By Thomas Kuipers

Corona app illustration (stock image from pixabay.com).

 

There’s an app for that

The desire to solve society’s problems with technological fixes is not new. They appear to be cheap, efficient and immediate. On the contrary, political and systemic responses are expensive, slow, and controversial. Often, we are not even sure what exactly political responses would entail, or how they would be realized. Typically, they foster heated debates, which appear to slow down this already lengthy process even further. The appeal of putting science and technology in the drivers’ seat is obvious.

In this regard, the coronavirus pandemic is no exceptional situation. It was not long before we vested our hopes of tackling this crisis in technology. A solution was formulated within the sociocultural context of recent mass adoption of smartphones, which came along with a plethora of apps designed to solve all of our problems, inconveniences and more. The echo of Apple’s commercial “There’s an app for that” has yet to fade. Perhaps it was not surprising that we imagined that an app would come to the rescue. In some nations, such as Australia and the Netherlands, the mass adoption of a ‘corona app’ was even listed as a hard requirement for lifting the lockdown. The Dutch government organized an ‘Appathon’, in which seven companies competed for a weekend to create an app that would be used to “combat the coronavirus”. What exactly the app should do was unclear, but that the coronavirus could effectively be fought with an app was taken as self-evident.

 

Roadblocks to an imagined future

Fast-forward one month and it appears that a particular type of corona-fighting apps has taken the center stage: one that facilitates contact tracing via Bluetooth. When two people have the app installed on their smartphones, they automatically exchange pseudo-random messages (hashes) with each other when they are within the reach of each other’s Bluetooth signal. Each person with the app keeps track of which messages it has received. When someone then gets infected with the coronavirus, an alert will be sent to all other participants via the internet. This alert, which contains another hash, will then be compared to all of the previously stored Bluetooth messages. If a match is found, this would mean that the participant has been within the vicinity of the now-infected patient, and is at risk of also being infected.

Even though little is known about these apps as of now, both proponents and opponents have been engaging in a hot public debate. It often appears that the choice of resorting to contact tracing apps is a matter of balancing public healthcare with privacy (Verhagen & van Gestel, 2020). Will contact tracing apps successfully “combat the coronavirus”? Or will they upend privacy as we know it? The only real answer at this point is: we have no idea. At this point in time, “the technology remains the figment of a particular technoscientific imagination” (Stilgoe, 2015, p. 6). Studying contact tracing apps means studying ideas, promises and imagined futures. Their very existence and their actual qualities are still being negotiated from various technical and political angles.

The technicalities of Bluetooth have thus far already played a major role in shaping these apps. On iOS, it is currently only possible for an app to send and receive these Bluetooth signals when the app is active and visible on the screen. When the phone is on standby, which it always is when it is in your pocket, the Bluetooth messages cannot be sent. On Android, it is possible for apps to send and receive Bluetooth signals when the phone is in standby mode. However, fears about battery drainage and reliability across a wide range of Android devices remain. These limitations on access to Bluetooth have been perceived as insurmountable by certain European officials and they have requested the tech giants to remove these restrictions. Initially, Apple and Google flat-out refused to do so on the grounds of protecting the privacy of their customers. Not much later, a French “senior government official” proclaimed that “European states are being completely held hostage by Google and Apple” (Rosemain & Busvine, 2020). One cannot help noticing the irony in European states demanding Silicon Valley tech giants to lift their privacy-protecting measures.

 A particularly empty snapshot of Museumsquartier, here in Vienna. Busy places like these could be regular ‘meeting’ points for our phones’ Bluetooth sensors (image taken by the author).

 

The political difference between an app and an API

These tech giants are now in the unique position to program the capability of Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing into our smartphones. They have been building the infrastructure of mobile connectivity for over a decade, with themselves firmly established at the heart of it. Building this global infrastructure is not a purely technical endeavor, it also “requires organizational, economic, political and legal innovation and effort in order to resolve the heterogeneous problems that inevitably arise” (Edwards, 2010, p. 10). While many individuals, institutions, businesses and governments are dependent on this infrastructure, Apple and Google hold a disproportionate amount of power over who gets to access or modify it.

Soon after the rallying cries of frustrated politicians, Apple and Google announced they would contribute to solving this global problem with a new collaborative effort between the two rivals, titled “Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing”. A crucial element of this effort is an Application Programming Interface (API) which enables apps to interact more smoothly with the Bluetooth protocol. Through this API, developers can access all the data necessary to create contact tracing apps. What is remarkable, is that Apple and Google are not creating a full-fledged contact tracing app themselves. They are merely providing the building blocks for others to do so, even though the two most powerful technology companies in the world certainly have the technical capabilities to create this app.

While we can only speculate whether this was a deliberate strategic decision, it certainly puts Apple and Google in a significantly less politically controversial position. ‘Corona apps’ and their advocates have come under great scrutiny in the media by privacy-guarding institutions and worried politicians. If Apple and Google were to develop the app themselves, they would surely attract the bulk of this storm of criticism, but now they appear to be shielded from at least part of it. We can only begin to imagine the kind of public and political backlash they would face were they to undertake the development of the entire app. To understand why the decision to only develop an API and not an app appears to be less controversial, we need to concern ourselves with what makes for controversy in the first place.

A common conception in contemporary societies is that technology develops independently of social and political forces (Wyatt, 2007) — it is even often believed to be neutral and value-free. This causes what is seen as purely technical to be shielded from scrutiny. Because engineers supposedly follow an independent and technocratic path of innovation, we need not worry about it: their innovations will take place regardless of societal debates. This conceptualization of technological progress is known as technological determinism. Quite on the contrary, the political is understood as an arena of debate in which collective decisions are made. Democracy — the rule of the people — surfaces as the antithesis of the technocratic notions of technological determinist thought. While these readings of technological progress and political decision-making appear as starkly separate domains, the boundary between them begins to blur as we realize that the design and development of corona apps is a highly political endeavor. Where exactly lies the boundary between the technical and the political and how does it emerge? Can we say that apps are always political, while APIs are not? Do technologies have certain intrinsic qualities that determine the extent to which they are political?

Thomas Gieryn (1995) provides an explanation that moves away from such essentialist explanations: the demarcation between the technical and the political is the result of boundary-work. Boundary-work is the act of distancing the scientific or technical from the social. Gieryn describes how successful boundary-work results in the prevention of the control of certain technoscientific activities by outside powers. As political pressure on Apple and Google was mounting to cooperate in the development of contact tracing apps, it was not unthinkable that they would be forced by nation-states to adapt their operating systems to accommodate these apps. Whether this would have been attempted by court order remains unknown, but the reputational risk of being seen or characterized as the impediment to public healthcare in a global pandemic was all too real. An attempt at such a characterization happened only later, on the 5th of May, when France’s minister for digital technology, Cedric O made some hefty accusations against Apple (Kar-Gupta & Rose, 2020):

Apple could have helped us make the application work even better on the iPhone. They have not wished to do so. I regret this, given that we are in a period where everyone is mobilised to fight against the epidemic, and given that a large company that is doing so well economically is not helping out a government in this crisis. We will remember that when time comes.

But already earlier it became crystal clear that states around the world were longing for contact tracing apps with reports about their development from Germany (Busvine, 2020a), France (Rose & Pineau, 2020), Israel (Cohen, 2020), Singapore (Ungku, 2020), South Africa (Dludla, 2020) and even a European effort (Busvine, 2020b). Meanwhile, Apple was all too aware of its privacy feature of limiting apps’ access to Bluetooth while not being opened and in the foreground. At least some form of action was crucial. In providing this API, Apple and Google have “kept politics near, but out” (Gieryn, 1995, p. 434). They have protected their autonomous control over their operating systems by providing political forces with just enough to prevent more threatening consequences. They engage with politics just enough to be able to contribute to societal problems and demonstrate their usefulness. However, they refrain from becoming entirely entrenched in the heated debate about contact tracing by not providing the apps themselves, therefore leaving the final implementation of the solutions to the public health authorities. This would allow Apple and Google to avoid risk of loss of prestige or credibility in the case of further controversies surrounding the contact tracing solutions. Developing the API, but not the app, is a clever maneuver which shows the skillful demarcation between the technical and the political. Not only are they walking the tightrope between these two territories — they have put it up themselves by constructing the boundary in a way that maximizes perceived beneficence and minimizes the risk of reputational loss, all the while maintaining full autonomy over their infrastructure.

 

Contested sovereignty and protocol politics

Even though Apple and Google are not directly engaged in developing the app, that does not hold them back from having a say in how the apps should behave. From their initial announcement of the new standard it was clear that they favored a decentralized approach: this is a central feature of the design of the APIs. Accessing the Bluetooth sensor’s data through the new API and storing it on a centralized server is not allowed. Apps that would do this would simply not be given access to the new API. A second limitation took longer to emerge. For weeks, the Silicon Valley companies remained unsure of whether they would allow contact tracing apps to combine the Bluetooth data with GPS data (Nellis & Dave, 2020a). It was only on the 4th of May that they finally announced that location data could not be used by apps that access their contact tracing API (Nellis & Dave, 2020b). This is in stark defiance of the explicit request of US states North and South Dakota and Utah to access location data. Simultaneously, a third limitation was introduced: only one app per country or region would be allowed. What exactly defines a region was not specified.

Theoretically, public health authorities could still decide to go without the new API and thus circumventing the newly imposed limitations on their apps. However, the importance of this API is rendered visible by examining Germany’s and France’s continued attempts at developing an app that does not rely on the newly proposed protocol (Rosemain & Busvine, 2020). They long desired a centralized approach which would give the respective governments far greater control over and insight into the collected data. Finally, Germany gave in to the desire for a decentralized approach and flipped (Busvine & Rinke, 2020). Colombia made a serious attempt to deliver contact tracing without Apple’s and Google’s API, but failed and dropped the contact tracing feature from their “CoronApp” after a month, planning to resume their program when the new API is ready (Dave & Nellis, 2020).

 

Evaluating infrastructures of healthcare: beyond privacy

Much public scrutiny appears to focus on the privacy implications of corona apps (Verhagen & van Gestel, 2020; Verhagen & Brouwers, 2020; De Wit, 2020). Function creep is one of the dominant aspects of these implications: while initially their only intended use would be to conduct contact tracing in order to contain the spread of the virus, governments and corporations could soon find other uses for the gathered data. The data in this case is highly sensitive and useful, a social graph of which people interact with each other. Replacing the word “infection” with “crime” directs our gaze at other potential use cases of this data (Parthasarathy, Stilgoe & Waisanen, 2020). If you have recently interacted with a criminal, there is a certain probability that you are also involved in criminal activity. Some may be satisfied by the guarantees that all data will be anonymized and only stored in decentralized ways. However, the potential applications of this data still remain: if a person can be identified as having been in contact with an infected person, she can also be identified as having been in contact with a criminal. Apple and Google have promised us that apps can only use their exposure notification API for contact tracing during the pandemic (Exposure Notification Frequently Asked Questions, 2020). However, the next time that governments will require this technology it will again be requested on the grounds of combating a crisis. And with crucial elements of the sociotechnical infrastructure already in place, the barrier to the adoption of this technology has been lowered significantly.

While such privacy concerns are not to be minimized and deserve careful consideration, we also cannot ignore the implications of building crucial elements of our public healthcare on top of an infrastructure that is under the tight control of Silicon Valley tech giants. By developing the API, but not the app, their political influence is disguised as the pure technological enablement of public health authorities to perform contact tracing in ways that seem appropriate to their locality. On closer inspection, however, we can observe that Apple and Google are still exerting significant power as system builders by controlling access to the infrastructure. And infrastructures last: their endurance is one of their fundamental qualities as they can last far beyond political trends and temporary crises (Edwards, 2010). Ever more elements will use the infrastructure as their foundation, strengthening the network as they are added. Eventually, the infrastructure’s endurance itself will function as its legitimization in a self-perpetuating cycle. The influence of Apple and Google on how public healthcare is conducted within the territories of nation-states might prove difficult to be rolled back once the pandemic is over, as Tamara Sharon (2020) has noted. She argues that our increased dependency on these tech companies for providing what used to be public services will ultimately lead in the reshaping of these services to more closely align with the values and interests of Silicon Valley. These may of course be at odds with those of European citizens.

In a crisis it is tempting to reach for technological fixes that promise to address our immediate concerns. However, we must not forget that these promises are based on technoscientific imaginations and not on empirical evidence. Coronavirus apps are strongly dependent on Bluetooth sensors, which are already known to be inaccurate and unreliable in measuring the proximity between devices. Furthermore, these apps are not created in a vacuum and they come embedded in a sociotechnical infrastructure. They can have long-lasting effects on the balance of power between tech giants and nation-states and have the potential to reconfigure the stage of geopolitics. It remains to be seen how these nation-states’ sovereignty will be affected when they hand over responsibilities to international corporations and increasingly come to depend on their computational infrastructures.

 

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Thomas Kuipers is following the masters program of Science-Technology-Society and works as a software engineer on various projects, most notably in the cyber security space. He is particularly interested in how software is used as politics by other means.

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References

Apple & Google. (2020). Exposure Notification Frequently Asked Questions. Retrieved from https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/applications/covid19/current/static/contact-tracing/pdf/ExposureNotification-FAQv1.1.pdf

Bratton, B. H. (2015). Introduction. In The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (pp. 3-18). The MIT Press.

Busvine, D. (2020a). Germany aims to launch Singapore-style coronavirus app in weeks. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL4N2BN3MQ

Busvine, D. (2020b). Europe to launch coronavirus contact tracing app initiative. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL8N2BP1N0

Busvine, D. & Rinke, A. (2020). Germany flips to Apple-Google approach on smartphone contact tracing. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN22807J

Cohen, T. (2020). 1.5 million Israelis using voluntary coronavirus monitoring app. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN21J5L5

Dave, P & Nellis, S. (2020). Colombia’s coronavirus app troubles show rocky path without tech from Apple, Google. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN22J03W

de Wit, T. (2020). Corona-app is succes op Britse eiland Wight, weinig zorgen om privacy. Volkskrant. Retrieved from https://nos.nl/collectie/13841/artikel/2334651

Dludla, N. (2020). S.Africa launches mobile tracking of those with coronavirus. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL8N2BQ61L

Edwards, P. (2010). Thinking Globally. In A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming (pp. 1-25). The MIT Press.

Gieryn, T. (1995). Boundaries of Science. In S. Jasanoff, G. Markle, J. Petersen, T. Pinch (Eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (pp. 393-443). London: Sage.

Jasanoff, S. (2013). Epistemic Subsidiarity – Coexistence, Cosmopolitanism, Constitutionalism. European Journal of Risk Regulation, 4(2), 133–141.

Kar-Gupta, S. & Rose, M. (2020). France accuses Apple of refusing help with ‘StopCovid’ app. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN22H0LX

DeNardis, L. (2009). Scarcity and Internet Governance. In Protocol Politics (pp. 1-24). The MIT Press.

Nellis, S. & Dave, P (2020a). Showdown looms between Silicon Valley, U.S. states over contact tracing apps. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN22702F

Nellis, S. & Dave, P (2020b). Apple, Google ban use of location tracking in contact tracing apps. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN22G28W

Parthasarathy, S., Stilgoe, J. & Waisanen, E. (2020). Episode 6: COVID Knowledge, Technology, and Politics: Dispatches from Around the World. The Received Wisdom Podcast. Retrieved from http://shobitap.org/the-received-wisdom/2020/4/19/episode-6-covid-knowledge-technology-and-politics-dispatches-from-around-the-world

Renew Europe (2020). RENEW EUROPE Webinar on COVID-19 contact tracing applications. [Online webinar]. Retrieved from https://re.livecasts.eu/webinar-on-contact-tracing-applications/program

Rosemain, M. & Busvine, D. (2020). France, Germany in standoff with Silicon Valley on contact tracing. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN2262LM

Rose, M & Pineau, E (2020). France working on ‘StopCovid’ contact-tracing app, ministers say. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN21Q1D3

Sharon, T. (2020). When Google and Apple get privacy right, is there still something wrong? Retrieved from https://medium.com/@TamarSharon/when-google-and-apple-get-privacy-right-is-there-still-something-wrong-a7be4166c295

Stilgoe, J. (2015). Balloon Debate & Making Models. In Experiment Earth: Responsible Innovation in Geoengineering (pp. 1-20, 159-174). Earthscan from Routledge.

Ungku, F. (2020). Singapore launches contact tracing mobile app to track coronavirus infections. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2171ZQ

Verhagen, L. & Brouwers, A. (2020). Nederlandse app-makers klaar voor corona-app. Volkskrant. Retrieved from https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/~bb2019b4/

Verhagen, L. & van Gestel, M. (2020. Apps kunnen helpen de coronacrisis te bezweren, helpt dit de privacy om zeep? Volkskrant. Retrieved from https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/~b9bac9d0/

By Ruth Falkenberg

Being productive in times of crisis, making the crisis productive?!

The corona pandemic we are currently facing is certainly an unprecedented crisis – a crisis in which science, medicine and health(care), global and national politics, socio-economic, and even environmental dimensions are entangled in complex and often seemingly elusive ways. As such, the current situation represents an immense and multi-faceted STS case study. As an STS scholar, it is hard not to think about what we see and hear in all kinds of media channels through our various STS lenses. Increasingly, there are also formalised calls to respond to, research and accompany the current pandemic from an STS, or more broadly, social scientific perspective.

Analysing, commenting and reflecting on the current crisis from a critical (scholarly) perspective is certainly crucial, as we find so many interesting, remarkable, but first and foremost worrisome things going on around us – things that would not have even been imaginable just a few weeks ago. As such, the current situation lays open many of the values that are so tacitly embedded in the ways the social worlds around us are organised. Furthermore, the shifts we are currently witnessing open up multiple versions of a ‘new normal after corona’, creating spaces for change and transformation that can happen in many directions. STS perspectives and (academic) interventions are therefore indispensable and can play a crucial role in shedding light on some of the complex entanglements of this crisis and in shaping the pandemic and its aftermath.

In short, the value of timely STS contributions to the corona crisis seems out of question.[1] Nevertheless, over the last days and weeks I increasingly find myself wondering and reflecting about scholarly responses to the corona pandemic. While I am following current discussions and conversations within STS and the broader academic community on various channels such as mailing lists or twitter, I cannot help myself asking what is actually driving our work and professional engagements in these times. (And I deliberately use the term ‘our’, since these reflections certainly also pertain to myself.) Do we produce papers, proposals or other forms of output related to the corona pandemic out of a wish to contribute something to the current situation that is of relevance and help to other actors, whoever these may be? Is it a sheer curiosity, finding so many (undeniably) highly interesting things happening right now? Is it maybe a way to deal with the current stressful and novel situation? Is it a pressure that as an STS scholar one has to make a contribution to the current situation, to turn this crisis into a form of productive output? Or is it a convenient option to add another item to the CV, or to get some quick grant money?

While lecture halls are empty, other aspects and logics of academic life are not coming to a halt.

(Image licensed under creative commons)

Certainly, the complex relations between these different aspects that guide our practices are impossible to disentangle, in these times as well as in other moments. Yet, it seems that these days it becomes particularly salient how fine and blurry the line is between providing a valuable contribution that may be of interest or help to other people, and rather productivity- and competition-oriented considerations. Which is not meant to deny the importance of any of these factors that may drive our work – clearly they all come from somewhere. For example, writing about the crisis as a way to cope with the own impressions, thoughts, and emotions can definitely be an important and valuable practice. And, of course, also the need to somehow continue to produce output, to stay visible and contribute to the academic discussions of the own field is something that cannot be neglected – the accumulation logics of epistemic capitalism do not simply stop in times of crisis.

Yet, at the same time, the current situation that produces so many exceptional states and lays open so many weak points of our societies, can also be an encouragement to reflect on the values, considerations, and tacit norms that actually guide our own practices. What is it that we produce output for? Who do we actually want to be as researchers? And what effects do our own practices sometimes create?

At the moment, there are new potential forms of competition and stress created for some people, in relation to contributing some scholarly output to the current crisis. At the same time, the current situation also radically exposes how closely the possibilities for academic productivity are tied to the own personal circumstances and always compete with other practices, roles, and ways to contribute – at the moment, there is a large gap between those who do not have many teaching, care, or other responsibilities and who may therefore indeed experience the current situation as a sort of deceleration, and those who need to juggle more duties than ever and may hardly have time to follow even their basic tasks. Furthermore, even some of those who have the time to write down their thoughts may rather feel a need to become active and engage with the current situation in a non-academic manner. What, then, does it mean to be a good scholar, and how to think about academic citizenship in times like these?

What is a valuable (academic) contribution in times of crisis? And who does, amongst many other tasks, actually have the capacities to engage in solitary writing? (Image licensed under creative commons)

It would not be possible to answer the questions that I have raised in the scope of this blogpost, but this is not my aim. Indeed, finding answers to such questions is to some extent a very individual and subjective process and there may be no absolute right or wrong. Yet, it is certainly important to (collectively) reflect on and discuss these issues – at least as far as the current state of exception allows it.

I want to thank my colleagues from the STS department who shared with me their thoughts and feelings on being productive in the face of the corona pandemic.

[1] For a nice example of this, you can just scroll down to read the post by my colleague Kamiel Mobach.

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Ruth Falkenberg is a PhD student at the Research Platform Responsbile Research and Innovation in Academic Practice. She is interested in meanings and practices of “relevant research” and in valuation practices in academia, particularly in the context of contemporary neoliberal regimes of research governance. Her dissertation is part of the project Valuing, Being and Knowing in Research Practices, which investigates how valuation practices and processes of subjectification are entangled with strategic decisions in researchers’ work.

By Kamiel Mobach

How many people are currently affected by the coronavirus, nobody really knows. Governments and their organizations are publishing figures every day, but this does not say anything about how many people actually carry the virus with them. Knowing this number accurately would be impossible, because the way in which such knowledge is produced is quite complex. In this post I will shortly illustrate that there is no objectivity in numbers. As an alternative, I will suggest the notion of ‘legibility’ as a view on what numbers can do for societies and governments. I will connect this concept to issues of responsibility and politics.

The sudden, discontinuous increase in this graph on the 13^th of February was the result of the Chinese government changing its definition of coronavirus cases to include people with symptoms who hadn’t been tested yet. The number of people who were being treated in Chinese hospitals did not change, but from this day onwards more of them were counted as ‘patients with coronavirus.’ More recently, many governments have stopped testing every person that has got symptoms. At the same time, most of them still publish numbers solely based on positive test results. Not testing everyone is justified by the fact of limited testing capacity. However, the continued publication of figures based on test results brings about unclarity about how many coronavirus patients there currently are. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch governmental public health institute reported 1135 cases on 15 March, while the country’s municipal health services said they estimated the number of infections in the country to be around 6000.

Statistical knowledge, like the figures just discussed, is an arena where practices of government and science are intimately intertwined. In his book Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott develops the concept of legibility to theorize this intertwinement (1998). The book gives a host of examples of how states developed formal knowledge categories in order to know more about their population. Examples include standardized measurements and weights, land surveys, mapping and building of cities, and census. Scott argues that the categories that the state uses to make things legible do not just describe how things are, but come to prescribe how people live, how land is organized and how people distribute and trade resources. However natural they seem to us now, surnames, as well as birthdays are artifacts of census practices imposed on our ancestors centuries ago.

In the current case of the coronavirus, the state has to impose means of categorization to define certain people as infectious, and to classify people into different categories of risk. The sudden increase in the number of coronavirus cases on the 13^th of February is an example of how the state knows differently through different categorizations. There is a whole apparatus behind the numbers that get shown in the media. There are people who administer tests, labs that process them, administration that keeps track of the numbers, and in all these stages and links of the process, choices need to be made about how to proceed. This can result in certain people not being tested, for example because they have not been in a risk area in the past weeks. Moreover, what counts as a ‘risk area’ is changing almost daily. The limited capacity of testing means that there are assumptions at play in who can be defined as a coronavirus patient. On top of that, there are multiple ways to test someone: for example, there are tests that find molecular signs of infections, tests that look for antibodies against the virus, as well as CT scans of a patient’s lungs. There are certain standards agreed upon that are not the only possible standards that could have been chosen.

None of this means that coronavirus patients are a made-up category. Instead, the discussion of ways of knowing about the coronavirus shows that making knowledge is a complex practice. What I want to focus on here, however, is not the way in which single patients are categorized, but how knowledge is created about a population. In the case of the before-mentioned increase, the Chinese government had to justify measures it was taking to stop the spread of the virus. It could do this only by convincing the public, organizations, other lawmakers and foreign actors that the measures it was imposing were justified. The population became a patient that needed to be categorized in order to decide and justify what the right ‘medicine’ would be.

The justification of certain measures over others depends on how they are made legible. Using a method that results in lower numbers might inspire inaction, whereas using a method that results in higher numbers might inspire rash measures to contain the spread. Therefore, legibility provides two intertwined functions: it makes governments able to know about the people and things it has power over, and it provides justificatory measures for policies it decides upon. People and groups think differently about which measures are justified. As there are many stories going around about what is happening, how many cases there could be and what the governments’ next measures are going to be, it is hard to find a conclusive story to believe.

The statistics that governments and other institutions provide can help explain their choices. Inversely, which strategies of counting and categorizing are used also depends on the measures that need justification. And this depends on what we see as the thing that needs to be cured. Is it the disease in specific people? Is it the epidemic in a population? And if so, in which population does it need to be cured more urgently and about which places do we care less? Maybe it is a specific country’s healthcare system that needs to be held upright. To do this we could try to ‘flatten the curve’, i.e. spreading the cases of the disease over a longer time in order not to go over hospital capacity. Doing this, however, stands in contrast with keeping the economy running in the most profitable way. To let businesses survive the crisis, it would be better to lower the lockdown time. Instead, looser measures could be chosen for by propagating the notion of ‘herd immunity’. Governments could also support the economy, but to whom should they give their newly created money? Big businesses? Self-employed people? Small businesses?

Having these matters of concern in mind, we see that the statistics published about the coronavirus can respond to different worries and fears. This begs the question whether we should publish numbers about cases around the world, in specific continents, in specific regions, or countries. Which ‘unit of people’ we publish about and where we draw boundaries between these units stands in relation to the possible responses. Making the coronavirus epidemic legible, then, is not just something that has to do with abstract knowledge-making but is an act of responsibility towards certain concerns.

Choices have to be made here, though. We cannot be responsible to all possible concerns around the epidemic, because some of them clash. We cannot keep the economy functioning like it is and at the same time stop the spread of the disease. Moreover, attention to some concerns, like keeping the Austrian healthcare system functioning, draw away attention from others, like the spread of the virus in refugee camps. On the other hand, a concern for situations farther away from home might be linked to concerns about one’s own region if thought through properly. European governments were quite inattentive to the situation in China when the virus did not spread to Europe yet. The way in which the situation evolved shows that such inattention is no option in our globalized societies.

Taking these thoughts into account, it is important to demand public access to the way in which figures about the pandemic are being created. On the website of the Austrian ministry for social affairs, for example, the government publishes how many people have been tested and how many of those tests were positive. The website explains that a test is conducted when a ‘health officer’ reports a potential case of the disease. This does not explain which decisions this officer should take to decide whether a potential patient is going to be tested. It is important that such information is made available to evaluate the justifications that governments use to implement certain measures. When governmental authorities show certain graphs to justify their measures, we should know what these graphs show, whether the shown in- or decrease in cases represent patients in hospitals, tested patients, or an estimate of the number of patients.

It will be very interesting to witness the discussions on what is worth a proper response and what is not during the rest of the pandemic and during its aftermath. The outbreak has opened up cracks of social inequalities that have been unethical, if not outright dangerous to societies all over the world. When people do not have access to healthcare, for instance, the disease spreads faster. If people are forced to keep working while they are ill or at risk of getting ill, they will take more risk and possibly spread the virus. If hospitals are incentivized to compete on a ‘health care market’, they will increasingly push away extra capacity to deal with emergency situations. Moreover, we will see for which populations governments are willing to take measures and spend money and for which they won’t. Which economical actors will get compensation for the production capacity lost in the past weeks and which won’t?

Another big question confronting us is how the current crisis will affect the attentiveness to future threats that are further from home. This is connected to the insight that in a globalized world, it is impossible to hide and protect your own while leaving others to their bad fortunes. How do the processes of making the coronavirus crisis visible and the swift responses to it compare to how the climate crisis has been made visible over the past decades? What about research on social inequality? It seems that making something legible does not directly translate into action from governments and society. Nonetheless, the way in which we make these threats visible, where we draw the boundaries between units of analysis such as populations, will have big effects on the measures taken in these future crises.

I want to thank Ruth Falkenberg and Isabel Frey for their very helpful critique and suggestions.

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Kamiel Mobach is a PhD student at our STS department researching the co-production of the scientific and sociopolitical identities of the ‘European Organization for Nuclear Research’ (CERN). He is interested in the historical evolution of notions such as ‘fundamental research’ and ‘objectivity’ as well as their sociopolitical functions.

By Marvin Alexander Heine

…I open up my eyes and see dozens of humans, young and old, in pleasurable selfindulgence deeply immersed in their phone. With a certain skepticism I watch a tastefully attained man, a father, holding his infant child. The child watches a shrill cartoon on one phone, while the man scrolls with his thumb over the display of a separate phone. This little instrument compartmentalizes, isolates and trains the perception of this defenseless creature. Smartphones bring everyone back to the safety of their home, the comfortzones, the satisfaction of online-shopping, fast-food-information, and simulated human connection(1). They are distant, objective facts, signifiers of a self-referential necessity, constantly transforming and conjuring by proudly proofing their own point. But most of all, these little, black objects that gently touch and smoothly caress the skin, – are hygienic, clean and sterile. Smell-less as they are, havens from the chaos of sensory information, they offer refuge and oblivion. Forget realism, – this is capitalist sensualism, – hyperaestheticized. I smell the disturbing taste of red-bull, deodorants, perfumes, textiles, a burger. I think someone just farted. This is life, teeming bare life. It is the same everydayness which is positioned as pathological above and below. So we let it fade away and replace it with an anosmic cube (2), white hygiene, offering a mesmerizing flow of information and disinformation to the sensorially deprived, culturally homogenized human of the 21. century, who’s subjective sensibility was cultivated and brought into being by the absent, the image, – by the disciplinary repetition of the mantra of commodity. We partake in the creation and approval of tautological, cannibalizing socio-economic virtualities, realms of products, self representation and immediately satisfiable desires. The train carriage empties, station by station. The rumbling and clattering of steel in motion gains fidelity, the noises reconfigure, I sense difference, grain, particularities. The rhythm smooths the thorns of noise.

Across from where I sit, a few seats further, facing me, garmented in a strikingly vivid Indian sari, I see a cheerful, beautiful woman, performing little dances, making funny faces and blowing kisses, dedicated to the little child in the baby stroller in front of her. The warmth and love she emanates is intense and radiates in pulses trough our train compartment. I have to smile and at one point I cannot hold it anymore and I laugh out loud. So here I sit, alone, dressed in a black hoodie. Next to me, not able to see the mother with her child, sits a young woman in my age, who’s attention I attracted. I feel her curious gaze on me, while I have to smile more and more broadly. When I look at her, from the corner of my eyes, I see an even, interesting face, revealing myriads of micro-expressions simultaneously. She reminds me of someone, – someone who makes me happy. Her eyes are filled with fire, almost blazing, – blue fire and pitch black lashes. There are only us four left in the carriage. The mother, her child, the woman next to me and me. The rhythms fade into each other. Like a Spanish guitar’s husky music. My whole body is filled with happiness, thanks to a mother’s play with her child. My feelings in turn contaminated the woman next to me, who is laughing too – and so here we are, transforming this space with solidarity and warmth. The air is sweeter, the colors brighter. This unexpected subversion of stereotypes, this theater of promise and desire for face-to-face contact, renders this space incomplete, in the making, let’s us script this place as it did script us before (3). New constellations of meaningful relations, new bodies of resonances, – a new rhythm, only for a short duration, and yet undeniably present, has been imprinted, echoing and reverberating into every corner of this space, this chaotic, smelly, noisy realm of the inbetween.

Everydayness, celebrated, in the constant process of becoming and transforming, creates moments of eurhythmia, alignment, potential and change. Of course, small encounters like these are necessary elements of the bigger rhythm, the rhythms of the state and of commodity and suffering. And yet, being surprised, being part of a hopeful improvisation among people, – sensing the poetics and potentialities of exchange, of micro-gestures, is a small revolution (4). All we need is, – more of it. Much more, – until this machine we’re sitting in, those networks, the whole city and every drunk, monk, dog and smartphone is infected by it, by an idea, the idea of creation and multiplicity, of decentering and diversity. I exit the Bridges in Spittelau, Vienna. 2019. Taken by the author train. I feel a little bit dizzy. I walk and walk, not knowing where to or why. But the sky seems brighter and the passerby’s faces seem more lively. Suddenly I realize that my path led me straight to a graveyard.

The air tastes like metal and mountain water. Where I am standing, with my eyes closed again, I am sensing and sniffing in the scents of fresh ploughed soil. It is quiet. I hear the wind playing in the trees, and every now and then there is a numb „donk“ when a chestnut hits the ground. I take a deep breath and open my eyes. I am standing in the center of an empty, wide square with seven narrow paths branching away from it. This area has the size of 2,5 km2, it is larger than two of Vienna’s districts combined and if one takes a closer look at the maps, it becomes obvious that this place is a labyrinth. This is the second largest Graveyard in Europe, designed by famous architects to give the dead a comfortable place to rot. They did a great job. I feel oddly alive and save, walking over the bones of three million viennese. „A schene Leich“. That’s what people use to say here. A good looking corpse. The people living in this city have the same morbid humor today as they had in 1874, when they dug up the earth to bury Jakob Zelzer, the first one among millions to be buried here. I take a look at the lighter in my hand: a giveaway-present, and in white letters it says „Bestattungen Wien“. I have to smile. I light up a cigarette and walk towards to setting sun in the west, which will probably lead me towards the buddhist cemetery, – and then the jewish cemetery. I really like it, that in this place the remains of human beings from every confession, culture, origin lie next to each other, laughing about the past and the present, and the ridiculous reasons the living bash their heads in over supposed ethnic and religious differences (5).

I enter a narrow pathway which is beautifully framed by an alley of glooming yellow and lilac autumn trees. The golden leaves that cover the ground crumble gently under the sole of my boots. There are 330.000 tombstones and at this moment every single one throws a growing shadow. The sun-cycle, and a thousand graves, – an enormous choreography, perfectly synchronized. In this charming city, – where the main problem in the summer time seems to be the question, if the subway-trains should be automatically aromatized with zitron-perfume (6), around 44 people are dying per day, – and 40 of them end up here, at the Wiener Zentralfriedhof, right beneath my feet. And that, my friend, is the bill. You have to pay 2,500 to 4,000 € to get disposed. But you had a whole life to work hard, spend your nights drinking and moaning, you deserve something better. Here, we have this beautiful shiny coffin for you for only a little extra-charge. No? You want to get cremated? We can do that! But if you want to take the urn home, we have to check in, and see if you placed the little casket in a delicate and solemn manner. What? No! That’s not a joke. That’s actually the law. A few days earlier, when I was having a tour through the central funeral building, I had the morbid pleasure to have a look into their „showroom“. You can get your remains bedded on the finest silk, or your ashes pressed into a diamond. When you are old you cannot work. You don’t earn money. You cannot spend it. You’re outside. They are making you invisible and hide you. And you are helping, because you are so damned ashamed to be useless. You are like one of those DELL laptops from 2007. A waste of resources. Redundant. Right until you made your last breath. Now, my friend, you are finally of value again (7). We throw a funeral-party for you, with the best wine from Niederösterreich. We buy a little sculpture of some divine person and take the second most expansive tombstone. My dear dead friend from Vienna, do you even realize how many jobs depend on you?

A strange sound awakens me from this imaginary dialogue. I am standing between two rows of graves, all of them overgrown with dark-red ivory. Behind one of them I see a pair of hooves disappearing. At first I don’t really believe it. I heard about the twenty deers living on this graveyard, but…Very slowly I place my feet on the gras, walking carefully closer, – and there is, in fact, a deer. The deer is eating the flowers from a grave. I like the attitude. Suddenly the deer is shaking it’s head very ambitiously and ends up looking at me. Behind a maria-statue a second deer appears. Hello Mr. and Mrs. Deer. After an awkward moment of silence8 these obscenely graceful creatures keep eating the flowers. I grew up wandering through forests and there was no deer daring to get so close to me. But in my forest they shoot deers on regular basis. On this graveyard no deer died since the mid-1980s. I follow them for over an hour. Every now and then a plane is flying extremely loudly over our heads. All three of us freeze when this happens. The Airport Schwechat, which was build seven decades after the Graveyard, is close. Thus, it is not allowed to let more than 14 balloons fly into the sky from these grounds. A graveyardguide told me that 15 balloons are enough to seriously confuse a pilot. That was a peculiar detail. I say thank you to my new friends and leave them be. I walk to the forest-graveyard, sit down on a tree-trunk, right next to a little burning candle. Everything around me looks like a forest clearing, – but looking closer I see a teddybear, little self-made boards with names written on them. For some reason it is not creepy. I light up a cigarette and watch people in the distance walking by. Then I see two young persons appear close to me. Every now and then they exchange a few sentences. They seem to be happy. They drink and smoke and lough and brood, and then they are investigating this tree, and then that plant. Explorers! Everyone, everything, our whole culture and economy rejects the notion of dying. They try to absorb it, to simulate it, to repress it. And here we are, on the grounds where so many people are buried, joyfully taking dying for granted, in the middle of a city, surrounded by highways, fiber-glass-cables, invisible communication-networks, by water and subways-trains, emergency response systems, advertisement-jingles, – and ghosts. (This was part two of a two part essay. Part one was published on this blog last week.)

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Marvin Alexander Heine is a master student at the department of sociology at the University of Vienna. He is deeply interested in the senses, their phenomenology, mediations, and politics. Currently he is writing and filming his master thesis about the influence of the urban acoustics on processes of socialization.

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Notes

(1) Amin & Thrift argue, that „the everyday rhythms of domesticate life have rarely counted as part of the urban, as though the city stopped at the doorstep of the home. But domesticate life is now woven routinely into the urban ‚public realm‘. How else are we to interpret the rise of home-working and teleshopping, and ‚public‘ involvement through the consumptiopn of goods, television, the internet and the growing exposure of domesticate life in chat shows (…)“. (Amin & Thrift 2002: p. 18)
(2) The Anosmic Cube, as it is articulated by Drobnick: „(…) smooth surfaces and geometric perfection point not inly to an intolerance of the olfactory, but to a distrust of the organic, of the sensual, of anything alluding to the realities and controversies of the external world.“ (Drobnick, 2005: p. 267)
(3) Blok & Farias argue, that „the urban built environment has been cast as a text that is written and read by different urban actors in different ways“. (Blok & Farias 2016: p.568)
(4) Lefebvre argues, that „by fully reinstating the sensible in consciousnesses and in thought, he (the rhythmanalyst) would accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world and this society in decline.“ (Lefebvre 1992: p. 26)
(5) For more information on the escalation that happened upon the opening of Zentralfriedhof in Vienna see Bauer (2004)
(6) For more information on spraying incense into Vienna’s subway carriages see Walker (2019)
(7) „Violent death changes everything, slow death changes nothing, for there is a rhythm, a scansion necessary to symbolic exchange: something has to be given in the same movement and following the same rhythm, otherwise there is no reciprocity and it is quite simply not given. The strategy of the system of power is to displace the time of the exchange, substituting continuity and mortal linearity for the immediate retaliation of death. It is thus futile for the slave (the worker) to give little by little, in infinitesimal doses, to the rope of labour on which he is hung to death, to give his life to the master or to capital, for this ‘sacrifice’ in small doses is no longer a sacrifice it doesn’t touch the most important thing, the différance of death, and merely distils a process whose
structure remains the same.“ (Baudrillard 1993: p. 71)
(8) „The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins here.“ (Derrida 2006: p. 29)

Bibliography

Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2002). Introduction & The Legibility of the Everyday City. In Cities: Reimagining the Urban (pp. 1-30). Cambridge: Polity.
Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic Exchange And Death. Sage: London.
Bauer, W. (2004). Wiener Friedhofsführer: Genaue Beschreibung sämtlicher Begräbnisstätten nebst einer Geschichte des Wiener Bestattungswesens (Kultur für Genießer). Wien: Falter Verlag.
Derrida, J. (2006). The Animal That Therefore I am. New York: Fordham University Press.
Drobnick, J. (2002). Volatile Architectures. XYZ Books, Toronto.
Farias, I. & Blok, A. (2016). STS in the City. In C. Miller, et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (4th Edition, pp. 555-582). Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Lefebvre, H. (1992). Rhythmanalysis. London: Bloomsbury.
Walker, S. (2019). Passengers incensed: Vienna adds perfumed trains to €1 a day travel. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/19/vienna-trials-perfumedsubway-
trains-passengers-incensed-austria-u-bahn

By Marvin Alexander Heine

It is the 11th of October, 2019, in Vienna, Austria, and a little more than a dozen human beings, all young and more or less healthy, stand in front of a huge, dusty machine. Their heads are covered with colorful helmets, and, even though it is rather early in the morning, underneath those helmets one can spot faces that are wide awake and thirsty for knowledge. In their culture, these promising animals (1) seek to become scientists, they are hopeful, and eager to change the world for the better. They take notes, hold up their recorders, ask specific, appropriate questions and listen carefully to the answers given by an enthusiastic tour-guide. This machine they observe, is part of a bigger machine. It’s like one organ of a larger organism.

The guide explains carefully and passionately the purpose of those metal-structures, their history, their transformation and economic implementation. The hall they’re in is very large and every sound in here reverberates and echoes for quite a while. The south-wall is completely covered with windows and one can see the eery sunrays through the dusty air. This machine consists of tubes and turbines and connection pipes, like calcified veins (2). Those sophisticated creatures keep walking, secretly taking pictures, protocoling every single detail in their notebooks. Strange staircases lead the cohort into the heart of this nonhuman metal cyborg (3), which is a building in itself.

The sheer complexity of this structure is overwhelming, to the extend of being boring (4). All this seems like a metaphor, a little model which represents society, or a nervous system. Yellow pipes for gas, blue for oil. Or was it the other way around? Our tour-guide tries to convince us, that we are confronted with an active energy plant, – a very modern one even, one that supplies 730.000 households with heat and electricity. Every now and then someone with a blue collar rides by on an old, loud bike, – like an extra, a bystander. This is, supposedly, an incineration plant, which works almost entirely with burning waste, – and therefore, – our guide incessantly repeats it, this plant is on the forefront of environmentally friendly energy production. A few decades earlier, he continues, there were dangerous symptoms of pollution and destruction, forest dying, sicknesses, etc. But improvements, using waste as energy, renouncing coal, changed a lot. If the politics would give more subsidies, if industries would improve their vision and if consumers would change their behavior, incineration plants like this one could be the future.

The students skeptically look around. There is still this scent of an old library or a museum in the air. The planet’s human population has doubled in the past 50 years. In that same period, the size of the global economy has quadrupled, and global trade has grown tenfold. Humans have significantly altered seventy-five per cent of the land. Over 85 per cent of wetlands have been lost. Approximately half the world’s coral cover is gone. In the past ten years alone, at least seventy-five million acres of forest have been destroyed. More than 7,000 underground methane gas bubbles are about to explode in the Arctic. We’ve emitted as much atmospheric carbon in the past thirty years as we did in the previous two centuries of industrialization and massive crop failures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic floodings are reported on a daily basis, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought (5).

And almost everyone still believes, that „if we all unite“ then we can still prevent the environmental apocalypse. Especially when we change our own „consumer behavior“. Well, why not? It is a first step, and if it’s true, that this energy plant is not just a museumpiece, than it is a manifested symbol of an alternative approach for natural and artificial coexistence. And to be honest, this species had millions of years to develop a wheel, and now, confronted with the destruction they caused, like ignorant children that didn’t know better, they have only 30-40 years to change EVERYTHING, or being forced to adapt to a new world. So energy plants like these, even though they might not actually prevent an immanent catastrophe, are, considering the circumstance, surprisingly progressive and inspiring (6). The tour has ended. The students swarm out, in every direction, towards busses, trams, machines to live in. Still in thought I walk towards a close-by train-station.

I don’t have to ease my pace, sidestep or use my limbs. This wall of glass welcomes me, it opens up and leads my way. As if by magic, and politeness, a friendly mechanic instinct detected my approach and cautiously reacts by opening up a door. The temperature changes, the air is dry and warm and filled with distant scents: Something sweet, like popcorn, – oil and meat. I smell kerosine, metal and dust. Transpiration of skin, restlessness and anxiety inexorably evaporates from a socio-technical body in motion. Sluggish machines, like lethargic little elephants, reluctantly suck in the wrappings of fastfood, flyers and printed advertisements. Showcases, seductions, a shiny flicker of light. I rest and observe and let myself be immersed by a car commercial. Those happy childreneyes, their motionless hair in the wind, /freedom/, a promised adventure. Next to it, barely dressed in dark-red lingerie, a female, whispering the colors of love, Baisser Volé: Cartier.

After a while, their unvoiced expressions change. They urge me to move on, to go to work, not to disrupt the flow, because I can’t afford them, only dream of them. A few steps forward and I get swept away by a current of bodies. Click-clacking shoes, fragmented announcements, distorted pop-music, leather, denim, wool: an intricate sound of movement, of routine, of busy bees buzzing around their hives. With a generic movement I validate the ticket and turn around (7).

 

 

Relentless, seamless streams of humans arise from, – or disappear in the underground’s gullet. Standing on the right side of the escalator, I hold on to the handrail and surrender, like everyone else around me, to the raw and efficient trans-human metabolism of urban public transport systems. As I descend, the appearance of things changes, their references to social reality, their cultural framework. White Noise. Sterile but warm. I cannot hear the cars anymore, the supermarkets, the sing-song from the coffeeshop. The rhythms that lay hidden above, now impose themselves upon my senses. Waiting. To dislocate. Departure in four minutes. Where am I? In-between. Only in those quiet minutes while waiting for a train I can clearly see the city (8).

 

I sense cyclical repetition, infinite itineraries, discontinuous lines of flight, a kaleidoscopic urban world. Each station linked into a greater uniform identity. Even down here, in this submerged and hidden non-space of the urban, where everyone is standing still, – I sense a thousand and one movements, bacterias, human hearts and disconnections. The platform releases subliminal vibrations, slowly intensifying, – and then I smell and feel the invisible wind being pushed through the tunnel. Joining the pressure in my ears the noise of steel and heaviness grows closer and stronger, instinctively alerting my body, – and then this monster of a machine, a cyborg city in itself, decelerates right before my eyes. An acoustical trauma for everyone who has never heard a subway approaching. I see myself reflected by the moving train, – a hypnotizing stop motion sequence, – until this mindless metal worm finally stops and yawns and coughs and vomits out passengers. After a mechanic choreography of giving way and entering and keeping distance and an impersonal face, I push away a populist tabloid paper, sit down and close my eyes.

A short moment of quietude followed by a signal as sharp as knife. I see red flashes of light through my closed eyelids, hear wheels forcefully grasp onto the rails and abruptly clickshutting doors. Zwish, Klonk. One hears and sees those trains start up, pull forward, but how? And Why? Those trains and the generatively multiplying networks they are part of are veins rooted beneath us, secretive symptoms of clandestine structures, constantly on the verge of breakdown. No one is really in charge (9). They are accepted as truly facts as rivers and lakes are (10). An ungraspable whole. And at the center is me, listening with my body, blindfolded, with my senses in evenly suspended attention. I hear de-centered recurrent patterns, relations of immediacy, the rippling and rising of voices. A concatenation of rhythms, acousmatic ghosts (11) of presences, time both broken and accentuated. Smells that overlap, irritate and vanish, – someone’s breakfast, someone else’s dinner. Everyone on this train is living out an individual itinerary, going to work, getting home, to the library, the bar. These itineraries, subjectively lived, endow this train with reality. And yet, everyone is conforming according to a certain social code, in the comfort of collective morality (12). The moving subway oscillates as a shadow, a mirror of the terrestrial, reflecting back on those spaces as they are charged by cultural and ideological forces (13)… (This was part one of a two part essay. Part two will be published on this blog in the following week.)

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Marvin Alexander Heine is a master student at the department of sociology at the University of Vienna. He is deeply interested in the senses, their phenomenology, mediations, and politics. Currently he is writing and filming his master thesis about the influence of the urban acoustics on processes of socialization.

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Notes

(1) Derrida, in his lecture „the animal that therefore I am“ refers to Nietzsche when he says „man is a promising animal (…) an animal that is permitted to make promises.“ (Derrida 2006: p.3)
(2) Kaika M., for example, states: „Cities are dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously human, material, natural, discursive, cultural, and organic (Kaika 2005: p. 23).
(3) Lancionne and McFarlance, when discussing key contributions of the urban political ecology (UPE) state, based on Haraway’s cyborgs and Latour’s hybrids„that the urban cannot be separated from the biophysical, and that the city is a key place for the reconfiguration of socio-natures“ (Lancionne & McFarlane 2016: p. 4.)
(4) Star begins her article on the ethnography of Infrastructure by stating, that many „aspects of Infrastructure are unexciting“, and that the scientists should explore the „embedded strangeness, a second order one, that of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place“. (Star 1999: p. 377ff)
(5) To find information on the acuteness off our environmental’s catastrophe one could read Wallace-Wells article „When Will Climate Change Make the Earth Too Hot For Humans?“ (Wallace-Wells 2017), or Jonathan Franzen’s „What If We Stopped Pretending?“ (Franzen 2019).
(6) Hommels discusses the problem of urban obduracy, and why changing embedded urban structures proves so difficult: „Once a technological frame work is established, it will guide the ways of thinking and interacting between actors.“ (Hommels 2018: p. 211)
(7) “In front of the bank automat I had to act as a generic individual endowed only with an individual pin code; pressed against the barrier on the pavement I was a mechanical force weighing against another mechanical force; in front of the traffic light I became a reader of signs, capable of understanding a prohibition;[…]” (Latour and Hermant 1998, plan 33).
(8) Sadjic argues, that „this new species of city is not an accretion of streets and squares that can be comprehended by the pedestrian, but instead manifests its shape from the air, the car, or the mass transit railway.“ (Sudjik 1992: p.297)
(9) One of the nine properties of infrastructures, according to Star is, that infrastructure „is fixed in modular increments, not all at once or globally“ (Star 1999: p. 382), and that this kind of de-centralization doesn’t allow for one determining control-system.
(10) Cronon, referring to the invention of railroad systems in North America, states that trains seem „less as an artificial invention than as a force of nature.“ (Cronon 1991: p. 73)
(11) „The acousmatic is a sound heard whose origin we do not see.“ (Labelle 2010: p. 14)
(12)„Transgressed or not, the law of the metro inscribes the individual itinerary into the comfort of collective morality, and in that way it is exemplary of what might be called the ritual paradox: it is always lived individually and subjectively; only individual itineraries give it a reality, and yet it is eminently social, the same for everyone, conferring on each person this minimum of collective identity through which a community is defined.“ (Marc Augé 2002: p. 30)
(13) This reminds of Foucault’s definition of heterotopia, that has „the curious property of being connected to all the other emplacements, but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented by them.“ (Foucault 1998: p.178)

Bibliography

Augé, M. (2002). In the Metro. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cronon, W. (1991). Preface & Rails and Water. In Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (pp. xiii-xxiii & 55-93). New York: W.W. Norton.
Derrida, J. (2006). The Animal That Therefore I am. New York: Fordham University Press.
Foucault, M. (1998). Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 2, Aesthetics. London: Penguin Books.
Franzen, J. (2019). What If We Stopped Pretending? Retrieved from: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending
Hommels, A. (2018). Re-Assembling a City: Applying SCOT to Post-Disaster Urban Change. In M. Kurath et al. (Eds.) Relational Planning: Tracing Artefacts, Agency and Practices (pp. 205-228). London: Routledge.
Kaika, M. (2005). Preface: Visions of Modernization & The Urbanization of Nature. In City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (pp. 3-26). New York, NY: Routledge.
LaBelle, B. (2010). Acoustic Territories. New York: Continuum.
Lancione, M. & McFarlane, C. (2016). Infrastructural becoming: sanitation, cosmopolitics and the (un)making of urban life at the margins. In A. Blok & I. Farias (Eds.) Urban Cosmopolitics (pp. 45-62). London: Routledge
Latour, B., & Hermant, E. (1998). Paris: Invisible City. Paris: La Découverte. (Virtual Book: [Sequences: 1 Traversing + 4 Allowing] http://www.bruno–latour.fr/virtual/ paris/english/frames.html).
Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3),377–391.
Sudjik, D. (1992). The 100 mile city. Harcourt Brace, San Diego.
Wallace-Wells, D. (2017) The Uninhabitable Earth. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

By Florentine Frantz

When you study medicine, you become a doctor. When you study law, you become a lawyer. But when you study STS, what do you become? The answer to that question is not straight forward, but it is a pressing one, for current and future STS students. Therefore, my colleagues from the STS Austria Council, Max Fochler and Helene Sorgner, Martina Merz, and I decided to organize a workshop titled “Skills, Career Trajectories and Stories”*. Many students from both Austrian STS Master programs (University of Vienna and University of Klagenfurt) as well as a handful of PhD students attended our event in early December. In this blog-post, I want to share my reflections on the event.

Skills – “You might not be aware of what you know”

You might not be aware of what you know – was one of the major takeaways from Jessica Mesman’s keynote speech. She repeatedly highlighted that STS people are often not aware of their own skills. Still, knowing what you know may be critical when thinking about careers. Many of the skills we acquire throughout our studies are seemingly invisible and become tacit intellectual tools. However, they are valuable assets in many different working environments.

STS people think differently about reality. STS students, who might be attracted by the shining buzzwords of Science, Technology or Innovation, will soon learn that STS people have distinct and critical perspectives on them: Science is understood not as a value-free search for truth, but as a complex socio-technical assemblage, full of practices, cultures and meanings. Moreover, science is never decoupled from society, but it is always embedded within specific contexts and co-produced with them. Technologies are in STS not understood as passive artefacts, but as active and political non-human actors. Innovation is never just technological innovation but always social innovation too, in how it is collectively imagined and in how it changes society. We often think about the same concepts as other people, but we think differently about them. We approach them with an intellectual sensibility that aims to recognize tacit assumptions, values or political and social dimensions.

This particular perspective on reality also is mirrored in how STS people approach problems. On the one hand, they are problem analysts, who don’t start with quick fixes. They open problems up trying to understand the underlying complexities and entanglements between actors before they propose solutions. On the other hand, STS people engage in counter-intuitive reasoning, in how they open black boxes and think outside boxes. Jessica, for instance, works with the notion of exnovation instead of innovation. Thus, she thinks about what we can learn from what is already there to improve, rather than fostering innovation, where new things are deemed necessary to improve a situation.

In our increasingly complex technoscientific worlds, it is often not enough to look at challenges only from one angle. That’s why STS education covers a wide range of disciplinary inputs, including sociology, philosophy, feminist studies, political science, anthropology, or the history and philosophy of science, which should give us the intellectual tools to grasp what’s going on in the situations we study.

But also, in who does STS, we see wide-ranging interdisciplinarity. While bringing the multidisciplinary perspectives together may be challenging in the first month of an STS Master’s program, it is definitely worth it. The capacity to look at things from different angles makes STS graduates not only good bridge builders in future jobs but also creates an attentiveness for how to deal with the intertwinedness and the complexity of the world, and to embrace a diversity of perspectives as desirable.

Moreover, we are often not aware of the advanced social and general skills we learn. We learn how to ask questions and strategies for answering them. We learn how to present and communicate our results and gain argumentative resources. We learn time and project management. Just because there is no “Soft-Skills” label attached to it, it does not mean that there are no soft-skills being trained.

 

Career Trajectories & Stories

Besides awareness of skills, it helps to have some ideas in mind of where people go and what people do when they do STS and get paid for it. Here, we can, of course, refer to wider job categories such as reflexive technology assessment, consulting, STI policy, science education, research funding agencies or journalism. Nonetheless, we thought it would be fascinating to have real people telling us about their STS career trajectories. Thus, we invited 6 STS alumni as “Living Books” to our workshop, who can tell us their stories of what and how they worked after having pursued an STS education.

None of our guests had foreseen their career-trajectories after having completed their studies. We heard about fortunate coincidences, of a back and forth between jobs or about prolonging jobs because too many new projects came up. Still, they all described how the skills they learned in STS are important in their everyday work. In particular, being sensitive to build-in assumptions and the capacity to get the bigger picture. Moreover, some of them reported how they developed their STS perspectives further throughout their occupational life. You probably haven’t mastered STS 100% once you get your Master’s degree. You learn rather how to look at the world, and the more you see, the more you can understand and question it

You will hardly find any STS jobs which are explicitly looking for graduates wearing the “Science, Technology, Society” label. But, looking into the required qualification of many jobs, you will most likely see that you are well trained for a variety of jobs carrying other labels. Still, it can sometimes, be challenging to illustrate your skills to your future employer and show what you are capable of doing or how you are capable of thinking. In particular, because googling “STS” in Austria might yield results about a famous Austropop band with the same name. However, it can be helpful to illustrate what STS does by providing your own empirical work in the form of theses, articles, blog-posts or seminar papers.

Also, not every STS course of studies, even within the same Master’s programme, is the same. At the University of Vienna, students are free to choose between different research specializations and thematic courses within them. It allows students to develop their individual interests regarding the manifold relationships between science, technology, and society further. This influences, of course, which topics we think more or less about. But, as Jessica reminded us STS people are trained as specialized generalists. We get specialized in how to look at the world, but we are not limited by where to look at. Hence, rest reassured, just because you write your thesis on one topic doesn’t mean you can never do anything else again.

Concluding, I want to stress, drawing on Jessica’s talk, that just because “We are always critical in STS. We are never just applauding”, we should not be overly critical when it comes to our own skillset. Even though there is no stereotypical career path as it is the case with many other lines of education, this does by no means mean that there are no jobs for STS graduates. We get trained a wide range of valuable skills, which we can apply in a myriad of ways, be it in working environments or in life more generally.

* At this point, I want to thank my co-organizers for being a dream-team organizing committee.

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Florentine Frantz is a PhD student and researcher at the Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice, working in the project Borderlands of Good Scientific Practice. Her main research interests lie in studying the dynamics of contemporary academia as well as how and which socio-epistemic and institutional configurations matter for doing research, in particular doing ‘good’ research.

By Ruth Falkenberg

As STS researchers, we constantly examine how knowledge is produced as well as disseminated, we inquire into the ways in which stories about science and technology are told and shared. In telling our own stories, we usually stick to established and commonly accepted forms of academic communication – we give conference presentations, we write papers for peer-reviewed journals, and already writing a blogpost like this one seems to be a refreshingly different form of engagement. Yet why not tell our own stories in more radically different ways?

The importance of rethinking the ways in which we tell our stories has been highlighted by STS scholars such as John Law, who in his book After Method encourages us to open up academic research and writing more to creativity and departures from the normativity of standard methods, in order to allow for grasping and enacting a wider range of realities. Being more directly concerned with practices of storytelling, also Donna Haraway frequently invites us to think about ways of ‘storying otherwise’.

One form of story-telling that enjoys quite some popularity – and that is increasingly used for the dissemination of information about science and technology – is the podcast. For me, the podcast is an interesting medium that allows to tell, approach, and receive stories in different ways. Thinking about calls like the one by Law to open up our own ways of storytelling, I started to look out for approaches in the field of STS that use this medium. In this blogpost, I want to present a selection of the variety of interesting podcasts that I came across during my search, amongst which some are recommendations from my colleagues here at the Vienna STS department. Not all of these podcasts have been produced by STS scholars, but they all touch upon issues related to our field of inquiry, open up new perspectives, and tell stories in ways that are a bit unlike than what we are used to.

An interesting example of an STSy podcast is the “How To Think About Science” series in which David Cayley talks to and about various philosophers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists of science, among them many familiar voices from the STS community, including, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Bruno Latour, or Brian Wynne. As an STS scholar, one will not find all too radically new ideas here, yet the series is definitely a valuable opportunity to listen to some STS stories in a different format than usual. Moreover, while the podcast series is framed as a look at science as an institution rather than STS per se, it still seems worth a recommendation for people outside of our own field who want to engage with some introductory STS perspectives without having to read lengthy academic papers.

Another thought-provoking introductory piece to some STS ideas is a podcast on “The Invention of Objectivity” with Peter Gallison and Lorraine Daston, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Coming rather from a history of science perspective, it may equally be worth a recommendation to students at the beginning of their careers in STS and as well to people who want to engage with science and its often taken for granted assumptions in a critical and reflexive manner.

A podcast that engages with more concrete issues surrounding technoscience and its relation to the societies we live in, is produced by the Bergman Klein Centre for Internet and Society who publish fishbowl discussions or other events in a podcast format. Here, one can follow conversations of “leading cyber-scholars, entrepreneurs, activists, and policymakers as they explore the bleeding edge of the internet and technology, democracy, law, and society”: The discussed topics range from algorithmic bias in resume search engines employed in hiring processes to broad issues such as how technology can be governed.

In contrast to this rather unconventional podcast format, the Digital Sociology Podcast by sociologist Christopher Till utilizes a more classical interview style, featuring conversations with various scholars who deal with digital culture and society in different ways. It is also worth scrolling further down the archive of this series, which started out with podcasts focusing specifically on Digital Health/Digital Capitalism. Personally, I would particularly recommend episode three featuring philosopher of technology Tamar Sharon who talks about her work on self-tracking and the quantified self.

Addressing a much broader and less academic audience, the podcasts of the Freakonomics series deal with “the hidden sides of everything” (thus not only but still often focusing on science and technology). While the series is not made by STS scholars or focusing primarily on STS topics, the hosts often take things apart in a quite critical manner, and definitely offer though-provoking viewpoints. Dealing with topics that range from 23andMe (a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company) to “How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War”, the podcasts offer interesting opportunities to encounter (critical) perspectives on science and technology provided by people from other fields than our own.

Similarly, also the 99% invisible podcast is not explicitly devoted to STS topics, but in dealing with the unnoticed aspects of (technological) design and architecture in the worlds that surround us, it often offers quite STSy viewpoints. The podcast’s episodes usually focus on a specific example of design and often feature interviews with architects, various kinds of experts, or people who have been influenced by the design – thus including both designer as well as user perspectives.

The last two podcasts I want to mention here may come closest to the idea of specifically sharing STS perspectives with a wider audience. One of these has recently been launched by STS scholars Shobita Partasarathy and Jack Stilgoe. In their podcast, they aim to challenge what they call “The Received Wisdom” about science, technology, and politics by talking to “thinkers and doers” from various domains and places. In doing so, they indent to reach audiences beyond our own academic field, to engage with people “out in the world” and specifically with those actually involved with science and technology. Setting out with these – from my perspective – quite promising goals, the first episode of the podcast already addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time – climate and tech activism in the context of the global climate crisis.

Last, a captivating podcast series produced by the Munich Centre for Technology in Society in the context of a seminar hosted by Ruth Müller. Quite in line with the thoughts that motivated me to write this blogpost, relating to how we can broaden our own ways of sharing and disseminating our stories, the seminar’s aim was to engage with the genre of the podcast in order to develop new practices of storytelling, specifically aiming to put questions of responsibility, sustainability and socio-ecological justice centre stage. The different episodes then deal with questions ranging from “What does it mean to drink a coffee “to go”?” to “How do scientists deal with questions they might never find an answer to?”.

Overall, while the collection of podcasts that I have presented here is certainly very selective, it may provide an impression of the various interesting formats that already exist out there in which one can listen to STS-related stories. I hope that this overview may serve as a stimulus for some who read this – for the own consumption or for recommendations to others, but especially also as an encouragement to maybe try out ourselves such different forms of sharing the knowledge we produce with wider audiences.

I want to thank all my colleagues from the Vienna STS department who provided me with very interesting and valuable inputs on my search for STSy podcasts.

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Ruth Falkenberg is a PhD student at the Research Platform Responsbile Research and Innovation in Academic Practice. She is interested in cultures of knowledge production and valuation practices in academia, particularly in the context of contemporary neoliberal regimes of research governance. Her dissertation is part of the project Valuing, Being and Knowing in Research Practices, which investigates how valuation practices and processes of subjectification are entangled with strategic decisions in researchers’ work.

By Artemis Papadaki Anastasopoulou

Anna Tsing writes how indeterminate encounters shape who we are. We are all contaminated, as “purity is not an option”¹ and multiple indeterminate encounters give us form and life. They are indeterminate because there is no direct control of their outcome; it is life in precarity at its finest. However, despite this absence of control, we can and, as I argue, should position ourselves in time-spaces where such encounters can happen – e.g. conferences, as I discuss in the following, along my experience of attending the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) Conference in Lancaster in summer 2018.

Exactly there, I not only had the chance to present some of my own work, but also got to experience multiple indeterminate encounters with people, topics, paper programmes, spaces and ideas. In the two following brief episodes, I touch not only on the meetings with people I would never had the chance to interact with otherwise, but also on the process of finding one’s own personal interests in the STS archipelago. Therefore, these are written accounts of encounters that deeply shaped my understanding of STS as discipline and of my own way of being in and out of the STS community.

Above all, I want to encourage Master’s students to go to such conferences, to position themselves in spaces in which such encounters can happen. In Lancaster, I could not fail to notice the low number of Master’s students within the conference crowd. “Why are there so few Master’s students attending this conference?” – that was a question which I kept coming back to whilst and after being there. Exploring and discussing this phenomenon with a colleague at post-doc level, he mentioned that he too did not attend conferences when being a Master’s student, simply because of not perceiving himself as part of the community. Giving a systematic answer to why Master’s students don’t attend conferences is beyond the given scope, but drawing on my own experience I briefly want to explore some reasons why I believe Master’s students should attend the EASST conference, and also touch upon the practical issues that might restrict them from doing so.

Beyond heroines and heroes

It’s 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 25th of July, and I am in front of Lancaster University’s Catholic Chapel, where a group of people are gathering for the ‘Meeting Soil’ excursion. The registration desk is not open yet, so no one is wearing name tags. As we head to the Ecohub garden and the permaculture grounds we are asked to communicate in small groups about who we are, why we are here, but also how we feel about being there. I was excited! What a great conference opener, encountering new people in a garden just to talk—first names only, not much academic talk, just talk.

Later in the afternoon, I am sitting in a panel discussion. In front of me are my own STS heroines and heroes, many of whom who I know only by reading their name tags. I was enthused. Having had read their work in my first semester, I felt like knowing them a little. The feeling was great, but I didn’t get to speak to them. On the other hand, I spoke to many other people whose work I had never read. I spoke with a person who is teaching design students, a librarian from Mexico and a PhD student who is doing fieldwork in India. At these conferences, there are many people whose work you have read in your studies, and they become important to you. I was looking forward to seeing them and listening to their talks; but I realised that the conference wasn’t only about this. It was also about all the other spontaneous meetings and encounters you would never otherwise have had. In particular, about all the people you wouldn’t have heard of or talked to otherwise.

On making decisions

The moment I got in my hands the conference programme I felt overwhelmed. SO MANY PANELS! Who should I see? The programme was 300 pages long and I needed to make decisions quickly, based on a very practical question; As I couldn’t go to all of them, I had to choose. This process of filtering invoked a reflection on my own interests, forced me to explore them and to ask myself: which panel will you go to now? Further, it helped me to reflect on my own research and what I feel connected too, but also assisted in seeing what other areas I am interested in. Hence, I left with a sense of security for what I want to pursue (at least in the near future) – the conference functioned as a filter through which I became more focused, grounded and content.

In the past, I have had many discussions with other students about our academic paths. STS offers so many interesting avenues of study that, when choosing a Master’s thesis topic or a PhD topic, it is easy to feel restricted by the need to pursue just one topic. There is a loss involved when you are interested in so many things but have to choose just one. At least, this is a feeling that I have had many times. For me, the conference offered a space where I could navigate my several interests and get the chance to explore them further. I got to hear talks and discuss them with people, see what they are currently working on, coming to understand if I could see myself researching these topics and approaches.

Of course, while there are many good reasons why Master’s students could benefit from conferences and their indeterminate encounters, there are also a number of obstacles potentially in the way of them being able to do so. These days, being granted a visa can be a problem faced by academics, Master’s students included. From personal experience, I know at least one person who couldn’t join the EASST conference due to visa issues. Finance can also be a considerable barrier, despite fee waivers being awarded to applicants. Are both Master’s and PhD student’s considered to be in the same category when fee reductions are considered? PhD students often get funds to go to such a conference whilst Master’s students don’t; so categorizing these groups as the same may disadvantage Masters students. However, such issues touch beyond the EASST conference and beyond the STS community as such.

Food-for-thought and collaborative survival

Taken together, these comments are offered as food-for-thought, for practices of inclusion within the STS community. The STS scholar and activist Max Liboiron writes about running a feminist environmental science lab, in which the values of equity (not equality) and humility are the center². Could STS conferences turn into spaces of resistance? Could STS conferences become the mushroom of Ana Tsing’s book that gives us new imaginations for collaborative survival? Perhaps it is too much to ask from a small field of STS, but for now one thing is sure: Master’s students have much to benefit from attending such conferences, just as much as the field of STS has to benefit from such students being there: they help building the community, challenge the traditions and assist in creating new spaces for an ever-expanding field.

1. Tsing AL. The Mushroom at the End of the World?: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press; 2017.
2. Liboiron M. How to titrate like a feminist. https://civiclaboratory.nl/2019/05/26/how-to-titrate-like-a-feminist/. Accessed May 31, 2019.

This blog post was originally published in EASST review. However, the version at hand was overworked by the original author, featuring additional theoretically-based reflections.

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Artemis Papadaki Anastasopoulou is a PhD student at Department of Science & Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her academic interest lies in the political dimensions of materiality with a focus on the case of plastics. Additionally, she cares about issues of inclusion and community building within STS and beyond.

by Sonja Steinbauer

“Whether jeans buttons, ceiling lights, beverage cans, coffee capsules, rooftops, cars or airplanes – aluminum is an integral part of our everyday lives. But what we always like to forget is that the raw material aluminum comes from the earth and its extraction strikes deep wounds in the landscape”, Global 2000 stated this year. Aluminium is the third most common element in the earth crust. It is an integral part of our everyday life and is used in construction industry, cosmetics or medicine. Nonetheless, this material has recently become the focus of critical investigations due to possible health risks or its mining conditions. This ambivalent views about aluminium were central in the STS-course “Science in Society Laboratories”. In the following poem, I describe the investigations my research group and I made during this seminar about aluminium and its implications concerning environment and health.

Aluminium, aliminium what a glittering material,
or just a killer in serial?

How to deal with it, how to cope,
is there any hope?

As this seems to be a rather complicated case, it
was often assessed,
and is here further addressed.

The theme was outspread through television,
science and news,
rightly, cause there are many connected issues.

Like possible health risks or environmental problems,
to name just some of them,
these are assessed further in this poem.

Let’s start by the Enviroment,
medial this topic is often completly absent.

Many indigenous people are threatened by mining,
companies,
experiencing personal tragedies.

Crop failure, polluted water and toxic bauxite are
problems going on,
in fact, to name just some.

But what do the companies do, what do they say,
to the people standing in their way?

We build you hospitals and give you streets,
but that’s not fitting to the peoples’ needs.

Communities not based on that,
causing social problems and therefore being a
threat.

Curing diseases they have caused,
their greed cannot even by NGOs or laws get
paused.

So there is only one thing to say,
dear companies, stop the greenwashing right away!

And the other ones to react are who,
or better said, what can we as consumers do?

Of course, less consumption means less production,
but the consumers reaction shouldn’t be the only
action.

Production processes in this case are very foggy,
and the consumer side alone really groggy.

National and international Actions need to be set,
so that goals concerning a better future can be met.

But the environment is not the only issue that needs
to be discussed,
giving an overview on possible health risks is a must.

Some say breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease,
stimualted by aluminium, would increase.

This is among others connected to aluminium in
cosmetics,
a question concerning consumer and production
ethics.

Antiperspirants were discussed the most,
is the aluminium in it the toxic if overdosed?

But what do scientific researchers say,
can they give a path or lead a way?

Studies are rare,
to make statements, they often don’t dare.

Scientific standards getting disregarded,
like studies with only two participants, to name a
target.

Only one assessment of humans was ever made,
and accumulated to the body aluminium still has an
uncertain fate.

The less problematic aluminium seems to be in food,
if taken up that way, it gets digested just the normal
route.

But concerning skin absorption or injection,
nobody can really declare the body’s reaction.

Furthermore, this uncertainty lets risky decisions
grow,
people not getting vaccinated in a row.

These determinations being taken,
even if the positive effect predominate, people
come on and waken!

Immunology said it’s unlikely for the named
disease,
that aluminium can cause it or increase.

Multi-layered indeed are Alzheimer’s’ and breast
cancer,
as many scientists will answer.

But only if aluminium does not have a direct effect,
does not mean that the body doesn’t react.

If you are already ill indeed,
caution about aluminium is what you need.

If you have serious problems with your kidney,
too much aluminium can be deadly.

If you have breast cancer to name a specific,
disease,
aluminium can work as xenoestrogen, which
stimulates the cancer to increase.

But by all these uncertain believes,
what about alternatives?

Concerning cosmetics, it is clear,
aluminium free products are on the market, if you
fear.

Especially alternative adjuvants are not even rare,
but companies don’t want to pay the fare.

To that theme I just say: Come on,
with safer options everybody would have won!

Alternatives definitely need to be staged,
and research due to uncertainties engaged.

Aluminium is a multi-layered theme,
concerning environment and health to name the
topic supreme.

As this poem is nearly past,
I make some statements at the last.

Aluminium production needs to become safe,
mandate mining companies to behave.

Better alternatives need to be chosen,
developments not because of financial issues frozen.

Research needs to be stimulated
and not unavailable knowledge simulated.

The theme aluminium is complicated indeed,
but with the right decisions, for fear there is no need.

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Sonja Steinbauer is a master student at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. Because of her other educational experiences (Bachelor in African Studies and Oriental Studies, Master in Theatre-, Film and Mediahistory), she was attracted by the interdisciplinary course “Science in Society Laboratories”, where she had the chance to encounter ‘the health risks of Aluminium’ together with students from various fields and get an insight into cross-curricular Research. Find more Information on the “Science in Society Laboratories” course on our website: https://sts.univie.ac.at/en/lehre/science-in-society-laboratories/