Vasilis Galis

Enacting disability : how can STS inform disability studies

This paper aims to discuss how science and technology studies (STS) can inform disability studies and challenge dominant approaches, such as the medical and the social models, in the ordering and representation of disability. Disability studies and STS have followed somewhat parallel paths in the history of ideas. From a positivist approach to their research objects to a strong social constructivism, both disciplines have moved to post-modern conceptualisations of science, technology and disability. In the same manner and challenging the extremes of modernism (either ordering disability as a bodily impairment or locating disability solely in society), this paper brings the conceptual vocabulary of actor-network theory (ANT) to the field of disability studies. ANT enables the ordering of disability as a simultaneous biological, material and semiotic phenomenon. Exchanges of performative agency between these elements determine the disability experience. The focus of the analysis shifts from merely defining disability as an impairment, handicap, or social construction (epistemology) to how disability is experienced and enacted in everyday practices, in policy-making, in socio-technical arenas, in the body, and in the built environment (ontology). This adoption of an ontological approach to disability allows the analysis to not only discuss how disability is done, but also to follow how disability groups and carriers of disability expertise and experience intervene in policy-making by developing ‘research in the wild’ and confronting scientific experts in different fora (ontological politics).This paper aims to discuss how science and technology studies (STS) can inform disability studies and challenge dominant approaches, such as the medical and the social models, in the ordering and representation of disability. Disability studies and STS have followed somewhat parallel paths in the history of ideas. From a positivist approach to their research objects to a strong social constructivism, both disciplines have moved to postmodern conceptualisations of science, technology and disability. In the same manner, this paper brings the conceptual vocabulary of actor-network theory (ANT) to the field of disability studies. ANT enables the ordering of disability as a simultaneous biological, material and semiotic phenomenon. The focus of the analysis shifts from merely defining disability as an impairment, handicap, or social construction (epistemology) to how disability is experienced and enacted in everyday practices, in policy-making, in the body, and in the built environment (ontology). This adoption of an ontological approach to disability allows the analysis to not only discuss how disability is done, but also to follow how disability groups and carriers of disability expertise and experience intervene in policy-making by developing ‘research in the wild’ and confronting scientific experts in different fora (ontological politics).

(Re-)constructing Nuclear Waste Management in Sweden : The Involvement of ConcernedGroups, 1970–2010

Sweden constitutes a leading nation concerning developing technological solutions for final disposal of spent nuclear fuel. The KBS-3 solution that is now to be implemented in Osthammar, northeast ...

Partisan Scholarship in Technoscientific Controversies: Reflections on Research Experience

Several academic traditions have addressed epistemological objectivity and/or partisanship in the study of technoscientific controversies. On the one hand, positivist and relativist scholars agree that the political commitments of the social researcher should not impinge on scientific enquiry, while on the other hand, feminist and Marxist scholars not only take stands in diverse technoscientific debates, but even claim their agendas to be more credible than those of orthodox scientists. Such perspectives stress that all research is partisan in one way or another because it involves questions of who controls, manipulates, and establishes decisions, facts, and knowledge. With this in mind, it is possible to identify different forms of partisan research including capture by participants, de facto and overt partisanship, and mercenary scholarship. These different forms of partisan scholarship are characterised by differences in the motives underlying epistemological choices of research topic and method, personal commitments to the fields studied, use of research findings in controversies, and positioning of results in wider debates. Two examples help to illustrate partisan scholarship: first, a study of new technologies for managing climate change (carbon dioxide capture and storage); and second, the construction of the new underground metro system in Athens and its accommodation of accessibility standards. Both cases entail partisan positions and raise similar concerns about the orthodox epistemological assumptions underpinning sociotechnical systems, especially when it comes to technoscientific controversies. Supporting STS partisan scholarship, therefore, enables greater social and democratic engagement with technoscientific development.

A Sociology of Treason : The Construction of Weakness

The process of translation has both an excluding and including character. The analysis of actor networks, the process of mobilizing alliances, and constructing networks is a common and worthwhile focus. However, the simultaneous betrayals, dissidences, and controversies are often only implied in network construction stories. We aim to nuance the construction aspect of actor–network theory (ANT) by shining the analytical searchlight elsewhere, where the theoretical tools of ANT have not yet systematically ventured. We argue that we need to understand every process of translation in relation to its simultaneous process of treason, and to add antonyms for Callon’s problematization, intressement, enrollment, and mobilization. This enables us to describe powerlessness not as a state but as a process. Our case focuses on the network building around measures for disabled people in the construction of the Athens Metro, during the period 1991-1993. The discussion highlights the efforts of disability organizations to intervene in the initial construction works of the metro project and the simultaneous actions of the Greek government to exclude disability organizations from the design process and to disrupt the accessibility-metro actor network.

Introduction: STS and Disability

What is the “conventional sense” of disability, and how do the questions addressed in this special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (STHV) differ from those inspired by Donna Haraway and the cyborg? In industrialized societies, the medical profession has authority over the determination of who should count as disabled while “assistive technologies” enable specific kinds of subject positions (in terms of personhood and competencies as well as limits). In this special issue of STHV, the focus of the essays as a whole is on the different enactments of disability, as complexity that simultaneously implicates bodies, gender, sexuality, technology, and politics. The study of disability offers scope for refinement and further articulation of many issues of long-standing concern to science, technology, and society (STS). In addition, we hope they will encourage further reflection on our field’s normative engagement.What is the ‘‘conventional sense’’ of disability, and how do the questions addressed in this special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values (STHV) differ from those inspired by Donna Haraway and the cyborg? In industrialized societies, the medical profession has authority over the determination of who should count as disabled while ‘‘assistive technologies’’ enable specific kinds of subject positions (in terms of personhood and competencies as well as limits). In this special issue of STHV ,t he focus of the essays as a whole is on the different enactments of disability, as complexity that simultaneously implicates bodies, gender, sexuality, technology, and politics. The study of disability offers scope for refinement and further articulation of many issues of long-standing concern to science, technology, and society (STS). In addition, we hope they will encourage further reflection on our field’s normative engagement.

Laying Claim to Social Media by Activists: A Cyber-Material Détournement

This article examines current appropriations of social media by activists of the radical left in Greece and Sweden. Previous research has shown that the discourse concerning social media’s empowering potential is embedded in commercial values that contradict the value systems of many activists who engage in struggles against the current economic system. We employ the notion of détournement, which describes how social movements turn something aside from its normal course or purpose. Based on interviews and online ethnographic observations, we seek to understand how and with what consequences social media facilitate and limit collective action. The article enhances our understanding of activists’ social media use by turning our attention to the sociotechnical impact of social media on collective action initiated by leftist groups as well as the relationship between ideological loyalties and the political economy of corporate social media.

MULTIPLICITY JUSTIFIES CORPORATE STRATEGY

This study conducts an analysis of the relationship between strategic theory, industry- or market-wide practices, valuation metrics, and justification rhetoric in performing strategic practice. In doing this, we refer to Michel Callon on the performativity of economics and Boltanski and Thévenot on the justification of strategic action. The paper introduces an analytical framework for studying the corporate strategy pragmatics of a forest industry company – Stora Enso – over the 1990–2008 period. The authors argue that Stora Ensos corporate strategy is justified by and represents the outcome of multiple performances that coexist and interact with each other. These multiple performances, ranging from general strategic management conceptual theories to industry-wide practices and valuation metrics, may lead to conflict when creating successful businesses.

We are all foreigners in an analogue world: cyber-material alliances in contesting immigration control in Stockholm’s metro system

Abstract Public spaces are often contested sites involving the political use of socio-material arrangements to check, control and filter the flow of people. In Sweden, the recently established police project (REVA) in is an attempt to strengthen ‘internal border’ controls. This paper discusses the emergence of practices in which activist groups organized and performed resistance through the use of counter technologies in the transport sector. We explain how a hybrid alliance of human and nonhuman others generated new virtual and urban spaces and provided temporary autonomous zones, to groups of undocumented immigrants. REVA Spotter, for example, was a tool, a manifesto and a peaceful means of resistance to the REVA policing methods through continuous Facebook status updates on identity checks at metro stations in Stockholm. The technology enabled reports on location and time of ticket controls to warn travellers in real time. Attempts by authorities to exert control over the ‘spatial’ underground were thereby circumvented by the effective development of an alternative infrastructural ‘underground’ consisting of assemblages of technologies, activists, undocumented immigrants, texts and emails, smart phones and computers. Based on ‘netnographic observations’ and interviews, the paper utilizes the case of the REVA to illustrate processes and practices that simultaneously configure the powerful surveyor, the discriminated and those who contest these politics through hybridities of cyber/material, human/nonhuman and urban/virtual space. The paper argues that by configuring such hybrid alliances, activists provided cyber-material autonomy to undocumented immigrants and other travellers in the metro, thereby creating new virtual and urban spaces for mobility and flows.