Techno-Scientific Promises, Disciplinary Fields, and Social Issues in Peripheral Contexts

ABSTRACT

Scientific work has always worked alongside promises of future developments. Promises, though, have very different consequences across different contexts. Indeed, the formulation of scientific promises in peripheral scientific contexts have different structures and consequences, compared to those in hegemonic sites. Promises are intended to provide solutions to important public problems. Yet in doing so, a scientific field or specialty is positioned as the most legitimate to solve these problems, displacing competing visions, questioning alternative actors, and building the epistemic bases with which to think about these issues. During these processes, scientific fields and technoscientific promises are co-produced. Since most of the studies on promises and techno-scientific expectations have focused on processes located in hegemonic sites, analytic tools must be adapted to analyze the emergence of techno-scientific promises and the corresponding development of scientific fields in peripheral locations. Facing structural barriers to transforming knowledge into marketable products, peripheral scientific elites do not have the same capacity to formulate solutions based on local knowledge. Chagas, a Latin American tropical disease, provides a good example of how scientific promises and scientific fields are co-produced in peripheral locations, along with various power asymmetries in a context of highly globalized knowledge. Through this example, it is possible to see how promises shape and are shaped by relations between different countries and research infrastructures. Because of the structural barriers that exist in peripheral countries, scientific promises often generate cutting-edge knowledge aligned with international agendas, but is almost never able to effectively address public problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• peripheral contexts
• techno-scientific promises
• scientific fields
• social issues

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As stated by one of the participants of the Project: ‘the PGTc provides information, stored in the project's database, and material, in the form of libraries and markers, which serve to approach studies in the field of Chagas disease with more and better tools.’ Levin (1999)

2 A model organism is a non-human species that is studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the model organism will provide insight about other organisms.

3 The transmission of T. cruzi through blood banks, as well as the intra-placental tract, has increased significantly in contexts where the disease did not exist before, like in some European countries and in the United States. In the latter country, it has also been observed an increase in the number of cases of vectorial transmission (i.e., through insects). For an analysis of the situation in the United States, see Bern et al. (2020) and, for the European case, see Strasen et al., 2013.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CONICET [grant number 11220120100418CO]; ANPCyT, PICT number 0583.

Notes on contributors

Pablo Kreimer

Pablo Kreimer is Director of the STS Centre, at Maimonides University (Buenos Aires), and Senior Researcher at CONICET (Argentina). His research interests include the production and use of knowledge, the development and structure of scientific fields, and the scientific relations between core and peripheral countries.