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Science and Technology Studies

Publisher:
—
ISSN:
2243-4690
Category:
HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Impact factor:
1.9
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Latest articles

Expertise at the Limits of Quantified Risk

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.

“A Train We Can’t Miss” for Economic Recovery

2025-02-17

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.

Expert Patients and Networks of Expertise and Ignorance

2024-11-26

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.