Catelijne Coopmans

This chapter is about a turbulent time in my early 40s that marked a major transition in my work. When I scaled down my university-based commitments to make room for a parallel career in coaching and research, I did not foresee the identity crisis that followed. My new life felt right, so why was I so insecure, and why did projects I thought intere...

The thought of rereading one’s own publications will, for many an academic, bring up a sense of dread. A critical streak often comes naturally to those who go into academia, so such an activity might easily yield a renewed impression of all that is ‘wrong’ with our work. Past writing that didn’t come out or has not been received as we’d hoped, may...

This chapter provides a framework for studying non-human imposters, the fake things and objects we read about in newspapers and sometimes encounter in everyday life. The approach has us treat fakes as a recognisable class of objects that ‘resemble the real thing but aren’t it’, so that we can study them for what they do and effect in this capacity....

Each society, each generation, fakes the thing it covets most. (Jones, 1990: 13) Introduction Imposters, as the contributions to this volume show, are promising figures to think with. Such thinking can take multiple forms and deliver various kinds of pay-offs for how we make sense of socio-material relations, of society. This chapter is about non-h...

This chapter provides a framework for studying non-human imposters, the fake things and objects we read about in newspapers and sometimes encounter in everyday life. The approach treats fakes as a recognisable class of objects, namely objects that resemble the real thing but aren’t it. What, in this capacity, these objects do and effe ct is at the...

This chapter approaches questions about data and data journeys by examining demonstrations of fakery and expertise in popular accounts by forgers and their pursuers. We examine how relations between tellers and audiences are configured – who can be trusted, and what can be relied on when it comes to knowing the real from the forged. The various amb...

This special issue aims to investigate the possibilities that spring from treating “care” as a practice and a moral-political orientation, through ethnographies and case studies related to medical settings across Asia. It pays attention to who and what is involved in care, and to historical and recent developments that feed into what forms of care...

This paper explores an episode of numbers appearing on a screen and being read/spoken, looked at and received as numbers, by people who work together to achieve a particular goal. The events happened in Singapore, in 2012-2013, as part of periodic reporting on diabetic retinopathy screening in the context of efforts to innovate such screening. I te...

This paper explores the question of how numbers and subjects co-constitute one another, drawing on an organizational ethnography of healthcare innovation in Singapore. In particular, it seeks to get traction on a persistent ‘disconnect’ involving numbers in the organization with the help of three STS analytics: Helen Verran’s work on number as a re...

The notion that Singapore’s multi-ethnic population provides a unique and quintessentially ‘Asian’ asset for its biomedical sciences initiative has been part of the discourse in local and international media coverage of that sector. It has also been highlighted by scholars as a feature of Singapore’s political economy. This article discusses how ‘r...

This article attends to the movement between disclosing and non-disclosing in accounts of expertise. While referencing discussions about tacit knowledge (‘experts know more than they can say’) and the politics of non-disclosure (‘withholding can help as well as harm the credibility of experts’), in the main it considers how experts move between con...

'Tacit' and 'explicit' knowledge, and their relation to expertise, have a long-standing importance within social studies of science and technology. At the centre of the development of thinking about these topics has been the work of Harry Collins and Robert Evans. In this article, we bring to bear observations of the work of people involved in grad...

In this article, we draw attention to the way in which accountability relations are manifested in and through the use of visual evidence. Through their status as representations of what is the case, evidentiary visual images frequently provide a basis for giving accounts and for raising questions regarding distributions of accountability. At the sa...

This chapter explores how relations between seeing and knowing are articulated in efforts to promote “visual analytics”: the practice of extracting insights from large datasets with the help of on-screen, interactive displays of trends, outliers and other patterns. The focus is on online seminars organized by a software vendor, in which experienced...

This introductory chapter sets out the theme of representation in scientific practice, and addresses why it remains such a vibrant topic for research in and beyond science and technology studies. The chapter draws particular attention to shifts in the content, context and concepts of inquiry that have occurred since the first volume to bear the nam...

Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, the long-awaited sequel to the influential volume, Representation in Scientific Practice, unites original editors Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar with colleagues Catelijne Coopmans and Janet Vertesi to present a new series of essays that sets the bar for the study of representation in science in the...

Since the turn of the millennium, Singapore has made significant investments in its biomedical research sector, with in recent years an increasing emphasis on efforts to ‘translate’ the fruits of research into clinical applications. In this paper, we investigate how translational research trajectories are built in present-day Singapore, through a c...

Based on three ethnographic vignettes describing the engagements of a small start-up company with prospective competitors, partners and customers, this paper shows how commercial considerations are folded into the ways visual images become 'seeable'. When company members mount demonstrations of prototype mammography software, they seek to generate...

Despite a substantial unfolding investment in Grid technologies (for the development of cyberinfrastructures or e-science), little is known about how, why and by whom these new technologies are being adopted or will be taken up. This chapter argues for the importance of addressing these questions from an STS (science and technology studies) perspec...

This paper addresses the relationships between creativity, innovation and organization by drawing on theories of play and examining their significance for the use of new innovation technologies in IBM. It contends that by doing so it deepens our understanding of the emerging role of technology in facilitating innovation in the under-researched serv...

The research project 'Playful Engineering' investigates how digital software tools, such as digital databases, enable innovation in an organization. the project is conducted in collaboration with a number of engineering and science-based companies and carried out within the Innovation Studies Center at Tanaka Business School, Imperial college, Lond...

In emerging theoretical models of innovation, digital simulation and prototyping tools are described as new means of production. However, relatively little is known about how such digital tools are used in construction and other industrial contexts, in particular how they are changing visual practices. In this paper, we present a study of the chang...

Although academic interest in the study of mobilities is on the increase, exactly what it takes and what it means for data to become mobile is seldom asked. This paper addresses that question for the case of digital medical images, more precisely mammograms (X-ray images of the breasts). It is argued that the kind of reasoning which treats mobility...

Despite a substantial unfolding investment in Grid technologies (for the development of cyberinfrastructures or e-science), little is known about how, why and by whom these new technologies are being adopted or will be taken up. This chapter argues for the importance of addressing these questions from an STS (science and technology studies) perspec...

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for collaboration in e-Science in the context of eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended in part to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the var...

This paper presents findings from an investigation into requirements for eScience in the context eDiaMoND, a Grid-enabled prototype system intended to support breast cancer screening. Detailed studies based on ethnographic fieldwork reveal the importance of accountability and visibility of work for trust and for the various forms of 'practical ethi...

Undoubtedly, STS has undergone significant expansion and transformation over recent years. The announcement for a recent Cornell meeting included the claim that in the past decade and a half, STS has evolved intellectually, built institutional strength, forged links with other disciplines, new communities and policy relevant areas; that STS has beg...