This paper problematizes the obsession with “scaling up” that is visible in numerous technological domains. Using the case of hydrogen mobility projects in France, we identify a tension between a discourse of rapid scaling for nationwide deployment, and projects undertaken by local authorities and private companies who make small-scale experiments with hydrogen cars and charging stations more dense, by adding uses, actors, and technical functionalities. We use the term “deep scaling” to characterize the latter approach. By examining projects focusing on “ecosystems” of hydrogen mobility, we discuss the consequences of deep scaling for the geographic and economic extension. In this configuration, technologies are not expected to expand to vast territories by remaining the same at a bigger scale. Instead, they are attached to local sites and develop alongside them, which raises the issue of the connections between those sites. The analysis of deep scaling allows us to identify potential alternatives to ready-made discourses of scalability and contribute to the analysis of the politics and practices of scaling.
The clinician-scientist is often viewed as the crucial nexus in the translational processes that turn scientific research into medical technologies, including but not limited to pharmaceuticals. To create a point of contrast, and to consider the theme of invisible labor, this paper foregrounds an alternative actant who has also been deemed a vital nexus in translational medicine within Science and Technology Studies: the laboratory animal as model organism. Based on observational research conducted in an animal facility that was caring for laboratory mice as well as the immunological laboratory that was conducting research regarding ageing and vaccine uptake using those mice, this paper explores how mouse bodies and animal technicians’ knowledge of those mouse bodies are rendered invisible through the everyday flows of translation. I draw on Balka and Star's concept of “shadow bodies” to consider variations in how mouse bodies are understood across the translational process and probe the consequences this has for what knowledge is legitimately produced and by whom. By making the invisible work of mice and of technicians visible, I argue that the organizational filters of translational medicine may inadvertently make the work of animal technicians all the harder, in a manner that reproduces social inequalities.
This paper shows that expert authority can be the result of a process of co-construction by scientists and users, using the case of the Netherlands' storm warnings system. I analyze the changing "culture of prediction" of the Netherlands' storm warnings system between 1860 and about 1920, focusing on the changing relation between scientific experts and users with experience-based expertise. When started, the storm warnings relied on users taking an active role. The new storm warning system, introduced by Buys Ballot in 1860 following the introduction of telegraph networks, explicitly tried to mobilize sailors' weather wisdom. Following complaints from the maritime community and controversies about criteria for accuracy or reliability around 1900, storm forecasting authority became the exclusive domain of scientists. Interestingly, the authority of experts was not challenged during this controversy. Rather, the debates focused on mutual expectations of expertise and on whether the storm warning system was primarily a scientific or a practical system. This paper is based on historical documentation from the archives of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, which includes the perspectives of users.
Digital infrastructures, such as editorial management systems (EMS), play a crucial role in academic publishing. However, despite their ubiquity, they have received surprisingly little analytical attention. Here, we investigate how EMSs are employed in practice and contribute to editorial evaluations. Conducting a case study of a biomedical publisher, we investigate the selection of peer reviewers by editors, using both qualitative and quantitative data. When looking at how interactions between editors and the digital infrastructures unfold, we observed three analytically different types of interaction: (1) editors and infrastructure jointly accomplish the acceleration of peer review, (2) editors mitigate the infrastructure when establishing a collective memory, and (3) editors disengage from the infrastructure when they evaluate potential reviewers. Through strategic disengagement from and mitigation of the infrastructures, editors create interpretative spaces for themselves. This way, most of the interpretative and evaluative work still remains in the domain of the human editorial staff. Our results furthermore highlight the importance of the specific spatial, social, organizational, and cultural conditions of the editorial office for editors' ability to modulate their engagement with the infrastructures, create interpretative spaces, and shape infrastructural effects.
Based on fieldwork in China on oncology clinical trials for immunotherapy which involve foreign patients as trial subjects, in this paper, I illustrate how the source material needed for the trial (the patient's T cells) is a scarce biological substance that needs to be generated and crafted though the efforts of patients, doctors, nurses, or lab technicians, as well as other staff: chauffeurs, translators, and foreign patient coordinators. Among the varied tasks done by these support staff, I focus on the intersubjective practices they perform to respond to the needs at the bench and the bedside, what I call "miscellaneous care." I argue that although invisible and neglected, these practices are constitutive of the techno-scientific assemblage of translational medicine. Miscellaneous care suggests that the capitalization of life itself does not only refer to the capitalization of biological substances and biological processes, it in fact includes capitalization of intersubjective processes, such as responding to the presence of others.
