Rachel Douglas‐jone
Biographic Data
| ID | 104197 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Douglas‐jone |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Douglas‐jone |
| SIGNATURE | JONE R D |
| AFFILIATIONS | IT University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9562-6572 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Provocations from the ‘STS as a Critical Pedagogy’ Workshop
This research article is a collaborative set of reflections and provocations stemming from the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded workshop on STS as a Critical Pedagogy, hosted online during the summer of 2021 by Shannon N. Conley and Emily York at James Madison University. The workshop occurred over four separate sessions, bringing together forty participants (including six undergraduate students who contributed as both facilitators and re…
Spaceships and Poetry: Enlivening the Lab as a Site of Feminist Critical Pedagogy
Whilst STS has long studied lab work, the past few years have also seen the introduction of labs as social formations for doing STS enquiry. But what kind of contributions to pedagogy, particularly in technical universities, can STS inspired university labs make? We respond to the need to more deeply understand how teaching may be practiced as a site of STS experimentation by describing the work of the ETHOS Lab, our critical feminist lab at the …
Credit Is a Basket: On the Inclusion of Blood Donation in China's Social Credit System
In 2019, the National Health Commission of China announced a nation-wide plan to incorporate blood donation into the country's emerging informational infrastructure: the social credit system (SCS). Through analysis of comments from Weibo, one of China's largest social media sites, alongside news articles and official government announcements from the time, we follow the figure of the basket, which we regard as vernacular critique. By analysing th…
Fixing stone in time: Making and measuring consolidants for heritage futures
Stone consolidants have been used in conservation practices for decades, with an increasingly interdisciplinary scientific attention to their composition and performance. This article is an ethnographic account of the process of testing a new consolidant's efficacy, drawn from fieldwork and interviews with scientists and heritage professionals involved in a European project in 2013. I illustrate, in line with prior scholarship on laboratory time,…
Introduction: Laboratory times
In this introduction to the Special Section 'Laboratory Times', the editors argue that a focused body of scholarship at the intersection of time and the laboratory has yet to materialize. To contextualize the papers that comprise the Special Section, we survey the role of the lab within time studies, as well as the place of temporality within Science and Technology Studies (STS). We show how time is made to structure and shape scientific practice…
Testing Uncertainty: Chance, Play, and Humour as Pandemic Response
The Poison Kings: Markers of Mobility and Morality
Opening the Blind Box: A multimodal account of access to the restricted field China during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic returned the politics of ‘access’ to the forefront of anthropological discussion. This article offers a multimodal, autoethnographic account of ‘access’ across axes, foregrounding the biomedical, digital, bureaucratic and citizenship contingencies of arriving in China, a process which was for two of the authors, a process also of returning ‘home’. We employ the metaphor of the ‘blind box’, colloquially and commercially meani…
Committee Work: Stem Cell Governance in the United States: Control
Ethics, Values, and Morality: Introduction
Misdirection in Global Health: Creating the Illusion of (Im)possible Alternatives in Global Health Research and Practice
Weaving the Net: Making a Smart City Through Data Workers in Shenzhen
This article focuses on data workers in Shenzhen, who, since 2013, have been recruited to fill positions in the city’s Weaving the Net program (zhiwang gongcheng, 織網工程). The program, furthering both the expansion of city gridding management techniques and local experiments with China’s Social Credit system, is designed to generate a daily set of data to inform the city’s “Smart Brain”, and is a core way of managing the city’s “floating population…
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised aroun…
Writing bodies and bodies of text: Thinking vulnerability through monsters
In this article, we suggest approaching writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of writers. We present an exercise‐method that we refer to as Monster Writing, which we have developed in order to engage with these instabilities as well as in order to address experiences of difficulty, anxiety and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. Though the writing process c…
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Committee as Witness: Ethics Review as a Technology of Collective Attestation
This article explores the ethics review committee as a contemporary witness to the conduct of biomedical research. Ethics committee work is an internationally growing form of deliberation and decision making, a technology of anticipation that grants researchers access to experimental spaces, research funds and publication venues. Drawing on ethnographic work with a range of ethics committees across the Asia-Pacific region, I explore the metaphori…
Bodies of data: Doubles, Composites, and Aggregates
In this essay, I describe three bodies of data, analysing how relations are drawn between physical, digital, and political composites. Following the phrase 'getting to know your data self', my aim is to draw out the kinds of relations people use data to make, and the versions of the body that I find codified in data imaginaries. Thematically, the stories give different accounts of control over data, as the data body is doubled, built out of compo…
Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data
The world is talking 'data'. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of 'big' data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social l…
Silent mentors: Donation, education, and bodies in Taiwan
Unlike cadaver donation in the West, which has to a large degree maintained the anonymity of the body used to teach medical students, the Taiwanese Tzu Chi Buddhist Silent Mentor programme at the centre of this article foregrounds the identity of the trai
Trial by Fire: Trauma, Vulnerability and the Heroics of Fieldwork
In this Introduction, we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the 'trial by fire' and the 'heroic fieldworker' to task. Our analysis traces out what we call everyday decentering of these tropes, which we argue is necessary for fieldwork to be taught and engaged with beyond romanticised twentieth century masculinist heroics. We argue that anthro-pology and related field research based disciplines might be better served by adopting a more ethno…
New immortalities: Death, donation, and dedication in the twenty-first century
Afterword: New immortalities
Getting inside ethical review: Anxious bureaucracies of revelation, anticipation and virtue
This article is concerned with strategies to bolster ethical review against insinuations that it might not be well done. My discussion traces doubts about the competences of ethics review committees in low and middle income settings to ask how a real ethical review is known, and for whom it must be evidenced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst committees participating in the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Western Pacific…
Making Room for Ethics
This article examines the work that goes in to ‘making room’ for ethics, literally and figuratively. It follows the activities of a capacity building Asia-Pacific NGO in training and recognising ethics review committees, using multi-sited field materials collected over 12 months between 2009 and 2010. Two queries drive this article: first, how are spaces made for ethical review –politically, infrastructurally, materially – as committee members c…
Building Capacity in Ethical Review: Compliance and Transformation in the Asia-Pacific Region
Capacity building in biomedical research ethics review has been a European priority since the early 2000s. Prompted by the increase in data originating in internationally sponsored trials in emerging economies, a range of capacity building initiatives were put in place in the field of ethical review to ensure the protection of human subjects participating in research. Drawing on fieldwork with the Forum for Ethical Review Committees in the Asian …
Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data
The world is talking 'data'. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of 'big' data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social l…
Science, value and material decay in the conservation of historic environments
The historic environment undergoes cycles of material deterioration, and these processes have a powerful impact on the meanings and values associated with it. In particular, decay informs the experience of authenticity, as a tangible mark of age and ‘the real’. This article examines the intersection between material transformation, scientific intervention and cultural value. Drawing on qualitative social research at three Scottish historic buildi…
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised aroun…
Writing bodies and bodies of text: Thinking vulnerability through monsters
In this article, we suggest approaching writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of writers. We present an exercise‐method that we refer to as Monster Writing, which we have developed in order to engage with these instabilities as well as in order to address experiences of difficulty, anxiety and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. Though the writing process c…
Trial by Fire: Trauma, Vulnerability and the Heroics of Fieldwork
In this Introduction, we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the 'trial by fire' and the 'heroic fieldworker' to task. Our analysis traces out what we call everyday decentering of these tropes, which we argue is necessary for fieldwork to be taught and engaged with beyond romanticised twentieth century masculinist heroics. We argue that anthro-pology and related field research based disciplines might be better served by adopting a more ethno…
Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison
Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropology. In this introduction, we outline the growing use of the idea of 'capacity building' within and beyond development settings, and highlight mechanisms by which it gains footholds in both policy and practice. This special issue centres and questions its histories, assumptions, intentions and enactments in order to bring ethnographic attention to the …
Bodies of data: Doubles, Composites, and Aggregates
In this essay, I describe three bodies of data, analysing how relations are drawn between physical, digital, and political composites. Following the phrase 'getting to know your data self', my aim is to draw out the kinds of relations people use data to make, and the versions of the body that I find codified in data imaginaries. Thematically, the stories give different accounts of control over data, as the data body is doubled, built out of compo…
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Introduction: Laboratory times
In this introduction to the Special Section 'Laboratory Times', the editors argue that a focused body of scholarship at the intersection of time and the laboratory has yet to materialize. To contextualize the papers that comprise the Special Section, we survey the role of the lab within time studies, as well as the place of temporality within Science and Technology Studies (STS). We show how time is made to structure and shape scientific practice…
New immortalities: Death, donation, and dedication in the twenty-first century
A ‘good’ ethical review: Audit and professionalism in research ethics
How does one conduct, measure and record a ‘good’ ethical review of biomedical research? To what extent do ethics committees invoke professionalism in researchers and in themselves, and to what extent do they see competence as adherence to a set of standard operating procedures for ethical review? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Pacific (FERCAP), a capacity-building NGO that runs ethics…
Credit Is a Basket: On the Inclusion of Blood Donation in China's Social Credit System
In 2019, the National Health Commission of China announced a nation-wide plan to incorporate blood donation into the country's emerging informational infrastructure: the social credit system (SCS). Through analysis of comments from Weibo, one of China's largest social media sites, alongside news articles and official government announcements from the time, we follow the figure of the basket, which we regard as vernacular critique. By analysing th…
Fixing stone in time: Making and measuring consolidants for heritage futures
Stone consolidants have been used in conservation practices for decades, with an increasingly interdisciplinary scientific attention to their composition and performance. This article is an ethnographic account of the process of testing a new consolidant's efficacy, drawn from fieldwork and interviews with scientists and heritage professionals involved in a European project in 2013. I illustrate, in line with prior scholarship on laboratory time,…
Building with History: Exploring the Relationship between Heritage and Energy in Institutionally Managed Buildings
Drawing on interdisciplinary research focusing on Durham University estate, we describe how buildings constructed as part of an eighteenth century transition to a high carbon coal-based economy, are used and understood by their current inhabitants. Applied heritage research has tended to focus on the thermal and energetic properties of historic buildings, as distinct from their social meaning and use. A similar separation between the physical bui…
A ‘good’ ethical review: Audit and professionalism in research ethics
How does one conduct, measure and record a ‘good’ ethical review of biomedical research? To what extent do ethics committees invoke professionalism in researchers and in themselves, and to what extent do they see competence as adherence to a set of standard operating procedures for ethical review? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Pacific (FERCAP), a capacity-building NGO that runs ethics…
Claiming and knowing the real: Authenticity Today
Science, value and material decay in the conservation of historic environments
The historic environment undergoes cycles of material deterioration, and these processes have a powerful impact on the meanings and values associated with it. In particular, decay informs the experience of authenticity, as a tangible mark of age and ‘the real’. This article examines the intersection between material transformation, scientific intervention and cultural value. Drawing on qualitative social research at three Scottish historic buildi…
Making Room for Ethics
This article examines the work that goes in to ‘making room’ for ethics, literally and figuratively. It follows the activities of a capacity building Asia-Pacific NGO in training and recognising ethics review committees, using multi-sited field materials collected over 12 months between 2009 and 2010. Two queries drive this article: first, how are spaces made for ethical review –politically, infrastructurally, materially – as committee members c…
Building Capacity in Ethical Review: Compliance and Transformation in the Asia-Pacific Region
Capacity building in biomedical research ethics review has been a European priority since the early 2000s. Prompted by the increase in data originating in internationally sponsored trials in emerging economies, a range of capacity building initiatives were put in place in the field of ethical review to ensure the protection of human subjects participating in research. Drawing on fieldwork with the Forum for Ethical Review Committees in the Asian …
Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison
Capacity building is a pervasive idea that has received little critical treatment from anthropology. In this introduction, we outline the growing use of the idea of 'capacity building' within and beyond development settings, and highlight mechanisms by which it gains footholds in both policy and practice. This special issue centres and questions its histories, assumptions, intentions and enactments in order to bring ethnographic attention to the …
Getting inside ethical review: Anxious bureaucracies of revelation, anticipation and virtue
This article is concerned with strategies to bolster ethical review against insinuations that it might not be well done. My discussion traces doubts about the competences of ethics review committees in low and middle income settings to ask how a real ethical review is known, and for whom it must be evidenced. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst committees participating in the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Western Pacific…
Silent mentors: Donation, education, and bodies in Taiwan
Unlike cadaver donation in the West, which has to a large degree maintained the anonymity of the body used to teach medical students, the Taiwanese Tzu Chi Buddhist Silent Mentor programme at the centre of this article foregrounds the identity of the trai
Trial by Fire: Trauma, Vulnerability and the Heroics of Fieldwork
In this Introduction, we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the 'trial by fire' and the 'heroic fieldworker' to task. Our analysis traces out what we call everyday decentering of these tropes, which we argue is necessary for fieldwork to be taught and engaged with beyond romanticised twentieth century masculinist heroics. We argue that anthro-pology and related field research based disciplines might be better served by adopting a more ethno…
New immortalities: Death, donation, and dedication in the twenty-first century
Afterword: New immortalities
Writing bodies and bodies of text: Thinking vulnerability through monsters
In this article, we suggest approaching writing as a vulnerable practice marked by an unstable boundary between bodies: bodies of text and bodies of writers. We present an exercise‐method that we refer to as Monster Writing, which we have developed in order to engage with these instabilities as well as in order to address experiences of difficulty, anxiety and uncertainty in relation with the text and writing process. Though the writing process c…
Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis
We are grateful to all the people and institutions that made this book pos sible.The In de pen dent Research Councils of Denmark (funding id 0602-02551b) supported Brit
Committee as Witness: Ethics Review as a Technology of Collective Attestation
This article explores the ethics review committee as a contemporary witness to the conduct of biomedical research. Ethics committee work is an internationally growing form of deliberation and decision making, a technology of anticipation that grants researchers access to experimental spaces, research funds and publication venues. Drawing on ethnographic work with a range of ethics committees across the Asia-Pacific region, I explore the metaphori…
Bodies of data: Doubles, Composites, and Aggregates
In this essay, I describe three bodies of data, analysing how relations are drawn between physical, digital, and political composites. Following the phrase 'getting to know your data self', my aim is to draw out the kinds of relations people use data to make, and the versions of the body that I find codified in data imaginaries. Thematically, the stories give different accounts of control over data, as the data body is doubled, built out of compo…
Introduction: Towards an anthropology of data
The world is talking 'data'. The early cross-disciplinary, business-orientated hype around the potential of 'big' data, with its promises of unprecedented insight into social life, has given way. Data now motivates a sweep of dystopian visions, from rampant commodification to the invasion of privacy, political manipulation, and shadowy data doubles. Yet anthropologists have been cautious in taking data itself as their object, even as the social l…
Committee Work: Stem Cell Governance in the United States: Control
Ethics, Values, and Morality: Introduction
Misdirection in Global Health: Creating the Illusion of (Im)possible Alternatives in Global Health Research and Practice
Weaving the Net: Making a Smart City Through Data Workers in Shenzhen
This article focuses on data workers in Shenzhen, who, since 2013, have been recruited to fill positions in the city’s Weaving the Net program (zhiwang gongcheng, 織網工程). The program, furthering both the expansion of city gridding management techniques and local experiments with China’s Social Credit system, is designed to generate a daily set of data to inform the city’s “Smart Brain”, and is a core way of managing the city’s “floating population…
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised aroun…
Testing Uncertainty: Chance, Play, and Humour as Pandemic Response
The Poison Kings: Markers of Mobility and Morality
Opening the Blind Box: A multimodal account of access to the restricted field China during Covid-19
The COVID-19 pandemic returned the politics of ‘access’ to the forefront of anthropological discussion. This article offers a multimodal, autoethnographic account of ‘access’ across axes, foregrounding the biomedical, digital, bureaucratic and citizenship contingencies of arriving in China, a process which was for two of the authors, a process also of returning ‘home’. We employ the metaphor of the ‘blind box’, colloquially and commercially meani…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Engineering ethics (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (7 works) · Business (6 works) · History (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works)