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Demands for research to generate impact, along with proliferating institutional regimes for evaluating impact, are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary scientific practice. Based on participant observation at an agro-environmental research institute in southwest China, this article explores three iterations of a tool for planning and evaluating impactful science called 'theory of change' (TOC). Despite their ostensible common grounding in TOC, I show how an impact scientist's framework, a donor's monitoring and evaluation regime, and a communication consultant's branding strategy each suggest very different normative structures for scientific practice. These structures entail: particular horizons towards which scientific research is to be practiced, precise points in time at which the future effects of research are to be anticipated, and specific assumptions about how scientists' agency should play out across time. Taking the peculiar sensibilities of TOC as a comparative framework, I illuminate IFF scientists' implicit imaginations of how contemporary science does and should generate effects in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While critics cast the Trump administration as anti-science, requiring in response vigorous defense of science, analysis of the Trump EPA reveals instead a strategy to develop deregulatory science. In its first 3 years, the Trump EPA introduced and started to implement a variety of new frameworks to remake scientific risk analysis, changing how it assesses exposures, hazards and costs of chemical harms. The article focuses on EPA frameworks associated with the Clean Air Act, Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science rule and Toxic Substances Control Act. The new approaches compel the agency to ignore many pathways of exposure and pivotal studies of hazards, include dose-response models that treat pollution as healthful and change how costs and benefits are calculated. Yet it justifies these frameworks in terms of evidence-based decision-making, transparency and the separation of science from politics. According to its political appointees, the Trump EPA stands for scientific integrity, because it is promulgating evidence-based approaches in risk analysis that show regulation to be neither necessary nor appropriate. This is not just rhetoric but represents an effort to engage science to delegitimize environmental regulation. There is continuity between the Trump EPA and past efforts to use science to justify regulatory rollbacks: defending science by demarcating it from non-science is just as much a strategy for deregulation as it is for regulation. A key lesson is that contesting deregulation by declaring it anti-science reflects an impasse, as deregulatory approaches then also seek to take the mantle of science. The alternative to engaging in debate over demarcation is to make explicit the values and interests shaping practices of regulatory science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That policymakers adopt technoscientific viewpoints and lack reflexivity is a common criticism of scientific decision-making, particularly in response to moves to democratize science. Drawing on interviews with UK-based national policymakers, I argue that an elite sociotechnical imaginary of 'science to the rescue' shapes how public perspectives are heard and distinguishes what is considered to be legitimate expertise. The machinery of policy-making has become shaped around this imaginary – particularly its focus on science as a problem-solver and on social and ethical issues as 'nothing to do with the science' – and this gives this viewpoint its power, persistence and endurance. With this imaginary at the heart of policy-making machinery, regardless of the perspectives of the policymakers, alternative views of science are either forced to take the form of the elite imaginary in order to be processed, or they simply cannot be accounted for within the policy-making processes. In this way, the elite sociotechnical imaginary (and technoscientific viewpoint) is enacted, but also elicited and perpetuated, without the need for policymakers to engage with or even be aware of the imaginary underpinning their actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordinary political institutions such as parliaments remain under-explored in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the conceptual resources for studying politics are far less developed than for science. But sites like parliaments are far more interesting than are their received images. This article argues that novel re-combinations of the issue-literature in STS and the works on parliament and objectivity by the German scholar Max Weber can provide us with analytical resources for grasping parliamentary politics with new lenses. In fact, reading Weber in light of the issue-literature provides for a better understanding of his work, and points towards how Weber's accounts are crucially about parliamentary politics as work – on and with issues and the matters at hand. In addition, Weber may improve STS's accounts of politics by his way of including the ordered and procedural side to issue-politics: Issue-politics is both about 'opening up' an issue as well as coming to decisions and take action. The article underlines this by discussing an often-misread part of Weber's work, namely his work on objectivity and points to how political procedure was a key inspiration to his understanding and developing of this notion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we explore the constitution of user representations of robots in design practice. Using the results of ethnographic research in two robot laboratories, we show how user representations emerge in and are entangled with design activities. Our study speaks to the growing popularity of and investment in robotics, robots and other forms of artificial intelligence. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that it is often difficult for designers and engineers to develop accurate ideas about potential users of such technologies. However, the social context of robots and design settings themselves have received significantly less attention. Based on our laboratory ethnographies, we argue that the practices in which engineers are engaged are important as they can shape the kind of user images designers create. To capture these dynamics, we propose two new concepts: 'image-evoking activities' as well as 'user image landscape'. Our findings provide pertinent input for researchers, designers and policy-makers, as they raise questions with regards to contemporary fears of robots replacing humans, for the effectiveness of user involvement and participatory design, and for user studies in STS. If design activities co-constitute the user images that engineers develop, a greater awareness is needed specifically of the locales in which the design of robots and other types of technologies takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, some areas of science have begun turning to masses of online volunteers through open calls for generating and classifying very large sets of data. The purpose of this study is to investigate the epistemic culture of a large-scale online citizen science project, the Galaxy Zoo, that turns to volunteers for the classification of images of galaxies. For this task, we chose to apply the concepts of programs and antiprograms to examine the ‘essential tensions’ that arise in relation to the mobilizing values of a citizen science project and the epistemic subjects and cultures that are enacted by its volunteers. Our premise is that these tensions reveal central features of the epistemic subjects and distributed cognition of epistemic cultures in these large-scale citizen science projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent editorial for this journal, Sergio Sismondo makes two claims. First, he states that STS bears no responsibility for the emergence of post-truth politics. Second, he claims that debates about the nature of expertise that take place within STS are irrelevant in this context. In contrast, we argue that, whether or not STS had a causal influence on the emergence of post-truth politics, there is a clear resonance between the two positions and that the current political climate makes the empirically informed and scientific analysis of expertise and the form of life of science more important than ever. We argue that treating the contribution of STS to these matters as essentially political rather than scientific surrenders any special role we have as experts on the organization and values of science and leaves STS as just one political actor among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]