Ambiguity and Scientific Authority: Population Classification in Genomic Science

The molecularization of race thesis suggests geneticists are gaining greater authority to define human populations and differences, and they are doing so by increasingly defining them in terms of U.S. racial categories. Using a mixed methodology of a content analysis of articles published in Nature Genetics (in 1993, 2001, and 2009) and interviews, we explore geneticists’ population labeling practices. Geneticists use eight classification systems that follow racial, geographic, and ethnic logics of definition. We find limited support for racialization of classification. Use of quasi-racial “continental” terms has grown over time, but more surprising is the persistent and indiscriminate blending of classification schemes at the field level, the article level, and within-population labels. This blending has led the practical definition of “population” to become more ambiguous rather than standardized over time. Classificatory ambiguity serves several functions: it helps geneticists negotiate collaborations among researchers with competing demands, resist bureaucratic oversight, and build accountability with study populations. Far from being dysfunctional, we show the ambiguity of population definition is linked to geneticists’ efforts to build scientific authority. Our findings revise the long-standing theoretical link between scientific authority and standardization and social order. We find that scientific ambiguity can function to produce scientific authority

Disentangling Public Participation In Science and Biomedicine

BACKGROUND: This article provides a framework for disentangling the concept of participation, with emphasis on participation in genomic medicine. We have derived seven ‘dimensions’ of participation that are most frequently invoked in the extensive, heterogeneous literature on participation. To exemplify these dimensions, we use material from a database of 102 contemporary cases of participation, and focus here on cases specific to science and medicine. We describe the stakes of public participation in biomedical research, with a focus on genomic medicine and lay out the seven dimensions. DISCUSSION: We single out five cases of participation that have particular relevance to the field of genomic medicine, we apply the seven dimensions to show how we can differentiate among forms of participation within this domain. SUMMARY: We conclude with some provocations to researchers and some recommendations for taking variation in participation more seriously

Trying to make race science the "civil" science: charisma in the race and intelligence debates.

When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvement in the scientific process as a story of suppression and persecution, in which only a few remarkable figures can withstand scrutiny and take on challengers with dignity. Description and elaboration of these figures and the folklore surrounding them sets in motion the interpretive processes by which some actors become charismatic leaders and others charismatic followers within science, ultimately providing alternative symbolic resources for an embattled research agenda to accrue legitimacy. To illustrate, we use the case of Arthur Jensen - a deceased intelligence researcher and the intellectual father to contemporary texts like The Bell Curve - and the circles of hero worship that admirers inside and outside academia have created to praise him. Using this perspective to study Jensen and his admirers demonstrates how the perennial race and intelligence debates gain a kind of symbolic power, unrelated to their scientific merit or racist appeal, which enables such debates to thrive and persist in the public sphere. More generally, our approach identifies contemporary processes by which scientific ideas can gain public authority even when their intellectual merit has been deemed dubious

Feminist retroviruses to white Sharia: Gender "science fan fiction" on 4Chan.

This article demonstrates-based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women's Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" discussion board-two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, "science fan fiction," in online spaces and (2) how gender "science fan fiction" is an outcome of the male supremacist cosmology, by producing and justifying resentment against white women as being both inherently untrustworthy (politically, sexually, intellectually) and dangerous. This perspective-which combines hatred and distrust of women with white nationalist anxieties about demographic shifts, racial integrity, and sexuality-then motivates misogynist policy ideas including total domination of women or their removal. 4chan users employ this discourse to "scientifically" substantiate claims of white male supremacy, the fundamental untrustworthiness of white women, and to argue white women's inherent threat to white male supremacist goals

Birds of the internet:a field guide to understanding action, organization, and the governance of participation

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public