Ontologies for Developing Things

ISBN-13: 9789460912085 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 196 str.

Casper Bruun Jensen

Opis

Ontologies for Developing Things offers a series of conceptually inventive analyses ofthe future-making processes put in motion in contemporary health care systems withthe introduction of electronic patient records and other communication technologies.The book shows how such technological development and implementation processes arebound up with multiple other issues: professional, social, economic and political. Throughsuch processes health care ontologies gradually change, often with unanticipated effects.In analyzing these effects, Jensen offers a highly innovative interpretation of wherescience and technology studies could be headed - towards performative, non- humanistmodes of inquiry.Casper Bruun Jensen is one of the most intellectually accomplished and creative theoristsof second-generation Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as one of the mostactive and productive researchers in the field. In Ontologies for Developing Things, he offersa series of highly original delineations and vigorous defenses of recent developments--or,as he calls them "dispositions"--in STS (ontological, performative, pragmatist, and soforth) through a series of parallel narrations of his own onsite studies of the introductionof new medical-information technologies in Denmark and Canada.Ontologies for Developing Things is a work of unflagging intelligence and intellectualenergy, spilling over with new ideas, surprising angles, sharp perceptions and interestingjuxtapositions, and written with correspondingly attractive punch and force. Readersinterested in information technologies, contemporary developments in social studies ofscience, and related cultural and political theory will find the book immensely engagingand endlessly useful. - Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Duke University and Brown University[author of Scandalous Knowledge: Science Truth and the Human and Natural Reflections:Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion]This superb book is all of empirically rich, politically engaged, ontologically profoundand lucid. Any three of the four makes a very good book; all four makes an outstandingone. - Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor in Cyberscholarship, University of Pittsburg (Authorof Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (With Susan Leigh Star) andMemory Practices in the Sciences).