About
57
Publications
18,791
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,672
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 2008 - present
Publications
Publications (57)
Genomics research is regularly appropriated in social and political contexts to publicly legitimize unjust and malicious political views, policies, and actions. In recent years, there have been high‐profile cases of mass shooters, public intellectuals, and political insiders using genomics findings to convince audiences that deadly force and coerci...
Recently, scholars have revitalized the study of race by exploring how ignorance epistemologically fortifies racial domination. To articulate terms of analysis, much of this literature invokes two recurrent modes of racialized ignorance—racist essentialism and racialized nonknowing. We introduce a third mode—racist agnotology. With racist agnotolog...
This article demonstrates—based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women’s Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan’s “Politically Incorrect” discussion board—two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, “science fan fiction,” in online spaces an...
There is growing attention to how unfounded beliefs about biological differences between racial groups affect biomedical research and health care, in part, through race adjustment in clinical tools. We develop a case study of the Eighth Joint National Committee (JNC 8)'s 2014 Evidence-Based Guideline for the Management of High Blood Pressure in Adu...
The “reproducibility crisis” has been one of the most significant stories in science in the past 15 years and has led to significant policy changes across the research landscape. Yet, scandals, irreproducible studies, and cries of crisis have occurred for decades in science. This article seeks to explain why the reproducibility crisis has taken roo...
This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democr...
This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democr...
A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inq...
Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nation...
Trustworthy science requires research practices that center issues of ethics, equity, and inclusion. We announce the Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design (LEED) of Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Medicine (STEM) initiative to create best practices for integrating ethical expertise and fostering equitable collaboration.
Background: Ancestry is often viewed as a more objective and less objectionable population descriptor than race or ethnicity. Perhaps reflecting this, usage of the term “ancestry” is rapidly growing in genetics research, with ancestry groups referenced in many situations. The appropriate usage of population descriptors in genetics research is an on...
When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional confli...
Glaring health disparities have reinvigorated debate about the relevance of race to health, including how race should and should not be used as a variable in research and biomedicine (1). After a long history of race being treated as a biological variable, there is now broad agreement that racial classifications are a product of historically contin...
There is a scientific and ethical imperative to embrace a multidimensional, continuous view of ancestry and move away from continental ancestry categories
A recent commentary critiqued the embrace of performance metrics at research universities. Drawing on our research studying the metascience movement, we suggest that the drive to maximize efficiency in science is increasingly extending beyond performance metrics, into labs themselves. Because institutional and public audiences are predisposed to vi...
A recent commentary critiqued the embrace of performance metrics at research universities. Drawing on our research studying the metascience movement, we suggest that the drive to maximize efficiency in science is increasingly extending beyond performance metrics, into labs themselves. Because institutional and public audiences are predisposed to vi...
Research on economization processes is increasingly taking seriously the social and material processes through which various policy domains are transformed into economic problems and solutions. This article engages “Value Added Modeling” (VAM) in teacher evaluation systems as a case study in economization. VAM is a statistical technology for evalua...
A series of failed replications and frauds have raised questions regarding self-correction in science. Metascientific activists have advocated policies that incentivize replications and make them more diagnostically potent. We argue that current debates, as well as research in science and technology studies, have paid little heed to a key dimension...
Research replication, with its potential to diagnose the truth of scientific claims, is argued to be central to social control in science. Yet a series of frauds and failed replications have raised questions regarding the frequency and effectiveness of current practices. Metascientific activists have advocated policies that incentivize replications...
Objectives:
Our aim in this study was to understand how genetics ideas are appropriated and mobilized online toward the political projects of White nationalism and the alt right. Studying three different online venues, we investigated how genetics is used to support racial realism, hereditarianism, and racial hierarchy. We analyzed how these ideas...
Emerging out of the “reproducibility crisis” in science, metascientists have become central players in debates about research integrity, scholarly communication, and science policy. The goal of this article is to introduce metascience to STS scholars, detail the scientific ideology that is apparent in its articles, strategy statements, and research...
Value Added Modeling (VAM) is a statistical technology used to evaluate teacher effectiveness. While it was heralded for years as the next big innovation in education reform, VAM has become an object of legal scrutiny since it was implemented in dozens of states across the U.S. Building on STS findings about science and the law, this paper consider...
White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stor...
The controversy over the genetic explanation for racial differences inintelligence and behavior has been sustained by the platform the field of behaviorgenetics has offered race researchers. Explanations of this support have focusedon political or scientific rationalities: behavior geneticists must support the claim thatblacks are genetically less...
This paper considers the emergence of new forms of race-making using a qualitative analysis of online discussions of individuals’ genetic ancestry test (GAT) results on the white nationalist website Stormfront. Seeking genetic confirmation of personal identities, white nationalists often confront information they consider evidence of non-white or n...
The molecularization of race thesis suggests geneticists are gaining greater authority to define human populations and differences, and they are doing so by increasingly defining them in terms of U.S. racial categories. Using a mixed methodology of a content analysis of articles published in Nature Genetics (in 1993, 2001, and 2009) and interviews,...
For much of its history, behavioral genetics, or research into the influence genetics has on human behavior, has been associated with a pessimistic view of educational reforms’ potential to make much difference in improving educational outcomes or reducing inequality. Recently, however, some behavioral geneticists have begun to speak in more optimi...
Behavior genetics has always been a breeding ground for controversies. From the “criminal chromosome” to the “gay gene,” claims about the influence of genes like these have led to often vitriolic national debates about race, class, and inequality. Many behavior geneticists have encountered accusations of racism and have had their scientific authori...
Participation is today central to many kinds of research and design practice in information studies and beyond. From user-generated content to crowdsourcing to peer production to fan fiction to citizen science, the concept remains both unexamined and heterogeneous in its definition. Intuitions about participation are confirmed by some examples, but...
This article provides a framework for disentangling the concept of participation, with emphasis on participation in genomic medicine. We have derived seven 'dimensions' of participation that are most frequently invoked in the extensive, heterogeneous literature on participation. To exemplify these dimensions, we use material from a database of 102...
Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated—how the activity of producing proteins is run. If genetics is concerned with how genetic variation produces differences in body and behavior, epigenetics concerns how similar genetics can produce different outcomes. Though molecular epigenetic r...
This paper uses Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to develop tools for analyzing interdisciplinary scientific fields. Interdisciplinary
fields are scientific spaces where no single form of scientific capital has a monopoly and therefore multiple forms of scientific
capital constitute the structures and stakes of scientific competition. Scientists comp...
Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated...
This paper examines how patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) representing those with rare genetic disorders drive research to their concerns. The rarity of the diseases produces a basic condition of marginalization: small numbers of widely distributed disease sufferers. The lack of promise of an eventual market makes it difficult to attract the ec...
I develop “personalized social policy” as a speculative exercise to examine the possibility that policy makers and service providers, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, could use genetic information to divide clients into “treatment groups” receiving differential service goods to better meet individual needs or achieve efficiency. Us...
In contrast to the audience in most of the world, New Yorkers experienced the events of 9/11 as more than symbolic images. Indeed, the experiential and practical foundations of New Yorkers’ cultural existences were transformed in the wake of 9/11, at least temporarily. The weeks following the crisis were spent coming to terms with what happened; ma...
As originally developed by Charles Ragin in The Comparative Method (1987), qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has been used extensively by comparative and historical sociologists as an effective tool for analyzing data sets of medium-N popula- tions. Like many other methods, however, QCA is atemporal and obscures the sequen- tial nature of path...
This article explores the processes involved in the construction and contestation of community in New York City following the disaster of September 11, 2001. By employing insights from the literatures on disaster and cultural meaning making, we examine how New Yorkers created and negotiated the meanings of the cultural, symbolic, and moral problems...
This article argues that the sociology of knowledge as a critical subfield of sociology and the artist Marcel Duchamp are engaged in epistemologically analogous projects. Two sets of claims demonstrate the analogy: that Duchamp and the sociology of knowledge both have the same conception of and attitude toward their objects (respectively, art and k...
Questions
Question (1)
We are doing a research project tracking how and why scholars use Research Gate, Academia to understand how open access platforms affect knowledge production and communication.