Showing papers in "Social Studies of Science in 2016"
TL;DR: It is shown that scientific work is more highly divided in medical disciplines than in mathematics, physics, and disciplines of the social sciences, and that, with the exception of medicine, the writing of the paper is the task most often associated with authorship.
Abstract: Scientific authorship has been increasingly complemented with contributorship statements. While such statements are said to ensure more equitable credit and responsibility attribution, they also provide an opportunity to examine the roles and functions that authors play in the construction of knowledge and the relationship between these roles and authorship order. Drawing on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary dataset of 87,002 documents in which contributorship statements are found, this article examines the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority. It shows that scientific work is more highly divided in medical disciplines than in mathematics, physics, and disciplines of the social sciences, and that, with the exception of medicine, the writing of the paper is the task most often associated with authorship. The results suggest ...
193 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore how and where boundaries are drawn between 'the technical' and 'the social' in engineering identities and practices, given the strong marking of sociality as feminine and technology as masculine.
Abstract: Engineers have two types of stories about what constitutes `real' engineering. In sociological terms, one is technicist, the other heterogeneous. How and where boundaries are drawn between `the technical' and `the social' in engineering identities and practices is a central concern for feminist technology studies, given the strong marking of sociality as feminine and technology as masculine. I explore these themes, drawing on ethnographic observations of building design engineering. This is a profoundly heterogeneous and networked engineering practice, which entails troubled boundary drawing and identities for the individuals involved — evident in interactions between engineers and architects, and among engineers, especially around management and design. Many engineers cleave to a technicist engineering identity, and even those who embrace the heterogeneous reality of their actual work oscillate between or straddle, not always comfortably, the two identities. There are complex gender tensions, as well as ...
189 citations
TL;DR: Examining the everyday ethics of people who live and work in Colorado's uranium-rich Western Slope and Wyoming's coal-rich Powder River Basin reveals an insistence that ‘good’ energy systems also provide opportunities for dignified and well-paid blue-collar work.
Abstract: This article brings together two growing literatures – on sociotechnical imaginaries in science and technology studies and on resource materialities in anthropology – to explore how two energy-prod...
99 citations
TL;DR: This work focuses on the LifeStraw, a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, and considers aspects of a postcolonial condition at the micro-level of immediate needs, including assumptions about nation-state politics and markets.
Abstract: Over the past decade, many ingenious, small-scale gadgets have appeared in response to problems of disaster and extreme poverty. Focusing on the LifeStraw®, a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, I situate this wave of humanitarian design relative to Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol’s classic article on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. The LifeStraw shares the Bush Pump’s principle of technical minimalism, as well as its ethical desire to improve the lives of communities. Unlike the pump, however, the straw defines itself through rather than against market logic, accepting the premise that one can ‘do well while doing good’. Moreover, it does not share the assumed framework of de Laet and Mol’s Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape: a postcolonial state happily en route to national self-definition. Nonetheless, it clearly embodies moral affect, if in the idiom of humanitarian concern rather than development. My aim is to open up three interrelated lines of inquiry for discussion. ...
93 citations
TL;DR: This account reconstructs the innovation journey of ‘citizen panels’, as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application.
Abstract: We reconstruct the innovation journey of 'citizen panels', as a family of participation methods, over four decades and across different sites of development and application. A process of aggregation leads from local practices of designing participatory procedures like the citizens jury, planning cell, or consensus conference in the 1970s and 1980s, to the disembedding and proliferation of procedural formats in the 1990s, and into the trans-local consolidation of participatory practices through laboratory-based expertise since about 2000. Our account highlights a central irony: anti-technocratic engagements with governance gave birth to efforts at establishing technoscientific control over questions of political procedure. But such efforts have been met with various forms of reflexive engagement that draw out implications and turn design questions back into matters of concern. An emerging informal assessment regime for technologies of participation as yet prevents closure on one dominant global design for democracy beyond the state.
80 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that these three features point to a new spatial and temporal politics of risk and responsibility that may heighten social and medical surveillance of women’s bodies and decisions, eclipsing larger questions about the uneven distribution of exposures in society and more holistic understandings of health that include neurodiversity.
Abstract: Research on autism and environmental risk factors has expanded substantially in recent years. My analysis draws attention to the regimes of perceptibility that shape how the environment is materialized in post-genomic science. I focus on how more complex narratives of autism's causes and social anxieties surrounding child development have helped situate autism risk in women's bodies before and during pregnancy. This has resulted in what I call the maternal body as environment in autism science. I show that this figure involves three characteristics: the molecularization of the environment, an individualization of risk, and the internalization of responsibility. I argue that these three features point to a new spatial and temporal politics of risk and responsibility that may heighten social and medical surveillance of women's bodies and decisions, eclipsing larger questions about the uneven distribution of exposures in society and more holistic understandings of health that include neurodiversity. I conclude by considering what the maternal body as environment signals for women, social justice, and the politics of environmental health in the post-genomic era.
50 citations
TL;DR: Research done at the University of California, Davis from about the 1950s to the 1980s by the enologist Maynard Amerine, his co-workers, and successors is focused on, suggesting ways in which these materials might prompt attention to the role of subjective judgment and the marketplace in other forms of late modern science.
Abstract: This article is about the relationship between the categories of the subjective and the objective in the late 20th-century California wine world, about attempts to transform ‘soft’ subjective judgments into ‘hard’ objective descriptions and evaluations, and about the role of both sensory science and chemistry in such attempts. It focuses on research done at the University of California, Davis, from about the 1950s to the 1980s by the enologist Maynard Amerine, his co-workers, and successors. It suggests ways in which these materials might prompt attention to the role of subjective judgment and the marketplace in other forms of late modern science.
48 citations
TL;DR: Questions concerning how funding requirements shape representations of this new technology, together with in vitro meat’s particular socio-spatial and socio-ecological implications, become problematically de-emphasized.
Abstract: Today, in vitro (Latin: in glass) meat researchers strive to overhaul meat production technologies by producing meat outside animal bodies, primarily by culturing cells. In the process, meat should become healthier, more environmentally friendly and kinder to animals. In this article, I scrutinize (and problematize) this promissory discourse by examining the world that proponents envision alongside the world from which promises emerge. First, I trace the increasing number of publications striving to pinpoint the nature of in vitro meat to unveil the creation of an in vitro meat canon wherein perceived possibilities become taken for granted. Second, I investigate how the promissory discourse is often relatively silent on key aspects of how this technology could remake the world. Wet laboratories, animals and end products become foregrounded at the expense of political economy and the biophysical properties of cultured cells. Thus, questions concerning how funding requirements shape representations of this new technology, together with in vitro meat's particular socio-spatial and socio-ecological implications, become problematically de-emphasized.
48 citations
TL;DR: Overall, the findings support that gender structures some part of the collaborative experience, but that status hierarchy exerts more clear effects.
Abstract: Collaboration is central to modern scientific inquiry, and increasingly important to the professional experiences of academic scientists. While the effects of collaboration have been widely studied, much less is understood about the motivations to collaborate and collaboration dynamics that generate scientific outcomes. A particular interest of this study is to understand how collaboration experiences differ between women and men, and the attributions used to explain these differences. We use a multi-method study of university Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics faculty research collaborators. We employ 177 anonymous open-ended responses to a web-based survey, and 60 semi-structured interviews of academic scientists in US research universities. We find similarities and differences in collaborative activity between men and women. Open-ended qualitative textual analysis suggests that some of these differences are attributed to power dynamics – both general ones related to differences in organi...
43 citations
TL;DR: The role of estimating dosimetry in post-disaster epidemiology is examined, how national identity and citizenship have mattered in radiation risk networks are highlighted, and how participants interpreted the relationships between nuclear weapons and nuclear energy are tracked.
Abstract: In this article, I reflect on the Radiation Effects Research Foundation and its ongoing studies of long-term radiation risk. Originally called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (1947–1975), the R...
34 citations
TL;DR: This article examines how science has been employed to establish, maintain, and contest senses of belonging on Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago administered by Norway since 1925 under an international treaty and deploys the concept of belonging to capture a sense of legitimate presence and stakeholdership that can be adequately captured by narrow concepts of sovereignty.
Abstract: This paper examines how science has been employed to establish, maintain, and contest senses of belonging on Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago administered by Norway since 1925 under an international ...
TL;DR: This article analyses how researchers working in small and medium-sized biotechnology companies in Vienna, Austria, describe the cultural characteristics of knowledge production in this particular institutional space and traces how they relate these characteristics to other institutional spaces they have experienced in their research biographies.
Abstract: Research and innovation policy has invested considerable effort in creating new institutional spaces at the interface of academia and business. High-tech startups founded by academic entrepreneurs ...
TL;DR: The study of political experiments proposed here offers analytical entry points for an examination of democratic ordering.
Abstract: Some recent work in STS has discussed various forms of 'political experiments'. But why and how do experiments matter, and for whom? Answering these questions requires that one leave the locality of the experimental site and account for the construction of wider spaces wherein experiments matter. Using examples related to the public debate on, critique and government of nanotechnology in France, the article identifies three of these spaces. The first one is characterized by the replication of technologies of participation, the second by the conduct of radical critique, and the third by the constitution of objects of government. Overall, the description of these spaces helps describe the current (and incomplete) transformation of French democracy, as the public administration attempts to include new elements, such as 'citizens as locals' or 'substances in a nanoparticulate state', in the French polity. Thus, the study of political experiments proposed here offers analytical entry points for an examination of democratic ordering.
TL;DR: It is argued that tandems of trust and control play a central role in the successful execution of clinical trials and the construction of scientific knowledge.
Abstract: Controlled human malaria infections are clinical trials in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with malaria under controlled conditions. Controlled human malaria infections are complex clinical trials: many different groups and institutions are involved, and several complex technologies are required to function together. This functioning together of technologies, people, and institutions is under special pressure because of potential risks to the volunteers. In this article, the authors use controlled human malaria infections as a strategic research site to study the use of control, the role of trust, and the interactions between trust and control in the construction of scientific knowledge. The authors argue that tandems of trust and control play a central role in the successful execution of clinical trials and the construction of scientific knowledge. More specifically, two aspects of tandems of trust and control will be highlighted: tandems are sites where trust and control coproduce each other, and tandems link the personal, the technical, and the institutional domains. Understanding tandems of trust and control results in setting some agendas for both clinical trial research and science and technology studies.
TL;DR: A series of case studies of field stations and field laboratories based at high altitudes in the Alps, Himalayas and Antarctica, which have been used by Western scientists from circa 1820 to present are offered.
Abstract: This article offers a series of case studies of field stations and field laboratories based at high altitudes in the Alps, Himalayas and Antarctica, which have been used by Western scientists (largely physiologists and physicists) from circa 1820 to present. It rejects the common frame for work on such spaces that polarizes a set of generalizations about practices undertaken in ‘the field’ versus ‘the laboratory’. Field sites are revealed as places that can be used to highlight common and crucial features of modern experimental science that are exposed by, but not uniquely the properties of, fieldwork. This includes heterogeneity of population and practice, diverse afterlives, the manner in which spaces of science construct individual and group expertise, and the extensive support and funding structures needed for modern scientific work.
TL;DR: This article analyzes the reading and publishing practices of two subsets of high energy physicists: theorists and experimentalists, and suggests digital platforms for the exchange of scholarly articles emerge in other fields could help shed light on general transformations of contemporary scholarly communication systems.
Abstract: In high energy physics, scholarly papers circulate primarily through online preprint archives based on a centralized repository, arXiv, that physicists simply refer to as ‘the archive’. The archive is not just a tool for preservation and memory but also a space of flows where written objects are detected and their authors made available for scrutiny. In this article, I analyze the reading and publishing practices of two subsets of high energy physicists: theorists and experimentalists. In order to be recognized as legitimate and productive members of their community, they need to abide by the temporalities and authorial practices structured by the archive. Theorists live in a state of accelerated time that shapes their reading and publishing practices around precise cycles. Experimentalists turn to tactics that allow them to circumvent the slowed-down time and invisibility they experience as members of large collaborations. As digital platforms for the exchange of scholarly articles emerge in other fields...
TL;DR: Mid-20th-century attempts to turn subjective judgments about the quality and composition of wine into objective knowledge are focused on the research of Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis, and his project to formalize the procedures of sensory evaluation.
Abstract: This article is about mid-20th-century attempts to turn subjective judgments about the quality and composition of wine into objective knowledge. It focuses on the research of Maynard Amerine at the University of California, Davis, and his project to formalize the procedures of sensory evaluation. Using controlled experimental conditions, Amerine and colleagues transcribed judgments about taste into numbers that could then be aggregated and analyzed statistically. Through such techniques, they claimed to be able to turn subjectivities into objectivities, rendering private taste sensations into reliable and stable facts about objects in the world.
TL;DR: The article explores the formation of an international politics of resistance and ‘alter-standardization’ in regenerative stem cell medicine by observing a trend toward the pluralization of the standards, practices, and concepts in the stem cell field.
Abstract: The article explores the formation of an international politics of resistance and ‘alter-standardization’ in regenerative stem cell medicine. The absence of internationally harmonized regulatory frameworks in the clinical stem cell field and the presence of lucrative business opportunities have resulted in the formation of transnational networks adopting alternative research standards and practices. These oppose, as a universal global standard, strict evidence-based medicine clinical research protocols as defined by scientists and regulatory agencies in highly developed countries. The emergence of transnational spaces of alter-standardization is closely linked to scientific advances in rapidly developing countries such as China and India, but calls for more flexible regulatory frameworks, and the legitimization of experimental for-profit applications outside of evidence-based medical care, are emerging increasingly also within more stringently regulated countries, such as the USA and countries in the European Union. We can observe, then, a trend toward the pluralization of the standards, practices, and concepts in the stem cell field.
TL;DR: An ethnographic study of regulatory decision-making regarding the cost-effectiveness of expensive medicines at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in England finds examples of both more blind-acquiescent and more critical-investigative forms of trust as well as, at times, pronounced distrust.
Abstract: This article presents an ethnographic study of regulatory decision-making regarding the cost-effectiveness of expensive medicines at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in England. We explored trust as one important mechanism by which problems of complexity and uncertainty were resolved. Existing studies note the salience of trust for regulatory decisions, by which the appraisal of people becomes a proxy for appraising technologies themselves. Although such (dis)trust in manufacturers was one important influence, we describe a more intricate web of (dis)trust relations also involving various expert advisors, fellow committee members and committee Chairs. Within these complex chains of relations, we found examples of both more blind-acquiescent and more critical-Investigative forms of trust as well as, at times, pronounced distrust. Difficulties in overcoming uncertainty through other means obliged trust in some contexts, although not in others. (Dis)trust was constructed through inferences involving abstract systems alongside actors' oral and written presentations-of-self. Systemic features and 'forced options' to trust indicate potential insidious processes of regulatory capture.
TL;DR: The empirical and conceptual significance of Polar and Tropical field stations as homes for scientific work and scientific lives and the mundane experiences of expatriation and appropriation establish particular political dynamics of knowledge-making in these locations are considered.
Abstract: A ‘halfway house’ between the generic, purified space of the laboratory and the varied and particular spaces of the field, the field station is a controlled yet uncontained setting from which natur...
TL;DR: It is shown that blogs confound categorization as permanent or ephemeral scholarly communication as well as the high-energy physics community as a whole questions the ongoing function of the blog.
Abstract: Controversies over string theory (collectively termed the 'string wars') intensified in 2005. Also in that year, the open-access preprint publisher arXiv instituted a new feature called a 'trackback'. This new feature enabled authors of blog posts discussing a paper on arXiv to leave a trackback (a link) to the post on the paper's abstract page on arXiv. The determination of which specific bloggers would have access to the feature generated a public controversy that was played out in the blogosphere. Although the community was in almost unanimous agreement that so-called 'crackpots' should not have access to the trackback feature, it was unable to reach a consensus as to how to define a 'crackpot' or an 'active researcher'. Blogs may provide a window into science in the making, yet this study shows that blogs confound categorization as permanent or ephemeral scholarly communication. The trackback feature was originally conceived to develop certain blog discourse as an alternative or complementary form of peer review. However, the high-energy physics community as a whole questions the ongoing function of the blog.
TL;DR: The somatic modes of attention developed by European and North American researchers as they follow bonobos in these forests are traced to show that as environments, beings and their elements become familiar, they do not become ‘neutral’, but rather, suff with meaning.
Abstract: This article explores the sensory dimensions of scientific field research in the only region in the world where free-ranging bonobos (Pan paniscus) can be studied in their natural environment; the equatorial rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. If, as sensory anthropologists have argued, the senses are developed, grown and honed in a given cultural and environmental milieu, how is it that field scientists come to dwell among familiarity in a world which is, at first, unfamiliar? This article builds upon previous anthropological and philosophical engagements with habituation that have critically examined primatologists’ attempts to become ‘neutral objects in the environment’ in order to habituate wild apes to their presence. It does so by tracing the somatic modes of attention developed by European and North American researchers as they follow bonobos in these forests. The argument is that as environments, beings and their elements become familiar, they do not become ‘neutral’, but rather, suffu...
TL;DR: It is argued that individuals’ abilities and understandings vary according to the ‘type of immersion’ they have experienced within a given practice and whether they bring with them another ‘perspective’, and the difference between practitioners and non-practitioners is reaffirmed.
Abstract: Collins and Evans have proposed a 'normative theory of expertise' as a way to solve the 'problem of demarcation' in public debates involving technical matters. Their argument is that all citizens have the right to participate in the 'political' phases of such debates, while only three types of experts should have a voice in the 'technical' phases. In this article, Collins and Evans' typology of expertise--in particular, the idea of 'interactional expertise'--is the focus of a detailed empirical, methodological and philosophical analysis. As a result, we reaffirm the difference between practitioners and non-practitioners, contesting the four central claims about interactional expertise--namely, that (1) the idea of interactional expertise has been proven empirically, (2) it is possible to develop interactional expertise through 'linguistic socialization alone', (3) the idea of interactional expertise supports the 'the minimal embodiment thesis' that the individual human body or, more broadly, 'embodiment' is not as relevant as linguistic socialization for acquiring a language and (4) interactional experts have the same linguistic fluency, understanding and judgemental abilities of practitioners within discursive settings. Instead, we argue, individuals' abilities and understandings vary according to the 'type of immersion' they have experienced within a given practice and whether they bring with them another 'perspective'. Acknowledging these differences helps with demarcation but does not solve the 'problem of demarcation'. Every experience is perspectival and cannot handle, alone, the intertwined and complex issues found in public debates involving technical matters. The challenge, then, concerns the ways to mediate interactions between actors with distinct perspectives, experiences and abilities.
TL;DR: The article utilizes conceptual perspectives from institutional theory, especially drawing on arguments from strategic choice, network-building, and network failure studies, to understand the initial organizational responses that universities and companies select while structuring collaborations.
Abstract: This article explores the emerging institutionalization of collaborative university–industry networks in Russia. The Russian government has attempted to use a top-down public policy scheme to stimulate and promote network-building in the R&D sector. In order to understand the initial organizational responses that universities and companies select while structuring collaborations, the article utilizes conceptual perspectives from institutional theory, especially drawing on arguments from strategic choice, network-building, and network failure studies.
TL;DR: The China case suggests how obesity might have been constituted an ‘epidemic threat’ in other parts of the world and underscores the need for global frameworks to guide the study of neoliberal science and policymaking.
Abstract: Science and Technology Studies has seen a growing interest in the commercialization of science. In this article, I track the role of corporations in the construction of the obesity epidemic, deemed one of the major public health threats of the century. Focusing on China, a rising superpower in the midst of rampant, state-directed neoliberalization, I unravel the process, mechanisms, and broad effects of the corporate invention of an obesity epidemic. Largely hidden from view, Western firms were central actors at every stage in the creation, definition, and governmental management of obesity as a Chinese disease. Two industry-funded global health entities and the exploitation of personal ties enabled actors to nudge the development of obesity science and policy along lines beneficial to large firms, while obscuring the nudging. From Big Pharma to Big Food and Big Soda, transnational companies have been profiting from the 'epidemic of Chinese obesity', while doing little to effectively treat or prevent it. The China case suggests how obesity might have been constituted an 'epidemic threat' in other parts of the world and underscores the need for global frameworks to guide the study of neoliberal science and policymaking.
TL;DR: This study proposes a new politics of care in technoscience and medicine, which begins with anxiety, based on ethnographic fieldwork at a plastic surgery clinic in Seoul, South Korea.
Abstract: This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at a plastic surgery clinic in Seoul, South Korea. Examining the three phases of plastic – consultation, operation and recovery – I show how surgeons w...
TL;DR: This article foregrounds comparison as a key practice in science by discussing the case of chronological comparability in paleoclimatology, and focuses on the calibration of a type of algae as a proxy for climate variables.
Abstract: This article foregrounds comparison as a key practice in science by discussing the case of chronological comparability in paleoclimatology. Based on an ethnographic study of a paleoclimate research project, I illustrate how paleoclimatologists are able to produce comparative data on and images of past climates through the use of ‘proxies’. I focus on the calibration of a type of algae as a proxy for climate variables. Such comparability is one illustration of the myriad ways in which relatively standardized forms of comparison underlie conceptions of ‘climate change’ and of ‘climate’ itself. The work of comparison discussed here has relevance for a variety of practices of qualification, quantification, monitoring, and evaluation.
TL;DR: The utility of examining existing juris-technical assemblages as the authors consider the future of self-monitoring and self-diagnosis is demonstrated, rather than restricting technological innovation, legal innovation provided pathways for widespread acceptance of the home pregnancy test by various groups.
Abstract: This paper explores the settlement process of one of the most common home diagnostic tools currently in use, the home pregnancy test. The controversial new device appeared to threaten the jurisdiction of both doctors and Food and Drug Administration regulations, while it aligned with the women's health movement's goals. But this study finds a more nuanced narrative: one of boundaries and positions that at once were blurry, later shifted, and were ultimately aligned without compromising the credibility of doctors or the legal system. To understand this process, the roles of court decisions and regulations are explained by stages of juris-technical accordance. In this case, rather than restricting technological innovation, legal innovation provided pathways for widespread acceptance of the home pregnancy test by various groups. As more tools move from expert users to layperson users, this paper demonstrates the utility of examining existing juris-technical assemblages as we consider the future of self-monitoring and self-diagnosis.
TL;DR: It is suggested that re-enacting early post-colonial science as events unfolding in the present disrupts straightforward narratives about the promises and shortfalls of scientific progress, raising provocative questions about the sentiments and stakes of research in ‘the tropics’.
Abstract: Located high in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains, Amani Hill Station has been a site of progressive scientific endeavours for over a century, pushing the boundaries of botanical, zoological and medical knowledge, and providing expertise for imperial expansion, colonial welfare, national progress and international development efforts. The station's heyday was from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period of global disease eradication campaigns and the 'Africanization' of science. Today, Amani lies in a state of suspended motion. Officially part of a national network of medical research stations, its buildings and vegetation are only minimally maintained, and although some staff report for duty, scientific work has ceased. Neither ruin nor time capsule, Amani has become a quiet site of remains and material traces. This article examines the methodological potentials of re-enactment - on-site performances of past research practices - to engage ethnographically with the distinct temporalities and affective registers of life at the station. The heuristic power of re-enactment resides in its anachronicity, the tensions it introduces between immediacy and theatricality, authenticity and artifice, fidelity and futility. We suggest that re-enacting early post-colonial science as events unfolding in the present disrupts straightforward narratives about the promises and shortfalls of scientific progress, raising provocative questions about the sentiments and stakes of research in 'the tropics'.
TL;DR: Sensory aspects of material politics in social movements are analyzed, focusing on two police tools: evidence-collecting cameras and noise meters for protest surveillance, and the visual power of cameras with the sonic power of noise meters.
Abstract: This article analyzes sensory aspects of material politics in social movements, focusing on two police tools: evidence-collecting cameras and noise meters for protest surveillance. Through interviews with Korean political activists, this article examines the relationship between power and the senses in the material culture of Korean protests and asks why cameras and noise meters appeared in order to control contemporary peaceful protests in the 2000s. The use of cameras and noise meters in contemporary peaceful protests evidences the exercise of what Michel Foucault calls 'micro-power'. Building on material culture studies, this article also compares the visual power of cameras with the sonic power of noise meters, in terms of a wide variety of issues: the control of things versus words, impacts on protest size, differential effects on organizers and participants, and differences in timing regarding surveillance and punishment.