Science and democracy reconsidered

To what extent is the normative commitment of STS to the democratization of science a product of the democratic contexts where it is most often produced? STS scholars have historically offered a powerful critical lens through which to understand the social construction of science, and seminal contributions in this area have outlined ways in which citizens have improved both the conduct of science and its outcomes. Yet, with few exceptions, it remains that most STS scholarship has eschewed study of more problematic cases of public engagement of science in rich, supposedly mature Western democracies, as well as examination of science-making in poorer, sometimes non-democratic contexts. How might research on problematic cases and dissimilar political contexts traditionally neglected by STS scholars push the field forward in new ways? This paper responds to themes that came out of papers from two Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Panels on Science and Technology Studies in an Era of Anti-Science. It considers implications of the normative commitment by sociologists working in the STS tradition to the democratization of science.https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/383Published versio

Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism

[Excerpt] This book examines efforts to expand access to health care and AIDS medicine in Thailand, Brazil, and South Africa. Although these countries are geographi­cally far apart, they share many similarities as newly industrializing countries engaged in processes of democratic opening. Scholars have often suggested that expansionary social policy is the product of left-wing parties and labor unions or bottom-up people’s movements. From a strictly rational perspective, that these groups would be at the forefront of such change makes perfect sense. After all, expanding access to health care and medicine would seem to be in their interest, and they would appear to have a lot to gain. While this book recognizes the role they often play, it focuses on a different, more puzzling set of actors whose actions are sometimes even more decisive in expanding access to health care and medicine: elites from esteemed professions who, rationally speaking, aren’t in need of health care or medicine themselves and who would otherwise seem to have little to gain from such policies. This group includes doctors like Sanguan Nitayarumphong and Paulo Teixeira, whose work with the poor and needy informed their advocacy for universal health care in Thailand and Brazil while also putting them into conflict with the medical profession of which they were a part. How is it that these people would play such an important and active role in making change happen

Acknowledgments

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?gmundar þáttr dytts ok Gunnars helmings: Unity and Literary Relations

Page range: 21-4

What Butler Saw: Cross-Dressing and Spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article. What Butler Saw: Cross-Dressing and Spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century France Joseph Harris Introduction For the past fifteen years or so, Judith Butler?s theories have been both contentious and profoundly influential in our understanding of sex and gender. Her most striking claim, laid out at the end of Gender Trouble, is that gender has no essence, but is instead constituted through a repeated and performative ?citation? of pre-existing models of gender. In typical post-structuralist fashion, Butler develops this theory by examining how the exception reveals the conditions that govern the norm; accordingly, she shows how cross-dressing and other marginal forms of gender play can reveal gender in its entirety to be constructed and performative. For Butler, apparently dissonant forms of gender performance have the potential to transgress and subvert sexual norms by revealing all gender to be a copy without an original: ?in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself?as well as its contingency?.1 At the same time, Butler?s theories are open to a number of criticisms, whichI intend to interrogate here byreassessing her thought in the light of three seventeenth-century poems about cross-dressing. Above all, Butler?s theories are profoundly ahistorical; although not in itself a criticism, this does mean that she can tell us little about the particular ways in which sex and gender might be constructed in different historical or..

Christian Form and Christian Meaning in Halldórs þáttr I

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Minkowski sums and Hadamard products of algebraic varieties

We study Minkowski sums and Hadamard products of algebraic varieties. Specifically we explore when these are varieties and examine their properties in terms of those of the original varieties.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figure

Romancing the Rune: Aspects of Literacy in Early Scandinavian Orality

Page range: 319-34

Gender and Genre: Short and Long Forms in the Saga Literature

Page range: 261-28