“She is not actually bullied.” the discourse of harassment in student groups

Bullying is a considerable problem in schools. It has various negative effects on the children involved. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how children themselves interpret and construct bullying. Three elementary school classes with a high number of victim nominations were chosen among the 48 classes taking part in a larger study. The pupils from selected classes were interviewed in small groups. The interviews were tape‐recorded, transcribed and analyzed using the discourse analytical methodology described by Potter and Wetherell [1987]. Various recurrently used systems of terms (e.g., interpretative repertoires) were found. The results suggest that bullying can be construed as unproblematic and justified among children. For example, the ‘interpretative repertoire of underestimation’ constructs bullying as a game or some other harmless action, the ‘odd student repertoire’ describes the victim as a negatively deviant student who cannot behave as he/she should and the ‘interpretative repertoire of deserving’ constructs meaningful reasons for hostility towards the victim. These and other interpretative repertoires are described and discussed. Aggr. Behav. 29:134–154. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Creating Inquiry Between Technology Developers and Civil Society Actors: Learning from Experiences Around Nanotechnology

Engaging civil society actors as knowledgeable dialogue partners in the development and governance of emerging technologies is a new challenge. The starting point of this paper is the observation that the design and orchestration of current organized interaction events shows limitations, particularly in the articulation of issues and in learning how to address the indeterminacies that go with emerging technologies. This paper uses Dewey’s notion of ‘publics’ and ‘reflective inquiry’ to outline ways of doing better and to develop requirements for a more productive involvement of civil society actors. By studying four novel spaces for interaction in the domain of nanotechnology, this paper examines whether and how elements of Dewey’s thought are visible and under what conditions. One of the main findings is that, in our society, special efforts are needed in order for technology developers and civil society actors to engage in a joint inquiry on emerging nanotechnology. Third persons, like social scientists and philosophers, play a role in this respect in addition to external input such as empirically informed scenarios and somewhat protected spaces.     

Portuguese-Canadian Emigrant Descendents in Multicultural Canada: Ambiguous Identity in a Sure-Footed Nation or Cultural Awareness in an Uncertain Country?

This paper examines the ways the descendents of Portuguese-Canadian immigrants contemplate and formulate their identities. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how these individuals contest ideas of ‘being Portuguese’ and ‘being Canadian’ within the frameworks of the Canadian multicultural policy. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation and Anglo/Francophone conformity, these individuals produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identified multiethnic bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own selves as intrinsically ‘multicultural’ and contributors to the very definition of a Canadian identity. Challenging the tropes of the Canadian multicultural narrative, these descendents, thus, develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Through the process of narrative analysis, my endeavour of this article are twofold: on one hand, to illuminate the role of these individuals who, as active actors, are shaped by the social worlds they delve in and, on the other, to explicate how the roles played out by these actors can contribute to the construction of ‘a Canadian identity’.     

Green Keynesianism: Bringing the Entrepreneurial State Back in(to Question)?

Since the global financial crisis of 2007/8, proliferating calls for a Keynesian Green New Deal have cast the publicly (and environmentally) minded state as a necessary driver of technological innovation and social transformation, while, vice versa, innovation has moved to political centre-stage. The history and genesis of this particular Green Keynesian paradigm illustrate that some of its most high-profile proponents selectively and problematically frame twentieth-century Keynesianism and the ‘public good’. It is important to examine critically the calls for an ‘entrepreneurial state’ in which Green Keynesian ideas are mobilized in support of an agenda for continued and accelerated development of commercially focused, privately developed green technologies. The entrepreneurial state represents a neoliberal re-appropriation of Green Keynesianism, where dominant financial actors (in Silicon Valley, as opposed to on Wall Street) are tapped as the visionaries who can and should set our collective innovation agenda. Although there is a need for large-scale, coordinated techno-social efforts to address climate change, supporting ‘green’ innovation cannot simply be framed as maximizing ‘innovation’ while taking the ‘state’ for granted. Instead, it must entail a careful assessment of the specific trajectories of innovation being enabled and the underlying socio-natures that they maintain and promote. Science and technology studies (STS)-informed analysis allows, and compels, asking how socio-technological innovation and their constitutive power relations are crucially interrelated, making the reshaping of the state—still the primary institution and system of social relations of collective governance—a core but neglected political, technological and ecological project of our time, with a key role for STS.     

Ethics and Technology ‘in the Making’: An Essay on the Challenge of Nanoethics

After reviewing portions of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that call for examination of societal and ethical issues, this essay seeks to understand how nanoethics can play a role in nanotechnology development. What can and should nanoethics aim to achieve? The focus of the essay is on the challenges of examining ethical issues with regard to a technology that is still emerging, still ‘in the making.’ The literature of science and technology studies (STS) is used to understand the nanotechnology endeavor in a way that makes room for influence by nanoethics. The analysis emphasizes: the contingency of technology and the many actors involved in its development; a conception of technology as sociotechnical systems; and, the values infused (in a variety of ways) in technology. Nanoethicists can be among the many actors who shape the meaning and materiality of an emerging technology. Nevertheless, there are dangers that nanoethicists should try to avoid. The possibility of being co-opted from working along side nanotechnology engineers and scientists is one danger that is inseparable from trying to influence. Related but somewhat different is the danger of not asking about the worthiness of the nanotechnology enterprise as a social investment in the future.     

Slim Futures and the Fat Pill: Civic Imaginations of Innovation and Governance in an Engagement Setting

Innovation politics is seen as an ever more central area of public policy, and as a key means for shaping societal futures. Particularly in Europe, with its history of controversial public debates about innovations, the idea that scientific progress is automatically equated with societal progress seems hard to sustain. Broader public participation within techno-scientific governance seems necessary; though who is to participate in which form often remains unclear. Increasingly, when the innovation process is discussed in both policy and academia, the question of when public engagement should take place in the innovation process is addressed using common models such as ‘upstream engagement’. However, these discussions about public engagement often assume a top-down approach, and pay little attention to citizens' perspectives. To address this gap in the literature, this article will ask the following questions: what tacit understandings of techno-scientific innovation and governance do citizens have; and how do they relate their understandings of the form, structure and dynamics of these innovation processes to their visions of governance and participation? How do specific cultural forms of conceptualising innovation open up or close down particular possibilities of governance and public participation, hence privileging the involvement of certain actors and not others? To address these questions, we analyse the discussions in a long-term public engagement setting involving both genome scientists and citizens in Austria.     

Collaboration Talk: The Folk Theories of Nano Research

The nano initiative in the US and elsewhere encourages and promotes various forms of multi-stakeholder activities, such as industrial collaborations. Forming part of the discourse of expectations around emerging technologies, collaboration is an important resource holding together different practices of knowledge production. In the conversations between policy and science, collaboration becomes a measurable entity and a measure in itself, figuring in the evaluations of the performance of individual faculty and research centres; however, the policy metaphor of ‘collaboration’ stands for a variety of different forms and shapes of interactions between university and industry. From a discourse analysis perspective, ‘folk theories’ of nano collaboration help to explore the dynamics of the university/industry boundary in the scientific organisational discourse as in a recent series of interactions with scientists, university officials and technology transfer officers in a number of US universities. What does the introduction of the new entity (nano) mean for scientists, and for university practices of technology transfer and commercialisation, in terms of trying to accommodate individual ‘nano’ cases into university regulations and procedures? How are these practices and experiences discussed in terms of collaboration? Assessments of value of collaboration ranged between polarised views, raising questions about occasions, audiences and communities of assessors invoked in the construction of acceptable accounts of nano collaboration. Metaphors and analogies were used to mobilise specific meanings in the discourses of the innovative potential of emerging fields. As such, assessments of the potential of terms pertinent to the emerging discourses, such as collaboration, would be better based on the assumption of shared meanings, not fixed and given, but actively achieved.     

The Ambivalence of Promising Technology

Issues of responsibility in the world of nanotechnology are becoming explicit with the emergence of a discourse on ‘responsible development’ of nanoscience and nanotechnologies. Much of this discourse centres on the ambivalences of nanotechnology and of promising technology in general. Actors must find means of dealing with these ambivalences. Actors’ actions and responses to ambivalence are shaped by their position and context, along with strategic games they are involved in, together with other actors. A number of interviews were conducted with industrial actors with the aim of uncovering their ethical stances towards responsible development of nanotechnology. The data shows that standard repertoires of justification of nanotechnological development were used. Thus, the industrial actors fell back on their position and associated responsibilities. Such responses reinforce a division of moral labour in which industrial actors and scientists can focus on the progress of science and technology, while other actors, such as NGOs, are expected to take care of broader considerations, such as ethical and social issues.     

Giving Voice to Patients: Developing a Discussion Method to Involve Patients in Translational Research

Biomedical research policy in recent years has often tried to make such research more ‘translational’, aiming to facilitate the transfer of insights from research and development (R&D) to health care for the benefit of future users. Involving patients in deliberations about and design of biomedical research may increase the quality of R&D and of resulting innovations and thus contribute to translation. However, patient involvement in biomedical research is not an easy feat. This paper discusses the development of a method for involving patients in (translational) biomedical research aiming to address its main challenges.After reviewing the potential challenges of patient involvement, we formulate three requirements for any method to meaningfully involve patients in (translational) biomedical research. It should enable patients (1) to put forward their experiential knowledge, (2) to develop a rich view of what an envisioned innovation might look like and do, and (3) to connect their experiential knowledge with the envisioned innovation. We then describe how we developed the card-based discussion method ‘Voice of patients’, and discuss to what extent the method, when used in four focus groups, satisfied these requirements. We conclude that the method is quite successful in mobilising patients’ experiential knowledge, in stimulating their imaginaries of the innovation under discussion and to some extent also in connecting these two. More work is needed to translate patients’ considerations into recommendations relevant to researchers’ activities. It also seems wise to broaden the audience for patients’ considerations to other actors working on a specific innovation.     

Settling space and covering the nation: Some conceptual considerations in analysing affect and discourse

This article explores how affect and discourse intertwine. We analyse a corpus of newspaper editorials and comment pieces from 2013 to 2014 concerning Aotearoa New Zealand's national day investigating how affective-discursive practices are mobilised to ‘cover the nation’ and ‘settle space’. We identify pervasive formulations of ‘bitter Māori’ and ‘indifferent Kiwis’ and the canon of affective-discursive repertoires and subject positions routinely set up as part of continuing white settler (Pākehā) cultural projects. A second objective is to contribute to the development of theory and method in studies of affect. We argue against non-representational perspectives and for a practice viewpoint that can work with entanglements of semiosis and embodied affect. Concepts from social psychological studies of discourse are applied in preference to ‘structures of feeling’, ‘affect economies’, ‘emoscapes’ and ‘emotion styles’.     

Lost in Translation? The Need for ‘Upstream Engagement’ with Nanotechnology on Trial

Nowadays, the criticism of the so-called ‘deficit model’ and the need for ‘upstream engagement’ in science and technology are becoming part of the master narratives of public policies in many countries, especially concerning nanotechnology. This may be considered as a major success for STS scholars, whose research results have largely contributed to this change, especially those concerning the GMO controversies. Some STS scholars thus move from a position of distant and critical observers to the role of experts in social engineering or advisers of policy-makers. However, in their enthusiasm concerning the expected benefits of upstream engagement, institutions, TA practitioners and social scientists seem to ignore some important limitations as well as the implicit framing assumptions of the concept. Based on an experience made by a group of social scientists in the Grenoble area—one of the major ‘nanodistricts’ in Europe—our paper shows that the ‘upstream engagement’ concept is still embedded in a linear model of innovation and is not very useful to anyone pursuing the co-production of innovations. It is especially true when socio-technical networks are already aligned by powerful actors and a worldwide agenda as in the case of nanotechnology. In order to give an opportunity for public engagement to have a larger impact on decision-making, we propose an alternative approach, which combines Actor–Network Theory (ANT), as an analytical tool, with the reflexive and ongoing implementation of public participation. Public engagement is probably one of the critical loci where STS scholars must reflect on the articulation between the knowledge they produce and public policies in action.     

Technology and the civil epistemology of democracy

In analogy with Rousseau's concept of ‘civil religion’ as a system of ‘positive dogmas’, ‘without which’, as he observed, ‘a man cannot be a good citizen’, this paper advances the concept of ‘civil epistemology’ as the positive dogmas without which the agents of government actions cannot be held accountable by democratic citizens. The civil epistemology of democracy shapes the citizen's views on the nature of political reality, on how the facts of political reality can be known and by whom. Modern liberal democratic politics assumes that the exercise of political power can be manifest in a visible domain of publicly accessible facts. It rests on the Enlightenment faith in the powers of light and visibility to demystify political power, render political actors more exposed and therefore more honestly accountable and enlist the sense of sight as a vehicle of universal political participation. It is, in this context, that technology has come to play such an important symbolic role in the construction of the particular democratic genre of public action as a political spectacle. Democratic civil epistemology, and technology ‐ in the widest sense of the word ‐ as the prototype of action which can be observed in the field of visual perception, uphold the democratic conception of politics as a view. Together they define political actors as visible performers, journalists as observers (who translate actual seeing into virtual seeing) and the citizens as witnesses.     

When Technologies Makes Good People Do Bad Things: Another Argument Against the Value-Neutrality of Technologies

Although many scientists and engineers insist that technologies are value-neutral, philosophers of technology have long argued that they are wrong. In this paper, I introduce a new argument against the claim that technologies are value-neutral. This argument complements and extends, rather than replaces, existing arguments against value-neutrality. I formulate the Value-Neutrality Thesis, roughly, as the claim that a technological innovation can have bad effects, on balance, only if its users have “vicious” or condemnable preferences. After sketching a microeconomic model for explaining or predicting a technology’s impact on individuals’ behavior, I argue that a particular technological innovation can create or exacerbate collective action problems, even in the absence of vicious preferences. Technologies do this by increasing the net utility of refusing to cooperate. I also argue that a particular technological innovation can induce short-sighted behavior because of humans’ tendency to discount future benefits too steeply. I suggest some possible extensions of my microeconomic model of technological impacts. These extensions would enable philosophers of technology to consider agents with mixed motives—i.e., agents who harbor some vicious preferences but also some aversion to acting on them—and to apply the model to questions about the professional responsibilities of engineers, scientists, and other inventors.     

Tuning Clinical Recruitment around Cultural Taboos in a Human Microbiome Study

ABSTRACT

Human microbial communities are bodies of microorganisms that reside in or on different body parts. Importantly, they have been found to affect human health. However, scientific research on human microbial communities has created new challenges for human subject recruitment. First, individuals are asked to collect samples of bodily substances that can be seen as repulsive (e.g. feces and urine). Second, because scientists want to understand how human microbial communities evolve over time, individuals are asked to commit to a regular sample collection for extended periods of time. A longitudinal qualitative study of the work of scientists, physicians, research staff, and study coordinators involved in a human microbiome research project has found that these actors can bypass some aspects of these recruitment and retention challenges through ‘tuning work’. Tuning work is a collaborative process where professionals agree to adjust their practices towards shared goals. Such professionals reconfigure their work practices, personal routines, and the study protocol in an effort to obviate cultural taboos against handling bodily substances. The burden of long-term participation provides fewer opportunities for tuning work for these professionals, however. As such, long-term commitment by human subjects remains a recruitment and retention obstacle.     

Of Nanochips and Persons: Toward an Ethics of Diagnostic Technology in Personalized Medicine

This paper proposes an ethical reflection on personalized medicine and more precisely on the diagnostic technology underlying it, including nanochips. Our approach is inspired by a combination of two philosophical frames of reference: first, John Dewey’s distinction between intuitive valuation and reflexive evaluation, second, John Rawls’ reflective equilibrium. We aim at what we call a ‘reflexive equilibrium’, a mutual adjustment between on the one hand, the intuitive beliefs scientists have about the ethics of the technologies they work on (‘valuations’ in Dewey’s vocabulary) and, on the other hand, the reflexive ethical assessment of these technologies (‘evaluations’). Our goal, in this paper, is to provide the first step of this process through a philosophical analysis of some valuations on individualized medicine. In order to apprehend the ethical values shaping the development of biochips, we present and analyze qualitative interviews with scientists involved in the conception and the development of biochips involving nanotechnologies. We then propose a critical assessment of the role of ethics in these scientific practices. Last, we suggest two distinct and complementary ways to solve some of the issues brought to light by the interviews, without aiming at any dogmatic or “ready-made” answer. The first of these perspectives gives a central role to the capability individuals could achieve through personalized medicine; the second approach analyses the ethical disruptions entailed by personalized medicine with a special focus on care.     

From Walls to Windows: Using Barriers as Pathways to Insightful Solutions

The purpose of this study was to explore and develop a conceptual model for how individuals unlock insight. The concept of insight — the ‘out of the box’ or ‘aha!’ solution to a problem — offers a framework for exploring and understanding how best to enhance problem solving skills due to the cognitive shift insight requires. Creative problem solving (CPS) is inherent to a variety of performance realms including effective decision making, innovation, and organizational development; however, related processes of insight, innovation and creativity remain intangible. The model, based on a review of the problem solving literature, proposes that insight involves a five stage, cyclical process emerging as: primary appraisal of the problem, secondary appraisal based on prior knowledge, initial focus, problem representation, and solution generation when, if no solution is found, the cycle begins again. The research has implications for individual, team and organizational settings suggesting that performance on a wide variety of problems may be improved by utilizing an integrated focus rather than a barrier or goal focus alone.     

Biography and Choice: Female Converts to Islam in the Netherlands

This article assesses the relevance of the rational-choice approach for understanding female conversion to Islam in the Netherlands. Rational-choice theories are important for focusing on the increasingly pluralistic character of the religious market and the active nature of religious actors. It is argued that women are active actors who make sensible choices. Yet the rational choice conception of rationality is rather limited and the specific characteristics of the commodity ‘Islam’ are not accounted for in this approach. In addition, the actors are presented as agents without identity and history. By analysing the life stories of three Dutch converts, it is shown how certain Islamic narratives become meaningful in their lives. By using a biographical approach, an attempt is made to bring the history and identity of the actors and the content of their faith into focus without denying the ‘rationality’ of their choice.     

Rhetorical Strategies for Scientific Authority: A Boundary-Work Analysis of ‘Climategate’

The term ‘Climategate’ refers to the episode in November 2009 when emails between climate scientists were stolen and published online. The content of this private correspondence prompted criticism from diverse commentators who cast doubts on the methods, claims, and members of the climate science community. In response, individual scientists and scientific institutions published statements responding to the allegations of scientific fraud. Gieryn's concept of ‘boundary-work’ can be used to analyse the rhetoric of scientists in situations where their legitimacy is disputed. More specifically, boundary-work can be used to analyse the responses of scientists in terms of: how they represent the attributes of science, what types of boundary-work they undertake (e.g. expulsion, expansion, and protection), and the professional interests that come into play. A boundary-work analysis of the commentaries published in the aftermath of Climategate reveals that scientists characterised climate science as consensual, asocial, and open. Scientists depicted climate science as consensual with the purpose of expelling dissenters and protecting areas of climate science from criticism. Scientists also described knowledge about climate as being ideally produced apart from society so that they could preserve their autonomy and exclude individuals who are accused of being ‘politically biased’. Scientists characterised climate science as necessarily open as the means to justify both existing and additional public funding for science and to avoid external corrective interventions against scientific opacity. Scientists and their critics alike interpreted the stolen emails as embarrassing deviations from the alleged social demands of a consensual, objective, and accessible science.     

Organizing a Collaborative Development of Technological Design Requirements Using a Constructive Dialogue on Value Profiles: A Case in Automated Vehicle Development

Following societal and policy pressures for responsible innovation, innovators are more and more expected to consider the broader socio-ethical context of their work, and more importantly, to integrate such considerations into their daily practices. This may require the involvement of ‘outsiders’ in innovation trajectories, including e.g. societal and governmental actors. However, methods on how to functionally organize such integration in light of responsible innovation have only recently started to emerge. We present an approach to do just that, in which we first develop value profiles of the involved actors, and second, design a workshop setting that allows innovators to develop design requirements in collaboration with representatives of parties that are not usually involved in such innovation design practices. Using a case study in automated vehicle development, we positively demonstrate the possibility and utility of our approach. We stress that in this study we wish to demonstrate the functionality of our developed method, and did not search for scientifically valid outcomes regarding this technical field.     

Context Matters: Promises and Concerns Regarding Nanotechnologies for Water and Food Applications

Expectations in the form of promises and concerns contribute to the sense-making and valuation of emerging nanotechnologies. They add up to what we call ‘de facto assessments’ of novel socio-technical options. We explore how de facto assessments of nanotechnologies differ in the application domains of water and food by examining promises and concerns, and their relations in scientific discourse. We suggest that domain characteristics such as prior experiences with emerging technologies, specific discursive repertoires and user-producer relationships, play a key role in framing expectations of nanotechnology-enabled options. The article concludes by suggesting that domain-specific discourses may lead to undesirable lock-ins into specific de facto assessments pre-structuring anticipatory strategies of actors.