Social Studies of Science

Within the last 2000 years the land demarcated by the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan Valley to the east has been one of the most disputed territories in history. World powers have redrawn its boundaries numerous times. Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 within British Mandate Palestine, Palestinians and Israelis have disagreed over the national identity of the land that they both inhabit. The struggles have extended from the battlefields to the classrooms. In the process, different national and ethnic groups have used various sciences, ranging from archeology to history and geography, to prove territorial claims based on their historical presence in the region. But how have various Israeli social and political groups used maps to solidify claims over the territory? In this paper we bring together science studies and critical cartography in order to investigate cartographic representations as socially embedded practices and address how visual rhetoric intersects with knowledge claims in cartography. Before the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the Israeli government and the Jewish National Fund produced maps of Israel that established a Hebrew topography of the land. After 1967, Israel’s expanded territorial control made the demarcation of its borders ever more controversial. Consequently, various Israeli interest groups and political parties increasingly used various cartographic techniques to forge territorial spaces, demarcate disputed boundaries, and inscribe particular national, political, and ethnic identities onto the land.

This paper builds on the growing literature in ‘postcolonial technoscience’ by examining how science and ethics travel in transnational HIV research. I use examples of two controversial US-funded studies of mother-to-child transmission in Africa as case studies through which to explore quandaries of difference and inequality in global health research. My aim is not to adjudicate the debates over these studies, but rather to raise some questions about transnational research, science, and ethics that often get lost in public controversies over the moral status of such trials. Using interviews conducted with American and Ugandan HIV researchers as well as relevant material published in the popular and medical press, I argue that debates over research practice and the conditions under which practices are deemed ethically legitimate or questionable reflect the challenges faced by African researchers seeking to participate in global health science. In doing so, I show how questions of scientific legitimacy and authority are played out in debates over who decides what constitutes ‘the normal’ in human biological research and who can legitimately ‘speak for Africa’ regarding the ethics of research design and practice. I conclude that researchers from ‘resource-poor settings’ must often walk a tightrope between claims of difference from the global North and assertions of sameness, in which a claim too forceful in either direction can undermine the ethical — and thus scientific — legitimacy of their research.

This paper builds upon studies of the constitutive role of technology in the establishment of colonial order by demonstrating some of the ways in which a relationship between spiritual authority and technologies of the secular state came to be articulated together in the late colonial period, and hence embedded within contemporary postcolonial techno-politics. Focusing on adult public health campaigns in French West Africa, I suggest that that the end of colonialism sparked a host of debates about what counted as knowledge of political reality, the means to obtain that knowledge and the persons in which such knowledge was vested. Within this turbulent context, ideas about the ‘magico-spiritual’ were woven together with ‘secular’ instruments of the state, in the process forging new conceptions of political reality. By describing the dynamics of this process, my analysis of African socio-technical systems modulates some key science studies frameworks to make them more applicable to contemporary non-Western settings. While science studies can more than adequately account for how technology may be used to build ‘the nation’, to be applicable to postcolonial contexts such studies should also be able to address the role of socio-technical contestation for producing techno-political states of enduring instability and disequilibrium.

This paper explores the styles of research associated with wind turbines, ethanol and fuel cells in six countries. The concept of a ‘research style’ emphasizes that values and interests, along with deeper historical and cultural influences, shape research and get built into technology. Open research styles are epitomized by a broad inclusion of actors in the research process, participatory ownership of its results, cooperation among stakeholders and users, and experimentation and flexibility. Closed research styles are distinguished by limited access and ownership, competition among researchers, centralization of the research process and rigidity in dictating programme goals and preferences. The paper uses the concept of open and closed research styles to compare the experiences of Denmark, Brazil and China (open) with those in the USA, France and Norway (closed).

This paper examines the social capital that evolved in the Sustainable Forest Management Network (SFMN), one of the Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence. Our longitudinal study shows a sevenfold increase in the total number of researchers and a high density of relationships among (researchers from) provinces across the country. The results of a social network analysis revealed that 52.6 percent of the network researchers maintained the same number of collaborators while 46.7 percent increased their number of collaborators enormously: the maximum increase in number of collaborators being 6900 percent and the minimum 6 percent. A bibliometric analysis suggested that the number of publications was strongly correlated to measures of social capital. From a science and innovation policy perspective, the finding that more than half of the researchers in the SFMN did not increase their personal networks of collaborators raises important questions. A theoretical model is proposed to examine whether funding agencies should focus on fostering various network structures and evolutions or rely on competition in the distribution of research funds through networks. The proposed model is designed to measure the impact of various network structures on the development of social capital and research output.