The Literature of Difference In Cultures of Science

The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics Edited by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. 368. $95.00 cloth,$45.00 paper.

Ready for the Robot: Bovines in the Integrated Circuit

Situating cows as co-laborers in global technology sectors, “Ready for the Robot” explores the predicament of cows working as robot operators, information workers, and data producers. The data cows produce shape the conditions in which they work, including their own bodies, as statistical evaluations of cattle abstract profitable traits and warp their connection to breed. Milking robots are posited as providing freedom to dairy cows, but this is far from guaranteed. Rather, cow bodies are programmed to fit the limitations of the robot and the routines of the automated farm, coding that breaches categories of breed. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, this article argues for a “cowborg politics” that shapes technology for new research questions and methods that produce genuinely better working conditions for cows and their human companions and co-workers

The Literature of Difference In Cultures of Science

Review of The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics, edited by Evelynn M. Hammonds and Rebecca M. Herzig. The Nature of Difference is a timely addition to conversations about race and genomics, organized so as to allow readers to make new connections between contemporary discourses and the histories of science and race. The text’s selections and the organization of the selections with introductory material are especially helpful, serving as navigational aids to the sometimes astounding statements of racial fact that could otherwise be conversation stoppers. The book would be useful either as a course text or as a collection of primary material for individual research. Students wishing to track the scientific construction of sex and sexuality more directly alongside race should consider pairing this text with Lucy Bland and Laura Doan’s 1998 edited volume of primary sources, Sexology Uncensored. For those looking for analysis of the production of genetic racial difference, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, edited by Barbara Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah Richardson (2008), keys its essays to genomics, race-based medicine, and genetic ancestry, while Genetic Nature/Culture, edited by Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (2003), offers an anthropological approach and respected scholars in science studies (Troy Duster, Sarah Franklin, Joan Fujimura, Donna Haraway, Rayna Rapp, and Hilary Rose, to name just a selection). Both of these essay collections would help students see how the analytic questions suggested by Hammonds and Herzig open up the apparently settled domain of science for productive interdisciplinary inquiry

West of Eden: Resource Wars and Nature-Cultures in the American West

The richness and variety of the western landscape is what is at stake in hot political contests for the resources of the West: much of this public land is available to economic activity, including for mining, grazing, logging, and recreation. These uses threaten to outpace the land’s ability to renew these resources along with others, like air and water. Now in the first decade of the millennium with a new environmental awareness emerging partly from media coverage of global warming and peak oil, The American West at Risk offers a wide-ranging look at the degradation of the environment in the western states, primarily on public lands. . . . No doubt some issues with The American West at Risk relate back to the authors’ efforts to cover so many aspects of land use in a single text. The main problem with Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett’s ambitious work isn’t that it is wrong to look at these uses of land as sites of environmental degradation, but that it precludes many of the interesting solutions invested actors in the West have been working on over the last 20 years or more. This contributes to the sense that the book is already outdated. By posing the problem as one of antagonism—people who care for the land who have science on their side versus people who abuse their land and who play on ignorance and mythology—the authors miss some of the interesting and unlikely alliances that have emerged in recent years. The premise of the text—that the West’s beautiful, fragile, and unique resources are at risk and in many circumstances mismanaged and ill-used—is amply supportable, but as Thompson asks, “How can one move beyond adversarial deadlock, where entire ‘moral universes’ face off, neither side even being able to engage the other?” (2002, p. 186)

Research Libraries, Emerging Technologies—and a Pandemic

Last October, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and EDUCAUSE partnered to explore how research libraries can leverage emerging tech-nologies to meaningfully and productively support research and learning, given ongoing evolutions of digital tools and data collections. Even while we were working on the slippery task of identifying and predicting technologies and processes that could have big impacts on research library objectives, we did not anticipate that a pandemic with world-stopping power might be a scenario we should consider. Pandemic Advice Not long after the novel coronavirus reached US shores in late Janu-ary 2020, my library, like most others in North America, closed, and staff dispersed to work remotely. We focused on doing as much of our work from home as possible and on providing support for students and faculty who had to suddenly shift the context for learning to an online model. With most labs closed, we grounded ourselves in whatever support for research continu-ity we could engineer. We now know enough about the virus to say that the next few years are uncharted and uncertain, and this uncertainty compounds financial and other strains on research libraries. In the early days of the pandemic, I read some expert advice that stuck with me: people should prepare for pandemics by, among other things, ensuring that the essential functions of society are maintained. In a worst-case scenario, research libraries’ functions that are not maintained could be difficult to restore when we’ve returned to some form of normalcy in the future. So the question is: Given what we’ve learned about promising emerging technologies, what approaches should research libraries take to maintain the most essential and valuable aspects of their work

Gendered Narratives of Innovation through Competition: Lessons from Science and Technology Studies

Library and information science is a technologically intensive profession with a high percentage of women, unlike computer science and other male-dominated fields. On the occasion of the 2011 Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) conference, this essay analyzes the theme “Competitiveness and Innovation” through a review of social psychology and science and technology studies literature. Both theme concepts have ramifications for library and information science (LIS) education. Librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction. Competition, as a management or learning style, may not promote meaningful innovation in LIS education and instead risks creating a climate that is hostile to its chief demographic. The feminization of LIS can be seen as a strength insofar as it promotes the relative parity in numbers of men and women full-time faculty. LIS education should build on this strength in its innovation practices, enabling friendly encounters between technologies, and men and women alike

Forming Bodies and Reforming Healthcare: The Co-Construction of Information Technologies and Bodies through the Imperative for Self Care

Care work and technological work are markedly striated by sex; the sites where they overlap are few. What happens when the labor of care meets up with information technologies? It makes good methodological sense to look at largely feminized environments that are also increasingly technological. Gender, Health, and Information Technology in Context, edited and with contributions by Ellen Balka, Eileen Green, and Flis Henwood, is a welcome contribution to the body of evidence about the socio-technical co-construction of technology, health, and gender. The volume houses nine studies, bookended by an astute introduction and conclusion by the editors. Each study brings empirical research to bear on technology and gender in health contexts. The studies originate from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, and from multiple sites of practice, including clinics, hospitals, community centers, libraries, and health outreach. Each of the nine chapters is based on theoretically grounded qualitative research. The represented theoretical approaches make connections between computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (STS), feminist epistemology, feminist science studies, labor studies, library and information science, and care work. Thus this volume is of interest to multiple audiences. It is equally appropriate to nursing, health sciences, information studies, and labor studies. It is also a helpful resource for those looking at the labor of care, both in nursing and in other care-based or feminized professions, and particularly those facing transformation of work routines through new information technologies. Informants include patients, nurses, health intermediaries, social workers, and other hospital workers. This collection will be valuable to anyone looking for empirical examples and studies of the intersection of women’s labor and technology, labor of care and technology, or gender and technology more broadly construed

iSchool Proposal for Themed Wildcard Session on New Information Systems Methods

???New Information Systems??? is an emerging field composed of social studies of science (STS), information sciences (IS), workplace studies and technological design, and new media forms such as cyberinfrastructure or eResearch. Within this area we are exploring the connections and inter-relationships between empirical studies of information at knowledge creation and use, and methods from more traditional IS, social networks, grounded theory and ethnomethodology. The collective creation of a theoretically driven cluster at this juncture would tie us together in a convergence that would link our scholarship and enable students to access this strong and existing - yet invisible - college. We propose a ???wildcard??? session here that makes a space for people to speak about their methods, assess their viability for helping to build our emerging community, and hopefully to explore the ???behind the scenes??? actions associated with practicing any methods. Such an event is most timely. At the recent meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), an entire day was devoted to the emerging intersections of STS and IS. In addition it should be noted that the same book, Memory Practices in the Sciences (G. Bowker, MIT Press, 2007), won the best book award at both ASIST and 4S. This might be seen as a harbinger for the deeply theoretical and methodological work that is to take place, if the intersection is to be a robust one. Our research directions will be focused on studies of infrastructure, ethical actions that are inscribed into IS, and theoretical studies of questions such as ???what is useful information???? We need to unpack the contextual nature of knowledge creation and use. As well, we need to understand the ways in which it is entangled with obligations from different domains and communities of practice such as privacy, consent, anonymity, confidentiality, ownership and a whole host of organizational and professional matters. New media studies point to an intense overlapping and interrelationship of fields and disciplines. Methods should come from a combination of (1) sensitivity to the historical moment (e.g., multiculturalism, extreme changes in the meaning of ???global???); (2) an assemblage of tools that are ready to hand, theoretically driven, are pleasant and effective to use; and (3) embody an ethical commitment to the values and meanings of those who are being studied (emic), within a way to explore the conventions, standards and infrastructures that both constrain and enable their experiences (etic). The papers here aim to show a range of approaches from the current STS, IS and Workplace Studies emergence that speak to the criteria detailed above. Each participant in the experiemntal forum will bring an example of their research, and as honestly as possible, assess its methodological strengths and weaknesses. The assessment will be relative to strengthening the development of the iSchool community, to the intersections noted above, and to the welfare of respondents

Teaching with Data in the Social Sciences at Michigan State University

This report is part of a broader project by Ithaka S+R, mobilizing teams at 20 universities to investigate, through interviews and qualitative analysis, how quantitative data is being used in social sciences instruction for undergraduates

Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning: Final Report

The generation, dissemination, and analysis of digital information is a significant driver, and consequence, of technological change. As data and information stewards in physical and virtual space, research libraries are thoroughly entangled in the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution:1 a societal shift powered not by steam or electricity, but by data, and characterized by a fusion of the physical and digital worlds.2 Organizing, structuring, preserving, and providing access to growing volumes of the digital data generated and required by research and industry will become a critically important function. As partners with the community of researchers and scholars, research libraries are also recognizing and adapting to the consequences of technological change in the practices of scholarship and scholarly communication. Technologies that have emerged or become ubiquitous within the last decade have accelerated information production and have catalyzed profound changes in the ways scholars, students, and the general public create and engage with information. The production of an unprecedented volume and diversity of digital artifacts, the proliferation of machine learning (ML) technologies,3 and the emergence of data as the “world’s most valuable resource,”4 among other trends, present compelling opportunities for research libraries to contribute in new and significant ways to the research and learning enterprise. Librarians are all too familiar with predictions of the research library’s demise in an era when researchers have so much information at their fingertips. A growing body of evidence provides a resounding counterpoint: that the skills, experience, and values of librarians, and the persistence of libraries as an institution, will become more important than ever as researchers contend with the data deluge and the ephemerality and fragility of much digital content. This report identifies strategic opportunities for research libraries to adopt and engage with emerging technologies,5 with a roughly fiveyear time horizon. It considers the ways in which research library values and professional expertise inform and shape this engagement, the ways library and library worker roles will be reconceptualized, and the implication of a range of technologies on how the library fulfills its mission. The report builds on a literature review covering the last five years of published scholarship, primarily North American information science literature, and interviews with a dozen library field experts, completed in fall 2019. It begins with a discussion of four cross-cutting opportunities that permeate many or all aspects of research library services. Next, specific opportunities are identified in each of five core research library service areas: facilitating information discovery, stewarding the scholarly and cultural record, advancing digital scholarship, furthering student learning and success, and creating learning and collaboration spaces. Each section identifies key technologies shaping user behaviors and library services, and highlights exemplary initiatives. Underlying much of the discussion in this report is the idea that “digital transformation is increasingly about change management”6 —that adoption of or engagement with emerging technologies must be part of a broader strategy for organizational change, for “moving emerging work from the periphery to the core,”7 and a broader shift in conceptualizing the research library and its services. Above all, libraries are benefitting from the ways in which emerging technologies offer opportunities to center users and move from a centralized and often siloed service model to embedded, collaborative engagement with the research and learning enterprise