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Scientists increasingly attempt to tackle these problems through inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations where experts from different fields, both from within academia and from elsewhere, join forces. Critical scholarship on science&technology has been picking up on these issues for decades with decolonial, postcolonial, and global “turns” being regularly proclaimed in science and technology studies, anthropology of science, science education, science policy, and so on. A few decades ago, it would have been hard to imagine Helen Longino and Alison Wylie, two of the founding figures of feminist philosophy of science, shaping the future of the field as recent presidents of the Philosophy of Science Association. There are often-unacknowledged institutional and pragmatic barriers to having inter-South dialogues, and one cannot ignore the fact that that insularity and unreflexive adoption of Northern paradigms can also be negative, or at least very problematic, for the South in a global setting.

In bringing together a global community of philosophers, Global Epistemologies and Philosophies of Science develops novel perspectives on epistemology and philosophy of science by demonstrating how frameworks from academic philosophy (e.g. standpoint theory, social epistemology, feminist philosophy of science) and related fields (e.g. decolonial studies, transdisciplinarity, global history of science) can contribute to critical engagement with global dimensions of knowledge and science. Global challenges such as climate change, food production, and infectious diseases raise complex questions about scientific knowledge production and its interactions with local knowledge systems and social realities. As academic philosophy provides relatively little reflection on global negotiations of knowledge, many pressing scientific and societal issues remain disconnected from core debates in epistemology and philosophy of science. This book is an invitation to broaden agendas of academic philosophy by presenting epistemology and philosophy of science as globally engaged fields that address heterogeneous forms of knowledge production and their interactions with local livelihoods, practices, and worldviews. This integrative ambition makes the book equally relevant for philosophers and interdisciplinary scholars who are concerned with methodological and political challenges at the intersection of science and society.

This article presents initial results from the Brazilian team in the Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice (RRI-Practice) collaboration, concurrently running in 22 countries. The project invites reflection from institutional actors through a variety of participatory exercises that focus on RRI’s potential for ‘opening up’ and impacting national science and innovation policy. After summarising the operational challenges faced during the research process, we focus on the main empirical findings. We conclude that despite its potential for opening up policy deliberation, RRI faces the inherent hurdles of surpassing longstanding Brazilian institutional traditions of hierarchical governance, autonomy and the dominance of linear models of innovation.

Here we try to characterize the fringe of science as opposed to the mainstream. We want to do this in order to provide some theory of the difference that can be used by policy-makers and other decision-makers but without violating the principles of what has been called ‘Wave Two of Science Studies’. Therefore our demarcation criteria rest on differences in the forms of life of the two activities rather than questions of rationality or rightness; we try to show the ways in which the fringe differs from the mainstream in terms of the way they think about and practice the institution of science. Along the way we provide descriptions of fringe institutions and sciences and their outlets. We concentrate mostly on physics.

In this introductory chapter, we discuss the potential contributions that Science and Technology Studies (STS) can make to the study of intercultural communication. We present four STS models that have been central to the study of the topic in recent years: trading zones, trust, interactional expertise, and boundary objects. We argue that communities interested in the study of intercultural communication would benefit from dialoguing with STS as this field has much to contribute to debates over this phenomenon. We also summarise the chapters that compose this book.

Cardiff sciSCREEN is a public engagement programme that brings together local experts and publics to discuss issues raised by contemporary cinema. Since 2010, Cardiff sciSCREEN (short for science on screen) has exhibited more than 50 films alongside short talks and discussions that draw on a range of disciplinary perspectives to explore the broad repertoire of themes found within different film genres. The aim of Cardiff sciSCREEN is to increase the local community's access to university research, while enabling university staff and students to engage a variety of publics with their work. In this paper, we first describe our method of public engagement, and then draw on data from a research survey we administered to sciSCREENers to discuss the relationship between the theory and practice of public engagement. Using research from public understanding of science (PUS), public engagement with science and technology (PEST), science and technology studies (STS) and film literacy, we discuss the ways in which our flexible characterization of science has made the programme inclusive, attracting a wide and varied audience. We consider the benefits of cross-disciplinary perspectives when communicating and engaging contemporary developments in science, where the term 'science' is taken to stand for the breadth of academic research and not merely the natural sciences, as well as discussing the importance of space in public engagement events.

During 2015 an unusually large number of articles denouncing seagull ‘antisocial behaviour’ appeared in the British press, with public outcry pushing for culls to seagull populations and political figures like former Prime Minister David Cameron publicly denouncing a ‘seagull problem’. We analyse the discourses surrounding these negative representations and compare these to the few published scientific responses to the media hype. We look at how cultural values surrounding wildlife moulded the controversy and the vitriolic attacks on seagulls by the general public, and then compared these to previous cases of wildlife demonization. Specifically, we illustrate how (a) seagulls were first anthropomorphised and then demonised using discourses of social deviancy and (b) boundary-breaching is used as the rhetorical source for pestilence discourses. We conclude by considering how science communication and journalism could be better carried out in similar episodes by first considering them as distinct cultural practices, embedded in specific socio-cultural milieus that are too often ignored by science.

This paper discusses the introduction of fraudulent “molecular detector” (non)technology into Mexico. The case is used to argue that contemporary science and technology studies’ approaches to scientific policy-making make basic assumptions about the societies they operate in that are inconsistent with the Mexican context. This paper also argues that contrary to what happens in the so-called Global North, the relative power of Mexican science in government and policy circles is as much limited by its relatively weak position as much as it is by self-censorship and unrealized impact in the country’s fragile democracy. The case is also used to highlight the necessity for more politically involved scientific institutions in Mexico, as these become critical safeguards against incoming destabilizing technologies from more powerful nations into the local “peripheral” context.

This article draws on empirical material concerning the communication and use of knowledge in experimental physics and its relations to the culture of theoretical physics. The role that trust plays in these interactions is used to create a model of social distance between interacting theoretical and experimental cultures. This article thus seeks to reintroduce trust as a fundamental element in answering the problem of disunity in the sociology of knowledge.

This paper describes the intense software filtering that has allowed the arXiv eprint repository to sort and process large numbers of submissions with minimal human intervention, making it one of the most important and influential cases of open access repositories to date. The paper narrates arXiv's transformation, using sophisticated sorting-filtering algorithms to decrease human workload, from a small mailing list used by a few hundred researchers to a site that processes thousands of papers per month. However there are significant negative consequences for authors who have been filtered out of the main categories. There is thus a continued need to check and balance arXiv's boundaries, based in the essential tension between stability and innovation., 19 pages

We add a small increment to understanding the notion of Primary Source Knowledge, knowledge that the non-expert and the citizen can acquire by assiduously reading the primary scientific journal literature without being embedded in the cultural life of the corresponding technical specialty. This comes from exposing four papers to the automated computer filters used by the physics preprint server arXiv. These filters are used to flag papers in need of further review by human assessors before being promulgated on the server; papers not flagged by the algorithm are generally posted on arXiv without further review. After the filtering, human moderators decide whether papers should be posted based on a relatively low bar of whether they are of interest, relevance and value to the research communities that populate arXiv., Comment: 9 pages

We analyse a recent paper by Goddiksen (2014) where the author raises questions about the relationship between authorship, attribution and Collins & Evans' concept of contributory and interactional expertise. We then highlight recent empirical work in the sociology of climate change science that has made similar points in order to clarify how authorship, division of labour and contribution are handled in real scientific settings. Despite this, Goddiksen's critique of both contributory and interactional expertise is ultimately ineffective because it rests on a misguided attempt to de-socialise these concepts. We conclude by stressing the importance of collective tacit knowledge acquisition through immersion as a critical step in becoming a full-blown contributory or interactional expert.

I discuss the different outlooks on ‘observation’ that are most commonly found in social science quantitative methodology by analysing the methodological approach that supported my four-year PhD project on the sociology of theoretical physics. I highlight how my pre-existing immersion into the social world of theoretical physics was the key element in allowing me to describe the sociology of the theoretical ‘thinking science’ subculture in a field where ‘observation’ cannot be carried out in a typical way.