STS Methods

A hastily compiled list of references on methods in STS, and (critical) STS reflections on methods.

Asdal, K. 2018: “Interested Methods” and “Versions of Pragmatism”. Science, Technology, & Human Values 43(4): 748-55.

Ballestero, A., and Winthereik, B. R., eds. 2021: Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bloor, D. 1991: Knowledge and social imagery. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Calvert, J. 2013: Collaboration as a research method? Navigating social scientific involvement in synthetic biology. In: N Doorn, D Schuurbiers, I van de Poel and M. E. Gorman (eds.) Early Engagement and New Technologies: Opening Up the Laboratory. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, Volume 16, Dordrech: Springer, pp. 175-94.

———. 2023: A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Clarke, A. E., and Star, S. L. 2008: The social worlds framework: a theory/methods package. In: E. J Hackett, O Amsterdamska, M Lynch and J Wajcman (eds.) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies – Third Edition. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press.

Dumit, J. 2014: Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time. Cultural Anthropology 29(344–362).

Garfinkel, H. 1967: Studies in Ethnomethodology. Edlewoods Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Hyysalo, S., Pollock, N., and Williams, R. A. 2019: Method Matters in the Social Study of Technology: Investigating the Biographies of Artifacts and Practices. Science & Technology Studies 32(3): 2-25.

Latour, B. 1987: Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

———. 2005: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.

Latour, B., and Woolgar, S. 1979: Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Law, J. 1986: On the methods of long-distance control: vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India. Power, action and belief: A new sociology of knowledge: 234-63.

Law, J. 2004: After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

Law, J., and Ruppert, E. 2013: The Social Life of Methods: Devices. Journal of Cultural Economy 6(3): 229-40.

Law, J., and Ruppert, E., eds. 2013: The Device: The Social Life of Methods: Special issue of The Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3).

Leurs, K. 2017: Feminist Data Studies: Using Digital Methods for Ethical, Reflexive and Situated Socio-Cultural Research. Feminist Review 115(1): 130-54.

Lippert, I., and Mewes, J. S. 2021: Data, Methods and Writing. Science & Technology Studies 34(3): 2-16.

Lury, C., and Wakeford, N., eds. 2012: Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Lynch, M., and Peyrot, M. 1992: Introduction: A Reader’s Guide to Ethnomethodology. Qualitative Sociology 15(2).

Marres, N. 2015: Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method. Science, Technology, & Human Values 40(5): 655-86.

Marres, N., and Gerlitz, C. 2016: Interface Methods: Renegotiating Relations between Digital Social Research, STS and Sociology. The Sociological Review 64(1): 21-46.

Michael, M. 2012: De-signing the object of sociology: toward an ‘idiotic’ methodology. The Sociological Review 60(S1): 166-83.

Mulkay, M. 1974: Methodology in the sociology of science: Some reflections on the study of radio astronomy. Social Science Information 13(2): 107-19.

Orthia, L. A., and Roberson, T., eds. 2023: Queering Science Communication : Representations, Theory, and Practice, Contemporary issues in science communication. Bristol: Bristol University Press.

Ramírez-i-Ollé, M. 2019: Friendship as a scientific method. The Sociological Review 67(2): 299-317.

Reddy, E. 2023: ¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Rogers, R. 2009: The End of the Virtual – Digital Methods. Amsterdam: Vossiuspers UvA.

Ruppert, E., Law, J., and Savage, M. 2013: Reassembling social science methods: the challenge of digital devices. Theory, Culture & Society 30(4): 22-46.

Subramaniam, B. 2023: Methodologies for the Pressed: Cartographies for Adisciplinary Sciences. Science, Technology and Society 28(1): 68-76.

Thorsen, L. M. 2016: The Energy Walk: Experimenting with Aesthetic Methods in STS? Science as Culture 25(1): 141-48.

Vertesi, J., and Ribes, D. 2019: digitalSTS : a field guide for science & technology studies. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Wilkie, A., Michael, M., and Plummer-Fernandez, M. 2015: Speculative method and Twitter: Bots, energy and three conceptual characters. The Sociological Review 63(1): 79-101.

We should listen to coronavirus experts, but local wisdom counts too

Here’s a version of a piece that has just come out over at the Conversation, a modest contribution to making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece was co-written with Brian Cook, Declan Kuch, Joan Leach, Niamh Stephenson, Rachel Ankeny and Sujatha Raman. 

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Makeshift hospital beds at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne during the influenza pandemic of 1919. Museum Victoria

Public health messages about COVID-19 have been inconsistent and changed rapidly. Many have called for a unified source of expertise to guide responses to the crisis.

However, with the federal, state and local governments, as well as international bodies, offering different advice, it is no simple task to “listen to the experts”.

In uncertain situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, biomedical and public health experts contribute facts and their own judgements about risk to our collective thinking and decision making.

The public also have important contributions to make. In response to the spread of coronavirus, community groups are setting out to care for elderly neighbours. People are remembering the importance of nurturing community connections and developing an understanding of the structural burdens placed on women in times of crisis.

Alongside traditional kinds of expertise, this kind of “real time” expertise and leadership at the local scale will be invaluable in coming weeks and months.

Expertise is political

Expert judgements don’t exist in a vacuum. They arise from specific social and political contexts. To understand them, we need to acknowledge the tacit assumptions embedded within expert knowledge claims, especially assumptions concerning how publics respond to expert advice.

In recent weeks there has been much debate about the federal governments’s decision to keep schools open, which has only been made more uncertain by disagreements between experts over the role of schools in the transmission of COVID-19.

Similarly, in the Ruby Princess “debacle”, different governments and agencies have attempted to blame each other and drawn on expert knowledge claims to justify their actions.

These examples demonstrate how expertise is entangled with questions of political judgement and anticipated societal responses.

For publics, it can be hard to distinguish between health experts working for the government and those criticising the government. Experts tend to look alike, sound alike, and “advise” alike, leaving publics to navigate the cacophony.

In this situation, deciding which experts to listen to can become a nearly impossible task. Little wonder many people have been slow to change their behaviour.

Understanding public responses

As recently as two months ago, during Australia’s catastrophic bushfire season, publics were seen as resourceful and resilient. That image has quickly been replaced by a characterisation as vulnerable, easily spooked, and panicking in the face of uncertainty.

However, we can understand buying food, cleaning products, face masks, toiletries, and medication for asthma and fevers as reasonable responses to questions that experts themselves are trying to address in real time. For example, medical anthropologist Christos Lynteris has argued that face mask buying sprees are a reminder we should think of epidemics “not simply as biological events but also as social processes”.

Science studies scholar Brian Wynne has said the idea of public trust in expertise is too simple. The relationship between publics and experts is complex and ambivalent, he argues, and qualified by “the experience of dependency, possible alienation, and lack of agency”.

Public responses to COVID-19 are not as simple as a mass panic, but they signal something more worrying. The public lacks confidence in public health infrastructure and its ability to contain the virus. “Toilet paper panic” is the response of a population for whom expert advice is one factor among many that affect their feelings of security and wellbeing.

For experts seeking to contribute to public decision making, researchers have empirically demonstrated the productive value of collaborative approaches. For example, sociologist Steven Epstein has documented how collaborations between researchers and broader “lay experts” during the AIDS/HIV epidemic in the 1990s played a key role in the public health response to the disease.

Engaging public expertise, even in times of crisis

But how do we achieve meaningful engagement between publics and experts? Broadening our understanding of expertise would be a start.

Expertise might include the outpouring of creative expression prompted by COVID-19, or the surge in creation of mutual support groups.

Likewise, efforts to translate health warnings are essential for engaging vulnerable communities. These networks of varied expertise are likely to prove invaluable when existing governance is over-stretched or breaks down.

Diverse, diffuse, and local initiatives are likely to continue during periods of chaos, with the added advantage of feeding further expertise from the ground back into the knowledge system.

The need for a diversity of expertise is already being recognised in responses to COVID-19. The WHO recommends risk communication strategies should “promote a two-way dialogue with communities, the public and other stakeholders”.

The ABC’s Coronacast podcast is one such two-way channel that responds to public concerns and questions. Scientists are also seeking volunteer researchers in the effort to address COVID-19, and many viral social media threads sharing notes on patients’ experience of triage and care have been important sources of information for healthcare workers.

Attending to the dynamism and diversity of expertise does not diminish its invaluable roles in society.

Understanding that the crisis of COVID-19 is also a social one should raise questions of how our traditional reliance on expert advice relegates local expertise to the sidelines.

It is critical that we recognise how local expertise is filling the gaps in government policies and expert advice, and is likely to continue to do so in crises such as the recent bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic.

We have an opportunity to appreciate that community responses are characterised by their own expertise. We ought also to listen to those experts.

Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory

Great to see a new edited volume Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory will soon be out with Bloomsbury.

The volume is edited by Juan F. Salazar, Céline Granjou, Anna Krzywoszynska, Manuel Tironi and myself. It’s been an amazing experience editing the book with such an amazing group of scholars, across four countries.

The geneses of the volume go back to two parallel encounters. First, is Going to Ground workshop I convened in October 2016 at USNW, with Céline Granjou and Juan Francisco Salazar. This workshop was designed as an opportunity to think both creatively and earnestly about the dirt we live on and off. The workshop brought together many of the contributors in the book to discuss how soil conservation and improvement practices are being marshaled in response to concerns over climate change, food security, and rural livelihoods, and how these might be indicative of the deep connections

between soil and social processes.

Second, the book also has its beginnings in a series of panels at the Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies International Conference held in Santiago, Chile, in November 2017, convened by Juan Francisco Salazar and Céline Granjou, where all five co-editors outlined the initial analytical coordinates for the book.

These panels also served as a catalyst to start a broader interdisciplinary discussion that had been brewing, and which we see as having been largely initiated by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa through her pioneering work in recent years. This discussion aimed to engage scholars from not only the humanities and social sciences but also the ecological and soil sciences, as well as soil practitioners, particularly those proponents of integrative science frameworks and social-ecological systems thinking. A premise of these conference panels was that, despite notable contemporary reconceptualizations of soi

l as a matter of care and concern, it is striking to observe how soil, and its manifold entanglements with plants, fungi, bacteria, and other forms of life, remains largely undertheorized or ignored in contemporary social theory. Despite soil’s vital ecological importance, its significance as a belowground three-dimensional living world remains elusive in

social and cultural research. The book is about developing work that is attuned and attentive to generating more ethical relations with nonhumans who both pervade and create livable environments, such as soil biota.

The volume includes the following chapters:

Preface Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

 

Chapter 1: Thinking-with Soils: An Introduction to the Edited Volume

Juan Francisco Salazar, Céline Granjou, Anna Krzywoszynska, Manuel Tironi and Matthew Kearnes

Chapter 2: Soil Theories: Invisibility, Relationality, Inhumanness 

Manuel Tironi, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, Céline Granjou and Juan Francisco Salazar

Chapter 3: Mapping soil, losing ground? Politics of soil mapping

Juliette Kon Kam Kim and Céline Granjou

Chapter 4:  Soils and Commodification

Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Levi Van Sant

Chapter 5: Knowing earth, knowing soil: epistemological work and the political aesthetics of regenerative agriculture

Matthew Kearnes and Lauren Rickards

Chapter 6: To know, to dwell, to care: towards an actionable, place-based knowledge of soils

Anna Krzywoszynska with Steve Banwart and David Blacker

Chapter 7: Soiling Mars: “To boldly grow where no plant has grown before”?

Filippo Bertoni

Chapter 8: Geosocial polar futures and the material geopolitics of frozen soils

Juan Francisco Salazar and Klaus Dodds

Chapter 9: Mend to the Metabolic Rift? The Promises (and Potential Pitfalls) of Biosolids Application on American Soils

Nicholas C. Kawa

Chapter 10: Reclaiming freak soils: from conquering to journeying with urban soils

Germain Meulemans

Chapter 11:  Soil refusal: thinking earthly matters as radical alterity

Manuel Tironi

Chapter 12: Geophagiac: Art, Food, Dirt

Lindsay Kelley

Beyond ‘social impacts’: Characterising the social aspects of negative emissions technologies

Here’s a video from a presentation I gave at the 2018 Negative Emissions Conference, hosted by the Australian Academy of Science and the ANU.

The conference was a very engaging and diverse event, with speakers approaching negative emissions from a range of perspectives.

The full playlist of videos from the conference is available here:

Also see the conference communiqué which emphasised that “to limit warming at 2 degrees or less requires NETs to draw down past and future emissions and store this carbon in land, ocean, and geological reservoirs” while also suggesting that “to deploy NETs at the scales envisioned would require acceptance by industries and communities whose economic activities, environments and amenities may be affected by large-scale deployment of NETs”.

Work with Holly Jean Buck, it my own presentation I attempted to suggest that the development of negative emissions technologies represents an opportunity to build in a robust role for the social sciences in an area of technical and regulatory development that remains at an early, and hence undetermined, stage. However, at present much of the social science related to carbon removal focuses upon “social impacts”, especially as a bounding factor to the feasibility of various carbon removal methods: the impacts follow downstream from the deployment.

This follows a broader tendency where scholarly literatures and popular commentary frame technology as “black-boxed” and well defined, with an independent asocial logic that results in “impacts” or “effects.” In this context social questions are often narrowly framed as “impacts” or “risk” issues, placing the site of social science inquiry also firmly “downstream” of development processes.

However, various approaches in science-and-technology studies have shown how technologies cannot be black-boxed and separated from sets of constitutive social relations. Interdisciplinary social science research can help illuminate the social and political dynamics of negative emissions. The research framework presented here considers both social impacts and social drivers, through both past-oriented and future-oriented social science methods. By re-thinking the role of the social sciences and taking the reflexive governance of negative emission technologies as a central concern, social scientific approaches can provide real-time social intelligence that will be critical to the scalability of negative emission technologies.

 

Remaking Participation in Science and Democracy

Jason Chilvers and I have a new paper out in Science, Technology and Human Values. It’s available open access, and in a series of tweets Jason summarises the main argument we advance:

Delighted to share “Remaking participation in science and democracy” a new OA paper with @mbkearnes in Science, Technology & Human Values @4sWeb https://t.co/1c468LpQeV

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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We look to #STS and constructivist ways of seeing to set out a new framework for remaking public participation in science and democracy. It comprises 4 paths, each with new approaches and criteria which have been missing from many existing frameworks. These paths are…

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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1️⃣ Experimental & reflexive participatory practices. Participation is exclusionary as well as inclusive and should attend to framing effects, exclusions, resistances and uncertainties. This links to work by @Macnaghten @MajahorstI @mmichael58 @stepscentre @DrRobBellamy & others

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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2️⃣ Ecologise participation. Move beyond public engagements as discrete isolated events to map their diversities & interactions in wider systems, issue spaces, etc. Links to work by @BrunoLatourAIME @NoortjeMarres @TommasoVenturin @3SResearchGroup @profparkinson @mattwtsn & others

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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3️⃣ Responsible democratic innovations. Don’t only evaluate the positives of participation after the event. Anticipate downsides & social/ethical implications of democratic innovations in advance. Links to work by @Ulrike_Felt @robdoubleday @Jackstilgoe @Sujatha__Raman & others

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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4️⃣ Reconstitute participation. Turn participation around from being a problem of publics engaging to one of institutions and powers that be recognising, listening & responding to diverse already existing public involvements. Links to work by @SJasanoff, Brian Wynne & others.

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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A key difference to many existing frameworks: our approach doesn’t narrowly predefine what participation is & should be. It potentially applies to any form of participation – from #communication & #deliberation to #digitalparticipation #activism #socialinnovation & more.

— Jason Chilvers (@jasondchilvers) June 5, 2019

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Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance

New paper in @ProgHumGeog with @kgrove80 @LaurenARickards @mbkearnes on ‘slow emergencies’ (who it was lovely working with). We try and open up space for thinking the relations between emergencies, racialised bio-politics, and different temporalities … https://t.co/QwJzeLFDtL

— Ben Anderson (@BenAndersonGeog) May 17, 2019

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Its scientism, not sci comm …

Possibly the single best tweet on sci-comm, the deficit model and public engagement. Jack Stilgoe nails it again.

And therein lies the trouble with John’s analysis. The deficit model critique is not about practise. It’s about assuming public trust is a function of knowledge. Scientism, not sci comm, is the problem. See our special issue of PUS: https://t.co/Ued2DW3XKf https://t.co/QfGF3qPc3p

— Jack Stilgoe (@Jackstilgoe) September 14, 2018

Five lessons from the #MyHealthRecord discussion for #PrecisionMedicine

By Dr. Declan Kuch*, Assoc. Prof. Matthew Kearnes*, Dr. Georgia Miller*, Dr. Walter Muskovic*

With Labor announcing a Senate inquiry into the ‘whole My Health Record system’, it’s worth considering what has been learnt so far in public discussions, which have brought the Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt into the spotlight in quite a different way to his normal announcements this year. Back in January, Hunt launched a major report from the Australian Council of Learned Academies on ‘The Future of Precision Medicine in Australia’ that included contributions from all major scientific, humanities and social science perspectives. It’s an interesting, well written overview of this emerging field. One way of understanding Precision Medicine is that it builds on advances in ‘-omics’ methods (see section 2.5 of the report) to build large datasets with a view to developing new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques. Minister Hunt has spent much of the year announcing funding in line with this vision, especially through the ‘Genomic Health’ mission, as well as funding for specific conditions, including cerebral palsy, severe epilepsy, kidney disease.

With only a few notable exceptions, public discussion of Precision Medicine and its potential has been completely disconnected from the My Health Record discussion. Instead, the focus has been on multiple dimensions of privacy (especially stigma, domestic violence risks); the breadth of organisations and individuals who can access the document; multiple concerns about insurance companies accessing records through the My Health Record database; and the clinical utility or otherwise of using data based on billing, and record summaries organised as PDFs. Experts in systems management, procurement or coding point to ways the problems with security, access and control are ‘locked-in’, tempering others’ calls to ‘fix the problems’ through amending legislation or penalties.

Greg Hunt at the launch of the Australian Council of Learned Academies report ‘The Future of Precision Medicine’ in January 2018

There are lessons in all this for the successful rollout of Precision Medicine, which hinges in large part on the widespread aggregation of biological materials. A combination of careful public consultation and a more open-ended design ethos could have avoided many of these problems, which are likely to have profound flow on effects.

Lesson 1: Make clear and compelling case for how the records will make us healthier

The ‘All of Us’ programme in the United States — presented as ‘a historic effort to gather data from one million or more people living in the United States to accelerate research and improve health’, associated with the US Precision Medicine Initiative set up on the final months of the Obama presidency — made a compelling case for the need for a large, voluntary biobank where new diseases are diagnosed, and treatments developed. The ‘sales pitch’ was a very broad one: give us your tissue samples, and data relevant to social and environmental determinants of health like fitness tracking data, and approved scientists will mine the data to make you better; crucially, considering America’s patchy history with biomedical research and minority populations, this ask has been framed as a deeply inclusive and participatory one. The benefits of the My Health Record are less clear: the website focuses on the portability of data without any reference to providing infrastructure for researchers or other government agencies, despite these featuring very prominently in the legislation.

This problem of how different constituencies understand trade-offs is compounded by insurers and pharmaceutical companies publicly seeking the records for uses that do not align with the interests of citizens. ‘Managing costs’ for insurance companies, for example, may mean excluding people from health or life insurance products based on genetic mutations. What is completely lost is any narrative about progress — will this system help us be healthier? How?

Lesson 2: No issue, no (effective) data platform.

“Digital Health is the penicillin of our time, with Precision Medicine and genomics offering opportunities to cure previously incurable diseases and deliver better life saving medicine”. — Greg Hunt.

The rhetoric about Precision Medicine seems boundless — another magic bullet to cure in a single hit. However, what the debates over the Australian My Health Records reveal is that databases of ‘health data’ are not inherentlyuseful. They require careful crafting concerning agreed standards for data inputs, ethical access and are most successful when responding to pressing issues in the community. One could extend Noortje Marres quip about ‘no issue, no public’ in this way — data is quite literally an act of giving, not a passive unit with inherent power.

Understanding the relations between experts, patients, devices and government in successful health database projects like the Hip and Knee Replacement Register demonstrates this etymological point. This registry was developed due to shared professional concerns about poor devices being approved and has successfully led to regulatory changes.

Expert commentary suggests that the My Health Record system was constrained by its political deadlines. Graham Grieve has called for a restructure of the system, arguing that the architecture lacks coherence:“Enterprises don’t automate their systems by collecting a huge pile of PDF documents.”

Furthermore, without justification for how and why government agency and third-party access defaults are set, journalists and members of the public are less likely to trade off their privacy to such a wide range of actors, many of whom have interests counter to their own health. The fate of the UK’s ‘care.data’ project, led by the Australian Digital Health Agency’s Tim Kelsey, bears out this point: the project was abandoned in July 2016 over concerns patient data could be sold to insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Lesson 3: May a thousand databases bloom? Need for a diverse economy of health data

Data cooperatives like Midata.coop and other non-traditional ways of aggregating data are likely to be an important part of the emerging horizon of Precision Medicine. Decentralisation has advantages of spreading the risk of hacking and enabling more democratic decision-making, as well as flow of benefits. Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can enable information exchange between platforms, mitigating a key security concerns around hacking. An ecosystem of democratically controlled, patient-centred databases would gel with calls for transforming both our understanding of the ‘the economy’ and its structure.

Lesson 4: Ownership matters to both the ethics of the program and ‘public acceptance’

Trust isn’t enough. Trust is active too — we trust healthcare institutions to care for us, but this trust is not absolute and does not automatically extend to ‘digital health’. Publics across the globe understand private ownership of healthcare institutions act according to their incentives, which seldom align with societal goals of equitable access to care.

The success of Precision Medicine hinges on public dialogue about the promise of better health. In this context, ownership over health data goes beyond the legal question of who technically owns the rights to patient records. How do we have a discussion about the collective ownership of health in ways that acknowledge the power of gifts to bond a society, for example? How could an appreciation of the diverse forms of social bonds that make up good health become the starting point for a discourse of innovation, rather than seen as a barrier to technological progress?

Lesson 5: ‘Health’ is an increasingly slippery concept in a post-genomic age

A key understanding of Precision Medicine is its emphasis on the ways it brings social and environmental data to bear on our understanding of disease risk. Thus, new databases of ‘healthy’ populations, such as the Medical Genome Reference Bank, are helping to shed light on how risky gene mutations manifest as disease.

Prof Kathryn North with Louie and Family at the launch of the ACOLA Precision Medicine report in Melbourne, January 2018

Concerns over tumour sequencing data being added to the My Health Record through systems designed by the Garvan Institute’s corporate arm, ‘Genome.One’, show both the power of genomic data in the public imagination and need for appropriate protections. Australia remains one of the final jurisdictions without legislation forbidding insurers from denying coverage based on genetic conditions. This should be an easy step for the government, one that hopefully saves us from another ‘Downfall’ parody.

Conclusion

The societal implications of the scientific developments around Precision Medicine are profound and require a wide-ranging public discussion about what it means to be healthy or diseased, who is the baseline against which claims of health are to be measured, and who should benefit from the scientific research into health and disease. These discussions require a sociological imagination — one that ties cases to populations and societal institutions; and can enable a sober analysis of the tradeoffs precision medicine poses.

*UNSW, Sydney; Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nano Science and Technology.

** Crossposted from an original post on Declan Kuch’s Medium page.

THREE PRESTIGIOUS SCIENTIA PHD SCHOLARSHIPS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES AND STS AT UNSW, SYDNEY

The Environmental Humanities programme at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, is advertising three PhD scholarships in specific areas in the environmental humanities and science and technology studies (with collaboration from colleagues in a range of other areas).

1.) Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Confronting Biopiracy
2.) The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Education Policy
3.) Multispecies Studies: Rethinking Human/Wildlife Interactions
(See below for descriptions)

These Scientia PhD Scholarships are specifically designed to attract high quality PhD candidates across a range of strategic research areas.

PhD Scholarship benefits under the scheme include:
— $40K a year stipend for four years
— Tuition fees covered for the full 4 year period
— Coaching and mentoring will form a critical part of your highly personalised leadership development plan
— Up to $10k each year to build your career and support your international research collaborations

Candidates would most likely already have completed work at Masters level and published work with leading academic publisher to be competitive (or equivalent).

More information on these scholarships is available here.

More information on the Environmental Humanities programme is available here.

1.) Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Confronting Biopiracy
Supervisory team: Daniel Robinson, Paul Munro and Danielle Drozdzewski.

This project analyses the commodification of nature/natural products and of Indigenous knowledge. It would seek to conduct a range of case studies, legal analyses, and ethnography, aimed at identifying biopiracy cases. It will also seek to analyse Indigenous mechanisms for protecting their environmental knowledge, including through customary laws and community protocols. This project will reflect upon implementation of the UN Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity and its role in preventing biopiracy, as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization Intergovernmental Committee on Traditional Knowledge.

Details here.

2.) The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Education Policy
Supervisory team: Kalervo Gulson, Matthew Kearnes and Andrew Murphie.

This project will be part of investigations into the ongoing and potential impact of artificial intelligence on both education policy making and analysis. PhD projects that address any or all of the following questions are welcome (1) what are the possibilities and challenges for education and education policy that are occurring and will occur by implementing artificial intelligence into governance, instructional and assessment settings? How might these possibilities and challenges relate to changes already occurring around algorithmic governance and big data in education? (2) what are the ethical, economic, and political biosocial considerations of implementing artificial intelligence into educational organizations? This includes issues of trust and transparency relating to the ‘black box’ of AI and prediction; and (3) how does artificial intelligence, including machine learning, use ideas from social policy, including policy and value networks, and how can policy analysts use these same ideas? What are the epistemological and ontological issues, such as those around representation, posed by AI for policy and analysis?

Details here.

3.) Multispecies Studies: Rethinking Human/Wildlife Interactions
Supervisory team: Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, Lindsay Kelley.

Multispecies Studies is an emerging field of interdisciplinary research that draws the humanities into dialogue with the biological sciences and ethnographic methods to better understand the shifting and highly consequential relationships between human communities and wildlife in a period of escalating social and environmental change. Providing new perspectives on issues as diverse as biodiversity loss, climate change and globalization, work in this area seeks to better understand and intervene in human/wildlife interactions to produce more sustainable, equitable and flourishing outcomes for all parties.

Details here.