Simulation-based training (SBT) has been on the rise as a medical education methodology in Germany since the 1980s, characterising this period of change in terms of professionalisation and institutionalisation. Jasmin Dierkes illustrates how SBT reflects significant historical and contemporary shifts in education, science and technology, and the medical profession, all of which are undergoing profound, albeit incremental, changes. Her study provides insights for researchers specialising in professional development, transformation, medical materiality, or educational and institutional structures, as well as to stakeholders in medical or higher education.
How has the world lost three quarters of its crop diversity in less than a century? How does a collection of seeds frozen in the Arctic help face this loss and ensure future food security? And how can Indigenous knowledges and artistic interventions inspire modes of dealing with agrobiodiversity loss that respond to contemporary socio-ecological transformations with care rather than techno-salvationism? Franziska von Verschuer traces these questions from the world's stronghold against agrobiodiversity loss, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to divergent worlds and modes of world-making it assembles along with seeds. This study shows that the future is more open than the popular story of the ›doomsday vault‹ suggests.
The Edinburgh and South-East Scotland City Region Deal (CRD) constitutes a long-term infrastructure investment that is designed to transform the city region into the »Data Capital of Europe«. Drawing on science and technology studies and urban studies, Nicolas Zehner explores the question of who gets to imagine what kinds of urban-regional futures by investigating the emergence and early implementation of this large, multi-stakeholder urban-regional development project. Demonstrating the growing influence of universities in shaping desirable futures, he introduces the notion of "dataist modernity" to characterise the contemporary relationship between science, technology and urban planning.
What does really happen between the moment when a scientist is observing a bird in the wild and publishing a scientific chart? Jana Thierfelder reveals the hidden life of field science through the 30-year archive of biologist Michael Griesser’s work with Siberian jays in Sweden. Blending design, anthropology, and science studies, it uncovers the sketches, notes, tools, and sensory practices behind scientific knowledge. By tracing how scientific observation becomes publication, it shows that science is not just objective output – but lived, embodied, and relational work. It is about the people, places, and processes that shape knowledge. A call for more open, transdisciplinary approaches to how we understand and share science.
How are human computation systems developed in the field of citizen science to achieve what neither humans nor computers can do alone? Through multiple perspectives and methods, Libuse Hannah Veprek examines the imagination of these assemblages, their creation, and everyday negotiation in the interplay of various actors and play/science entanglements at the edge of AI. Focusing on their human-technology relations, this ethnographic study shows how these formations are marked by intraversions, as they change with technological advancements and the actors' goals, motivations, and practices. This work contributes to the constructive and critical ethnographic engagement with human-AI assemblages in the making.
