A review of Bowker's 2006 book published by MIT Press.

This article addresses the political role of information technology in the Philippines. It uses a theoretical framework inspired by Antonio Gramsci to examine the discourse surrounding automated elections in two major daily papers, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Business World Philippines. It argues that this discourse strengthens current conceptions of the development process by appealing to the interests not only of the dominant fraction of capital in the country today, but also to the middle class. Such operations are essential for the creation of a historic bloc capable of exercising hegemony.

In today's knowledge-based and competitive economy, research and development (R&D) efforts are increasingly geographically distributed across multiple institutions. This chapter explores the management of cognitive and affective trust and distrust within a new type of geographically distributed and multi-institutional R&D organization, called the conceptual organization. Both cognitive and affective trust are important to the conceptual organization because it relies on collaboration among individual members to achieve its goals, and collaboration is not possible without cognitive or affective trust. Data from a 2-year case study of a conceptual organization illuminates how the organization's structure, use of power and information and communications technology (I&CT) shape and are shaped by cognitive and affective trust. Tightly coupled collaboration appears to only emerge in situations where high cognitive and affective trust simultaneously exist, and no collaboration will emerge in situations with high cognitive and affective distrust exist. In comparison, limited collaboration emerges when affective trust and cognitive distrust exist concurrently, and competitive collaboration appears to emerge when cognitive trust and affective distrust exist concurrently. Different mechanisms to manage the collaboration emerged in these situations. These results help inform our understanding of cognitive and affective trust and distrust, and their management in R&D.

A review of Bowker's 2006 book published by MIT Press.

Science and technology have become indispensable elements of virtually every public debate. While nations strive to employ the best experts to make timely decisions, discontented citizens increasingly demand better accountability and democratic legitimacy through broad and direct public consultation. Participatory decision-making, on the other hand, is often met by the worry that sound science might drown in a sea of ignorance. As science and technology studies (STS) attempts to navigate these conflicting concerns, it sometimes draws heavily, albeit often uncritically, upon contemporary political philosophy. In this dissertation, I explore links between H. M. Collins and Robert Evans’s account of the appropriate role of public participation in technical policy debates, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s liberal theory of deliberative democracy. Both views exemplify what I call the “gatekeeping paradigm”, a tendency to employ rigid constraints on admissible inputs as the primary means to direct democratic processes toward outcomes that are independently judged to be desirable. I argue that such an approach not only fails to account for the complexi-ties of public discourse in modern societies, but also reflects an impoverished conception of deliberative democracy as a black box. As an alternative to the gatekeeping paradigm, I develop and defend a social construc-tivist theory of democratic governance based on the ideas of Alan Irwin, Sheila Jasanoff, and Brian Wynne in STS; and John Dryzek in political philosophy. The constructivist view focuses less on externally imposed input-constraints and more on internal processes of self-regulation within shifting and heterogeneous discourses. Although this approach will need to be further developed and augmented with much empirical research before its efficacy can be determined, I suggest that constructivism offers a promising framework for the governance of science and technology as well as for thinking about deliberative democracy generally. / Thesis (Ph.D, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2012-06-21 16:54:31.171

In the past fifty years, a need to address the ethical and social dimensions in the biosciences has become pervasive. To this end, notions of bioethics, and an associated range of methodologies have been institutionalised throughout the UK biosciences; talk of research ethics, public engagement, various forms of technology assessment, and recently notions of responsible innovation in technoscientific worlds is increasingly commonplace. A desire to unpack discourse and action surrounding these practices sits at the heart of this thesis. Of particular interest are the ways that different groups construct the ethical dimensions of biofuel development and deployment and then distribute responsibility for addressing them. To achieve this, I find analytic power by deploying theory from the interpretative social sciences, namely the sociology of bioethics and science and technology studies. Empirically, I use controversy about the development and deployment of biofuels as a means to analyse, primarily through documentary analysis and qualitative interview, how three prominent groups (non-governmental organisations, public research funders and scientists) construct understandings of ethics and then distribute responsibility for addressing those issues. This approach makes it possible to see that the constitution of ethical issues (their ‘form’) and the ways that they are addressed (the ‘task’ of ethics) are both tightly coupled to the situations from which they arise. They are thus fundamentally multiple, locally contingent and often unpredictable. Using a range of discursive strategies and actions, actors are able to negotiate, blurring in and out of focus, what counts as an appropriate issue of concern, who should be addressing it and how. Dominant traditions of theory and practice have a tendency to standardise the form and task of ethics, such as in terms of issue types (e.g. ‘Playing God’) and the methods for addressing them (e.g. public engagement). I argue that ethical dimensions’ situated nature should be acknowledged rather than ignored and is fundamental to making research more ‘socially robust’. However, this tension between dominant institutionalised forms and lived experiences is not easily resolved because it forces an engagement with the roles of those who are tasked with steering knowledge production. Hope is, however, offered by new approaches that have explicitly sought to deal with such tensions in new forms of knowledge production and new models of collaboration.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the science wars of the 1990s with the two-culture debate of the 1960s. It is a work in the history of intellectual debates, focusing on contested concepts of science. Over the past decade, there have been numerous references made in science wars literature that evoke comparisons to the two-culture controversy. I intend to show that while these comparisons have merit for their popular cultural reference, they are not valid when we consider the structures and contexts of the two debates. Thus, I will compare those structures, summarizing the main points of argument between the relevant actors in each instance, to illustrate the differences. The thesis advanced by C.P. Snow in 1959, and responded to most pointedly by F.R. Leavis in 1962, was predicated on the existence of foundational differences between science and humanities. The broader issues then were what validity a distinction between forms of knowledge had and which domain had the more reliable claim to knowledge. Just as the two-culture controversy called into question the credibility of literary knowledge, the credibility of science studies scholarship was ultimately at stake in the science wars, and is of central concern in this thesis. My contention is that recognizing the differences between the two-culture debate and the science wars can help guide the future of science studies, since those differences demonstrate the importance and validity of STS scholarship. When scholars ignore those differences, and presume that the two debates are comparable, they unintentionally give credibility to those who defend science against perceived assaults by STS scholars. / Master of Science

The common us of social media in everyday life has raised questions on the possible impact it has on individuals’ wellbeing. This study was conducted to determine if there was a correlation between Instagram, a common social media platform, usage and self-esteem of college students. The sample population for this research was 95 undergraduate students at Mississippi State University during the fall semester of 2019. Data was collected via an online survey that included Rosenburg’s Self-Esteem scale and ten additional questions relating to the independent variables and Instagram. The independent variables of this study were the number of Instagram followers, the average number of likes on a post, the frequency of posting, and the pressure to post and the dependent variable was self-esteem according to the Rosenburg scale. This study did not find a correlation between Instagram usage and self-esteem.

This dissertation examines the structure of epistemological claims made about science within the field of science and technology studies (STS). The social constructivist invocation to put science in "context" necessarily implies a logic of justification. Made explicit, this logic of justification provides a basis on which to adjudicate meta-scientific claims. The appeal to context blurs internal and external references, offers an ontological starting point for STS accounts of science, serves as the basis for methodological debate, and refers to values which anchor a notion of scientific objectivity. Hence: Contexts are assumed to exist. Contexts can be accessed and demarcated from other contexts in which they may be embedded; as a result, contexts are not paradigm-bound. Since contexts exist, the elements composing them are taken to exist in some logical and ontological relation to one another. Contexts are taken to affect scientific practice. Since contexts affect scientific practice some logical and ontological relation exists among the elements of the context, a given scientific practice, and the world that practice describes. Contexts are taken as temporally stable; infinite regress is not an immediate consequence of a local explanation of scientific practice. Since contexts exist in a stable, ontological relationship to the scientific practice they interpret or explain, criteria for justifying one context-based perspective over another are necessarily implied. Contexts necessarily imply justificatory criteria and imply a means for adjudicating among contexts and context-based statements. Since contexts imply a logic of justification independent of the scientific practice being examined meta-scientific evidence consists of observation statements. Context-based observation statements can, initially, be adjudicated a priori. A form of meta-scientific realism exists. If a form of meta-scientific realism exists, we can determine which contexts explain scientific practice and which do not. As a result we have epistemological claims about science which can be adjudicated on realist grounds which are not just the product of designated contexts. The future of STS turns on articulating a meta-scientific realism in relation to scientific practice and truths about the world. Finally, I advocate a contingent foundationalism on which STS can be made relevant to an understanding of science and technology. / Ph. D.

Philosophy of technology (PoT) analyzes the nature of technology, its significance and consequences, and its mediation of human experiences of the world. Classical philosophers of technology describe mechanization as alienating: Technology causes humans to lose their connection with the natural world. Tehno-rationality replaces critical engagement and creativity. Failing to comprehend the essence/nature of Technology, and its consequences, portends disastrous social, political, and economic consequences. Such perspectives, however, neglect individual experiences of technologies. Filling that lacuna, contemporary philosophers of technology challenge the sweeping determinism of their intellectual forerunners and investigate how specific technologies mediate particular human experiences. Their descriptive prowess, however, lacks the normative engagement of classical PoT, and they emphasize micro effects of technologies to the detriment of macro implications. This dissertation describes an 'un-disciplined' philosophy of technology (UPoT) that unites the macro and micro perspectives by providing narratives of human-technology symbiosis and co-development. Un-disciplined philosophers of technology present posthuman and transhuman perspectives that emphasize the symbiotic relationships between humans and technology. Thus, they deny disciplined philosophy's first critical maneuver: define and demarcate. UPoT enables conversations and debate regarding the ontological and moral consequences of imagining humans and technologies as hybrid, co-dependent things. UPoT builds upon environmental and animal rights movements, and postphenomenology, to emphasize pluralist accounts that emphasize the dynamism of human-technology relations. UPoT argues we should imagine technologies as extensions/parts of living things: they do the shaping and are shaped in turn. I argue that such thinking reinforces the habit, already proposed by contemporary PoT, that emerging human-technology relations demand active interpretation and engagement because the relationships constantly change. Thus, we need to imagine a moral theory that best matches the hybrid/connected condition of the present century. Increasing automation in agriculture and surgery, for instance, exemplify technologies mediating human experiences of food and health, thus affecting how we understand and define these categories. / Ph. D.