This article examines how researchers who study inter- and transdisciplinary research practices conceptualise and navigate methodological choices. Drawing on science, technology and society (STS), we combined a meta-ethnography and semi-structured interviews with scholars engaged in investigating inter- and transdisciplinary research. Our analysis identifies four interrelated dynamic pairs: familiarity/exploration, systematisation/adaptability, transferability/contextualisation, and reflection/action, that shape methodological decision-making. Rather than viewing these as tensions, we argue they function as productive dualities guiding reflexive and context-sensitive research inquiry. The study underscores the importance of methodological awareness, documentation, and collaborative engagement in advancing the study of inter- and transdisciplinary research. There has, to date, been no systematised understanding of how methodological practices influence the investigation and support of inter- and transdisciplinary research and their impact. The article then contributes to STS and inter- and transdisciplinary scholarships, by offering a systematised understanding of how methodological practices influence the investigation and support of collaborative research and its impact.
Scientific research, particularly in international collaborations, operates within a complex web of expert-driven practices, legal regulations, and ethical considerations that are often distanced from local and regional participation. While ethical, legal and social initiatives to govern science have attempted to bridge this gap, the good governance of science, especially in cases marked by historical power imbalances, remains a significant challenge. Existing governance structures, often influenced by national or supranational legal frameworks and cosmopolitan ideals, may not adequately address the nuances of international, privately funded, or postcolonial research landscapes. This paper addresses relating limitations, particularly in the case of international scientific collaborations involving the Global South. It argues that current governance models, while aspiring to universalism, can inadvertently perpetuate injustices and overlook local values and needs. Using the case of a German-Ethiopian research collaboration on Coccinia abyssinica, an endemic Ethiopian plant, this paper illustrates the tensions arising from differing sociotechnical imaginaries, research repertoires, and power relationships to decision making processes. As a corrective, this paper proposes the development and adoption of virtue-based ethics. This perspective emphasizes virtues and responsibilities for actors within the scientific and bioethical ecosystem, aiming to foster more equitable, culturally sensitive, and fair international research collaborations. By integrating postcolonial critiques of epistemology and STS insights to bioethics, this approach seeks to reconfigure bioethical governance to better navigate the complexities of global science and promote genuine epistemic inclusion.
Gear cultures are a novel kind of social formation around specific kinds of fetishised objects (e.g., recording studio equipment, digital cameras, guitar pedals, espresso machines, synthesisers, overclocked computers, mechanical keyboards). Gear typically represents technologies that nominally were made obsolete by software simulations or mass market commodities but that gained new meanings, uses and practices through transnational networks of online/offline users. After surveying proto-gear culture literature within several fields, this article presents a flexible but generalisable multi-mode, multi-sited methodology for the ethnographic study of ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ (Barad, 2007) and the ‘agency configurations’ concept (Erofeeva, 2019). Gear cultures research has raised salient questions about how we study agency and gendered social formations while attending to the irreducible materiality of gear—within multi-platform social media engagement and a YouTube influencer economy, in trade shows, and in local/regional meetups and gear societies.
In 2020, Finland launched its own national Artificial Intelligence (AI) program called AuroraAI. The goal of the program was to develop a more human-centric approach to public and private services using AI. AuroraAI was conceptualized as a type of AI assistant for citizens, which would help improve the human condition and at the same time help alleviate the financial burden of the state through more efficient service provision and empowering individuals. Using the notion of “enchanted determinism” developed by Campolo and Crawford (2020) I explore the ambiguous position that Finland’s national AI program occupied within contemporary discourses of technological progress and development. I explore the operation of AuroraAI as a platform for public service development through two examples. First, I look at visual representation of the operation of AuroraAI, and second, how AI was envisioned to provide insight for self-improvement. The two examples provide insights of how the logic of AuroraAI was conceptualized as a type of Master Algorithm (Domingos, 2015) that would have embodied many of the characteristics that Campolo and Crawford have described as re-enchantment. AuroraAI’s approach to the use of AI was a mixture of modernist and positivist thinking infused with visions of imagined capabilities attributed to AI.
Boundary-spanning agency is important for weaving together different ways of doing and knowing. This article examines boundary-spanning agency in the context of courtroom contestation of veterinary expertise. Analysing Finnish supreme administrative court judgments, we highlight how knowledge claims about animal welfare and about the process of supervisory inspections are deployed and contested by both veterinarians and animal owners in a bid to set down an authoritative interpretation about empirical actuality at the inspected sites. A central finding is that veterinarians, contrary to the implications of earlier studies, are in a potent position in their supervising role. Given the lack of intermediary soft law mechanisms such as inspection guidelines, the interpretative space left between animal protection law and veterinarians' inferences about the conditions at the inspected site leaves veterinarians with a wide mandate to make decisions about ending livelihoods and euthanising the inspected animals.
Science, technology and innovation (STI) policy is shaped by the policy instruments used. However, we know relatively little about the work practices of policy actors implementing them. This article investigates how policy objectives are translated into governance by drawing on a case study of the implementation of a 'Strategic Research' funding instrument in Finland. The instrument is expected to fulfil a plurality of objectives, calling for solutions to various societal challenges through broad collaboration on research themes that require government approval. I examine the articulation work of the policy actors implementing the funding scheme and identify anticipatory tailoring and the repurposing of templates as central dimensions of this work. I show how the translation of policy objectives into a funding instrument expected to satisfy social worlds from politics to science is historically contingent and challenging. The article contributes with empirical detail into how policy actors managed multiple social worlds while implementing the research funding scheme, and the consequences and tensions that ensued.
Studies of architectural design practices have shown that building projects take shape through the intricate interactions between human designers and various technological tools. In present-day's architectural practice, these interactions are increasingly being reconfigured by two major trends that are affecting the future of construction: digitalisation and the imperative to make building processes and the built environment sustainable. Against this backdrop, the paper presents insights from an ethnographic case study on socio-digital co-design practices in the planning and preconstruction phase of an ambitious building project. This research explores how digital tools reconfigure design practices and highlights the 'reverse salient' that has limited the realisation of the integrative potential of socio-digital design processes. Using a practice theory approach centred on'socio-digital co-design', the study shows that digital tools reorganise, but do not take over, the coordination practices in early design necessary to achieve coherent results and sustainability outcomes.
Strangely, few recent studies of misinformation have given attention to the concept of misinformation itself. An examination of several studies of Covid misinformation shows them to be implicitly based on having unquestioned possession of the truth, so there is no attention to struggles over who decides what counts as misinformation and no mention of the possibility that views labelled misinformation might offer reasonable alternative perspectives. This has limitations, especially if understood in the context of research on public scientific controversies: ethical and political disagreements are obscured, and social analysts become de facto supporters of scientific orthodoxy.
‘Excellence’ is omnipresent in the research ecosystem but the focus on excellence is increasingly controversial. This paper contributes to the excellence debate through an empirical study of how notions of excellence are used in eight research funding organizations. Because research funding organizations are shaped by the excellence regime, and constrained by both governmental policy and scientific elites, funders cannot simply resort to a debunking critique and do away with excellence altogether. To navigate the ambiguous relationship to excellence, the approach to excellence is shifting from it being taken as a ‘matter of fact’ to a ‘matter of concern’ that needs to be unpacked and reconfigured. In mitigation strategies funders attempt to reconfigure excellence by patching, pluralizing and transforming their activities around excellence. We argue that a transformation of the research ecosystem is unlikely to happen when underlying assumptions about competition and meritocratic ideals are not also problematized.
This article explores the implementation of an Robotic Process Automation (RPA) -based robot designed to automate one small phase of data validation in primary healthcare. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Finnish wellbeing services county, we investigate the complexities involved in the implementation and use of RPA technology. Theoretically, the article uses and develops the concepts of breakdown and friction to examine how the robot performs its mundane data tasks. In this case, technical breakdowns and repair work were relatively minor compared to persistent frictions and the ongoing need for human assistance. We identified four sources of friction that hindered the robot's ability to complete the assigned task: technical failures, legislation and national guidelines, austerity and cost savings, and organisational complexity and hierarchies. The robot is described as a human-assisted technology to highlight the support it required to function. The findings suggest that alongside breakdowns, frictions deserve attention when examining digital technologies and their everyday use.
From robots to chatbots, AI technologies in care (nursing) homes have gained policymakers'attention amid critical issues like staffing shortages. Concurrently, the long-term care sector has become a prime target for technologists due to its global market potential given the growing ageing population. Drawing conceptually on ideas of breakdown and repair, we explore sociotechnical discourses of AI-based care for later life. We combine Bruno Latour's concept of delegation and Madeleine Akrich's notion of user representations to frame how these discourses can support breaking or repairing long-term care. Through this theoretical lens, we analysed 33 AI companies targeting the sector. Visual, textual, and semiotic analysis of their websites identified overarching discourses on ageing carefication, public inefficiencies, AI solutionism, and care datafication. Older people were depicted as passive data sources and staff as inefficient, positioning AI as the solution to all caregiving challenges. We consider implications for caregiving futures and for reimagining AI-human care.
T This article examines the organizational trajectory of a news recommender system developed within RTBF, Belgium’s public service media. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it conceptualizes the algorithm as a black box in the making and investigates how breakdown–repair cycles shaped its embedding and eventual stabilization within the organization. The study identifies two major breakdowns and demonstrates that the subsequent repairs functioned less as transformative solutions than as patching strategies: targeted adjustments that resolved immediate issues while simultaneously reinforcing the system’s legitimacy. By foregrounding these patching strategies, the article contributes to Science and Technology Studies (STS) by extending the literature on breakdowns and repair. It shows that such practices not only address technical vulnerabilities but also reconfigure organizational relations, contain dissent, and gradually contribute to the closure of the algorithmic black box.
This article explores the implementation of an Robotic Process Automation (RPA) -based robot designed to automate one small phase of data validation in primary healthcare. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Finnish wellbeing services county, we investigate the complexities involved in the implementation and use of RPA technology. Theoretically, the article uses and develops the concepts of breakdown and friction to examine how the robot performs its mundane data tasks. In this case, technical breakdowns and repair work were relatively minor compared to persistent frictions and the ongoing need for human assistance. We identified four sources of friction that hindered the robot’s ability to complete the assigned task: technical failures, legislation and national guidelines, austerity and cost savings, and organisational complexity and hierarchies. The robot is described as a human-assisted technology to highlight the support it required to function. The findings suggest that alongside breakdowns, frictions deserve attention when examining digital technologies and their everyday use.
