SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE 是一份国际同行评审期刊，鼓励提交有关科学、技术和医学的原创研究。该杂志是多学科的，出版的作品来自多个领域，包括：政治学、社会学、经济学、历史学、哲学、心理学、社会人类学、法律和教育学科。该期刊是出版伦理委员会 (COPE) 的成员

Social Studies of Science is an international peer-reviewed journal that encourages the submission of original research related to science, technology, and medicine. The journal is multidisciplinary, publishing works from various fields, including political science, sociology, economics, history, philosophy, psychology, social anthropology, law, and education. It is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

《Social Studies of Science》是一本国际同行评审的学术期刊，鼓励提交关于科学、技术和医学的原创研究。该期刊具有多学科特性，发表的作品涵盖多个领域，包括政治学、社会学、经济学、历史学、哲学、心理学、社会人类学、法律和教育学。该期刊是出版伦理委员会（COPE）的成员。

Social Studies of Science

Social roboticists design their robots to function as social agents in interaction with humans and other robots. Although we do not deny that the robot’s design features are crucial for attaining this aim, we point to the relevance of spatial organization and coordination between the robot and the humans who interact with it. We recover these interactions through an observational study of a social robotics laboratory and examine them by applying a multimodal interactional analysis to two moments of robotics practice. We describe the vital role of roboticists and of the group of preverbal infants, who are involved in a robot’s design activity, and we argue that the robot’s social character is intrinsically related to the subtleties of human interactional moves in laboratories of social robotics. This human involvement in the robot’s social agency is not simply controlled by individual will. Instead, the human–machine couplings are demanded by the situational dynamics in which the robot is lodged.

Morana Alač

Javier Movellan

Fumihide Tanaka

Soc Stud Sci

When a robot is social: Spatial arrangements and multimodal semiotic engagement in the practice of social robotics

当机器人变得社交：社会机器人实践中空间安排与多模态符号互动

Rhetorical moves that construct humanoid robots as social agents disclose tensions at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and social robotics. The discourse of robotics often constructs robots that are like us (and therefore unlike dumb artefacts). In the discourse of STS, descriptions of how people assimilate robots into their activities are presented directly or indirectly against the backdrop of actor-network theory, which prompts attributing agency to mundane artefacts. In contradistinction to both social robotics and STS, it is suggested here that to view a capacity to partake in dialogical action (to have a ‘voice’) is necessary for regarding an artefact as authentically social. The theme is explored partly through a critical reinterpretation of an episode that Morana Alač reported and analysed towards demonstrating her bodies-in-interaction concept. This paper turns to ‘body’ with particular reference to Gibsonian affordances theory so as to identify the level of analysis at which dialogicality enters social interactions.

Raya A Jones

What makes a robot ‘social’?

机器人何以“社交”？

The label ‘post-truth’ signals for many a troubling turn away from principles of enlightened government. The word ‘post’, moreover, implies a past when things were radically different and whose loss should be universally mourned. In this paper, we argue that this framing of ‘post-truth’ is flawed because it is ahistorical and ignores the co-production of knowledge and norms in political contexts. Debates about public facts are necessarily debates about social meanings, rooted in realities that are subjectively experienced as all-encompassing and complete, even when they are partial and contingent. Facts used in policy are normative in four ways: They are embedded in prior choices of which experiential realities matter, produced through processes that reflect institutionalized public values, arbiters of which issues are open to democratic contestation and deliberation, and vehicles through which polities imagine their collective futures. To restore truth to its rightful place in democracy, governments should be held accountable for explaining who generated public facts, in response to which sets of concerns, and with what opportunities for deliberation and closure.

Sheila Jasanoff

Hilton R Simmet

No funeral bells: Public reason in a ‘post-truth’ age

没有丧钟：“后真相”时代的公共理性

When the future is connected to the term 'imagination', it is generally presented through the concept of the 'imaginary'-that is, an image of the future that is related to a grand social image. In this article, we discuss the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and argue that although this concept provides a needed perspective that allows scholars to unpack imaginaries associated with technological futures, it often features very broad concepts, hindering investigation of the ongoing dynamics of the actual acts of imagining and imagination. In contrast, we are interested in examining the processes and practices of imagination of socio-technical futures. Attempting to extend and deepen the development of this prevalent approach in STS, we make three incremental claims. First, future imaginaries should be addressed as a product of a process of imagination, not just in their final stable states. Second, exploring the process of future imagination reveals the effect of different temporalities-patterns of future imagination that expand the common singular far-future imaginary. Third, using a temporality-based analysis, we can identify different future planning techniques and practices in terms of their levels of formality and institutionalization.

Limor Samimian-Darash

Amit Sheniak

Nir Rotem

Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development

解构想象：高科技发展中的未来想象技术类型学

This article explores the development of T cell-based therapies in Switzerland. These therapies, which elicit the immunological potential of each patient to respond to tumor development, constitute a major promise for so-called ‘precision oncology’. We document how immunological concepts, technologies, and practices are articulated given the centrality of genomics in ‘precision oncology’. We consider ‘precision immunotherapies’ to probe whether and how change ensues in these established sociotechnical regimes of biomedicine. The case of genomics and immunology in oncology offers a unique insight into the conditions of possibility for change in such regimes. How does the present new wave of cancer immunotherapies challenge, integrate, and complement the centrality of genomics in ‘precision oncology’? What are the specific processes that make possible the convergence, competition, or co-existence of distinct conceptions, infrastructures, and programs of innovative cancer medicine? Drawing from observations and interviews with researchers and clinicians, we qualify these sociotechnical processes as hybridizations. Bringing together different sociotechnical regimes of biomedical research is conditional to the articulation of core concepts, technologies, and translational practices of genomics and immunology. Pivotal to this objective are neoantigens, cell surface proteins originating from the somatic genetic mutations of tumors and which activate a patient’s immune response. While neoantigens are an unstable entity in experimentation, they offer a conceptual and material substrate to renegotiate the dominance of cancer genomics, and initiate the production of a new, hybrid regime of ‘immunogenomic precision’ in oncology.

Luca Chiapperino

Nils Graber

Francesco Panese

A precision immuno-oncology turn? Hybridizing cancer genomics and immunotherapy through neoantigens-based adoptive cell therapies

精准免疫肿瘤学的新篇章？通过基于新抗原的过继细胞疗法融合癌症基因组学与免疫治疗

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are novel techno-economic configurations underpinned by cryptocurrency ledgers that transform digital files like graphic art, music, videos, etc. into digital assets. NFTs are often framed as a way for artists and other creators to profit from their activities, transforming ‘experiences’ into something for sale. As such, NFTs raise some questions pertinent to science and technology studies and political economy. We focus on analysing how NFTs are constructed as digital assets by unpacking the practices, devices, relations, and rights implicated in their construction. We use the concept of ‘assetization’ to examine the contingencies, problematics, and implications of NFTs and the claims, practices, and entitlements that configure them as a new type of asset. We undertake this analysis through a research-creation process by summarizing and discussing the process of creating and submitting an NFT to a specialized marketplace.

Alia Miroshnichenko

Kean Birch

Constructing digital assets through blockchain technologies? Unpacking the techno-economic configuration of non-fungible tokens

通过区块链技术构建数字资产？解析非同质化代币的技术经济配置

Oil wastewater often contains high levels of radium, a carcinogenic and radioactive element. This article closely engages with two investigations of radium in groundwater downstream from oil wastewater storage pits. While one investigation found that radium did not travel beyond the storage pits, the other found evidence of elevated radium some two kilometers downstream. With an agential realist analysis, we resolve these differences, showing that these two experimental apparatuses defined and mobilized two different phenomena of radium, and of radium-as-contaminant. What geologists call ‘rock-water interactions’ are materially meaningful intra-actions. Far from being a mere philosophical gloss on otherwise conventional science, the ‘intra-’ signifies that, in these processes, the sediment and the groundwater are bringing each other into being. Groundwater sampling entails a specific set of intra-actions with the subsurface that enact different agential cuts. In addition, a geochemical focus on objects, rather than relations, also constrains understandings of chemical harm and accountability. These concepts do not only affect experimental apparatuses; rather, they come into being through and with each other. Therefore, rigorous approaches to groundwater and remediation do not lie in the pull to reify individual groundwater constituents, or to arbitrate between ‘contaminant’ and ‘contaminated’. Rather, rigorous approaches lie in the role of chemical relations in constituting specific groundwater phenomena. We elaborate three aspects of these relations: the constitution of radium-as-isolated-element through the ontological work of sampling schema, the formation of scale and attendant spacetimematterings within experimental apparatuses, and the work of contamination logics within conceptualizations of chemical harm. This analysis has major implications for understanding the potential harm of oil wastewater to groundwater.

Vivian Underhill

Karen Barad

What work does ‘contamination’ do? An agential realist account of oil wastewater and radium in groundwater

“污染”的作用是什么？关于地下水中油污水和镭的能动实在论解释

In March 2024, the Anthropocene Working Group's proposal for a formal Anthropocene Series/Epoch of the Geologic Time Scale was formally rejected by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. What does the failed formalization effort reveal about the relationship between science and normativity under conditions of 'climate crisis'? Drawing on four years of ethnographic observation of the Anthropocene Working Group, this article explains how the Group developed its proposal, why it failed, and what it reveals about the social construction of geological truth. The effort to formalize an Anthropocene unit was based on a coupling of science and politics, wherein geo-scientists could make normative assertions in the register of scientific fact. Ultimately, the Group failed because it was seen as appropriating incumbent geological techniques to advance claims about the future, transitioning geology from a descriptive science about the past to a site of warning.

Abbreviation	Soc Stud Sci
Journal Impact	2.81
Quartiles(Global)	HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE(Q1)

ISSN	0306-3127, 1460-3659
h-index	106

Publication Information	Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd，Publishing cycle: Bimonthly，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 1971，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:10.30%， Gold OA Rate: 54.62%
Average review cycle	网友分享经验：>12周，或约稿
Average recruitment ratio	网友分享经验：较易

Social Studies of Science

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Share Submission Experience

When a robot is social: Spatial arrangements and multimodal semiotic engagement in the practice of social robotics

What makes a robot ‘social’?

No funeral bells: Public reason in a ‘post-truth’ age

Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development

A precision immuno-oncology turn? Hybridizing cancer genomics and immunotherapy through neoantigens-based adoptive cell therapies

A precision immuno-oncology turn? Hybridizing cancer genomics and immunotherapy through neoantigens-based adoptive cell therapies

Unboxing the imaginary: Typology of future imagination techniques in high-tech development

Constructing digital assets through blockchain technologies? Unpacking the techno-economic configuration of non-fungible tokens

What work does ‘contamination’ do? An agential realist account of oil wastewater and radium in groundwater

Anthropocene angst: Authentic geology and stratigraphic sincerity