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285Roadkill: Between Humans, Nonhuman Animals, and TechnologiesSociety and Animals 12 (4): 277-298. 2004.This paper has two broad objectives. First, the paper aims to treat roadkill as a topic of serious social scientific inquiry by addressing it as a cultural artifact through which various identities are played out. Thus, the paper shows how the idea of roadkill-as-food mediates contradictions and ironies in American identities concerned with hunting, technology, and relationships to nature. At a second, more abstract, level, the paper deploys the example of roadkill to suggest a par ticular appro…Read more
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39These Boots Are Made for Walking...: Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment RelationsBody and Society 6 (3-4): 107-126. 2000.This article begins with a consideration of the `pure' unmediated relation between the human body and nature, exemplified, in different ways, by environmental expressivism, and Ingold's subtle analysis of affordance and the taskscape. It is argued that perspectives fail properly to incorporate the role of mundane technology in the mediation of human-nature relations. Drawing upon the work of Michael Serres, and, in particular, his concept of the parasite, I explore how these mundane technologica…Read more
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23Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies TransplantationScience, Technology, and Human Values 26 (1): 3-22. 2001.This article discusses xenotransplantation and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the best species from which to “harvest” transplant tissues in the future. The authors’ analysis shows that scientists and medical practitioners routinely switch between scientific and cultural repertoires. These repertoires enable such actors to …Read more
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19Comprehension, Apprehension, Prehension: Heterogeneity and the Public Understanding of ScienceScience, Technology, and Human Values 27 (3): 357-378. 2002.This article examines the main approaches to public understanding of science in light of recent developments in social and cultural theory. While traditional and critical perspectives on PUS differ in terms of their models of the public, science, and understanding, they nevertheless share a number of commonalities, which are humanism, incorporeality, and discrete sites. These are contrasted, respectively, to versions of the person as hybridic, to treatments of embodiment drawing especially on Wh…Read more
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44From the representation of publics to the performance of 'lay political science'Social Epistemology 14 (1): 3-19. 2000.No abstract
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10Performing Risk & Ethics in Clinicians’ Accounts of Stem Cell Liver TherapiesIn Hauke Riesch, Nathan Emmerich & Steven Wainwright (eds.), Philosophies and Sociologies of Bioethics: Crossing the Divides, Springer. pp. 149-169. 2018.In this paper we set out to explore the enactments of risk by clinicians involved in the development of stem cell therapy for liver disease. In the process, we contribute to a performative re-thinking of how ‘risk’ can be analytically treated in relation to health. The bulk of the paper, drawing on interview data, is concerned with how clinicians’ accounts about the risks entailed in their research-oriented work performatively ‘make’ clinicians themselves, but also various other ‘constituencies’…Read more
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145The hiss of history and the sigh of psychologyHistory of the Human Sciences 10 (2): 133-139. 1997.Robert M. Farr, The Roots of Modern Social Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. £40.00 (hbk), £12.99 (pbk), xvii + 204 pp. Graham Richards, Putting Psychology in its Place: An introduction from a critical historical perspective. London: Routledge, 1996. £40.00 (hbk), £12.99 (pbk), x + 197 pp. Daniel N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology, 3rd edn. London: Arnold, 1995. £14.99 (pbk), viii + 381 pp
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28HIV, Globalization and Topology: Of Prepositions and PropositionsTheory, Culture and Society 29 (4-5): 93-115. 2012.In this article we explore how two enactments of HIV – the UN’s AIDS Clock and clinical trials for an HIV biomedical prevention technology or pre-exposure prophylaxis – entail particular globalizing and localizing dynamics. Drawing on Latour’s and Whitehead’s concept of proposition, and Serres’ call for a philosophy of prepositions, we use the composite notion of pre/pro-positions to trace the shifting topological status of HIV. For example, we show how PrEP emerges through topological entwineme…Read more
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22“What Are We Busy Doing?”: Engaging the IdiotScience, Technology, and Human Values 37 (5): 528-554. 2012.Engagement events—whether interviews, installations, or participatory encounters—can entail a range of happenings which, in one way or another, “overspill” the empirical, analytic, or political framing of those engagement events. This article looks at how we might attend to these overspills—for instance, forms of “misbehavior” on the part of lay participants—not only to provide accounts of them but also to explore ways of deploying them creatively. In particular, Stengers’ figure of the “idiot” …Read more
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17On “Aesthetic Publics”: The Case of VANTAblack®Science, Technology, and Human Values 43 (6): 1098-1121. 2018.This exploratory paper investigates the enactment of a number of “publics” in relation to a recent, ostensibly “technical”, innovation, namely, the nanotechnology Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array-black. In particular, we show how various representations of VANTAblack—as technical artifact, as an exclusive artist’s material, as an exciting coating for a mass-produced commercial product, and as an object of science communication—implicate different “aesthetic experiences”. We discuss these aesthe…Read more
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27Accounting for Animal Experiments: Identity and Disreputable "Others"Science, Technology and Human Values 19 (2): 189-204. 1994.This article considers how scientists involved in animal experimentation attempt to defend their practices. Interviews with over 40 scientists revealed that, over and above direct criticisms of the antivivisection lobby, scientists used a number of discursive strategies to demonstrate that critics of animal experimentation are ethically and epistemologically infenor to British scientific practitioners. The scientists portrayed a series of negative "others" such as foreign scientists, farmers, an…Read more
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21Expectation and Mobilisation: Enacting Future UsersScience, Technology, and Human Values 34 (4): 502-522. 2009.This article considers how the figure of the ``user'' is deployed to imagine the assembling of location-based mobile phone technologies in the context of UK policy. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we address the performativity of the ``user'' in the think tank Demos' publication Mobilisation. In the process, we analyze how discourses about users enact particular futures that feature arrangements of, for example, persons, mobile phone technologies, and political institutions. We present…Read more
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20Lay Discourses of Science: Science-in-General, Science-in-Particular, and SelfScience, Technology and Human Values 17 (3): 313-333. 1992.The understanding of science by members of the public has been of increasing concern to social scientists. This article argues that such understanding, or the ostensible lack of it, is structured by discourses that address science both as an abstract entity or principle and as an activity directed at specific phenomena or problems. Drawing upon a wide range of interviews about various sources of ionizing radiation, it is suggested that understanding is tied to questions of social identity that e…Read more
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26Medicine: Experimentation, Politics, Emergent BodiesBody and Society 18 (3-4): 1-17. 2012.In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental obj…Read more
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51This article is an attempt to operationalize A.N. Whitehead's ontological approach within sociology. Whitehead offers lessons and clues to a way of re-envisioning `sociological practice' so that it captures something of the nature of a `social' that is at once real and constructed, material and cultural, and processual and actual. In the course of the article, the terms `operationalize' and `sociology' will themselves be transformed, not least because the range of objects and relations of study …Read more
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79Screening for genetic disorders: therapeutic abortion and IVFJournal of Medical Ethics 16 (1): 43-47. 1990.This paper examines a proposal to make use of IVF techniques to provide an alternative to therapeutic abortion of fetuses with genetic abnormalities. We begin by describing the proposed procedure, and then show that, considered in itself, it is morally on a par with therapeutic abortion. However, once the wider practical implications are brought into view, the proposed new procedure loses its initial appeal. The pros and cons are not sufficiently clear-cut entirely to rule out the IVF procedure,…Read more
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48Talking about talking about nature: Nurturing ecological consciousnessEnvironmental Ethics 15 (1): 33-47. 1993.The increasing effort, both lay and academic, to encourage a transition from an “I-It” to an “I-Thou” relation to nature is located within a typology of ways of “knowing nature.” This typology provides the context for a particular understanding of human conversation which sees the relation as a cyclical process of “immersion” and “realization” from which a model of the dialectic between “I-It” and “I-Thou” relations to nature can be developed. This model can be used to identify practical measure…Read more
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42How to understand mundane technology : New ways of thinking about human-technology relationsIn John R. Dakers (ed.), Defining Technological Literacy: Towards an Epistemological Framework, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 50--63. 2006.
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185Reviews : Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: a rhetorical approach to social psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 (1987), paper £9.95, vi + 290 pp (review)History of the Human Sciences 4 (3): 441-444. 1991.
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40A resource for resistance: Power-knowledge and affordance (review)Theory and Society 21 (6): 869-888. 1992.
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39Towards the applied: the construction of ethical positions in stem cell translational research (review)Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 11 (3): 351-361. 2007.This paper aims to make an empirically informed analytical contribution to the development of a more socially embedded bioethics. Drawing upon 10 interviews with cutting edge stem cell researchers (5 scientists and 5 clinicians) it explores and illustrates the ways in which the role positions of translational researchers are shaped by the ‘normative structures’ of science and medicine respectively and in combination. The empirical data is used to illuminate three overlapping themes of ethical re…Read more