Aaron Panofsky
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 100850 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Aaron Panofsky |
| PRENOMES | Aaron |
| SOBRENOME | Panofsky |
| ASSINATURA | PANOFSKY A |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7666-2359 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 345 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2003 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Remaking the landscape of scientific expertise
This article examines an emergent research program aimed at the complete automation of science, analyzing how various automation projects funded by DARPA and others are working to replicate traditionally human scientific competencies. Rather than directly attempting to create fully autonomous robot scientists, these projects break down complex scientific work into discrete, automatable “tasks.” While individual projects often preserve some role f…
Genetics and Scientific Values
This letter responds to the letter by Jan te Nijenhuis, Bryan J. Pesta, and John G. R. Fuerst in the May‐June 2025 issue of the Hastings Center Report
Racist Agnotology
Recently, scholars have revitalized the study of race by exploring how ignorance epistemologically fortifies racial domination. To articulate terms of analysis, much of this literature invokes two recurrent modes of racialized ignorance—racist essentialism and racialized nonknowing. We introduce a third mode—racist agnotology. With racist agnotology, actors perpetuate racialized ignorance by characterizing social constructionist accounts of race …
Hereditary
Feminist retroviruses to white Sharia
This article demonstrates-based on an interpretive discourse analysis of three types of memes (Rabid Feminists, Women's Bodies, Policy Ideas) and secondary thread discourse on 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" discussion board-two key findings: (1) the existence of a gendered hate based scientific discourse, "science fan fiction," in online spaces and (2) how gender "science fan fiction" is an outcome of the male supremacist cosmology, by producing…
Confronting the “Weaponization” of Genetics by Racists Online and Elsewhere
Genomics research is regularly appropriated in social and political contexts to publicly legitimize unjust and malicious political views, policies, and actions. In recent years, there have been high‐profile cases of mass shooters, public intellectuals, and political insiders using genomics findings to convince audiences that deadly force and coercive policies against racial minorities are warranted. To create a just genomics, geneticists must con…
Beyond Biological Essentialism
Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essent…
Metascience as a Scientific Social Movement
Trying to make race science the 'civil' science
When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvem…
How White nationalists mobilize genetics
OBJECTIVES: Our aim in this study was to understand how genetics ideas are appropriated and mobilized online toward the political projects of White nationalism and the alt right. Studying three different online venues, we investigated how genetics is used to support racial realism, hereditarianism, and racial hierarchy. We analyzed how these ideas are connected to political and metapolitical projects. In addition, we examined the strategies used …
Arguments against efficiency in science
A recent commentary critiqued the embrace of performance metrics at research universities. Drawing on our research studying the metascience movement, we suggest that the drive to maximize efficiency in science is increasingly extending beyond performance metrics, into labs themselves. Because institutional and public audiences are predisposed to viewing science in simple terms, it can be challenging for scientists to articulate counterarguments t…
Ambivalent economizations
VAM on trial
Value Added Modeling (VAM) is a statistical technology used to evaluate teacher effectiveness. While it was heralded for years as the next big innovation in education reform, VAM has become an object of legal scrutiny since it was implemented in dozens of states across the U.S. Building on STS findings about science and the law, this paper considers the lawsuits involving VAM as an opportunity to analyze the contestation of expertise in court. It…
Genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists
White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We s…
The Postgenomic Condition
Reconciliation projects and the ontological choreography of race
Political Biology
Rethinking scientific authority
Ambiguity and Scientific Authority
The molecularization of race thesis suggests geneticists are gaining greater authority to define human populations and differences, and they are doing so by increasingly defining them in terms of U.S. racial categories. Using a mixed methodology of a content analysis of articles published in Nature Genetics (in 1993, 2001, and 2009) and interviews, we explore geneticists' population labeling practices. Geneticists use eight classification systems…
Democratizing Inequalities
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
What Does Behavioral Genetics Offer for Improving Education
For much of its history, behavioral genetics, or research into the influence genetics has on human behavior, has been associated with a pessimistic view of educational reforms’ potential to make much difference in improving educational outcomes or reducing inequality. Recently, however, some behavioral geneticists have begun to speak in more optimistic terms about the promise of genetically informed education to improve learning for all children,…
The Material Gene
Misbehaving Science
Challenging Genetic Determinism
Tabula raza
From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back
Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated-how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic research is highly biochemical, it is of interest to sociologists because some epigenetic changes are environmentally mediated and can persist across the life span or into further generations. Environmental epigenetic research tracks mechanisms by which social …
Tqca
As originally developed by Charles Ragin in The Comparative Method (1987), qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has been used extensively by comparative and historical sociologists as an effective tool for analyzing data sets of medium-N populations. Like many other methods, however, QCA is atemporal and obscures the sequential nature of paths of causation. QCA ignores the order of events by treating combinations of attributes as though they oc…
Genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists
White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We s…
Ambiguity and Scientific Authority
The molecularization of race thesis suggests geneticists are gaining greater authority to define human populations and differences, and they are doing so by increasingly defining them in terms of U.S. racial categories. Using a mixed methodology of a content analysis of articles published in Nature Genetics (in 1993, 2001, and 2009) and interviews, we explore geneticists' population labeling practices. Geneticists use eight classification systems…
Generating sociability to drive science
This paper examines how patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) representing those with rare genetic disorders drive research to their concerns. The rarity of the diseases produces a basic condition of marginalization: small numbers of widely distributed disease sufferers. The lack of promise of an eventual market makes it difficult to attract the economic and biological resources necessary for sustained research. My analysis relies mainly on 21 in…
Field Analysis and Interdisciplinary Science
Birds of the Internet
Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provid…
Political Biology
Contesting the New York Community
This article explores the processes involved in the construction and contestation of community in New York City following the disaster of September 11, 2001. By employing insights from the literatures on disaster and cultural meaning making, we examine how New Yorkers created and negotiated the meanings of the cultural, symbolic, and moral problems that followed the attacks. Though this postdisaster period has come to be heralded as one that witn…
How White nationalists mobilize genetics
OBJECTIVES: Our aim in this study was to understand how genetics ideas are appropriated and mobilized online toward the political projects of White nationalism and the alt right. Studying three different online venues, we investigated how genetics is used to support racial realism, hereditarianism, and racial hierarchy. We analyzed how these ideas are connected to political and metapolitical projects. In addition, we examined the strategies used …
Ambivalent economizations
Rethinking scientific authority
Beyond Biological Essentialism
Scholars and practitioners position health disparities research as an important tool for redressing race-based inequities and re-conceptualizing racialized health outcomes in non-essentialist terms. Given this context, we explore a peculiar phenomenon, which is the circulation of such research among white nationalists. We discover that white nationalists incorporate and respond to health disparities research not solely to defend racist and essent…
Metascience as a Scientific Social Movement
Trying to make race science the 'civil' science
When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this paper, we re-theorize these relationships. We re-center charismatic authority as an interpretive resource that allows scientists and onlookers to recast a professional conflict in terms of a public drama. In this mode, both professionals and lay enthusiasts portray involvem…
The Postgenomic Condition
Behavior genetics and the prospect of “personalized social policy”
I develop “personalized social policy” as a speculative exercise to examine the possibility that policy makers and service providers, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, could use genetic information to divide clients into “treatment groups” receiving differential service goods to better meet individual needs or achieve efficiency. Using real and hypothetical examples from genetics and social services, I show how personalized social…
Arguments against efficiency in science
A recent commentary critiqued the embrace of performance metrics at research universities. Drawing on our research studying the metascience movement, we suggest that the drive to maximize efficiency in science is increasingly extending beyond performance metrics, into labs themselves. Because institutional and public audiences are predisposed to viewing science in simple terms, it can be challenging for scientists to articulate counterarguments t…
Reconciliation projects and the ontological choreography of race
From Epistemology to the Avant-garde
This article argues that the sociology of knowledge as a critical subfield of sociology and the artist Marcel Duchamp are engaged in epistemologically analogous projects. Two sets of claims demonstrate the analogy: that Duchamp and the sociology of knowledge both have the same conception of and attitude toward their objects (respectively, art and knowledge/truth), and that they both mount similar critiques of the institutions they occupy (respect…
Contesting the New York Community
This article explores the processes involved in the construction and contestation of community in New York City following the disaster of September 11, 2001. By employing insights from the literatures on disaster and cultural meaning making, we examine how New Yorkers created and negotiated the meanings of the cultural, symbolic, and moral problems that followed the attacks. Though this postdisaster period has come to be heralded as one that witn…
Tqca
As originally developed by Charles Ragin in The Comparative Method (1987), qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has been used extensively by comparative and historical sociologists as an effective tool for analyzing data sets of medium-N populations. Like many other methods, however, QCA is atemporal and obscures the sequential nature of paths of causation. QCA ignores the order of events by treating combinations of attributes as though they oc…
Behavior genetics and the prospect of “personalized social policy”
I develop “personalized social policy” as a speculative exercise to examine the possibility that policy makers and service providers, making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, could use genetic information to divide clients into “treatment groups” receiving differential service goods to better meet individual needs or achieve efficiency. Using real and hypothetical examples from genetics and social services, I show how personalized social…
After the Fall
In contrast to the audience in most of the world, New Yorkers experienced the events of 9/11 as more than symbolic images. Indeed, the experiential and practical foundations of New Yorkers' cultural existences were transformed in the wake of 9/11, at least temporarily. The weeks following the crisis were spent coming to terms with what happened; making meaning in practical, interpersonal, and historico-political terms; and interpreting and manipu…
Generating sociability to drive science
This paper examines how patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) representing those with rare genetic disorders drive research to their concerns. The rarity of the diseases produces a basic condition of marginalization: small numbers of widely distributed disease sufferers. The lack of promise of an eventual market makes it difficult to attract the economic and biological resources necessary for sustained research. My analysis relies mainly on 21 in…
Field Analysis and Interdisciplinary Science
Social Movements and the Transformation of American Health Care
Birds of the Internet
Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provid…
Challenging Genetic Determinism
From Social Structure to Gene Regulation, and Back
Epigenetics is a burgeoning area of biomedical research into the mechanisms by which genes are regulated-how the activity of producing proteins is controlled. Although molecular epigenetic research is highly biochemical, it is of interest to sociologists because some epigenetic changes are environmentally mediated and can persist across the life span or into further generations. Environmental epigenetic research tracks mechanisms by which social …
Misbehaving Science
Democratizing Inequalities
Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive polic…
What Does Behavioral Genetics Offer for Improving Education
For much of its history, behavioral genetics, or research into the influence genetics has on human behavior, has been associated with a pessimistic view of educational reforms’ potential to make much difference in improving educational outcomes or reducing inequality. Recently, however, some behavioral geneticists have begun to speak in more optimistic terms about the promise of genetically informed education to improve learning for all children,…
The Material Gene
Rethinking scientific authority
Ambiguity and Scientific Authority
The molecularization of race thesis suggests geneticists are gaining greater authority to define human populations and differences, and they are doing so by increasingly defining them in terms of U.S. racial categories. Using a mixed methodology of a content analysis of articles published in Nature Genetics (in 1993, 2001, and 2009) and interviews, we explore geneticists' population labeling practices. Geneticists use eight classification systems…
Reconciliation projects and the ontological choreography of race
Political Biology
Genetic ancestry testing among white nationalists
White nationalists have a genetic essentialist understanding of racial identity, so what happens when using genetic ancestry tests (GATs) to explore personal identities, they receive upsetting results they consider evidence of non-white or non-European ancestry? Our answer draws on qualitative analysis of posts on the white nationalist website Stormfront, interpreted by synthesizing the literatures on white nationalism and GATs and identity. We s…
The Postgenomic Condition
VAM on trial
Value Added Modeling (VAM) is a statistical technology used to evaluate teacher effectiveness. While it was heralded for years as the next big innovation in education reform, VAM has become an object of legal scrutiny since it was implemented in dozens of states across the U.S. Building on STS findings about science and the law, this paper considers the lawsuits involving VAM as an opportunity to analyze the contestation of expertise in court. It…
How White nationalists mobilize genetics
OBJECTIVES: Our aim in this study was to understand how genetics ideas are appropriated and mobilized online toward the political projects of White nationalism and the alt right. Studying three different online venues, we investigated how genetics is used to support racial realism, hereditarianism, and racial hierarchy. We analyzed how these ideas are connected to political and metapolitical projects. In addition, we examined the strategies used …
Arguments against efficiency in science
A recent commentary critiqued the embrace of performance metrics at research universities. Drawing on our research studying the metascience movement, we suggest that the drive to maximize efficiency in science is increasingly extending beyond performance metrics, into labs themselves. Because institutional and public audiences are predisposed to viewing science in simple terms, it can be challenging for scientists to articulate counterarguments t…
Ambivalent economizations
Sociology (27 obras) · Political science (22 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Race, Genetics, and Society (15 obras) · Biology (10 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras) · Gender Studies (10 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Genetics (8 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras)