Towards a Life Sciences Code: Countering the Threats from Biological Weapons

Ye

In-Depth Implementation of the BTWC: Education and Outreach

Ye

Leaky revelations: Commitments in exposing militarism

This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this recordContests over the control of information are central to the perpetuation and critique of militarism. This article examines one of the most prominent sets of state document leaks in recent political history: the online posting of hundreds of thousands of US war logs and diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. Bold statements were advanced in 2010 and afterward regarding what these releases made visible. In contrast, this article considers how disclosure and nondisclosure came bundled together. With reference to the tensions of keeping secrets and producing transparency, I suggest that the promise attached to the released documents did not just derive from the argument that they revealed modern statecraft, nor that such knowledge was tantalizingly out of reach, but from the manner in which what had been rendered knowable could be revisited over time. Through this argument I want to explore the affective knots, conceptual tangles, and problematic story lines associated with exposing militarism

Codes of Conduct for the Life Sciences: Some Insights from UK Academia

Ye

Data Shadows: Knowledge, Openness and Absence

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.This editorial critically engages with the understanding of openness by attending to how notions of presence and absence come bundled together as part of efforts to make open. This is particularly evident in contemporary discourse around data production, dissemination, and use. We highlight how the preoccupations with making data present can be usefully analyzed and understood by tracing the related concerns around what is missing, unavailable, or invisible (“data shadows”), which unvaryingly but often implicitly accompany debates about data and openness.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Sabina Leonelli was funded by the European Resarch Council, award number 335925 (DATA_SCIENCE). Brian Rappert was funded by an ESRC/AHRC/Dstl project titled “The Formulation and Nonformulation of Security Concerns” (ES/K011308/1). All three editors were also supported by the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science Fund of the University of Exeter

Counting the dead and making the dead count: configuring data and accountability

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer via the DOI in this recordThis article examines the relation between counting, counts and accountability. It does so by comparing the responses of the British government to deaths associated with Covid-19 in 2020 to its responses to deaths associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarities and dissimilarities between the cases regarding what counted as data, what data were taken to count, what data counted for, and how data were counted provide the basis for considering how the bounds of democratic accountability are constituted. Based on these two cases, the article sets out the metaphors of leaks and cascades as ways of characterising the data practices whereby counts, counting and accountability were configured. By situating deaths associated with Covid-19 against previous experience with deaths from war, the article also proposes how claims to truth and ignorance might figure in any future official inquiry into the handling of the pandemic

Opening Spaces through Exhibiting Absences: Representing Secretive Pasts

This is the final version. Available on open access from Rowman & Littlefield via the ISBN in this recor

What is absent from contemplative neuroscience? Rethinking limits within the study of consciousness, experience, and meditation

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Imprint Academic via the URL in this recordIn conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description has been a recurrent topic of commentary in a wide array of literature—including religious doctrine, meditation guides (secular and religious), and contextual accounts written by historians and social scientists. Yet, to date, this question has not significantly informed neuroscientific studies on the effects of meditation on brain and behaviour, in large part—but not wholly—because of the disregard for first-person accounts of experience that still characterizes neuroscience in general. By juxtaposing perspectives from nonneuroscientific accounts on the tensions and questions raised by what is and is not expressed or expressible in words, this article paves the way for a new set of possibilities in experimental contemplative neuroscience

Now you see it, now you don’t: methods for perceiving intersubjectivity

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordWhat work is entailed in learning skills? How do processes of enskillment enable alternative ways of seeing, feeling and acting? How can we intersubjectively meet each other when deception is regarded as prevalent? This article addresses these questions through recounting my experiences associated with learning entertainment magic. I outline how the training of competencies can involve an ongoing problematising of the relationship between seeing and knowing as well as between knowledge and ignorance. Furthermore, through recounting the affirmations and disorientations of my process of learning, I want to consider how skills acquisition can serve as a method for self-other investigation

Beyond the digital divide: Towards a situated approach to open data

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP via the DOI in this record.Poor provision of information and communication technologies in low/middle-income countries represents a concern for promoting Open Data. This is often framed as a “digital divide” and addressed through initiatives that increase the availability of information and communication technologies to researchers based in low-resourced environments, as well as the amount of resources freely accessible online, including data themselves. Using empirical data from a qualitative study of lab-based research in Africa we highlight the limitations of such framing and emphasize the range of additional factors necessary to effectively utilize data available online. We adopt the ‘Capabilities Approach’ proposed by Sen to highlight the distinction between simply making resources available, and doing so while fostering researchers’ ability to use them. This provides an alternative orientation that highlights the persistence of deep inequalities within the seemingly egalitarian-inspired Open Data landscape. The extent and manner of future data sharing, we propose, will hinge on the ability to respond to the heterogeneity of research environments.The research informing this article was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust title ‘Beyond the Digital Divide’ (RPG-2013-153). Sabina Leonelli was also funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ ERC grant agreement n° 335925. Ann Kelly’s contribution was also supported by UK Economic Social Research Council Urgency Grants mechanism (ES/M009203/1)