Recording engineers have an interest in maintaining their roles as skilled professionals as compared to external competitors, which increasingly include unpaid amateurs and automated software tools. They do this through a variety of material-semiotic demarcation practices. Formal modes of demarcation, such as unionization and professional attire, have largely eroded in recent decades, making informal practices increasingly important. These informal demarcation practices, which I term 'shibboleths', allow engineers to locally observe and perform differences between 'real' engineers and non-engineers (amateur and automated) while also controlling the visibility of these performances for various audiences. I situate the shibboleth concept within the existing literature on boundary objects and boundary-work, suggesting that it is useful for analyzing situations where collaboration and consensus temporarily break down. I consider two examples: electrical audio cable wrapping techniques and hearing the artifacts of digital vocal tuning software.

Although it is broadly acknowledged that democratic politics should operate through the public competition of binding positions, the careful development of these positions is commonly neglected. Providing ethnographic analysis of the work of staff advisers in parliamentary groups, the paper explores the invisible work invested into these competing positions. We argue that the invisibilization of work serves to accomplish a central tenet of democratic political discourse: the demonstration of resonance between constituents and elected politicians. The latter may be assisted by - but must not depend on - non-elected staff. Against this 'sacred' premise of representative democracy, the paper shows that and how political positions are based on invisible work and the work of invisibilizing. Building on laboratory and workplace studies, we specify the shape and function of invisibility by contrasting studies on invisible work in the natural sciences, in case law, and in party politics. In these instances, invisible work serves different discursive objects-in-formation: scientific facts, legal cases, and binding positions. Understanding invisible work, thus, leads us to consider different constitutive relevancies. In turn, these serve to specify established concepts in STS, such as 'controversy,' to better distinguish the day-to-day conduct of natural science from that of politics or law.

To implement EU climate policy, the UK’s New Labour government(1997–2010) elaborated an ecomodernist policy framework. It promotedtechnological innovation to provide low-carbon renewable energy,especially by treating waste as a resource. This frameworkdiscursively accommodated rival sociotechnical imaginaries, understoodas visions of feasible and desirable futures available throughtechnoscientific development. According to the dominant imaginary,techno-market fixes stimulate low-carbon technologies by makingcurrent centralized systems more resource-efficient (as promoted byindustry incumbents). According to the alternative eco-localizationimaginary, a shift to low-carbon systems should instead localizeresource flows, output uses and institutional responsibility (aspromoted by civil society groups). The UK government policy frameworkgained political authority by accommodating both imaginaries. As weshow by drawing on three case studies, the realization of bothimaginaries depended on institutional changes and material-economicresources of distinctive kinds. In practice, financial incentivesdrove technological design towards trajectories that favour thedominant sociotechnical imaginary, while marginalizing theeco-localization imaginary and its environmental benefits. Theecomodernist policy framework relegates responsibility to anonymousmarkets, thus displacing public accountability of the state andindustry. These dynamics indicate the need for STS research on howalternative sociotechnical imaginaries mobilize support for theirrealization, rather than be absorbed into the dominant imaginary.

It is becoming apparent that changes in climatic and demographic distributions are increasing the frequency and social impact of many 'natural hazards', including wildfires (or 'bushfires' in Australia). Across many national contexts, the governmental agencies legally responsible for 'managing' such hazards been called upon to provide greater foresight into the potential consequences, occurrence and behaviour of these dynamic phenomena. These conditions, of growing occurrence and expectation, have given rise to new anticipatory regimes, tools, practitioners and expertise tasked with revealing near and distant fiery futures. Drawing on interviews with Fire Behaviour Analysts from across the fire-prone continent of Australia, this article examines how their expertise has emerged and become institutionalized, exploring how its embedding in bushfire management agencies reveals cultural boundaries and tensions. This article provides important insight into the human and nonhuman infrastructures enrolled in predicting and managing landscape fires, foregrounding the wider social and political implications of these infrastructures and how their 'fuzzy boundaries' are negotiated by practitioners. Such empirical studies of expertise in practice are also, we suggest, necessary to the continued refinement of existing critiques of expertise as an individual capacity, derived from science and serving established social orders.

This article examines a set of public controversies surrounding the role of nuclear power and the threat of radioactive contamination in a post-Fukushima Japan. The empirical case study focuses on the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan's most influential ministry and, more importantly, the former regulator of nuclear energy before the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Through participant observation of METI's public conferences, as well as interviews with state and non-state actors, I examine how particular visions of nuclear power continue to affect the basis of expert authority through which state actors handle post-Fukushima controversies and their subsequent uncertainties. In its post-Fukushima representations, METI frames nuclear power as an apolitical necessity for the well-being of the Japanese nation-state and the common humanity. It does so by mobilizing categories of uncertainty around specific political scenes, such as global warming. For METI, the potential uncertainties linked with the abandonment of nuclear power have the power to trigger political turmoil of a higher scale than those linked with Fukushima's radioactive contamination. A form of double depoliticization takes place, in which the issue of Fukushima's radioactive contamination gets depoliticized through perceived priorities that are paradoxically depicted as 'post-political' - that is, in an urgent need for immediate action and not open to in-depth deliberation. I refer to this process as establishing 'post-political uncertainties'. This kind of depoliticization raises ethical questions surrounding meaningful public participation in decisions that happen at the intersection of politics and science and technology study.

How has commercial remote sensing influenced the framing of public narratives about nuclear programs and weapons of mass destruction? This article examines an early and formative case: In 2002, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization used commercial satellite images to publicly identify the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran. The episode helped inaugurate the 'Iran nuclear crisis' as we have known it since. But it also played a role in fomenting a commercial market for remote sensing, adjusting the role of 'citizen scientist' in the nuclear arms-control community, visualizing a new television journalism beat of 'covering the intelligence community', legitimizing a transforming role of nuclear safeguards inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and solidifying Iran's nuclear program as 'clandestine'. This article follows the images as they pass through these social worlds and examines how heterogenous actors incorporated remote sensing into their identities and commitments to global transparency.

Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but instead illustrate how both positions reproduce a powerful anthropocentrism that effaces the entanglements and coordinations between humans and nonhumans in border spaces. Drawing from fieldwork with customs officers, immigration officers and airport managers at a UK and a European airport, we illustrate how border agents navigate a turbulent ‘cycle’ of automation that continually overturns assumed hierarchies between humans and technology. The coordinated practices engendered by institutional culture, material infrastructures, drug loos and sniffer dogs cannot be captured by a reductive account of automated borders as simply confirming or denying a predetermined, data-driven in/out decision.

When measures come to matter, those measured find themselves in a precarious situation. On the one hand, they have a strong incentive to respond to measurement so as to score a favourable rating. On the other hand, too much of an adjustment runs the risk of being flagged and penalized by system operators as an attempt to 'game the system'. Measures, the story goes, are most useful when they depict those measured as they usually are and not how they intend to be. In this article, I explore the practices and politics of optimization in the case of web search engines. Drawing on materials from ethnographic fieldwork with search engine optimization (SEO) consultants in the United Kingdom, I show how maximizing a website's visibility in search results involves navigating the shifting boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' optimization. Specifically, I am interested in the ethical work performed as SEO consultants artfully arrange themselves to cope with moral ambiguities provoked and delegated by the operators of the search engine. Building on studies of ethics as a practical accomplishment, I suggest that the ethicality of optimization has itself become a site of governance and contestation. Studying such practices of 'being ethical' not only offers opportunities for rethinking popular tropes like 'gaming the system', but also draws attention to often-overlooked struggles for authority at the margins of contemporary ranking schemes.

What happens when expertise is forced to face disasters of unprecedented scales? How is knowledge produced in critical moments when every action and decision is a matter of life and death? And how are local social networks mobilized to cope with unforeseen crisis? This paper addresses these questions by examining the emergence of disaster medicine expertise in the aftermath of Fukushima nuclear disaster that struck Japan in 2011. Studies on Fukushima's impact have to date revolved around the suffering of Tōhoku citizens and the development of Japan's nuclear energy industry. Acknowledging the gravity of such work, this paper offers an alternative, but equally crucial angle on the disaster: that of the medical caregiving and public health system built in response to radiation hazards resulting from the triple meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. Through detailed interviews conducted with eight medical practitioners in Fukushima Prefecture, this paper analyses the significance and impact of Japan's most recent radiation disaster on its public health infrastructure. To describe the contingent nature of radiation disaster medicine developed in response to radiation risk in Fukushima, we draw on Jasanoff's characterization of scientific knowledge as 'serviceable truths' with regards to public policy and the law, suggesting that expertise in relation to disasters is usefully understood in analogous terms.

In the 1980s, the Chinese state pushed the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to establish businesses. Some of these businesses did not engage in any research and development (R&D), and this resulted in scientists having concerns about the boundary around the institutionalizing scientific community. When the state supported CAS's 'Knowledge Innovation' reform in the late 1990s, CAS's organizing principle became centered on a more narrowly scientific logic, which led to less reliance on business income. Regression analysis indicates that CAS-owned enterprises without R&D were more likely to be discontinued during 'Knowledge Innovation'. Moreover, businesses having no R&D were more likely to be discontinued (1) if they were making high profits and (2) if they were supervised by an institute in which Academicians had longer tenure, because these conditions heightened science-market conflict.