Social Studies of Science

Over the past 20 years a small group of astronomers and planetary scientists has actively promoted the idea that an asteroid might collide with the Earth and destroy civilization. Despite concerns about placing weapons in space, the asteroid scientists repeatedly met with scientists from the Strategic Defense Initiative to discuss mitigation technologies. This paper examines the narrative context in which asteroids were constructed as a threat and astronomy was reconfigured as an interventionist science. I argue that conceptualizing asteroids through narratives of technological salvation invoked a `narrative imperative' that drew the astronomers towards the militaristic endings that their stories demanded. Impact-threat science thus demonstrates both the ways in which scientific research can be framed by fictional narratives and the ideological ends that such narratives can serve.

The priority dispute between Raymond Damadian and Paul Lauterbur over the `invention' of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has attracted the attention of social and natural scientists for more than 30 years. In this paper, I have used this priority dispute to analyze the complex socio-epistemic processes through which a claim for an invention is made and strengthened. I argue that a tension exists because techno-scientific practices are embedded within a particular disciplinary regime of authorship: even though techno-scientific practices occur through distributed cognition and are contingent upon particular socio-epistemic contexts, a claim for an invention requires assigning authorship to a particular person, company, or institution in order to clearly define the origin and the novelty of that particular techno-scientific event. Nevertheless, the outcomes of socio-epistemic practices for making and strengthening priority claims are shifting, open-ended, and contingent upon particular socio-epistemic contexts.

The communication between distinct social worlds or forms of life is a central topic in the sociology of knowledge. How do different communities interact with each other? Based on a sociological analysis of the work of Japanese—Portuguese interpreters in the Brazilian steel industry, I argue that the `language barrier', which is normally thought as a problem, can aid communication by preventing people who hold potentially clashing concepts, beliefs and customs from directly confronting each other. The importance for such people of not understanding each other is revealed in the work of interpreters, who facilitate the interaction between representatives of different steel companies and support the transfer of technology from Japan to Brazil. They maintain cordial relationships by acting as `buffers' between the Japanese and Brazilian forms of life. Three `models of mediation' are discussed in a comparison of the Japanese—Portuguese interpreters with other cases of interaction.

Simulators that represent human patients are being integrated into medical education. This study examines the use of a haptic-enabled, virtual reality simulator designed to allow training in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) techniques. The paper shows how medical practices and practitioners are constructed during a simulation. By using the theoretical tools that situated learning and communities of practice provide, combined with the concept of reconstituting, I broaden the discussion of medical simulators from a concern with discrete skills and individual knowledge to an examination of how medical knowledge is created around and with computer simulators. The concept of reconstitution is presented as a theoretical term for understanding the interplay between simulators and people in practice. Rather than merely enacting simulator training, reconstituting creates a different context, different actors and different techniques during the simulation.

This paper develops a framework for understanding social movements that address issues related to science, technology and expert knowledge. `Democratizing science movements' contest, reframe, and engage in the production of official scientific research in order to achieve their goals. They contest the seeming objectivity and neutrality of science and seek to legitimate lay perspectives. In order to empirically explore why such movements arise and how they work, I discuss two cases: the anti-dam movement in Brazil and the environmental breast cancer movement in the USA. While there are obvious internal and contextual differences between these two movements, they both exemplify similar characteristics of democratizing science movements. In this sense, these cases are representative of a broader, transnational phenomenon. Qualitative data in the form of interviews, ethnographic observations and document collection were used to study these cases.

Divisions between variable-oriented and person-oriented approaches in social and behavioral research are newly drawn. Yet few person-oriented approaches have been fully articulated; those that have are predominantly quantitative. This work presents an argument for a qualitative, person-oriented study of careers; an approach identified as careers in context. Based on a national study of scientists, this contextualist approach is grounded by three interacting, but analytically distinct, emphases to suggest how careers can be studied in and beyond science: (1) an emphasis on time and place as under-utilized dimensions on which to direct further study of careers; (2) an emphasis on the subjective career as a concept that qualitatively encapsulates temporal and spatial dimensions; and (3) an emphasis on career study in life course perspective. Subjectively (and objectively), careers are, of course, not static. By situating subjective careers in the times and places in which they occur, we are drawn to how those careers `play out' over the course of the lives of the people leading them. This paper concludes by stressing ways in which contextual studies of careers in and beyond science will advance our understanding in five larger domains of social process: identity construction; institution building; social—psychological differentiation; job satisfaction; and mystification of work.