ABSTRACT Scientization tends to be understood as a process whereby a form of knowledge is rendered scientifically legitimate. In this way, scientists work with other experts and lay theories to move claims into the realm of fact, where they are stabilized and expanded through scientific practice. Paradoxical scientization describes a process in which efforts to render cultural values scientifically legitimate depend on and reproduce claims to cultural specificity. The recent scientization of sisu – a historically mutable Finnish concept and cultural value that is typically translated as grit or resilience while cast as ‘impossible to translate’ – has occurred in three steps: the datafying of affect, the creation of a measurement scale, and the scale's extension through machine-learning methods. Through this process, what was previously seen as a mutable cultural value has been transformed into a measurable affective capacity. Paradoxical scientization relies on sisu being both cultivatable and universal to all humans, yet unique to the Finnish culture, language, and people. It also lays the ground for sisu’s commercialization as a neoliberal self-help product. Scientization does not occur in isolation, but must be analyzed in context. In the case of sisu, scientization is taking place alongside neoliberal restructuring and ethnonationalist mobilization – contexts in which appeals to sisu are made to advance ideological agendas. By leaving unresolved the paradox at its heart, the scientization of a cultural value can reinforce racialised, ableist and classist exclusions.

ABSTRACT Policy and scholarly discourse emphasizing the panacea of Open (research) Data shapes expectations, and directs and legitimizes investments in data technologies and infrastructures. This is driven by the hope that Open Data will quicken the pace of research and innovation through data reuse, and that they do so more effectively than other access regimes, such as stewarded and proprietary data. Drawing on Leonelli’s relational framework and Gadamer’s hermeneutical conceptualization of a horizon of meanings, data reuse can be understood as a fitting process. In the latter, a researcher engages in a hermeneutical dialogical interaction with the data’s affordances with the goal of making a scientific contribution. Moreover, the fitting process takes place within a researcher’s bounded individual horizon (BIH), defined as an intentional orientation towards the future; it is made up of the relations and circumstances that modulate each researcher’s unique situation. Seen thus, data reuse is likely to result from the persistence of a researcher’s desire or need to make a scientific contribution, independently of the data access regime. What is more, the necessary interaction between potential reusers and data curators or owners can open up the interpretive affordances of data in the context of proprietary and stewarded data, making data more mutable compared to the relative immutability of data in open repositories. Accordingly, stewarded data, with the proper curation and digital preservation services, might provide a more sustainable form of sharing and reusing data where privacy is at stake.

ABSTRACT At the ten-year anniversary of the Flint water crisis, Flint residents continue to work to improve the well-being of their community and advance community leadership in science. While the water crisis is remembered by most as just an egregious example of government mismanagement, a lesser told story is that of the ongoing leadership and mobilization of Flint residents. Our paper reflects on a collaborative project as part of a larger, sustained partnership in co-producing knowledge about Flint residents’ experiences with the water crisis, their expertise in responding to public health crises, and concerns and curiosities that may be explored as scientific research questions. We detail our investigative effort over five years focusing on understanding Flint residents’ expertise in responding to the water crisis and our processes of working with residents to connect personal experiences to explorable questions. We align the activities of our engagement (focus groups, workshops, a technology co-development pilot study, and interviews) with an iterative process of listening, dialogue, and action consistent with Paulo Freire’s processes for advancing collective consciousness. We position our work as an implementation of liberation sociology by working to explore scientific questions that are meaningful and impactful to disenfranchised populations.

ABSTRACT Malaria control has been one of the defining goals in global health. Recently, strategies that aim to control the insect-borne disease by altering mosquito biology have gained interest. One such strategy currently in development is to engineer mosquitoes equipped with so-called gene drives: elements that increase the likelihood of a specific set of genes to be passed on to the next generation. The strategy encapsulates hopes of technological solutions in global health, as well as expectations for the applications of synthetic biology. Hence, gene drive research operates with the potential of genetically modified mosquitoes: to survive in the wild, to reproduce, and to perform the work expected of them in some future timeline. I examine gene drive research with the concept of potentiality and how establishing it has guided gene drive research. Knowledge and uncertainties about mosquitoes and mosquito ecologies emerged through working with the mosquito as a research animal in the laboratory, as population data, and as a regulatable biotechnology. Mathematical modelling made it possible to establish the potential to move from the lab to the wild. In modelling, the mosquito as a research object could be made to work as part of future projections that assembled different kinds of data. As gene drive research progresses, I suggest that the researchers are also modelling how biotechnology handles uncertainty that is related to the ways producing genetic modification in the lab and producing knowledge about their possible environmental effects and efficacy translates into landscapes and mosquito ecologies in the wild.

ABSTRACT Epidemiological cohort studies are a central research design in public health which appeal to, and can reinforce, specific ideas of the nation, sociality and the ‘good’ citizen. The concept of publics, the sociology of expectations and a co-productionist framework provide the theoretical frame to investigate how popular representations of two cohort studies, German National Cohort and UK Biobank, attempt to enrol a concerned public. By constructing promissory publics, cohort studies produce morally charged visions of health research and civic engagement as normative social practices. Promissory publics straddle the population and the citizen, the nation and the region, the future and the past, thus adding nuance to existing conceptual approaches. The publics of cohort studies are bolstered by the care practices of predominantly female staff, functioning as a performance of social recognition in lieu of an immediate beneficiary of research participation. Through these processes, popular representations of cohort studies intervene into much broacher visions of society and its anticipated futures, co-producing socially dominant and morally charged projections of sociality as well as health. The production of such publics thereby draws boundaries between members of the public and those practices enacted as endangering civic values. As such, cohort studies may have much broader socio-cultural ramifications that could reinforce old or reintroduce new lines of inclusion or exclusion.

ABSTRACT Digital connectivity of queer migrants on the move to Europe plays a crucial role in confronting border regimes, heteronormativity and racist oppression. ICTs at the disposal of queer migrants interrupt the material politics of silence and violence. However, digital technology also implies serious hazards. Queer migrants use digital space to empower themselves, to build networks, and to trace, reach and create safer spaces of care. This paper conceptualises how care is materialised in self-organised actions and horizontal relationships that question power regimes and commodification practices while introducing the notion of radical digital care. Digital spaces of (radical) care constitute safe spaces of compassion where people can be heard and believed. They act as points of reference for queer people seeking recognition and care. Moreover, queer migration constitutes constant shifting between subject and care positions that redefine the notion of home and safety and the material ordering of migration itself. Based on a qualitative study of ten semi-structured interviews with solidarians and migrants, this paper reveals how the appropriation of digital media by queer migrants re-arranges the material politics of the borderland by contesting border technologies, and through radical care, allows communities to live through hardship, fear, and abuse.

ABSTRACT Complex phenomena such as antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are often explained in biomedical sciences by using analogies and metaphors. Metaphors play a crucial role in the knowledge production processes, as well as in ensuring the continuity of scientific models of thought. Novel conceptual metaphors, such as ‘AMR is an apocalypse’ or ‘antibiotics are weapons’ are usually immediately recognised as metaphors. Therefore, they have been scrutinised for their role in producing militaristic and even discriminatory discourses towards specific antibiotic use practices or populations, such as migrants or residents of low-income countries. At the same time, other terms have been presented as literal and descriptive, thus escaping critical analysis. Terms such as ‘bacterial reservoirs’ and ‘bacterial colonies’ have been conventionalised in biomedical sciences. However, the historical links between these terms and the sources of comparisons (reservoir – a source of something; and colony – a settlement in a foreign territory) are still present in biomedical discourses. As such, these terms stimulate a style of thinking about bacteria as foreign actors coming from foreign lands and bodies. Critical engagement with conventionalised metaphors helps to trace the continuity in scientific thought processes that links the historical context from where these metaphors are coming from to the present material practices and methods of science-making, including funding distribution.

ABSTRACT Public institutions have increasingly responded to calls for more accountability by promoting ideas of data-driven governance. As this focus on using data tools to strengthen governance intensifies, it is important to examine how the tools that underlie such claims are made. In the context of US agri-environmental policy, policy leadership has spoken the language of data-driven decision-making for over thirty years, primarily in response to accountability demands. However, the reliance on metrics and calculation is most explicit in the newest initiative called the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Unlike other initiatives, the CSP used a single environmental scoring and decision-making algorithm to allocate approximately US$3.8 billion to 68,000 farmers. Applying a Social Construction of Technology approach to the development of the tool shows that different social groups – political aides, program officials, and subject-matter specialists – interpreted data-driven governance differently. Tool design emerges not despite but through the contestations over the purpose and practicality of doing data-driven governance. Social groups involved in tool development are themselves embedded in different accountability structures that shape the rationalities they marshal when negotiating practical decisions about tool design. The final tool used in the CSP was technically contested and the tool development process was poorly documented, yet it had an important legitimacy function: it deflected accountability pressures for more rationalization in public spending without causing major policy disruption. Centering analysis on the negotiations entailed in making the tools that come to underlie claims of data-driven governance can explain how and to what extent a push for more data in public policy can strengthen (and weaken) accountability relations.

ABSTRACT In the fields of sci-art, bioart and speculative design, contemporary artists are creating experiential visions of the future based on trends within science. Two artworks with futuristic figurations of human reproduction, Pinar Yoldas’ Designer Babies and Ai Hasegawa’s I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin/I Wanna Deliver a Shark, serve as the point of departure for revisiting the eternal nature-culture debate. Hasegawa’s work explores relations to other species in the radical figuration of humans giving birth to sharks and dolphins. Yoldas plays with the notion of bioscientists as playing God, giving genetically modified progeny god-like features, while critically showcasing the potential of genetic engineering. Contemporary sci-art stages experiments and encounters of technoscience and human biology, thus experiments with the very ‘facts of life’. These sci-art works involve critical perspectives on the technoscience of assisted reproduction including surrogacy and genetic engineering. Still, they configure nature not as threatened but as dynamic, responsive, and continually undergoing change. By expanding the perspective on human reproduction through surprising and mind-expanding figurations, they address emerging technologies as a shift to new techno-natures, entailing the ongoing merging of natural biological processes with emerging biotechnologies.