5,695 research outputs found
Vulnerability in Technological Culture: New directions in research and governance
No full textNovel technologies and scientific advancements offer not only opportunities but risks. Technological systems are vulnerable to human error and technical malfunctioning that have far-reaching consequences: one flipped switch can cause a cascading power failure across a networked electric grid. Yet, once addressed, vulnerability accompanied by coping mechanisms may yield a more flexible and resilient society. This book investigates vulnerability, in both its negative and positive aspects, in technological cultures. The contributors argue that viewing risk in terms of vulnerability offers a novel approach to understanding the risks and benefits of science and technology. Such an approach broadens conventional risk analysis by connecting to issues of justice, solidarity, and livelihood, and enabling comparisons between the global north and south. The book explores case studies that range from agricultural practices in India to neonatal intensive care medicine in Western hospitals; these cases, spanning the issues addressed in the book, illustrate what vulnerability is and does. The book offers conceptual frameworks for empirical description and analysis of vulnerability that elucidate its ambiguity, context dependence, and constructed nature. Finally, the book addresses the implications of these analyses for the governance of vulnerability, proposing a more reflexive way of dealing with vulnerability in technological cultures
Regulating risks by rules: Compliance and Negotiated Drift in the Dutch Chemical Industry under the Seveso Regime
No full text
Europe's Infrastructure Vulnerabilities: Comparisons and Connections
No full textThis book has investigated the historical shaping of critical transnational infrastructure in europe, its associated vulnerabilities, and its intertwine ment with broader processes of european integration and fragmentation. The chapters in the three parts have scrutinized these issues from different thematic angles and in a broad range of geographical and temporal settings. While each study has generated intriguing insights in its own right, the range of empirical cases has also set the stage for comparative and connecting observations. This final chapter sets out to harvest from our case studies by focusing on a number of such cross-cutting issues.keywordseuropean unionnuclear power plantcritical infrastructurepower companyiron curtainthese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves
Studying Obduracy in the City: Toward a Productive Fusion between Technology Studies and Urban Studies
No full textThis article draws the city into the limelight of social studies of technology. Considering that cities consist of a wide range of technologies, it is remarkable that cities as an object of research have so far have been relatively neglected in the field of technology studies. This article focuses on the role of obduracy in urban sociotechnical change, an issue that, it is argued, has considerable importance for both students of the cities and the daily practice of town planners and architects, and, at the same time, forms an important theoretical debate in science, technology, and society (STS) studies. The article provides an overview of theoretical conceptions of obduracy in both technology studies and urban studies and proposes a heuristic model for the analysis of this phenomenon. In this way, this article aims to contribute to the establishment of a common interdisciplinary playground for these disciplines
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