Suchergebnisse

Die Frage, über wie viel naturwissenschaftliches Wissen heute ein/e Bürger/in verfügen sollte, um sich in einer schnell wandelnden Wissensgesellschaft zurecht zu finden bzw. an ihr aktiv Teil haben zu können, stellt sich heute in unterschiedlichsten Formen und Zusammenhängen. Der Artikel beabsichtigt, diesen Diskussionen entlang drei unterschiedlicher Linien zu folgen. Zum einen skizziert er die diskursiven Verschiebungen auf europäischer Ebene, zum anderen werden wesentliche Etappen der akademischen Auseinandersetzungen reflektiert. Schließlich wird an einem konkreten Fallbeispiel die Bedeutung von partizipativem Lernen diskutiert. Durch das Zusammendenken der verschiedenen Ebenen soll ein Verständnis dafür entstehen, wo die kontemporären Herausforderungen für die Interaktionen und gegenseitigen Lernmöglichkeiten von Naturwissenschaften und Gesellschaft liegen.

Many cities have formulated strategies, visions, and policies to deploy a local version of the "smart city." While analysts have frequently focused on tech innovators as central players, this paper takes one step back investigating policy documents and how they open a space to reimagine the city. Taking Vienna as a case study, we examine how policy documents translate and adapt globally circulating smart city imaginaries into local versions. This offers insights into values and power relations that underpin urban imaginaries and allows to reflect how they participate in tacitly governing the future directions of urban transformation. Identifying three dominant narrative strands, we gradually trace the emergence of a sociotechnical imaginary of preservation and (technological/digital) enhancement that discursively underlines the importance of local values. However, simultaneously, we witness the striking absence of the voice of citizens in shaping these future visions and how digital capitalism enters the scene through indicator-driven urban positioning work. This leads us to call for responsible imagineering, which not only means to more collectively imagine and engineer the future city involving a more diverse set of actors but also to critically reflect related forms of storytelling as performed in policy documents.

A central and formative ingredient in the governance of migration in the European Union (EU) is the continuous construction of a large-scale digital infrastructure to ensure border security. Although border and critical security studies have increasingly focused on the multiple aspects of techno-materiality and infrastructural devices of border control, less has been said about how such an infrastructure encodes and transmits collective future visions of border (in)security. Therefore, this paper analyzes the making of a sociotechnical imaginary of digital transformation of the EU border regime, specifically focusing on the role of eu-LISA, the European agency for the development and management of large-scale IT systems. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview material, we analyze the ways in which this agency emerges as a site for assembling and rehearsing this sociotechnical imaginary, gradually transforming borders into sites of experimentation in the EU Schengen laboratory. As our case illustrates, studying the visionary dimensions of digital infrastructuring helps us to understand how imagination becomes collectivized and materialized, opens up or closes down sociotechnical realizations, and thus tacitly governs the project of digitally infrastructuring the EU border regime.

The article retraces the social and institutional circumstances that in 1986 led two researchers at the IBM laboratory near Zurich, Müller and Bednorz, to discover high-temperature superconductivity. After confirmation of the unexpected breakthrough an unprecedented mobilization of research groups all over the world took place while simul taneously high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) turned into a subject of intense media interest. The authors discuss these events under three perspectives: the closer interlinkage capacity of researchers and the relationship between the social organization of research and unforeseen cases of scientific creativity.