.
The
issues at stake range from the ways in which STS may be useful (the external
argument) to how it may be rewarding to confront theory with extra-academic
practices (the internal argument). Can intervention strengthen the thrust of
critical analysis or may established institutional conventions corrupt its
content and trustworthiness? In addition to emulate personal experiences,
different viewpoints reflect basic apprehensions regarding the ambitions of the
STS-project, enlightenment or critique. In short, questions posed for theory
are questions about politics.
But
rather than rehearsing categorizations made, positions taken and arguments
expressed, the purpose here is to analyse the renewed interest for the problem
of participation and intervention in the light of transformed research policies
emphasizing privatisation and relevance of research. Disagreements regarding
the problem of participation and intervention have thus become even more
central to the field. In fact, this problem now belongs to a category that are
fundamental in the sense that the answers given can be used to generate
identity markers as well as fuelling the process of self-reflection within STS.
In conclusion, dissolving the problem of participation and intervention would
mean nothing short of dissolving STS.
Things,
Names & Judgements in the UK Biofuel Controversy
Philip
Boucher
Manchester
Institute of Innovation Research, Manchester Business School, University of
Manchester
A
critical realist understanding of the sign (based upon Peirce’s semiotic
theory) corresponds well with Winner’s (1993) assertion that it matters what a
thing is (referent), what name it has (locution), and how people judge its
properties (sense). Considering the UK
biofuel controversy through the lens of this triadic sign, it is found to be constituted
by different types of disagreement, resolution of which must be sought through
different means.
Some
such disagreements are characterised by a ‘referent-sense dissonance’, where
there are multiple judgements of the same thing conflicting with each another.
These disagreements might be resolved by negotiation between actors, as
documented in many STS case studies.
Here, the focus is upon disagreements characterised by a
‘locution-referent dissonance’, where one name is used to refer to many different
things. Many such examples are found in
the UK biofuel controversy, perhaps because the locution ‘biofuels’ refers to
such a monumentally diverse group of discrete technical artefacts. Such disagreement may also be found in
controversies surrounding other broad technologies, such as nano-. In these
cases, resolution might be achieved by actors negotiating a transformation of
the vocabulary associated with the technology.
This transformation can affect techno-political developments, e.g. in
defining which biofuels may contribute to the meeting of legislative
quotas. Evidence of these processes can
be traced through the analysis of discourses maintained in textual and visual
relics of the UK biofuel controversy.
Technological
controversies: A cultural psychology view
Giuseppe A. Veltri
The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies
(IPTS), the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Science
has become a major transformative force in contemporary society. There is a
social motivation to familiarise the unfamiliar particularly as science plays
such a big role in our lives, but a large proportion of the public has little
scientific understanding. Moreover, every scientific issue that appears in the
public sphere becomes a ‘public issue’, which by definition concerns everyone.
The process of ‘making sense’ is conceptualised as a two-level process of
mediation, comprising the denotative level and the connotative one. While the
denotation meanings are largely controlled by the experts and are usually uncontested
outside their domain of origin, connotative meanings cannot be monopolised by
the experts and are often the subject of debate and challenge. In the public
debate, the focus is on the connotations of a technology rather than on its
denotations. That is to say, controversies in the public sphere arise around
the social meanings that a new technology assumes in its public life, rather
than its technical boundaries and features. Furthermore, when the denotative
level of knowledge is insecure or highly technical, connotative meanings,
shaped by the social and cultural context, are less constrained and come to
play a more important role in the public domain. It is the implications of the technology for
society that are in dispute – the benefits, risks and uncertainties and ethical
dimensions. In the early days of a
technology these are often conjectural, after which we see the emergence of
different public perceptions of the technology, some supportive, others oppositional.
Destabilizing
disability: The case of Athens Metro 1991-1993
Vasilis
Galis and Francis Lee
Department
of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linköping University
The
aim of this paper is to tell the story of the destabilization of the Greek
disability movement and the construction of Athens Metro, through the lens of a
modified model of translation (Callon 1986). Here, our point of departure is
the acknowledgement that the process of translation has both an excluding and
including character (Cf. Law 1997). In our view, the analysis of
actor-networks, the process of mobilizing alliances and constructing networks
is a common and worth-while focus. However the simultaneous betrayals,
dissidences, and controversies are often only implied in network construction
stories.
Here
we aim to nuance the construction aspect of ANT by shining the analytical
searchlight elsewhere, where the theoretical tools of ANT have not yet
systematically ventured. Thus, we argue that we need to understand every
process of translation in relation to its simultaneous process of exclusion,
and to add antonyms for Callons (1986) problematisation, intressement,
enrolment and mobilization. This enables us to describe both stability and
destabilization in the struggles for hegemony in the network “accessibility-Athens-Metro”.
Our
case focuses on the network building around measures for disabled people in the
construction of the Athens Metro, during the period 1991-1993. The discussion
focuses on the efforts of disability organizations to intervene in the initial
construction works of the metro project and the simultaneous actions of the
Greek government to exclude disability organizations from the design process
and to destabilize the accessibility-metro actor-network
States
of Ignorance, States of Disagreement: The Unmaking of Death Tolls
Brian
Rappert
University
of Exeter
This
presentation considers the complications and tensions associated with knowing
about the production of ignorance. In
particular it attends to how the analysis of ignorance hazards being associated
with its production. It does so through
questioning how the UK government contended the number of civilian deaths
stemming from the 2003 Iraq invasion could not ‘reliably’ be known. The twists and turns of official public
statements are interpreted against back region government and civil service
deliberations obtained under the British Freedom of Information Act. Far from settling what took place, however,
this material intensified the problems with analysts attributing and
characterizing strategies for manufacturing ignorance through reference to
disagreement. From an examination of the
choices, contingencies, and challenges in the way actors and analysts depict
ignorance, this article then considers future possibilities for inquiry whereby
social analysts can question their ignorance in the face of disagreement while
questioning claims to ignorance.
