Tereza Stöckelová

Immutable Mobiles Derailed: STS, Geopolitics, and Research Assessment

Science policies and science studies largely share an understanding of scientific knowledge and objects as immutable mobiles. This article shows how the analysis of research assessment in a non-Anglophone country and its effects on social sciences can shed new light on this shared notion. The preference for immutable mobiles in assessment regimes pushes social scientists to publish in specialized, usually Anglophone journals, which can result in the attenuation of local relevance of the knowledge they produce and contribute to the performance of globally converging societies. The author argues that the observed consequences for the social sciences in non-Anglophone countries underscore a larger problem with both the policy ideal and the science and technology studies (STS) idea of immutable mobiles on two counts: the relation of the social and natural sciences to society and the engagement of sciences with the multiplicity of societies as well as natures.

Making Pure Science and Pure Politics On the Expertise of Bypass and the Bypass of Expertise

This article is based on a case study of a long-term public controversy over the construction of a highway bypass (around Plzeň, Czech Republic). Two principal variants of the bypass were proposed. One of them began gradually to appear preferable, increasingly attractive for experts, but remaining only on paper. In the meantime, however, the other variant became more realistic, pushed through mainly by local politicians and actually constructed. This article shows how purification of science from politics (and vice versa) played a key role in the development and ending of the case. Initial expertization of the case switched to its sharp politicization, when people got frustrated from protraction and indecisive evidence of accumulated expertise. This turned to be fatal for those who consistently staked everything on “pure facts.” This article concludes by outlining some general consequences of such a development for both democratic decision making and the political relevance of expertise.

Beyond inclusion: effects and limits of institutionalised public participation

European institutions as well as member states have been recently promoting participatory procedures that are proclaimed to contribute to the legitimacy of political regimes and decision-making processes. Discussing three cases in the controversy over GMOs in the Czech Republic and France, this paper analyses participatory procedures as a power technique, and argues that they have a tendency to strengthen existing power and epistemic relationships. The paper goes on to focus on the initiative of Faucheurs volontaires (voluntary reapers) in France, a collective mobilised to destroy GMO fields. The paper contends that it is a strong and remarkable form of public participation and discusses its key features: focus on material effect on the world; the dispersed character of action; and the personal legal and bodily engagement of the reapers. On the basis of the three cases, the paper argues that the idea of an all-inclusive governance is treacherous.

Social technology transfer? Movement of social science knowledge beyond the academy

Technology has become a key vehicle and index of the societal impact of science. Technology’s dominant image, both in science and technology studies (STS) and in science policies, is one of a material device or a complex procedure using machines with origins in natural science disciplines. This article inquires into the vehicles and forms of societal impact in the case of the social sciences. It empirically looks into the generation and circulation of knowledge and expertise on Roma and, drawing upon Strathern, follows three types of vehicles: projects, products, and persons. In the conclusion it argues against the asymmetrical treatment of the social and natural sciences or social and material technologies, and suggests that the troubles the social sciences have with accounting for their societal impact are comparable to effects of critical evaluation of the natural sciences and should be seriously considered as exposing more general challenges for science in a knowledge society.

Evidence-Based Alternative, ‘Slanted Eyes’ and Electric Circuits: Doing Chinese Medicine in the Post/Socialist Czech Republic

This chapter analyses concurrences and conflicts of three partially connected versions of Chinese medicine (CM) as it has been enacted in changing geopolitical, social and economic circumstances in the Czech Republic, namely: (1) ‘medical acupuncture’, institutionalised in the socialist Czechoslovakia as a specialisation within the state’s biomedical healthcare system, (2) a dissident CM practised since the 1960s by individual doctors who embraced the epistemologically distinctive theory of health and disease of ‘traditional’ CM and which, after 1989, became institutionalised at private schools and clinics while marginalised by the biomedical establishment, and (3) a state-supported version of CM that has been imported to the country since 2013 as a pillar of the revived economic and political cooperation between the Czech Republic and China as a rising global power.

Chinese Medicine on the Move into Central Europe: A Contribution to the Debate on Correlativity and Decentering STS

Abstract Contributing to the ongoing debate on decentering science, technology, and society (STS) from Western contexts, this article elaborates on and reconsiders Wen-yuan Lin and John Law’s proposal for correlative STS (“A Correlative STS” 2014). Like them, we empirically draw on Chinese medicine (CM) and its relation to biomedicine, but we explore the modes by which CM was enacted in the historical, political, and sociomaterial settings of socialist and postsocialist Central Europe. We show that not only specific correlations but also correlativity itself—as the ontological stance of the actors—are situated and can shift. Our argument regarding STS is twofold. First, while Lin and Law argue that STS needs to develop an appropriate mode of betrayal when translating across ontological differences from a source language to a destination language (Western analytics), we show that in our case an ethnographer cannot find any single source language. Consequently, we argue that STS should study actors’ modes and moves of betrayal and their doing ontology as an open process. Second, unlike Lin and Law, who postulate the Chinese mode of international as “subtle” and “minimalist” and an alternative to the Western mode (Lin and Law 2013), we argue that with the rise of China and the changing world political economy, STS needs to be more attentive to dominating expansions that come from non-Western locations as much as from the West.

Academic stratospheres-cum-underworlds: when highs and lows of publication cultures meet

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to link up and think through two bodies of literature, namely the critique of predatory publishing practices and the critique of political economy of established publishers, while introducing a reflection on the dynamic asymmetries of geopolitics and economics of globalizing knowledge production. Design/methodology/approach The authors deploy a conceptual approach developed with reference to a case study in order to explore the embedded logic of the current system of academic publishing. Findings The analysis shows that rather than examining two seemingly different issues (predatory publishing vs established publishers) as conflictual dualism, it is more productive to conceive them in associative and mutually constitutive fashion. Research limitations/implications A nuanced and multidimensional research approach is needed if we are to understand the dynamics of contemporary academic landscape. Originality/value The originality of the contribution lies in its problematizing of three established approaches that feature debates on the transformation of the academy. It moves beyond a micro-level explanation by (the lack of) individual morality as well as a structural explanatory framework preoccupied with publishing infrastructure and culturalist approach based on ready-made dichotomies of west/north vs south/east. Instead, the analysis provides an account that engages both with morality and geopolitics whilst tackling them as dynamic processes in making.

On the Track of C/overt Research: Lessons From Taking Ethnographic Ethics to the Extreme

Despite the growing body of literature that critically assesses the ambiguous impacts of institutional review boards (IRBs) on anthropological research, the key standards on which the IRB evaluations are based often remain unquestioned. By exposing the genealogy of an undercover research in which the authors participated as ethnographer, supervisor, and research participant, this article problematizes some of these standards and addresses the issues of power dynamics in research, informed consent, and anonymization in published work. It argues that rather than addressing genuine ethical dilemmas, IRB standards and the ethical fiction of informed consent mainly protect researchers from having to openly face the uncertainties of fieldwork. As an alternative, the authors put forth the notion of c/overt research, which perceives any research as processual and, in effect, becoming overt only during the research process itself. As such, it forces researchers to cultivate sensitivity to research ethics.