Paper long abstract:

In the field of clinical microbiology, the databases of pathogens and their associated transmission events are undergoing new mapping techniques providing specific (and at times beautiful) visualisations of mobility. In the case of 'bugs', mobility is at once evolutionary and geographical, depicting stories of lineage, contamination and distances travelled. Mediated by the application of whole genome sequencing these visualisations impart identities and histories that for the first time link bug with host in a manner flagged up for its' potential clinical utility. Through extensive ethnographic and historical work exploring the practices of translational and implementation work amongst a team developing whole genome sequencing of pathogens for clinical application, this paper gives a conceptual nod to Hannah Landecker (2005). Where bug and host have often been separated, a focus on the technique of pathogen genomics, illuminates the various ways that biological identities are developed, imagined, and indeed, visualised. I will also describe how the translational imperative and its visual outworking in this case, tell us something about contemporary attitudes to dirt and purity, contamination and containment and the cultural power of place and mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Sports are increasingly shaped by science and technology. Sportspersons now routinely operate in an environment consisting of devices, data flows, laboratories, and scientists. While governments, research industries, and many scientists across the world promote the integration of science and technology into sports as a means of inspiring innovation in sports, how this integration is achieved has not been systematically investigated. To remedy this shortcoming in science and technology studies (STS) and to grasp how science, technology, and sports are mutually attuned in everyday situations, this paper examines a sociotechnical device developed by scientists in Flanders (Belgium) popularly known as the 'sports compass' (sportkinelab.be/sportkompas). As the sports compass is designed to detect and develop sports talent in young children through standardized physical trials, it is widely used in Flemish sports clubs and schools. Drawing on ethnographic methods and on interviews with sports compass developers and users (children, parents, and coaches), the paper argues that despite its acclaimed and real benefits the compass's solidity as a scientific conduit for talent is disrupted by the multiple social aims it serves (e.g. sports participation, striving for excellence) and the multiple expectations it elicits. Accordingly, multiple solidarities and shifting alliances can be discerned between technology developments and uses, devices and humans, and between research institutes, schools, and sports organizations. The paper's findings serve to open a discussion both on the meaning and viability of talent detection among children and sportspersons, and on sports and innovation policies designed to render sports more scientific and technological.

Paper long abstract:

How do we justify our reliance on the outputs of the various instruments in science and in our everyday lives? The received view in epistemology has it that the necessary and sufficient condition is that the relevant causal connections must hold. Take a thermometer as an example: there has to be a reliable causal connection between the mercury and certain features in the environment of the thermometer - this is sufficient for the user to acquire knowledge.

I argue that this view ignores the social interactions that are necessary for an instrument to produce its output. The causal connection is a necessary condition for acquiring knowledge via an instrument but it is not sufficient. In other words I try to transmit the emphasis of the interrelations between science and the social and political world that STS brings forward into the realm of epistemology. The social components in our (scientific) knowledge run deeper than the received view would accept.

To illustrate my point I want to use a narrative from the history of thermometry. For a meaningful measurement of temperature it is necessary to have some fixed points where a reliable causal connection can hold, a certain dilation of mercury and a certain state in the world. It turned out that this connection is not simply found in nature but scientists had to agree upon certain conventions to keep the fixed points - boiling and freezing of water - fixed. Their negotiations and agreement is part of what we now call reliably working thermometer.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will attempt a re-rendering of health and medical interventions and, specifically, a prevailing 'problem' of the treatment user deficient in some form of capacity—knowledge, circumstance, morals—by recasting treatment as a positive/productive, generative force or set of forces. I ask what possibilities arise when intervention—here, pharmaceutical intervention in the form of a daily pill—is not confined to a prevailing anxiety about lack or deficiency? What are the implications of posing the treatment field in this way? Relatedly, what happens to the inquiries of intervention when entities—now actualized through their relations with others —are allowed to exceed disciplinary constraints? The focus of my efforts will be the reliance on 'the treatment user' in efforts to deal with HIV/TB co-infection—a condition that calls up a tripartite of management, cure and management of exacerbation as the virus (HIV) and bacteria (TB) become together in the Deleuzian sense of becoming. Staying close to natural scientific inquiries and its own productive contributions to altering both virus and bacteria—at least as my initial point of departure—I am interested in what happens when these differentiated yet co-affecting life forms invivo are reconceived with an orientation toward this generative feature. Does such a re-rendering give ground to a mode of speculative practice oriented to taking to task the limits of the existing problem and, hence, abandoning the very reasoning in its formulation?