Amateurization and re-materialization in biology: opening up scientific equipment - Archive ouverte HAL
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2015

Amateurization and re-materialization in biology: opening up scientific equipment

Résumé

This chapter examines the ways in which scientific equipment is opened up, redesigned, reinvented and reassembled to make it more usable for amateur scientists. I call this process “amaterialization”. Scientific equipment is amaterialized to produce other versions of equipment or, to be more precise, to produce a similar functionality with another kind of equipment. The amaterialization of equipment is, in fact, a many-fold process. We see equipment being redistributed across social worlds, being technically transformed and redesigned, and alongside material artefacts, we see a proliferation and an increasing circulation of non-material entities (texts, information, videos, etc.). This equipment can act as a material link between, on the one hand, the actual experimentation in laboratories and, on the other, more general arguments about the “democratisation” and “opening up” of biology. Hence, their value does not only derive from the fact that they can serve as boundary objects between amateurs and professionals. Their value also stems from their evocative power, a power that arises from a convergence between material practices and moral visions, between the redesign of scientific objects and the articulation of political objectives.
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Dates et versions

hal-01623492 , version 1 (25-10-2017)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01623492 , version 1

Citer

Morgan Meyer. Amateurization and re-materialization in biology: opening up scientific equipment. Wienroth M. and Rodrigues, E. Knowing New Biotechnologies. Social Aspects of Technological Convergence, Routledge, pp. 142-157, 2015, 9781138022935. ⟨hal-01623492⟩
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