Research on scientific/intellectual movements, and social movements generally, tends to focus on resources and conditions outside the substance of the movements, such as funding and publication opportunities or the prestige and networks of movement actors. Drawing on Pinch's theory of technologies as institutions, I argue that research methods can also serve as resources for scientific movements by institutionalizing their ideas in research practice. I demonstrate the argument with the case of neuroscience, where the adoption of machine learning changed how scientists think about measurement and modeling of group difference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPharmacovigilance databases contain larger numbers of adverse drug events (ADEs) that occurred in women compared to men. The cause of this disparity is frequently attributed to sex-linked biological factors. We offer an alternative Gender Hypothesis, positing that gendered social factors are central to the production of aggregate sex disparities in ADE reports.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcademics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile there has been considerable interest in debates about right wing ideas in LGBT movements-military service, marriage, nationalism, white supremacy-there has been comparatively little attention to self-proclaimed right wing LGBT organizations, what I call the "gay right." Social theory to date offers a fragmented set of theoretical tools to explain them, including homonationalism, post-gay identity, additive intersectionality, and systems justification theory. I propose a two axis framework to unify these theories and map wide ranging diversity within the gay right.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScientists' identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together this disparate literature under the framework of professional cultures and show population-level trends supporting it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Astron Space Sci
July 2020
Recent improvements in data collection volume from planetary and space physics missions have allowed the application of novel data science techniques. The Cassini mission for example collected over 600 gigabytes of scientific data from 2004 to 2017. This represents a surge of data on the Saturn system.
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