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Despite the growing body of literature that critically assesses the ambiguous impacts of institutional review boards (IRBs) on anthropological research, the key standards on which the IRB evaluations are based often remain unquestioned. By exposing the genealogy of an undercover research in which the authors participated as ethnographer, supervisor, and research participant, this article problematizes some of these standards and addresses the issues of power dynamics in research, informed consent, and anonymization in published work. It argues that rather than addressing genuine ethical dilemmas, IRB standards and the ethical fiction of informed consent mainly protect researchers from having to openly face the uncertainties of fieldwork. As an alternative, the authors put forth the notion of c/overt research, which perceives any research as processual and, in effect, becoming overt only during the research process itself. As such, it forces researchers to cultivate sensitivity to research ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology has become a key vehicle and index of the societal impact of science. Technology’s dominant image, both in science and technology studies (STS) and in science policies, is one of a material device or a complex procedure using machines with origins in natural science disciplines. This article inquires into the vehicles and forms of societal impact in the case of the social sciences. It empirically looks into the generation and circulation of knowledge and expertise on Roma and, drawing upon Strathern, follows three types of vehicles: projects, products, and persons. In the conclusion it argues against the asymmetrical treatment of the social and natural sciences or social and material technologies, and suggests that the troubles the social sciences have with accounting for their societal impact are comparable to effects of critical evaluation of the natural sciences and should be seriously considered as exposing more general challenges for science in a knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently there have been pleas for STS to make a difference in how science policies are constructed and enacted. Much less remarked upon is the possibility that there may be troubling alignments between science studies and research policies in the form of shared conceptual, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Both have come to emphasise material outputs and visible activity, obscuring other processes, relationships and orderings involved in science work. This collection of papers focuses on these connections between STS and contemporary research policies. They explore empirical material from ‘other epistemic places' (disciplinary, geo-political and spatial) to foreground and critique what is privileged and rewarded by science policies. But they also seek to make a theoretical contribution to STS itself, showing how its early focus on the hard centres of global technoscience have been constitutive of its characteristic concerns, epistemologies -and blind spots. As science studies moves out of the lab andbeyond the heartlands of the political West and global North, we argue that acknowledging some problematic affinities between science studies and science policy is both a critical necessity and an opportunity for new insights. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Science policies and science studies largely share an understanding of scientific knowledge and objects as immutable mobiles. This article shows how the analysis of research assessment in a non-Anglophone country and its effects on social sciences can shed new light on this shared notion. The preference for immutable mobiles in assessment regimes pushes social scientists to publish in specialized, usually Anglophone journals, which can result in the attenuation of local relevance of the knowledge they produce and contribute to the performance of globally converging societies. The author argues that the observed consequences for the social sciences in non-Anglophone countries underscore a larger problem with both the policy ideal and the science and technology studies (STS) idea of immutable mobiles on two counts: the relation of the social and natural sciences to society and the engagement of sciences with the multiplicity of societies as well as natures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is based on a case study of a long-term public controversy over the construction of a highway bypass (around Plzeň, Czech Republic). Two principal variants of the bypass were proposed. One of them began gradually to appear preferable, increasingly attractive for experts, but remaining only on paper. In the meantime, however, the other variant became more realistic, pushed through mainly by local politicians and actually constructed. This article shows how purification of science from politics (and vice versa) played a key role in the development and ending of the case. Initial expertization of the case switched to its sharp politicization, when people got frustrated from protraction and indecisive evidence of accumulated expertise. This turned to be fatal for those who consistently staked everything on "pure facts." This article concludes by outlining some general consequences of such a development for both democratic decision making and the political relevance of expertise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]