‘‘Undone science’’ refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ‘‘new political sociology of science.’’
Standards are useful in the development of medicine because they enable communication and consistency in experimentation. Standards, however, often require expensive tools like laboratories and clinical trials. How, then, might citizen scientists develop standards given the difficulty of obtaining these tools? This article provides one answer, by describing how Clusterbusters, a non-profit organization that represents an online network of people with cluster headache, developed a standardized protocol for using psychedelic mushrooms as a treatment for their disease without the assistance of laboratory equipment or institutional scientific support. In a multi-sited, digital ethnographic investigation of Clusterbusters, we find they used multiple strategies to standardize their experiments. Clusterbusters consumed their medicine in the form of homegrown psilocybe mushrooms because they lacked access to pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin. A dose of a mushroom cannot be standardized as easily as an isolated chemical, yet each individual experimenter needed to understand how much psychedelic they were about to consume. They solved their problem by developing an “embodied standard” for dosage that combined both the weight of the dried mushroom and the subjective experience the dosage produced. This hybrid measure enabled Clusterbusters to develop a collective phenomenological understanding of a standard dosage. Our discussion highlights how the pragmatic goals of knowledge production of citizen science differ from the institutionalized scientists’ need to legitimate their findings with academic journals, peers, and regulatory agencies. This insight may be useful not only for those who study citizen science, but also those who work with institutionalized protocols in other domains.
This special issue of “The Forum” publishes Charles L. Bosk's final work—a book proposal written for a trade audience titled—The Price of Perfection: The Cost of Error. Five noted scholars Carol Heimer, Carla Keirns, Mark Neuman, Julia Szymczak, and Stefan Timmermans offer commentary. Their essays touch on common themes: Bosk's humanity, his wry sense of humor, and keen ability to highlight the absurdity of the social organization of contemporary medicine alongside the sacred obligation that accompanies caring for the sick. Together, the book proposal and these five essays focus our attention on the impact Bosk's scholarship had in medicine, sociology, and the patient safety movement.
Abstract This book chapter analyzes the notion that migraine has recently undergone a paradigm shift-an idea that permeates headache specialists' narrative retellings of their discipline's own history. Headache specialists describe migraine as having undergone a revolutionary transformation from a condition "once believed to be a disorder of neurotic women," but which is now understood as a "neurobiological disease." Headache specialists are excited about this transformation, in large part because it allows them to leave behind a history that in many ways appears to be nonscientific, if not completely sexist. I argue, however, that this paradigmatic shift is driven, in part, by a professional desire to build a more credible and legitimate profession. In the meantime, I demonstrate that this move towards the brain has failed to de-gender migraine and instead has created a new, highly gendered "kind" of migraine patient-a person in possession of a hypersensitive, demanding "Migraine Brain." I argue that the "Migraine Brain" is not much different than the psychosomatic migraine patient that researchers suggest it replaces, and, in fact, it reifies many of the gendered assumptions that psychosomatic medicine made.
