Tsjalling Swierstra

Dealing with in/dependence: doctoring in physical rehabilitation practice

By now, the laboratory tradition, crafting transportable knowledge that allows for comparison, has been amply studied. However, other knowledge traditions, notably that of the clinic, deserve further articulation. The authors contribute to this by unraveling some specificities of rehabilitation practice. How do laboratory and clinical traditions in rehabilitation relate to independence? The first seeks to quantify peoples independence; the latter attends to qualitatively different ways of being independent. While measuring independence is a matter of aggregating scores on a priori established dimensions, clinical rehabilitation concerns coordinating different ways of being independent. While independence scales map a linear development in time, rehabilitation participants juggle with time, including uncertain futures in their present. In clinical practice, then, independence is neither a single, coherent, fact nor a clear-cut, stable goal. Instead, professionals as well as patients work by creatively doctoring with the large variety of elements that are relevant to daily life with long-term disabilities.

Responsibility without Moralism in Technoscientific Design Practice

While engineering ethics usually addresses the responsibility of engineers in rare cases of whistle blowing, the authors broach the question to what extent engineers can be held responsible in normal practice. For this purpose, they define the conditions under which individuals can be imputable as they prevail in ethics and common sense. From outcomes of science and technology studies research, the authors conclude that these conditions are seldom met in modern technoscientific research practice. By examining such practice in a case study and comparing the results with perceptions of engineers on social responsibility as expressed in interviews, the authors are able to demonstrate that (1) a change in structural characteristics of this practice, such as funding rules, stimulates engineers to attune the inner politics of science to wider societal policies and concerns, and (2) it helps them to overcome the shifting of social responsibility to others as a consequence of the lack of agency they usually perceive.

From an autopsy of the Old Eugenics to the Challenges of the New Science of Genetics

No Abstract. Ethiopian Journal of the Social Sciences and Humanities Vol. 3 (1) 2005: pp. 105-116