Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting/Conférence Annuelle 2007 Montréal 2 Society for Social Studies of Science October 10-13 2007 10-13 octobre Program Theme: Thème de la conference: Ways of Knowing Façons de savoir The theme for the conference is ways of knowing. By this we mean several things: implicitly, that there are many ways of knowing any particular object, process, or event; that some of these ways of knowing have historically been more valued than others; and that processes of adjudicating ways of knowing have usually been neither nice nor neutral. So we are interested in processes of valuation (from the language of debates to acts of censorship) that result in one way of knowing as “the right one” or “the natural one.” We are interested in how people, groups, or cultures hold more than one way of knowing, and whether this is stable, durable, or problematic. When different ways of knowing are triangulated, how is this actually done in practice? What is lost and what is gained in the triangulation process? We are interested in how certain ways of knowing are deemed to be “non-scientific,” (for example, magic, divination, astrology, etc). Several other interesting areas spring from this mixture of questions: historically, what is kept, or what is ignored, in studies of knowledges and paradigm shifts? (Including here questions of collective memory and collective forgetting.) How do new regimes of record keeping, such as the electronic patient record or the full text data base, affect what is remembered and what is forgotten? 3 (This may be true across a large numbers of fields.) All sorts of questions about translation arise in discussing these issues – Who chooses what is to be translated? Who does the translation? Does the quality of the translation impact the nature of knowledge, and if so, how? In Howard Becker's famous concept, "hierarchy of credibility," he claims that, for a well-socialized member of a hierarchical organization or institution, information coming from "the top" is de facto more credible than that coming from "the bottom." So, a bank president, regardless of what she says, is more credible than a temporary janitor. However, within science studies, and following many sorts of principles of symmetry, we do not take members' hierarchies for granted, especially as questions of voice and position are precisely the matters under analysis. Given that our conference will be in Quebec, one of the sites where language (as a marker) of difference was bitterly disputed, we must examine the idea that language carries powerful politics. In some cases, as with Aboriginal children, the attempt to suppress a language is linked with the destruction of culture and even with genocide. Finally, there are different ways of knowing that are formed by gestures, by ways of pronouncing words, or by how names are heard and understood. Sometimes ways of knowing are different with respect to quantitative vs. qualitative; visual vs. textual, or statistical vs. enumerative. These only suggest the ways knowledges may frame findings, thus mirroring a final finding. --Leigh Star, President 4 Background Informations Information générales Acknowledgements Many people helped bring the program together. I want to thank especially Wes Shrum, for handling the many details and questions regarding the meeting and program policies in general; Anne Borrero, for helping get the program into a readable shape and handling many inquiries; Leigh Star, for developing the program’s call for papers and helping with the Weds. plenary; Tracey McKee, for organizing the hotel relations, rooms, exhibits, and registration; Rick Duque, for helping with catering and other arrangements; Steve Coffee, for organizing the web site and helping with electronic issues; Jean-François Blanchette, for assisting in translation of the French; Wenda Bauchspies, for answering questions based on her experience as the previous program chair; the access committee members (Steven Emery, Florence Millerand, Ursual Naue, Kristin Snodden, Leigh Star, Ernst Thoutenhoofd); and the program committee members (Dean Nieusma, Jill Fisher, Torin Monahan, Sergio Sismondo, and Roli Varma), for reading abstracts and making preliminary panel sorts. We also wish to thank the staff of the Doubletree Plaza Hotel in Montreal. --David Hess Program Chair 5 Cover Photo and Design The cover photo is printed with permission of Tourisme Montréal. © Tourisme Montréal, Stéphan Poulin. Photo 852. Terrace on Place Jacques-Cartier, Old Montréal. Terrasse de la place Jacques-Cartier - Vieux-Montréal. The cover design is by Paulina Manzo ([email protected]). A Note on Paper Presentation Lengths The Society for Social Studies of Science has grown rapidly in recent years, and the number of abstracts submitted has been very high compared to previous years. As a result paper presentation length has been compressed to about 15 minutes on the average. The council plans to deliberate on the issue and to solve it in future years by finding a larger space, making the selection criteria more rigorous, or finding some other solution. Abstracts Per recommendation from the 4S leadership, abstracts are posted on the 4S web site. 6 Governance Gouvernance The 4S is governed by a President and a council of nine persons. Council members serve three year terms, and the President serves a two year term after a one year term as President Elect. All Past Presidents are non-voting members of Council. President: Susan Leigh Star (Santa Clara University) President Elect: Michael Lynch (Cornell University) Past President: Bruno Latour (Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Science-Politiques) Secretary: Wesley Shrum (Louisiana State University) Council Members: Sergio Sismondo (Queen’s University) Roli Varma (University of New Mexico) Joe Dumit (University of California, Davis) Maureen McNeil (Lancaster University) Martina Merz (University of Lucern) Paul Wouters (KNAW) Stefan Timmermans (UCLA) Gabrielle Hecht (University of Michigan) Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto) Ex-Officio: Chrstine Hine, Pres. of EASST (U. of Surrey) Student Representatives: Michelle Steward (University of California, Davis) Matthew Harsh (University of Edinburgh) 7 8 9 PROGRAM RESUME AT A GLANCE DU PROGRAMME Wednesday (Oct. 10) 3:00-8:00pm Registration 1:00-3:00pm Publications Committee Meeting (Fortin) 3:00-6:00pm Council Meeting (Fortin) 6:00-7:00pm Prize Committee Meetings (Fortin) 6:15-7:15pm (Monet Ballroom). “STS in 1977: Feminist and Multicultural Perspectives” This plenary session will continue the tradition of historical retrospective sessions, featuring talks by Sandra Harding, Willie Pearson, Cheryl Leggon, Leigh Star, and Judy Wajcman. 7:15-9:00pm (Monet Ballroom). Informal senior/junior mentoring and mingling session. Thursday (Oct. 11) 1 Thursday 8:15-10:00am 1.1 The Local/Global Politics of Regenerative Medicine 1.2 STS and Information Studies I: Cyberinfrastructure/e-Science 1.3 Ways of Knowing the Biomedical Body 1.4 Knowledge for Governing Science 1.5 Climate Change 1.6 Translating Knowledge, Transgressing Boundaries: An Exploration of Cultures and Practices Underlying the Conversion of Biomedical Knowledge 1.7 Innovation, Universities, and Industry 1.8 Crossing Boundaries in E-research 1.9 Ethics in Practice 10 1.10 Communicating Value through Language: How Language Is Used to Assign 1.11 Institutional Ideologies of Knowing: Perspectives from Eastern Europe 2 Thursday 10:15-12:15 2.1 Regimes of Production of Knowledge in Life Sciences 2.2 STS & Information Studies II: Archives & Databases 2.3 New Perspectives on Science and Social Movements 2.4 Private Sector Science: Commercial Ways of Knowing 2.5 Ways Knowing Everything About Each Other: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 and Social Networking 2.6 Technologies of Repair 2.7 Postphenomenological Research I 2.8 Global Knowledges and Democratic Agency 2.9 Mobilized Subjects: Militarization in National and Transnational Contexts 2.10 Ways of Knowing the Field 2.11 Ways of Knowing Within and Through Games and Play 3 Thursday 12:30-1:30 3.1 A Hands-On Mapping Workshop for Exploring Different Representational Strategies for Describing Complex Technoscientific Domains (Roundtable) 3.2 STS & Information Studies III: Doing STS in Information Schools (Roundtable) 3.3 Assemblages, Eduscapes, and Knowledge: A Critical Anthropology of Knowledge Society 3.4 Embodied Translations, Translating Embodiment 3.5 Field Science and Embodied Knowing in an Era of Virtuality 11 3.6 Faculty Panel: Getting Your First Academic Job (sponsored by the student section of the 4S) 3.7 Learning Together, Learning Apart: The Contradictory Dynamics of Mixing Disciplinary Knowledges 3.8 Postphenomenological Research II 3.9 Ask your Doctor About… Science and Commerce in Canadian Health 3.10 Intimate Interfaces: Constituting Technologies, Bodies, and Users through Seamless Relations 3.11 STS in Canada: Building Towards the Future (roundtable) 4 Thursday 1:45-3:15 4.1 Student Business Meeting (may be moved to Saturday lunch) 4.2 STS & Information Studies IV: Mapping Science 4.3 Law and the Question of Non-science: Legal Encounters With ‘Other’ Ways of Knowing 4.4 Knowledge Gaps and STS 4.5 Exploring the Nano-Enterprise 4.6 Twice Alive? The Re-birth of the Gene in Science Studies 4.7 Social and Technical Aspects of Scientific Collaborations 4.8 Knowing with Computers: How Software and Systems Encapsulate Expertise 4.9 Ethnographies of Science and Technology Across Disciplines: The Theory and Practice of