Social Studies of Science

Many parts of the world receive from abroad not only objects of technology, but also scientific discoveries, and organizing elements and practices as well. Since these entities materially comprehend a formidable part of their modes of existence, let us say that non-Western countries result from ontologies/epistemologies that in large part come from abroad. This manifested coloniality emerges in the feeling of contradiction between national realities and the ideological prestige of the Western imperial centers that serve as models to them. This configures a malaise that is deeply rooted in educated Brazilians. I discuss lines of flight from that malaise in an articulation that configures a philosophical and political novelty in Brazil. In examples concerning computing in Brazil, I juxtapose elements of STS, the metaphorical anthropophagic movement, and the European Enlightenment project, to enact a more symmetrical, dialogical, and inclusive world by constructing ‘respectful enough’ stories. In doing so, the anthropophagic movement, previously in practice restricted to the artistic realms, incorporates sciences and technologies. In each of these stories, the enlightened motto ‘daring to know’ is juxtaposed with the anthropophagic metaphorical motto ‘eat the stranger’ around modern Western scientific and technological issues in local situated ways.

The history of cybernetics has often displaced non-white actors and women from its accounts. Recentering them offers an opportunity to rearticulate the history of computing through its entanglements with labor and race/gender as network formations. In paying attention to these actors and the silences in the STS literature, this article offers an analysis of networked asymmetries, non-essential knowledge and disposability. In doing so, it redraws the boundaries of STS with race/gender integral to the field. It proposes hemispheric approaches that trouble national bounds and move us beyond the dominant sites of Europe and the United States, and that interrogate US empire. The article follows closely the role of Arturo Rosenblueth in the development of cybernetics and of Mexican women workers in computer semiconductor assembly. These stories of technoscience show the invisible work of Latina/o/es as unacknowledged and unaccounted entities in the infrastructural assemblage of cybernetics and computing.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in force since 2018, has introduced design-based approaches to data protection and the governance of privacy. In this article we describe the emergence of the professional field of privacy engineering to enact this shift in digital governance. We argue that privacy engineering forms part of a broader techno-regulatory imaginary through which (fundamental) rights protections become increasingly future-oriented and anticipatory. The techno-regulatory imaginary is described in terms of three distinct privacy articulations, implemented in technologies, organizations, and standardizations. We pose two interrelated questions: What happens to rights as they become implemented and enacted in new sites, through new instruments and professional practices? And, focusing on shifts to the nature of boundary work, we ask: What forms of legitimation can be discerned as privacy engineering is mobilized for the making of future digital markets and infrastructures?

This article examines the relationship between diagnosis and therapy, focusing on the case of leukemia and cancer chemotherapy in the 1960s. This case, I argue, reinforces the need to study diagnoses from a social-science perspective, because the persistent controversy around leukemia classification was resolved by institutional restructuring introduced through clinical experimentation, rather than by techno-scientific advances. In an attempt to prove that chemical cancer therapy was possible, oncologists replaced the question ‘Is this drug working?’ with the question ‘How can we make this drug work?’ To create the conditions and criteria under which drugs could work, oncologists undertook the reclassification of cancers and patients, producing a new diagnostic style that reversed the roles of diagnosis and therapy. Experts gained and secured the power to classify not by solving existing problems, but by redefining what counts as a problem and what qualifies as a solution. Similarly, therapies can become transformative not only when they ‘work’, but when they work just well enough to mobilize resources and support. Theorizing these displacements, I develop the concept of ‘adequate trials’ in order to capture modes of innovation in which a deep commitment to give new technologies a ‘fair chance’ to succeed (i.e. an ‘adequate trial’) leads experts to redefine the tasks and goals of their field. To further our theoretical understanding of how rigid drug testing becomes malleable and conducive to normative change, I analyze the organizational, scientific, and jurisdictional conditions that gave rise to oncologists’ practical orientations.

Who owns the internet? It depends where you look. The physical assets at the core of the internet, the warehouses that store the cloud’s data and interlink global networks, are owned not by technology firms like Google and Facebook but by commercial real estate barons who compete with malls and property storage empires. Granted an empire by the US at the moment of the internet’s commercialization, these internet landlords shaped how the network of networks that we call the internet physically connects, and how personal and business data is stored and transmitted. Under their governance, internet exchanges, colocation facilities, and data centers take on a double life as financialized real estate assets that circle the globe even as their servers and cables are firmly rooted in place. The history of internet landlords forces a fundamental reconsideration of the business model at the base of the internet. This history makes clear that the internet was never an exogenous shock to capitalist social relations, but rather a touchstone example of an economic system increasingly ruled by asset owners like landlords.

Marked by the killing of a senior ICT professional working for the Electoral Commission and the invalidation of the presidential election by the Supreme Court, the 2017 Kenyan elections make for a good case through which to study how digital technologies shape contemporary electoral practice. This article examines the practice of electoral transparency through technology and argues that it can be conceived as a socio-technical device based both on distancing people from knowledge of the electoral infrastructure and on staging a simplified discourse on public access to the electoral infrastructure. Drawing on interviews with key actors in election technology implementation and ethnographic observations of public events around it, the article argues that digital technology has had three sets of implications for elections. First, it has shaped the electoral infrastructure and the nature of the final result (now a paper and digital hybrid). Second, it has shaped the distribution of knowledge among electoral professionals, giving a central role to ICT actors, objects, and knowledge in the definition of electoral transparency. Third, the centrality of ICTs in elections and the order of knowledge they bring are highly controversial and criticized by other electoral actors who demand for material proof for understanding the inner workings of elections.