2026-09-14 · Special Issue: Across the Layers
Estrid Sørensen, Leman Çelik, Stefan Laser
Based on a review of literature on the notion of the planetary, the concept of planetary scientific knowledge is developed. It reframes scientific knowledge as integrally and inherently planetary. While building on the established understanding in Science and Technology Studies (STS) of scientific knowledge as socio-material, the planetary perspective introduces a new conceptualisation of scientific knowledge as extended relations in and through one shared world. The notion of planetary scientific knowledge parts with problematic underpinnings of modern science, from widening metabolic rifts to obscured accountability. Planetary scientific knowledge is transgressive, and in its spherical ontology it grants agency to scientific knowledge to intervene in its own means of production. This implies heterogeneous, changing relations and multiple temporalities. The concept of planetary scientific knowledge thus offers a foundation for a move from social to planetary studies of scientific knowledge.
2026-09-14 · Book Reviews
Aube Richebourg
2026-09-14 · Guest Editorial
Stefan Laser, Leman Çelik, Estrid Sørensen
2026-09-14 · Special Issue: Across the Layers
Anne Pasek, Brian Sutherland
High-performance computing research, particularly concerning so-called artificial intelligence, is increasingly scrutinised for its environmental impacts. Many researchers are actively debating how to respond. Surveying recent English language research community publications, this paper identifies three distinct but overlapping proposed approaches to greening compute-heavy machine learning research: 1) efficiency, 2) the net benefit of downstream impacts, and 3) virtuous competition through environmental metrics. Alternative, and much more radical, proposals can be found in a small but growing contingent of scholars who seek to 4) subordinate research questions to planetary limits. Each approach is more than merely technical, with significant considerations given to researchers’ social incentives and relational commitments to one another. Nevertheless, all approaches are constrained by limitations in enumerating compute and mobilising social incentives. This article assesses tensions across these approaches and concludes by connecting them to wider discussions on the constitutive and increasingly planetary character of method in STS.
2026-09-14 · Special Issue: Across the Layers
Martin Tremčinský
This article explores how the energy transition is reconfiguring knowledge practices that mediate the relationship between energy and capitalist valuation. It argues that batteries should be understood not only as storage technologies but as information devices that translate intermittent renewable flows into commodifiable forms of energy. Through three case studies – of a virtual battery, Bitcoin-as-battery, and a grid storage battery – the paper identifies three modalities of energy: account, waste, and stock. Each exemplifies how valuation practices (accounting, evaluation, valorisation) abstract energy from its material conditions and render it exchangeable within markets. Batteries thus operate as devices in which planetary energies are re-articulated as economic objects, sustaining the commodification of renewables. The article highlights how the transition to renewables is also a transformation of the knowledge practices that govern energy’s circulation.
2026-09-14 · Special Issue: Across the Layers
James Maguire
This paper examines a radical proposition for planetary futures: a collaboration between a group of synthetic biologists and a design collective interested in exploring the role of DNA as a digital storage and climate technology. Central to this collaboration is the use of speculation, both as an explicit design method and as an implicit technique used by synthetic biologists to imagine indeterminate future states. The paper highlights how biologists imagine such future states through contemporary limits and gaps in their understanding, and how such a practice inflects ethics as a particular kind of concern. Such an inflection, the paper suggests, cannot be considered an absence of ethics, but rather an ethics of absence: a means of doing ethical practice that puts doubt into abeyance and diminishes the role of ethics as a speculative force. This, the paper argues, is a considerable problem for the role of speculation in imagining more radical planetary futures. Radical planetary propositions, need, the article suggests, far more radical ways of imagining future ethics.
2026-09-14 · Special Issue: Across the Layers
Mads Dahl Gjefsen, Synne Svinsås Gjønnes, Can Hankendi, Ayse Coskun, Benjamin Sovacool, Anna-Laila Danielsen
Global tech corporations are recalibrating their sustainability ambitions as they grapple with the surging projections of digital infrastructure’s energy and resource needs associated with generative artificial intelligence. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to develop constructive cross-fertilisation between STS and scholarship in de-/post growth by exploring changing parameters for digital sustainability discourses. We document eight ‘rhetorical visions’ by which Big Tech and other tech actors rhetorically reconcile digital and economic growth trajectories with sustainability. Together these visions ostensibly render sustainability both legible, measurable, and attainable, but they increasingly also precondition sustainability on continued expansion of digital infrastructure and products. Accordingly, to the extent that data centres are a focus point for making sustainability visible, we may say that yesterday’s ‘clouds’ are giving way to a kind of ‘fog’: elusive yet grounded and palpable in the literal sense, while offering veiled and fuzzy legibility of digital extractivism in the metaphorical one.
2026-09-14 · Book Reviews
Brett Mommersteeg, Nona Schulte-Römer
Jérôme Denis and David Pontille (2025) The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance . Translated by Andrew Brown. Polity Press. 292 pages. ISBN: 978-1509562381
2026-05-14 · Book Reviews
Jongheon Kim
2026-05-14 · Research Papers
Nathan Flore
The Walloon Region adopted its own AI strategy in 2019, called DigitalWallonia.4ai. This paper analyses it and explores the coproduction (Jasanoff, 2004) of AI adoption and of Wallonia’s future by means of Jasanoff and Kim’s (2009) concept of sociotechnical imaginary. Given its industrial history, the Walloon Region is an interesting case to analyse the interplay of cultural traits, artefacts, and imaginaries, which has been scarcely explored in the interpretive literature on AI. Studying this Region also contributes to the broadening of the scope of research on sociotechnical imaginaries. A document analysis was conducted, along with interviews of prominent AI promoters. The data were interpreted through discourse analysis, and tropes were used as heuristics to reconstruct the desirable future at the heart of the imaginary. The results show that the latter is entrepreneurial and deeply embedded (Jasanoff, 2015b) with the Region’s economic history and connected with transnational, continental, and national imaginaries.
2026-05-14 · Research Papers
Bryony Parrish
The idea that users learn about new technologies in order to make them work within their daily lives is an important concept in domestication theory. It offers a way to conceptualise technology-user co-construction across household- and societal-level trajectories, and can be applied to identify policy relevant insights. However, while cognitive, symbolic and practical dimensions of learning in domestication are well established, processes of how users learn remain under-conceptualised. To address this gap, this paper employs process analysis to examine how users learned about a novel lower-carbon home heating technology (smart hybrid heat pumps). Starting from the principle that learning emerges from interactions between elements of technologies and of users’ daily lives, it abductively develops a framework of four learning processes: receiving, experiencing, interpreting and responding . It illustrates how these four interlinked processes give rise to cognitive, symbolic and practical learning, then discusses their role in domestication trajectories and implications for policy.
2026-05-14 · Research Papers
Carsten Horn, Ulrike Felt
In late 2019, Germany took significant steps towards becoming a forerunner in digital health. A new legislation stipulated that medical apps for different indications could now be prescribed to patients by their healthcare providers – the so-called Digital Health Applications (DiGAs). Patients’ public health insurance then covers the costs for these apps. The precondition for apps to be eligible for prescription and remuneration is that they undergo a prior approval process with the German Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices. We take this transformation of an ordinary health app into a medico-legal product, a DiGA, as the point of departure for a detailed examination of the regulation of digital health in practice. Analyzing the approval process for DiGAs allows us to generate insights into what qualities of apps are assessed and how it addresses the fluid ontology of digital apps. Based on regulatory documents and interviews with developers of Digital Health Technologies, we approach the approval as a multi-faceted process and provide two accounts that unpack the complexities digital health poses for regulation: (1) the re-negotiation of the boundary between health-related lifestyle and medical apps and (2) the tension between the dynamic developments of apps and the static nature of regulation. Drawing on Latour’s legal sociology and the notion of reality tests developed by Boltanski and Thévenot, we argue that the approval process performs a two-fold ontological politics that transforms the ontology of both apps and regulation itself.
2026-05-14 · Research Papers
Olga Kuchinskaya
Patients with rare or understudied diseases often encounter a lack of medical answers about diagnosis or treatment and might seek new ways to obtain answers. The conceptual framework of “networks of expertise” helps analyze such encounters with a lack of medical answers as situations of medical ignorance, which are not necessarily accidental and have been shown to reflect the bias and organization of related networks of expertise. In this context, the paper analyzes and compares public narratives of patients’ experiences and suggests three possible patient strategies for responding to the lack of answers. These strategies include establishing external ties with experts and non-experts outside of one’s healthcare teams, engaging with patient organizations to affect medical research, and engaging with online communities as an alternative or supplementary network of expertise. In all three cases, patients’ efforts are both epistemic and organizational, seeking to (re)shape broader networks of expertise so that they are more likely to generate answers. These organizational dimensions of patients’ knowledge production work can be overlooked by the debates on “expert patients” and the relationship of patients’ expertise to that of credentialed experts.
2026-05-14 · Book Reviews
David Antolínez
2026-05-03 · Research Papers
Bianca Vienni-Baptista, Victoria Herbig
This article examines how researchers who study inter- and transdisciplinary research practices conceptualise and navigate methodological choices. Drawing on science, technology and society (STS), we combined a meta-ethnography and semi-structured interviews with scholars engaged in investigating inter- and transdisciplinary research. Our analysis identifies four interrelated dynamic pairs: familiarity/exploration, systematisation/adaptability, transferability/contextualisation, and reflection/action, that shape methodological decision-making. Rather than viewing these as tensions, we argue they function as productive dualities guiding reflexive and context-sensitive research inquiry. The study underscores the importance of methodological awareness, documentation, and collaborative engagement in advancing the study of inter- and transdisciplinary research. There has, to date, been no systematised understanding of how methodological practices influence the investigation and support of inter- and transdisciplinary research and their impact. The article then contributes to STS and inter- and transdisciplinary scholarships, by offering a systematised understanding of how methodological practices influence the investigation and support of collaborative research and its impact.
2026-04-22 · Research Papers
Joaquín Yrivarren, Miquel Domènech
We examine the implementation of an AI-based imaging system in a clinical microbiology laboratory, focusing on the negotiation between AI developers and laboratory members over classification rules to be embedded into the system prior to its deployment in a clinical setting. The negotiation was triggered by a discrepancy identified during a performance evaluation, when the AI detected microcolonies that laboratory technicians had overlooked. While STS research has explored how medical imaging technologies, once in use, shape healthcare professionals’ diagnostic knowledge, we adopt a technology-in-the-making perspective to analyse how the negotiation process shapes microbiologists’ visual practices even before the system becomes part of routine laboratory work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the supplier company’s R&D department, we analyse how different evaluations of the visibility status of microcolonies emerge through product customisation and developer–client interactions, and how contrasting viewpoints of what is worth seeing are negotiated into agreement. We argue negotiation over technological capabilities shapes visual routines by unfolding as a process of co‑producing a socio-natural reality. As a contribution to ongoing STS debates, we introduce the term ‘image reversibility’ to capture a mode of problematising conventions underlying AI system development. We also discuss the implications of mobilising the notion of ‘artisanal intelligence’ to encapsulate an implementation style that favours adaptability by embedding specific laboratory practices within the system.
2026-03-23
Johan Daniel Andersson, Anders Hansson, Mathias Fridahl
Quantitative risk analysis has long underpinned public trust in experts who interpret and address environmental disputes. However, in the uncertain and complex context of responding to a changing climate, it has been argued that trust in scientific expertise must be warranted on norms other than experts’ competence in quantifying risk. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of solar geoengineering. Much like abrupt climate change, solar geoengineering involves potential nonlinear or threshold responses, where both the triggering points and the system’s reactions are poorly understood, leaving risks inadequately characterized. In this paper, we examine climate model experiments with solar geoengineering to understand how expertise is justified in the absence of reliable risk assessments. We argue that these experts enact a specific norm of competence, which holds that trust should be warranted not on their ability to quantify risk, but to render unknown unknowns into known unknowns.
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Carl-Axel Gemzell
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Andrew M. Blasko
1989-12-31
Martti Kuokkanen
1989-12-31
Govindal Parayil
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Vladislav Kelle
1989-12-31
Reijo Miettinen
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Sven Hemlin, Henry Montgomery
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Vessela Misheva
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Helmut Steiner
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Gernot Böhme
1989-12-31 · Research Papers
Jaime Jimenez, Juan C. Escalante
1989-12-31
Andrzej Dabrowski
1988-12-31 · Research Papers
Martin Kusch