In this article, I examine the work of human–technology interface researchers in Japan to argue for the emergence of a “symbiotic ethic” in their felt encounters with technologies. Using ethnographic fieldwork at university labs conducted since 2011, I explore why researchers create technologies that are made to be “felt” rather than “used” to show how they draw together theories of biological symbiosis, critiques of neoliberal society situated in recent Japanese technology policy, and bodily experiences of technology, uncanny and otherwise, into an alternative vision of technocapitalism in Japan. In their attempts to create a more “human-centered” “Ambient Information Society,” the researchers develop interfaces that will enable Japan's future economic and social development. Yet at the same time, the bodily experiences they have with their technologies push them toward human–technology relations in which the state's emphasis on economic value can be displaced by the ethical value of symbiosis. This article extends notions of value from anthropology and of ethical subject formation in STS to show how spaces to explore possibilities for symbiosis between humans and technologies become valued themselves, as the researchers imagine alternative technocapitalisms for Japan.
This article examines the phenomenology of nursing care delivered through V & auml;lkky, a full-body teleoperated humanoid robot trialed in a Finnish hospital ward in 2023. Bringing science and technology studies into dialogue with phenomenology, we analyze qualitative data from observations, focus groups, and interviews with nurse-operators, managers, roboticists, and one patient involved in the pilot. We argue that V & auml;lkky's deployment constituted a "robot drama" in which the frictions between robotic imaginaries and situated clinical practice produced "infrastructural inversions," making visible normally tacit dimensions of nursing care. To conceptualize these dimensions, we develop the notion of "experiential care infrastructures": the embodied, affective, and relational conditions that underpin care but can be overlooked in task-based approaches to robot design. Our analysis shows that V & auml;lkky afforded limited experiences of telepresence, and that nurses found the technology to interrupt rather than enable caring relations. We conclude that the design and deployment of telepresence robots in healthcare settings must attend to experiential infrastructures that make ethical and relational care possible.
Wildfire risk maps have emerged as a prevalent yet contested scientific object in the United States and internationally. These maps, often a patchwork of bright reds and oranges, depict relative risk scores for different locations. Dozens of these maps from private companies and public agencies have proliferated in recent years, yet members of the public and scientists alike have posed questions about map accuracy: can the maps reliably depict the risk of such infrequent, high-consequence events? In this article, I examine these maps as a contribution to the Science and Technology Studies scholarship on the production of risk assessments. Though they appear orderly and neat, wildfire risk maps are the result of complicated, layered scientific decisions. Drawing on interviews with wildfire risk map producers, I analyze how these maps are socially constructed and materialize future risk. Almost universally, these map producers share a lack of confidence in their approaches to modeling wildfire risk because they view wildfire as unpredictable and risk modeling as faulty. How then do these actors determine what constitutes success or a lack thereof? I find that many, in their attempts to navigate indeterminacy, turn instead to personal knowledge of wildfire risk in the places they live.
In Morogoro, Tanzania, people regularly embark on treasure hunting expeditions, usually near places or buildings associated with German colonialism. In recounting their attempts to find buried wealth, treasure seekers describe their practice as anticipatory, framed by an anxiety about being “behind” (nyuma) in terms of access to prospecting technologies when compared to foreigners (wageni). Based on ethnographic participation in two treasure hunting expeditions, I propose that treasure hunting is a chronopolitical act, an intervention into time that constructs alternative futures beyond state and market logics. Treasure seekers rely on their experiences with detection tools, spiritual practice, and postcolonial history to help them locate buried treasure. As a contemporary social practice, treasure hunting bridges indigenous, vernacular, and outsider knowledge about technology to reorder postcolonial time and recuperate a degree of agency over an economic future potential. Drawing on ongoing science and technology studies (STS) scholarship about the underground and about technology in African contexts, I demonstrate that treasures, as imagined and precious entities, exemplify forms of value that precede materialization. I conclude by suggesting that STS scholarship could attend to underground matter whose value is shaped by persistent intangibility and indeterminacy.
This article challenges the view of technologies, and more particularly generative artificial intelligence (AI), as augmenting experience through binary human-computer interactions and offloading tasks. Instead, it argues that such technologies exhibit atmospheric qualities, shaping situated encounters through an interplay of infrastructure and affect. The article proposes atmospheric analytics as a heuristic framework for investigating these encounters. The framework is intended to be relevant for multiple social and cultural contexts, and is illustrated here by applying it to educational settings. The framework attends to the relational complexity of emerging technologies, such as generative AI, through the careful deployment of three analytical optics: density, saturation, and viscosity. These optics direct attention to atmospheric variations in intensity, vitality, and resistance associated with the proliferation of technologies like generative AI in everyday situations. By focusing on situations, atmospheric analytics move beyond simplistic notions of technologies as instrumental tools or threats, instead examining how they are agentially interwoven within practices. Ultimately, atmospheric analytics contributes to a critical understanding of the social, political, and ethical implications of algorithmic technologies, moving beyond determinism to explore the nuanced and multifaceted realities of human-technology coexistence.
Since COP21 in 2015, carbon neutrality targets have emphasized the enhancement of various carbon sinks, including soils, to help sequester carbon away from the atmosphere. What does it take to make soils into carbon sinks? This article focuses on a French digital model of soil carbon cycling named AMG, which quantifies soil carbon stocks and their evolution under various agricultural practices. We examine how AMG circulates and transforms within a loosely connected network of actors and organizations involved in agricultural development, climate research, land-use planning public administrations, and carbon commodification. We show how the model evolves into three distinct yet interconnected regimes of carbon quantification-in climate academic research, local public action, and carbon markets-that contribute to building and expanding a sociotechnical infrastructure for quantifying soil carbon sequestration potential. Our findings contribute to the literature on environmental quantification and knowledge infrastructures by calling for a shift from viewing knowledge infrastructures as stable and fixed, toward an approach that emphasizes open-ended, flexible, and ongoing processes of infrastructuring. We also contribute to the literature on soil-human relations by emphasizing how this model fosters a new focus on the active role of soils in the global carbon cycle and climate change mitigation.
This article focuses on social movements’ engagement in the field of environmental health through a particular form of knowledge production: “popular expology.” This concept reflects the growing development of initiatives aimed at producing data on human exposure to pollutants, rather than establishing the causes of health effects, as “popular epidemiology” does. To develop our concept, we draw on the case of the French anti-pesticide movement. For more than a decade, organizations from this movement have increasingly invested in the performance of studies designed to demonstrate the presence of pesticide residues. We show that popular expology is encouraged by the difficulties social movements face in producing epidemiological data, by the development of a market for affordable pesticide detection tools, and by the increasing accessibility of toxicological and epidemiological knowledge produced by research and expert institutions. We also analyze two roles that popular expology plays for social movements: on the one hand, embodying invisible pollutions and raising the attention of the media to this issue; on the other hand, demonstrating weaknesses in regulatory risk assessment. This article, therefore, suggests the need for a broadening of our understanding of the use and production of science as a political mode of action for environmental social movements.
Since the late 2000s, artisanal and small-scale gold miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have incorporated mechanized ball mills in their workflow. With finely ground rock dust escaping from the hinges of these mills, these same miners are increasingly exposed to pulmonary damage as pulmonary diseases move from the underground to the air above the mines. On the one hand, the lack of infrastructure and exposure to multiple volatiles makes it difficult to understand the underlying mechanism that produces silicosis. On the other hand, miners also recover dust-borne waste and transform it into tailings. Drawing from Michel Serres's notion of a parasite, this ethnographic account challenges extractive histories from the ambiguous vantage point of rock dust. Tracking from a silicosis-based regime under colonial rule to more recent human-machine-dust assemblages, this article uncovers not a history of flows but rather one of parasitic interruptions, unexpected agencies, and uneven dispersions.
This paper takes nuclear decommissioning as an entry point in the way we understand and value innovations from what they leave behind. Nuclear decommissioning allows one to capture transformations through which an infrastructure that has lost its initial use and value is transformed into storable nuclear waste. We label this process "residual care," a form of care in practice dealing with neglected things, and analyze it through the case of graphite-moderated reactors in France. Once at the forefront of nuclear innovation in the 1950s-60s, these machines have turned into poorly known piles of degrading residues that are now planned to be fully decommissioned in 2100. The irradiated graphite they contain, long considered a negligible background element, does not fit the current standards of nuclear waste management and must be turned into proper waste. We argue that residual care changes the nature of the infrastructure-as different facts appear, such as the radiological properties of graphite and the fragility of its containment devices. What was once a demonstration of mastery has become the object of a fragile demonstration of care.
Despite lamentations to the contrary, expertise continues to play an important role in contemporary societies. In the context of pressing sustainability challenges, calls for so-called transformative change are emerging, with concomitant expectations that knowledge and expertise can contribute to such change. One area in which such expertise is being developed is in the context of alternative concepts of wellbeing to replace the dominance of gross domestic product (GDP), yielding an ongoing co-production of modes of expertise with modes of policymaking. In this paper, we explore this ongoing co-production in the context of what is called “Dutch Broad Wellbeing.” We introduce the concept of knowledge accountability to refer to what knowledge is mobilized and how it is expected to feature in policymaking. We identify two different logics of knowledge accountability, a technocratic and a political logic, and discuss how they interrelate with transformative change. We suggest that the analysis of logics of knowledge accountability not only supports understanding how knowledge features in policymaking but also underscores the need to make fit-for-purpose modes of expertise explicit. We contend that, for the benefit of both transformative change and democracy, these modes should yield expertise that politicizes.
As part of the Danish Climate Act of 2019, the government established a Climate Citizens' Assembly to secure public participation in the formulation of climate policy. Due to COVID-19, the Assembly was moved online to the virtual meeting platform Zoom. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines what happens when such participatory processes are conducted digitally, asking how the digital mediation of the Assembly shaped both facilitation practices and participants' experiences of participation. Combining Knorr Cetina's notion of the "synthetic situation" with Kelty's concept of "formatted participation," we argue that participation in the Assembly became "synthetic," both because digital mediation created forms of estrangement and because the online format required greater procedural rigidity, replacing engaged discussion with a demanding, highly structured writing process. The analysis extends theoretical discussions of synthetic and formatted participation to digitally mediated democratic experiments, demonstrating that the medium of participation-while easily overlooked-can fundamentally reshape the character and quality of public deliberation and citizen participation.
This study investigates the role of validation reports in legitimizing laboratory automation through artificial intelligence and robotic systems in clinical microbiology. Based on a qualitative analysis of thirty reports authored by expert microbiologists between 2016 and 2023 across eight countries-Australia, Belgium, China, Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom-we examine how technological promises are made accountable. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the sociology of expectations, we approach these reports not as mere sources of "objective" information, but as instruments of accountability that link future-oriented promises with conventional laboratory practices-particularly manual labor. We argue that they embody a distinct accountability style, diverging from an ethics-driven approach often found in influential STS contributions. Automation promises-largely framed through managerial values-actualize their contractual character when articulated through metrics designed to assess satisfactory performance. Yet numerical results alone are insufficient to legitimize devices that mostly match the performance of manual labor. A paradox emerges: while manual labor serves as the gold standard against which automation is assessed, for automation to be validated, manual labor must be discursively problematized as an "entrenched habit"-a hindrance to addressing contemporary healthcare challenges. We argue this constitutes an essential feature of the validation accountability style.
Infrastructures built to move goods, people, and information across distance support the functioning of everyday tasks, logistical networks, and industrial lifeworlds across both the Global South and the Global North. What work does noise perform in their functioning? How does noise matter for their design? This paper suggests that noise within infrastructures elicits knowledge and alteration that it recursively eludes, but that such epistemes of representation and intervention are historically specific to the transductive chains through which noise manifests itself as interference. Working across two different historical examples, this paper compares the incommensurable ways that engineers and scientists understood and addressed the problem of noisy interferences within signaling systems engineered for communication within the deep-shaft coal mines of Germany's Ruhr in the 20th century. This comparison requires decoupling the concept of noise as an audible phenomenon from its disruptive capacity manifested as interference within the transmission of signs, two aspects of noise often conflated. More broadly, the paper proposes a heuristic of transduction as an alternative framework for STS studies of infrastructures-one that shifts attention away from their elemental components (copper, steel, concrete) toward how noise within sociotechnical systems involving energy conversions and signal transmission comes to matter.
"Developmental New Space" might, at first glance, seem to be an oxymoron since New Space is often conceptualized as being free from centralized government support or state programming. However, a historical and discursive analysis of contemporary South Korean policy reports, media reports, public education programs and interviews illustrate that developmentalism very much shapes South Korean New Space policy. "Developmental New Space" in South Korea emerges from its history of militarized developmentalism and continues to shape neocolonial inter-Asian relations as South Korea exports New Space technologies and products globally and expand South Korean influence. This paper contributes to the theorization of emergent forms of capitalism in outer space by placing it in histories and politics that shape market relations in South Korea. In doing so, it shows that no account of New Space can be decontextualized from the geopolitical and neoliberal hierarchies that have structured global capitalism since the Cold War. Interviews and participant observation with South Koreans illustrates that the public is divided over national investments in New Space. Some seek a future in outer space that is not contingent upon militarized developmentalism, while others support New Space for what they perceive to be continued economic growth and global competitiveness.
This article examines the transformation of terrarium building from a colonial-era hobbyist practice into a contemporary YouTube-based citizen science movement, analyzing how this shift reflects changing conceptualizations of nature's relationship to capital. Through a case study of AntsCanada, a prominent YouTube channel focused on ant-keeping terraria, the article demonstrates how traditional terrarium design's "logic of closure" has been subordinated to a "logic of function" within social media's attention economy. The channel's evolution from simple ant colonies to complex community terraria reveals how contemporary platform capitalism preserves and mobilizes multiplicities of nonhuman matters of concern as speculative inventory for future business opportunities. Drawing on actor-network theory and Alain Badiou's theory of multiplicities, the article argues that this YouTube entrepreneur exemplifies the new vectoralist class in the current software capitalism, where profit derives not from direct resource extraction but from redirecting system excesses into new affordances. The article concludes that while this vectoralist approach to scaling ecosystems appears to mirror Badiou's concept of truth procedures, it ultimately serves as capitalism's novel instrument for capturing nonhuman multiplicities.
Today, science is expected to open up to publics and be more responsible. At the same time, the legitimacy and autonomy of academic work are increasingly challenged. Public participation in science constitutes a critical site of these ambivalent dynamics, while it also becomes questionable as an emancipatory practice and as an analytical concept. To examine these reconfigurations of science-society relations, this article proposes to study the doing and undoing of symbolic boundaries by bringing the concepts of boundary work, boundary objects, and boundary organizations closer together. Empirically, new insights are provided on citizen science as an emblematic approach that unites and reshapes diverse forms of participatory research. The analysis moves beyond single projects tracing three boundary management practices that propel the consolidation of citizen science at the field level: (1) rhetorically identifying as double promise of innovative science and societally useful participation; (2) infrastructuring collaboration among projects through adaptive qualification; and (3) organizing practitioners as a movement within institutions. The entanglements of those boundary practices give rise to the high connectivity as well as fragility of a field that currently emerges as a prototype of science-society relations.
This paper explores the development of an algorithm for child welfare administration in Denmark. Based on an ethnographic study of the development process, we argue that scientists and IT developers enacted not one but multiple versions of "the" algorithm, and in this process, also engineered its multiple potential worlds. We conceptualize these as "algorithm-worlds"; specific sets of relations in which a version of the algorithm can exist and act. We illustrate three examples from our study: the algorithm as a docile tool within the world of child welfare casework; the algorithm as a data-connector within the world of public data infrastructure; and the algorithm as a data processor in the world of a legal assessment. We contend the merely foregrounding algorithms' multiplicity risks underestimating their world-making power, whereas construing algorithms as powerful without attending to their processes of becoming renders them seemingly singular and universal. By combining recent work on the multiplicity of algorithms in STS with actor-network-theory studies on "heterogeneous engineering," our approach, in turn, allows elucidating not only three different versions but also how each of these came with a distinct world of practice. We argue that these algorithm-worlds partially coexist, partially conflict or cascade.
This article builds on the affective turn in Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses of public engagement with science to explore the tension between epistemological interrogation and social and political transformation. The empirical basis for this exploration is a year-long interdisciplinary public engagement project about routine data use in critical care. Partly conceived as a form of "otherwising" in relation both to determinist tropes of health data and reductionist forms of patient and public involvement in health research, the project sought to open up dialogue and debate using design-led methods, namely cultural probes. Widely regarded as a success, the project was, however, less subversive than originally envisaged, in spite of its commitment to playful and speculative processes. In order to explain this, we draw on feminist STS literature on the inseparability of knowledge and care, where care is conceived as a form of mutually transformative relating between beings-or attaching. Interdisciplinary collaboration, we suggest, was an effect of attaching, enabled by our methodological orientation to play. We show how playfulness as a mode of otherwising goes beyond the hollow critique of critical constructivism and fosters caring relations, both toward the objects of science and between scientists, clinicians, sociologists, and designers.
Innovation is regularly depicted as the answer to regional socioeconomic decline and deindustrialization. Yet, the results of regional innovation strategies are frequently underwhelming and contested, leading citizens to question the promises of innovation and policymakers to doubt constituents' willingness to embrace change. This paper investigates how innovation-centered revitalization policies land in "Rust Belt" regions-the supposed lost hinterlands of innovation-in uneven, fragmented, and occasionally crude ways. We analyze Upstate New York as a site where the US CHIPS and Science Act (CHIPS Act) was envisioned to counter chronic decline and irrelevance with investments in innovation and high-tech jobs. Drawing on scholarship on regional innovation cultures and postindustrial futures, we show how the CHIPS Act-couched in a desideratum of innovation-casts a penumbra of "others" in the form of undesirable regions, histories, and ways of life that clash with locally grounded understandings of resilience, worth, and hope. Postindustrial communities associate the CHIPS Act with previously broken policy promises of revival, and resist having their social value tethered to innovation productivity. We argue innovation policies for Rust Belt regions should invoke elements of regional worth and identity beyond jobs and competitiveness, and be legible as social and economic policy.
This article examines the political economy of technoscientific promises in peripheral contexts, focusing on the often-overlooked question of promise fulfilment. Drawing on Argentina's COVID-19 vaccine shortage, it explores how futures imagined through science and technology are shaped by scarcity and power asymmetries-constraining both promises and delivery. Amid a health emergency, national limitations, and a global vaccine race that sidelined developing countries, we show Argentina's response unfolding through three interrelated technoscientific promises-timely health access, industrial self-sufficiency, and sovereign science-interweaving expectations on science, technology, and the state. We trace how peripheral promise-making and delivery took shape, grounded in material foundations-coalitions, capacities, and technologies that conferred credibility-and symbolic ones-national imaginaries and development aspirations, framed as visions of the "public good," which lent legitimacy to the chosen paths. We highlight the distinct dynamics of peripheral promising, where limited agency and structural asymmetries constrain both ambition and fulfilment. Under crisis-fueled public scrutiny, symbolic and material resources were mobilized to meet expectations around science, technology, and the state-ultimately narrowing broad aspirations into pragmatic, demonstrable outcomes. Fulfilment required constant adaptation, revealing the fragility, contingencies, and bounded possibilities of what peripheral nations can credibly envision, pursue, and achieve.
