83 research outputs found
Interpretazione e ricerca sociologica. La costruzione dei fatti sociali nel processo di ricerca
No full textIl volume raccoglie una serie di contributi internazionali sulle conseguenze epistemologiche e metodologiche derivanti dal riconoscimento del carattere essenzialmente interpretativo della ricerca sociale. L'attenzione dei vari interventi si concentra sulla relazione fra il sociologo nella sua qualità di osservatore e i fenomeni sociali in quanto oggetti della sua attività di osservazione. La ricerca sociale viene dunque considerata come un processo che, mentre costruisce i fatti di cui si occupa, viene a sua volta fortemente determinato proprio da tali fatti. Scritti di M. Cardano, G. Gobo, A.v. Cicourel, M. Rampazi, R. Zoll, F. Neresini, B. Latour, P. Barbetta, S. McNamee, J.V. Lannamann e J. Shotter
Scienza e nuove generazioni. I risultati dell'indagine internazionale ROSE
No full textInteressi, atteggiamenti e opinioni degli studenti su scienza e tecnologia dentro e fuori dalla scuola. Una comparazione internazional
Can We Look at Refused Knowledge Differently?
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown how knowledge refused by scientific institutions can be endorsed by diverse segments of our societies for addressing health, illness, and well-being. Despite this sharp evidence, the understanding of current cultural perspectives and discourses ques
tioning the epistemic authority of science tends to be jeopardized by a normative view that reduces such refused knowledge to an irrational and deviant mindset to be opposed in order to preserve democracies and the well-being of our societies. Assuming an agnostic analytical stance over its epistemic value, this book aims to analyse the processes through which refused knowledge receives epistemic credibility, which people are engaged in such processes, how they relate with prevailing epistemic institutions and in which ways they practically enact a body of refused knowledge in their everyday lives. The book, drawing on an extensive three-year mixed-method empirical research, shows that it may be less helpful to frame the contestation of the authority of science in terms of an irrational “zeitgeist”, than to treat refused knowledge as a more pecu
liar mode of knowing the world and ways of addressing the uncertainties that inevitably affect our everyday life. Indeed, people involved in social worlds within which refused knowledge plays a pivotal role engage a complex dialectic with prevailing scientific institutions that are increas
ingly embedded in a societal landscape featured by an epistemic pluralism. As a consequence, taking refused knowledge seriously helps not only to better understand the legitimation processes that confer credibility to knowledge claims otherwise refused, but also to analyse how knowledge is, at large, the result of sociotechnical assemblages. The book thus offers a relevant contribution for scholars and students from a range of disci
plines interested in the understanding of the changing relations between science, expertise and society, including Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology. At the same time, it also speaks to a wider audience concerned with the public debate over the supposed crisis of scientific expertise in the post-truth era, as well as the current mistrust towards the political and scientific estab
lishment and their knowledge
La sociologia della conoscenza scientifica e la ricerca sociale come processo interpretativo
No full text“This is the real face of Covid-19!”: How Refused Knowledge Communities Entered the Pandemic Arena
No full textThis chapter analyses the process involved in enacting broad discursive substantive arenas in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. In so doing, the chapter highlights the role played by both human and non-human agents (such as the technologies mobilised to counteract the spread of SARS CoV-2 and the actors considered experts by refused knowledge communities’ [RKCs’] followers) in enacting counter narratives about the Covid-19 pandemic, so as to make sense of the global emergency according to a body of refused knowledge. Hence, the chapter illustrates how these counter narratives progressively empower RKCs to collaboratively act within a broad discursive arena, fostering public dissent against public health policies. Indeed, RKCs permeate public discourses about emerging societal issues in depth, also attracting the attention and concerns of both policymakers and media operators
From Bench to Bed, Back and Beyond: The Four Bs of Biomedical Research
No full textAbstract: Contemporary biomedicine is characterized by the ever-closer connection between clinical practice and research. Laboratories become nodes of articulated networks, making it no longer possible to consider them as single entities. In light of these changes, a wide range of actors – researchers, scientific instruments, data-bases, experts in bio-informatics and bio-statistics, pharmaceutical companies, clinicians, drugs, patients, cells, ethical and regulatory issues – are involved. In this Introduction, we address why these processes represent a relevant challenge for social sciences as well
The role of intermediary organizations in the mainstreaming of Responsible Research and Innovation in the Italian industrial sector
No full textInnovation can be conceived of as ‘collective experimentation’, and industry can be viewed as a full partner in heterogeneous innovation networks. The significance of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) depends on the possibility of aligning the diverse actors involved in innovation processes, including firms. A specific challenge in Italy is that the overall majority of industrial companies are small and medium enterprises (SMEs). By reporting the opinions of the participants in an Italian stakeholder workshop, this article suggests that intermediation processes and intermediary agents have an important influence on the uptake of RRI in SMEs
Health and/in Technologies. Biomedicine, gender, platform and self-tracking
No full textThis dissertation concerns the study of the digital biomedicine ground-ed in everyday self-tracking practices through the theoretical lens of Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Technoscience Studies and Sociology of medicine.
The dissertation is divided into two parts. Part One presents the theo-retical and methodological issues related to the central topic of the re-search. It disentangles the theoretical underpinnings that sustain the analysis – with particular regard to the recent debate on new materialism in feminist theory. Additionally, this part undertakes the discussion on the performative character of methods in shaping empirical and situated practices whereby I have carried out my research.
Part Two discusses the research findings, collected through an empirical research that focuses on two distinct issues in two empirical fields. The first analytic inquiry concerns the analysis of health platforms and apps for menstrual tracking, exploring how the supposed ‘neutrality’ of design performs genderless sociomaterial objects, that is without gender, rather than gender-free, i.e. free from gender constraints and stereotypes. With the second analytic inquiry I carried out some interviews to investigate the enactment of lay and expert knowledge situated into everyday practices.
Regarding the first field, I have analysed the two main Health platforms developed by the major competitors in the market of the Big Five: Health Apple and Google Fit. In this case, I investigated the gender script of the two apps developed with purposes of monitoring wellbeing by Google and Apple and to investigate the biomedical classification of premenstrual syndrome inscribed in the materiality of apps able to datafy menstruation.
With the second empirical field, I questioned the engagement of women in self-tracking practices. I carried out thirty interviews with women who use wearables for the management of wellbeing and for the digital tracking of their menstrual cycle. This second line of research aims to draw attention to how women intra-act with bioknowledge suggested by the wearables and apps used. The analysis, which draws upon feminist theoretical sensibilities on science and technology, calls into question two forms of engagement. This involvement sees overlapping knowing-in-practices which, enacted by plural patterns of engagement between the body and material knowledge, have been categorized as follows: a functional engagement with the bioknowledge inscribed in sociomaterial objects and an affective engagement with the knowledge suggested by sociomaterial objects.
Finally, this dissertation provides a reflection on the period of health emergency that we are experiencing due to the Covid-19 pandemic out-break. Particularly the focus is on the development of the app for contact tracing: Immuni
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