When lost, any map will do

Hackett, Edward J., Amsterdanska, Olga., Lynch, Michael., Wajcman, Judy (eds). The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies of Science. MIT Press, 2008.

I began reading about environment and images in science and technology studies (STS) in journals that, at the time, seemed to exist at the fringes of my previously known reading-universe. To not begin my studies with more foundational work like the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies seems in hindsight then a bit paradoxical.

But it is with a sense of ‘coming home’ that I have now positioned myself in relation to these seminal readings. And besides, I did not know that there was a handbook to begin with. And there probably will never be a THE HANDBOOK for STS, considering the eclectic character of this field.

The Handbook outlines these relativistic and ethical approaches of STS that have become, ironically, its foundations. This (anti)-tradition is also one of its challenges. Previous categories of society, technology, science have required further division into more specific areas of inquiry: “what society, which technologies, whose science”? New topics, like ‘environment’, have become relevant, provoking questions of how technologies and information develop concepts of nature etc.

The Handbook does not claim to be representative for all bifurcations for STS. But it does give a glimpse of what has changed since last. The Handbook is a continual endeavour to gather the different directions of STS into comprehensive themes of a single publication. The first edition was finished 1977, requiring  six years from conception to publication. Subsequent editions have each added a year to the production phase (and the current, fourth, edition does not yet have an end date as of yet).

 
Practices, Peoples and Places

Steven Yearley’s study of environmental issues in STS developer a keener understanding of how networks have been involved in  mediating ‘environment’ as concept. It connects to a wider critique of the ‘natural’ in modern society (p. 921), this time relating to climate change, genetically modified organisms (GMO) and human nature in a changing environment.

Humans are conceived as both in and above nature. And similarly, ‘the natural’ is looked for in relation to, a supposed, pre-human condition (p. 932-8), which is indicative of problems in defining what is ‘natural’.

Yearley’s contribution to the Handbook pinpoints why environmental studies are relevant and also illustrates the eclectic character in which STS appropriates new theories (and theorists), blending the old with the new: Bruno Latour, Francis Fukuyama, Tim Ingold.

What´s Wrong With This Picture?

The making and meaning of images is also something that I grapple with when understanding mediation of environment. Burr and Dumit position such ambitions at the heart of the Social Studies of Scientific Imaging and Visualisation (SIV). Basically this is to ask: “What happens when images travel outside of their original settings into other contexts?” (p. 297). What makes images relevant to studies of science, nature and (indeed) identity are their social persuasiveness and power.

The implication and deployment are more important than the nature behind images. Power comes from playing on concepts of realism rather than what is actually seen in a location (like an astronaut over a cloudy Earth).This is hyper-realism and calls us as STS-scholars to historicize what can be seen in an image (p. 300), looking at sciences, technologies, bureaucracies, education systems. The method proposed by Burr and Dumit is to distinguish the image as:

1. production: image as artifact
2. engagement: image as scientific tool-
3. deployment: image as used in other contexts

As image presentation holds more power than image stories, scientific communities have begun debating picture manipulation, though I am not sure if the authors used by Burr and Dumit would claim that studies of causes behind images could be downplayed so as to only focus on their effects (p. 306 ; cf. Edwards, Bowker, Lahsen).

Eitherway, a start would be to begin with definitions of images as:

• ‘epistemic things’ (Rheinberger, 1997)
• ‘incomplete models’ (Schienke, 2003 ; Fortun and Fortun, 2005) and/or,
• ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1988)

I realise that as we expand the possible means by which environment and images may be interpreted and defined, we move from practice studies towards more complex studies of power. Olga Amsterdamska suggest that STS may become sensible, and susceptible, to issues of power distribution by following practices in relation to more permanent, large-scale, processes.

According to Henke and Gieryn, the action-structure dilemma is connected to places of knowledge production, of “who is speaking from where?” It is the characteristic of places to make ‘placeless’ knowledge claims that explains why certain facts travel and others do not (p. 353).

How ironic that as things become mobile, wireless, digital, they also cease to be the immutable mobiles that Latour so forcefully argued was relevant to movement of knowledge. If Henke and Gieryn are right so is Latour: as facts become mutable so too does the claim to truth crumble apart. Science, again, cling to place for authority and credibility (p. 364).

But this claim by Henke and Gieryn could also be read as leading to scientific provincialism, that neither origin nor movement of science are the most important consideration, but the ability of facts to be picked up by others, or used in the service of other networks.

Similar to my reading of this Handbook, science would be more like cherry-picking. Globalisation in this case contributes to different power-centres emerging, rather than old places retaining their authority we would see think tanks and more interest-driven research centres. Place might indeed become important (again) but perhaps then the importance of the state as a place for knowledge production diminishes.

If it isn´t broken (by you), don´t fix it

There is no easy way of summarising a handbook – let alone The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (I looked and they don´t have one). That said I will end with relating Johnson and Wetmores discussion of ethics with Evans and Collins on the emergence of technological and scientific expertise as both these are areas of further inquiry for my research on satellite projects.

Johnson and Wetmore outlines how origin and movements of knowledge concerns issues of ethics and responsibility of its makers. Although users and marketers are influential for the usage of a technology (cf. Pinch and Bijker, 1987 ; Oudshoorn, Nelly & Trevor Pinch, 2003), engineers would be ultimately to be held accountable for the appliance of their work (p. 567).

Responsibility to whom it belongs is a question of who holds expertise, which according Evans and Collins itself is a matter of community. Experts hold tacit, social and cultural knowledge which the community agrees is a requirement for membership (p. 610). Knowledge, following from expertise, is defined as socialisation within a community (p. 620).

Another solution regarding responsibility then is not to hold engineers accountable for innovations but for laymen to pass judgment on which knowledge they want to be guiding the future development of society. Evans and Collins witty solution is that as laymen are not members of the expert-community, neither are they tied by their obligations of agreement or socialisation. I suppose only further studies of laymen-expert communities could outline how such strategies have, could and should work out.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. Memory Practices in the Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Edwards, Paul. The World in a Machine: Computer Models, Data Networks, and Global Atmospheric Politics [Final title is A Vast Machine], Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Fortun, Kim & Mike Fortun. “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology,” in American Anthropologist 107 (1): 43–54, 2005.

Hackett, Edward J., and Society for Social Studies of Science. The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. MIT Press, 2008.

Lahsen, Myanna. “Technocracy, Democracy and U.S. Climate Science Politics: The Need for Demarcations,” in Science, Technology & Human Values 30(1): 137–69, 2005.

Oudshoorn, N. & T. Pinch (eds). “How Users and Non-users Matter” in N. Oudshoorn & T. Pinch (eds), How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technologies, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Bijker, Wiebe, E., Hughes, Thomas P., Pinch, Trevor (eds). The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology Published by The MIT Press. The MIT Press, 1987.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Schienke, Erich W. “Who’s Mapping the Mappers? Ethnographic Research in the Production of Digital Cartography,” in M. Hård, A. Lösch, & D. Verdicchio (eds), Transforming Spaces: The Topological Turn in Technology Studies, Darmstadt, Germany: Online Conference Proceedings, 2003.