CfP: Science - something old, something new, something blue
We
invite research articles and notes that explore the interplay of
science and daily life, the role of new technologies in scientific
knowledge, the just-emerging and the strongly-persistent practice of
science making and reporting, as well as other topics in the social
organization and consequences of scientific knowledge.
Contributions may address questions such as (but not limited to) the following:
- How is scientific research formulated, invoked and challenged in public debates about vaccination, homeopathy, GMOs, evolution, contraception, abortion, climate change and other deeply controversial issues of health, life and death?
- How do various scientific methods and discourses shape our public knowledge of gender, age, race and other social classifications – from neurosexism (Fine 2010) to social research ageism (Bodily 1994; Rughiniș and Humă 2015) and new forms of racism in heritability studies or IQ research (Block 1995), among others?
- How are we to understand and account for the replication crisis in science (Ioannidis 2012; Open Science Collaboration 2015)? How is scientific fraud and fabricated research socially organized and sanctioned (Fanelli 2009)?
- How is Big Data transforming, challenging, or reproducing practices of scientific research across disciplines? How are representations of the world derived from Big Data re-shaping what we know and don’t know about patterns of behavior, inequalities, what is significant and what is negligible (boyd and Crawford 2012; Lazer et al. 2014)?
- How are new search and communication platforms changing scientific methods, peer review or science communication – from dedicated platforms such as Google Scholar, Academia.edu and ResearchGate.org to Facebook, Twitter or other digitally-mediated forms of shaping and sharing data and knowledge?
References
Block, Ned. 1995. “How Heritability Misleads about Race.” Cognition 56: 99–128. http://www.lscp.net/persons/
Bodily, Christopher. 1994. “Ageism and the Deployments of ‘age’. A Constructionist View.” In Constructing the Social, eds. Theodore R. Sarbin and John I. Kitsuse. Sage Publications, 174–94.
boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. 2012. “Critical Questions for Big Data.” Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 662–79.
Fanelli,
Daniele. 2009. “How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data.” PLoS ONE 4(5): e5738.
Fine, Cordelia. 2010. Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. WW Norton & Company.
Ioannidis, John P. A. 2012. “Why Science Is Not Necessarily Self-Correcting.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 7(6): 645–54.
Lazer,
David, Ryan Kennedy, Gary King, and Alessandro Vespignani. 2014. “The
Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis.” Science 343(6176).
Open Science Collaboration. 2015. “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science.” Science 349(6251).
Rughiniș,
Cosima, and Bogdana Humă. 2015. “Who Theorizes Age? The
‘socio-Demographic Variables’ Device and Age–period–cohort Analysis in
the Rhetoric of Survey Research.” Journal of Aging Studies 35: 144–59.