Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2,280,818
result(s) for
"Science and Technology Studies"
Sort by:
Science Interrupted
Science Interrupted examines how scientists in China pursue environmental sustainability within the constraints of domestic and international bureaucracies. Timothy G. McLellan offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the formal procedural work of Chinese bureaucracy—work that is overlooked when China scholars restrict their gaze to the informal and interpersonal channels through which bureaucracy is often navigated.
Homing in on an agroforestry research organization in southwest China, the author takes the experiences of the organization's staff in navigating diverse international funding regimes and authoritarian state institutions as entry points for understanding the pervasiveness of bureaucracy in contemporary science. He asks: What if we take the tools, sensibilities, and practices of bureaucracies seriously not only as objects of critique but as resources for re-thinking scientific practice?
Extending a mode of anthropological research in which ethnography serves as source of theory as well as source of data, Science Interrupted thinks with, and not only against, bureaucracy. McLellan shows that ethnographic engagement with bureaucracy enables us to imagine more democratic and more collaborative modes of scientific practice.
eBook
Inhuman networks : social media and the archaeology of connection
\"Social media's connectivity is often thought to be a manifestation of human nature buried until now, revealed only through the diverse technologies of the participatory internet. Rather than embrace this view, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection argues that the human nature revealed by social media imagines network technology and data as models for behavior online. Covering a wide range of historical and interdisciplinary subjects, Grant Bollmer examines the emergence of \"the network\" as a model for relation in the 1700s and 1800s and follows it through marginal, often forgotten articulations of technology, biology, economics, and the social. From this history, Bollmer examines contemporary controversies surrounding social media, extending out to the influence of network models on issues of critical theory, politics, popular science, and neoliberalism. By moving through the past and present of network media, Inhuman Networks demonstrates how contemporary network culture unintentionally repeats debates over the limits of Western modernity to provide an idealized future where \"the human\" is interchangeable with abstract, flowing data connected through well-managed, distributed networks. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The reconfiguration of biobanks in Europe under the BBMRI-ERIC framework: towards global sharing nodes?
Freezers with biospecimen deposits became biobanks and later were networked at the pan-European level in 2013 under the Biobanking and BioMolecular Resources Research Infrastructure—European Research Infrastructure Consortium (BBMRI-ERIC). Drawing on document analysis about the BBMRI-ERIC and multi-sited fieldwork with biobankers in Spain from a science and technology studies approach, we explore what biobanks are expected to do and become under the BBMRI-ERIC framework, and how infrastructural transitions promote particular transformations in biobanking practices. The primary purpose of biobanks in Europe is presented as being to become mediators in contemporary biomedical research (global sharing nodes) distribution, and distributed nodes of samples and their associated data. We argue that infrastructural transitions are complicated and heterogeneous, giving rise to unattended local concerns on adjusting their practices to fit into the BBMRI-ERIC framework, even for non-members, as the case of Spain illustrates, where “old practices” of collection and storage are questioned. In this article, we aim to encourage qualitative studies to explore the lags between pan-European policies and prospects, different contextual interpretations, and biobanking reconfigurations as an opportunity to explore what that lag is made of (e.g. tensions with “old practices,” unresolved conflicts with the national agendas, reservations on a possible centralization of the biobanking practices by regional biobanks, lack of funding, etc.). Such research could enrich not only policy guidance, but also the understanding of technoscientific infrastructures’ scalability.
Journal Article
The co-constitution of ageing and technology – a model and agenda
This paper presents a model for studying ageing and technology. It investigates the theoretical gains that can be made by combining insights from Age Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Although technology has become a much more salient part in the everyday lives of older people and investments are high in technologies to deal with the alleged challenges of demographic change, theory development about ageing–technology relations has not kept up with these trends. Partly this is due to the poor connection between the social scientific understanding of ageing and the technically focused discipline of gerontechnology. This has led to an interventionist logic that underlies much of the current and implicit theorising about ageing and technology. We briefly analyse the problems of the interventionist logic and then present a model that conceptualises ageing and technology as co-constituted. We propose this model – which we call the CAT-model – to highlight a number of fundamental ideas about ageing–technology relations. At the centre are four different arenas (life-worlds of older people, design worlds, technological artefacts and images of ageing) in and across which these relations can and should be studied. To develop the model, we build on our own theoretical and empirical work over the last decade, and on examples from recent scholarship that straddle the disciplinary boundaries between STS and Age Studies.
Journal Article
Consuming music in the digital age : technologies, roles and everyday life
\"Consuming Music in the Digital Age explores issues related to the consumption of music in the digital age of music technologies. In exploring questions related to the material and technological modalities of contemporary music consumption, to the diffusion of music within everyday life, to individuals' affective responses to music, to their taste and to the relevance of music within their life narratives, this book aims to highlight how music increasingly represents an essential resource to individuals' daily lives. It offers a much-needed update to theories from the sociology of music on individual music practices, while also accounting for the various structural elements that come into play in how individuals consume music. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Feedback literacy: a critical review of an emerging concept
Systemic challenges for feedback practice are widely discussed in the research literature. The expanding mass higher education systems, for instance, seem to inhibit regular and sustained teacher-student interactions. The concept of feedback literacy, representing students’ and teachers’ capacities to optimize the benefits of feedback opportunities, has gained widespread attention by offering new ways of tackling these challenges. This study involves a critical review of the first 49 published articles on feedback literacy. Drawing on science and technology studies, and in particular on Popkewitz’s concept of fabrication, we explore how research has invented feedback literacy as a way of reframing feedback processes through the idea of individual skill development. First, we analyze how research has fabricated students and teachers through their feedback literacies that can be tracked, measured, and developed. Here, there exists a conceptual shift from analyzing feedback as external input to feedback literacy as a psychological construct residing within individuals. This interpretation carries positive implications of student and teacher empowerment, whilst downplaying policy-level challenges facing feedback interactions. The second contrasting fabrication positions feedback literate students and teachers as socio-culturally situated, communal agents. We conclude that feedback literacy is a powerful idea that, if used carefully, carries potential for reimagining feedback in higher education. It also, however, risks psychologizing students’ and teachers’ feedback behaviors amidst prevalent assessment and grading policies. We call for further reflexivity in considering whether feedback literacy research aims to challenge or complement the broader socio-political landscapes of higher education.
Journal Article
Flickering Presence: Theorizing Race and Racism in the Governmentality of Borders and Migration
Analytics of biopolitics and government have proven to be powerful tools in a growing scholarship examining the bordering, surveillance, securitization and contestation of migratory processes. Yet the critical potential of such research is hampered by the rather limited ways it has managed to make sense of race and racism. While Foucault was insistent that governmentality should orient itself to the understanding of singularities, too often race appears, when treated at all, as a general phenomenon. This article makes two contributions aimed at addressing these shortcomings. First, we survey studies in the governmentality of migration and develop a typology of what we call framings of race – the ways that race appears, is mobilized, or haunts this scholarship. Second, we look to recent debates about race and racism in Science & Technology Studies for useful theoretical innovations that might help us study border- and race-making as mutually constitutive processes.
Journal Article