Mike Fortun

For an ethics of promising, or: a few kind words about James Watson

Abstract This essay questions some of the limits that both science studies and bioethics have assumed in their engagements with technoscience, and genomics in particular. It argues that these disciplines have privileged an “ethics of suspicion” regarding technoscience, and argues that this is ill-suited to promissory sciences such as genomics. The essay begins to develop elements of an “ethics of friendship” toward genomics, using examples from toxicogenomics and behavioral genetics, to suggest what an ethics of promising might involve.

Experimental Ethnography Online: The asthma files

This essay describes The Asthma Files, an experimental, digital ethnography project structured to support a collaborative research process and new ways of presenting academic research. While examining ways in which asthma is understood, cared for and governed in varied settings, the project also examines how digital tools can be used to support new research practices, new ways of expressing ethnographic analyses and new ways of drawing readers to ethnographic work. The Asthma Files is an experiment in ethnography, and in science, health and environmental communication. The project responds to dramatic increases in asthma incidence in the USA and globally in recent decades, and to wide acknowledgement that new forms of asthma knowledges are needed. The project aims to advance understanding of the way asthma and other complex conditions can be productively engaged, leveraging ethnography, deep play with interdisciplinarity and deep respect for different kinds and forms of knowledges.

Pushback: Critical data designers and pollution politics:

In this paper, we describe how critical data designers have created projects that ‘push back’ against the eclipse of environmental problems by dominant orders: the pioneering pollution database Scorecard, released by the US NGO Environmental Defense Fund in 1997; the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EnviroAtlas that brings together numerous data sets and provides tools for valuing ecosystem services; and the Houston Clean Air Network’s maps of real-time ozone levels in Houston. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, we analyse how critical data designers turn scientific data and findings into claims and visualisations that are meaningful in contemporary political terms. The skills of critical data designers cross scales and domains; they must identify problems calling for public consideration, and then locate, access, link, and create visualisations of data relevant to the problem. We conclude by describing hazards ahead in work to leverage Big Data to understand and address environmental problems. Critical data designers need to understand what counts as a societal problem in a particular context, what doesn’t, what is seen as connected and not, what is seen as ethically charged, and what is exonerated and discounted. Such recognition is produced through interpretive, ‘close reading’ of the historical moment in which they operate.