10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17452
The paper introduces the ten years anniversary issue of Tecnoscienza. A short history of the journal is presented, together with some reflections about its evolution along the years. Sketching the texts that compose the anniversay issue, we identify some past, present and future themes in STS.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17452
1
en
Manuela Perrotta
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
STS
“Do It First, Do It Yourself, and Keep on Doing It”: Ten Years of Tecnoscienza
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Editorial
2020-11-12
2023-06-26
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
7-13
TS
Manuela Perrotta
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17452
7
Queen Mary University of London
2038-3460
1
STS
en
13
“Do It First, Do It Yourself, and Keep on Doing It”: Ten Years of Tecnoscienza
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17452/16301
11
                                                                              Introduction
                                                                                              7




“Do It First, Do It Yourself, and Keep on
Doing It”: Ten Years of Tecnoscienza
      Attila Bruni                       Paolo Magaudda              Manuela Perrotta
      Università di Trento                    Università di Padova    Queen Mary University
                                                                           of London



    Abstract: The paper introduces the ten years anniversary issue of Tecno-
    scienza. A short history of the journal is presented, together with some re-
    flections about its evolution along the years. Sketching the texts that compo-
    se the anniversay issue, we identify some past, present and future themes in
    STS.

    Keywords: Tecnoscienza; anniversary; do-it-yourself; academic publishing;
    STS.

    Submitted: September 1, 2020 – Accepted: September 20, 2020

    Corresponding author: Attila Bruni, Department of Sociology and Social
    Research, Via Verdi 26, 38122 Trento, Italy. Email: attila.bruni@unitn.it.




    Commonly, at around 10 years old, children start to change drastical-
ly: they begin to build strong relationships with peers, from whom they
also experience greater pressure; they become more independent from
their family and start to recognise more clearly the point of view of oth-
ers; their attention span increases, while at the same time they need to
cope with greater school commitments; as puberty approaches, they also
become more aware of their own bodies. While not properly a child (but
possibly our “non-human child”), at the end of its tenth year of life
Tecnoscienza begins to deal with issues very similar to those listed above,
facing increasing pressures, putting its own identity under discussion and
coping with higher responsibilities.
    Tecnoscienza was born in 2010 (but its conception goes back to at
least 2008) as an open access journal, in an academic scenario where this
model of self-organised open access publishing represented the newest
and in some sense the most radical alternative to traditional scientific
publishing. However, over the years, this scenario has changed rapidly.
Ten years ago open access publishing platforms were, at least in social

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
11 (1) pp. 7-13 – ISSN 2038–3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                     2020
8                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

and human sciences, still an embryonic phenomenon – also considered as
an emerging technology surrounded by both technical and social contro-
versies. Today, not only are open access journals a well-established reality
in academia, but the same notion of “open access” has been actualised in
several different ways.
    When the first issue of Tecnoscienza came out, open access was main-
ly discussed as a political tool able to rebalance the huge concentration of
power within the academic publishing sector. Today, open access is no
longer one distinctive model, alternative to established corporate publish-
ing, but it includes very different, and to some degree conflicting models,
including the last frontier of that same corporate publishing that open ac-
cess appeared to bring into discussion at the beginning. For example, it is
quite common today (for instance within EU projects) to encourage open
access in its so called “gold” declination, which means that the authors
pay a fee to make their own work freely accessible for everyone, without
the need for the readers to pay a subscription. Although a valuable initia-
tive in terms of knowledge circulation, this model does not offer a real al-
ternative to existing monopolies in the publishing sector, with the associ-
ated risks of weakening the quality of academic publications (as in some
situations authors pay to receive a publishing “service”) and also carrying
the further responsibility of stimulating the growth of the much deprecia-
ble phenomenon of predatory publishing.
    In contrast, at the beginning of its journey, Tecnoscienza adopted a
different and more radical kind of open access model, defined as “plati-
num” or “diamond” open access, in which neither authors nor readers
are required to pay to make scientific work freely available, thanks to a
self-supported publishing organisation. This was made possible by a col-
lective effort put in place by the Italian STS community and supported by
STS Italia, the Italian Society for Science and Technology Studies. In
2009-2010, the group of founders of the journal adopted this quite un-
common – at that time – way of publishing with the idea that an alterna-
tive organising of the way a journal is funded economically and managed
operationally was fundamental to allow different voices, identities and
perspective to emerge. At the same time, as STS scholars, we enthusiasti-
cally embraced new technical tools available (especially the Open Journal
Systems open access software, released originally by the Public
Knowledge Project in 2001) with the genuine belief that new technologies
need to be appropriated with emancipatory political aims in order to dis-
play fully progressive outcomes.
    At the beginning, these choices undoubtedly favoured Tecnoscienza,
allowing the journal to grow in an environment that was increasingly
“welcoming” to such alternative views on academic publishing. However,
while the changes occurring in the academic publishing landscape in the
last decade helped the development of Tecnoscienza, along the years they
brought new pressures, raised by several interconnected phenomena. Just
to name a few: the increased competition in the open access sector; the
Bruni, Magaudda & Perrotta                                                   9
increasingly demanding work required to maintain a high quality publica-
tion; the multiplication of open access STS-inspired international jour-
nals; the proliferation of scientific databases (each with its criteria and in-
dicators to meet); and the increased pressure for publishing in high-
ranked journals.
    The flourishing of other self-organised and open access publishing
experiences within the STS community has allowed Tecnoscienza to find
'peers' with whom to compare and build common experiences. At the
same time, however, the presence of an increasing number of open access
journals has also been a source of 'pressure' on Tecnoscienza, which has
had to find ways to characterise its identity in a more marked way in the
face of a very different and more densely populated landscape than the
one in which it was born. Moreover, having been cited and considered on
several occasions as a possible 'model' to be inspired by has made us fo-
cus not only on the identity of Tecnoscienza that was being built, but also
on the expectations nurtured towards it.
    In order to sharpen the journal’s identity and to make it relevant to
the already-existing and evolving STS international community, we opted
to draw transversal lines across the existing categories and boundaries, for
instance giving space to reflect on the evolving geography of STS at the
global level. Since the STS landscape arose in specific countries (i.e. the
UK, the Netherlands, the USA, and Nordic countries), it has been charac-
terised by the growth of newer, increasingly international and globally in-
terconnected networks, journals, and research. Today, the presence of
STS scholars has expanded in many different countries around the world.
In this scenario, one of the aims of Tecnoscienza has been to redefine the
geography of the global STS community by giving resonance to the im-
portance of the local embeddedness of STS perspectives. Thus, not only
is Tecnoscienza an attempt to draw attention to a relatively new, ‘indige-
nous’ Italian STS community; it also more generally supports a revalua-
tion of the role of smaller national communities and alternative perspec-
tives in the STS domain.
    Staying true to the original idea of working without the support of a
traditional publisher – thus maintaining full autonomy over our work and
offering a true platinum/diamond open access formula – we continue to
manage everything by ourselves and attend to all aspects of the publishing
process, from the governance and decision-making about editorial choic-
es, to the management of the peer-review process, copyediting, mainte-
nance of the web platform, and promotion. This is of course hard work,
often with little visibility, and not rewarded in academic terms, but never-
theless crucial for the journal’s independence and autonomy which, we
believe, are the pivotal features to advance and to develop a critical and
reflexive discourse on academic publishing and knowledge making.
    As is well known in STS, knowledge production is not a neutral activi-
ty, but on the contrary a work that actively contributes in producing the
realities it claims to just report. Knowledge production is performative,
10                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

and research practices and methods enact a specific reality at the same
time they describe it. From this standpoint, looking at scientific publish-
ing in a “critical way” implies a reflexive attitude about our own scientific
practices, of which publishing is a crucial one. Setting up and running a
journal, thus, is not just a way to share ideas; it is a performative action
that can alter the scientific context we inhabit and the kind of knowledge
we produce and circulate.

     A celebratory issue

    As a 'celebration' of its first ten years, this issue of Tecnoscienza fol-
lows a different model to the usual one. Playing with words (and time), at
the beginning of 2020 we invited several members of our Scientific
Committee to contribute with short texts reflecting on the state of the art
of STS and its future challenges, possibly within the next ten minutes,
days, months or years. Then the SARS-COV-2 (commonly known as
“Coronavirus” or ”Covid-19”) appeared and all of a sudden a dramatic
reconfiguration of our daily private and public practices (including work,
of course!) took place. Priorities took on a different shape and we all had
to be smart enough to find ways to manage exactly at the same time our
analogue and digital life, as well as our private and public spaces.
    Thus, notwithstanding all the problems we and our contributors have
had to face in the last months, we are happy to present to our readers a
collection of celebratory contributions from several of the friends and
supporters of this publishing adventure. These texts are a meaningful set
of reflections on the journal’s history, on the state of the field of STS in
Italy and internationally, with a focus on present issues but also on future
challenges and, of course, on the contemporary issues related to the pan-
demic that emerged precisely during the writing of the texts.
    The set of articles is opened by a sort of birthday gift Lucy Suchman
has kindly donated to the journal. Thinking through volumes 1 (2010)
and 10 (2019), she sketches five generative lines of future STS inquiry:
translations; ordering; senses; feminism; and ‘more than human’. More
importantly, the text by Suchman is a call to expand “our capacity to
acknowledge radical difference, including the specificities of our own lo-
cations and associated onto-epistemological conditions, and the histories,
politics, economies and discourses that hold those differences in place”
(Suchman 2020, 20). The politics of language in academia and scientific
publishing in particular, with the dominance of English as lingua franca,
she remarks, “are integral, in sum, to thinking about our field’s pasts and
transforming its futures” (ibid, 16). And a less hegemonic future could
look for “new possibilities for researchers not only to think and work but
also to write in first languages” (ibid, 16). In fact, as recently pointed out
also by Law and Mol (2020, 265), the point is not just about “the effects
of english on whatever it risks eroding (…) [but] the possible value for
Bruni, Magaudda & Perrotta                                                  11
english of importing some of the intellectual resources embedded in other
tongues. (…) What kinds of lessons might ‘english’ usefully learn?”
    To stay with Suchman, it could learn that “too often the worlds of ref-
erence remain implicit, comprising the taken for granted settings and
networks in which we ourselves are located. Who do our words reference,
when, where, and under what circumstances?” (Suchman 2020, 20). This
discussion and the text by Suchman explicitly interpellate Tecnoscienza,
which at the beginning published articles in Italian and in English, but
shifted to English only in 2016. It is not the case to recall the endless con-
versations we had at that time in our board, nor to try to quickly solve a
complex issue which opens up many questions: how to balance the evalu-
ation of local idioms with the need to reach potentially global readers?
How to contribute to the scientific debate by questioning or refusing the
linguistic standards of scientific debates? How to give voice to a plurality
of languages without marking new boundaries between them?
    Whereas Suchman articulates her discourse by taking the 10 year tra-
jectory of Tecnoscienza as a reference point, the following two contribu-
tions by Massimiano Bucchi and Mariachiara Tallachini focus on the co-
existence of various ‘modes’ of science and on the dialogue among insti-
tutions, scientists, and citizens as a crucial theme for the future of STS.
Taking the present pandemic condition as “the greatest exercise in public
scientific education that there’s ever been” (Shapin, in Bucchi 2020, 23),
Bucchi questions whether it is still plausible (and promising for STS re-
search) to conceptualise science and scientific knowledge as the results of
chronological transitions of organisational practices of research (from ac-
ademic to post-academic science, from Science 1.0 to Science 2.0). May-
be, he argues, it is time to “recognise the coexistence of different modes
of science – as narratives, rhetorics and images that continuously overlap
and intersect, with the same actors practicing and preaching different
modes in different situations” (ibid., 24). In the same vein, Tallachini
starts from the present situation to point to another issue STS have vari-
ously underlined, namely the processes of coproduction of scientific
knowledge and policy making. Incidentally, differently from the past she
argues, “the very same citizens, previously depicted as undisciplined re-
cipients of compulsory measures, have turned into essential actors in deal-
ing with the pandemic (…)” (Tallacchini 2020, 30). In this scenario, the
idea of coproduction could be “a powerful democratic instrument to
open up science policy to public discussion”.
    The texts by Giuliano Pancaldi and Paolo Volontè shift the attention
to the past of STS in order to trace some future lines of direction. Giuli-
ano Pancaldi (2020) does so by concentrating on the history of STS in Ita-
ly, highlighting the ways in which the field has gained visibility in the Ital-
ian context, but also pointing out obstacles and problems that still must
be overcome. First of all, the traditionally rigid disciplinary partitions of
Italian academia, which contrasts (and constrains) the vocational interdis-
ciplinarity of STS. In fact, as Paolo Volontè notes in observing “the future
12                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

twenty years of twenty years ago” (2020, 44), the public engagement of
science and technology has been quickly expanding, but the same cannot
be said about the presence of STS in the knowledge of scientists, engi-
neers and designers. Focusing on some recent trends of European tech-
nical universities towards integrating critical and reflexive skills into the
core of their educational programmes, Volontè underlines the opportuni-
ty for STS to become protagonists of a process which could have pro-
found effects on the education of technologists and engineers, and thus
on the present and future world.
    Alessandro Mongili and Federico Neresini adopt metaphorical think-
ing as a conceptual strategy to widen the analytical architecture of STS
and face the future challenges and ambiguities of what can no longer be
conceived as a one-world world. Mongili (2020) uses two images in this
regard, that of a ‘lateral’ approach and that of an ‘unsewn’ world. Only by
lateralising our research can we challenge the Western-centred STS can-
ons, amplify multiplicity, and conceptualise the world in local and global
terms at once. Neresini (2020) proposes the metaphor of the ‘swerve’, or,
better, of a ‘swerving methodology’ as a tool for reflexively questioning
STS objects of study and epistemologies, together with their ‘exclusive-
ness’. Also, the swerve implies a lateral move, thanks to which we can
make more evident the intrinsic processuality of objects and research
questions and avoid self-referentiality.
    As closure of the section devoted to “anniversary reflections”, the text
by Geoffrey Bowker (2020) offers a swerve itself, exploring apps for men-
strual tracking, the affiliative power of technologies and the reconfigura-
tion of expert and lay knowledge. It may sound out of place, but sound-
ing out of place is at the core of past, present, and future STS.
    The issue is closed by a reflection by Assunta Viteritti, current Presi-
dent of STS Italia, on what STS can say about the pandemic we are in and
what kind of scientific models we need to question our time. Because an-
niversaries, in order not to be simply ritualistic, also have to take into ac-
count ongoing situations. Finally, as always, the issue is closed by book
reviews of not-only Anglo-American books.


     A motto and an attitude

    The quotation chosen for the title of this anniversary introduction
(“Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it”) is not an innocent one,
being the motto of the gangster Tony ‘Scarface’ Camonte. Not that we
subscribe to a gangster imaginary or attitude, but beside being a gangster,
the peculiarity of Tony Camonte resides in continuing to take action him-
self. While other bosses get comfortable and set the limits of their ambi-
tion as their career proceeds, Camonte stays actively involved in the front
line, willing for more and not taking for granted what he already has. We
believe a do-it-yourself attitude is necessary not to forget that things
Bruni, Magaudda & Perrotta                                                   13
could have always been done differently and that we cannot simply wait
for things to happen. Without the do-it-yourself attitude Tecnoscienza
would simply not exist; so yes, we will keep on doing it.


References

Bowker, J. (2020) Immunity and Community: Being Stuck and Getting Moving,
   in “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 65-68.
Bucchi, M. (2020) STS Challenges. The Next Ten Minutes and The Coexistence
   of Modes of Science, in “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 23-26.
Law, J. and Mol, A. (2020) Words to think with: An introduction, in “Sociologial
   Review”, 68 (2), pp. 263-282.
Mongili, A. (2020) Future Hybrids in an Unsewn World, in “Tecnoscienza” 11
  (1), pp. 51-58.
Neresini, F. (2020) ‘The Swerve’: A Modest Hint for Appreciating Tradition and
   Escaping Self-Referentiality, in “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 59-64.
Pancaldi, G. (2020) What Can We Learn from the History of STS in Italy? A Few
   Hints for the Future, in “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 35-42.
Suchman, L. (2020) Alcune riflessioni sul 10° anniversario di Tecnoscienza, in
   “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 15-22.
Tallacchini, M. (2020) Establishing a Legitimate Knowledge-based Dialogue
    Among Institutions, Scientists, and Citizens During the COVID-19: Some
    Lessons from Coproduction, in “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 27-34.
Volontè, P. (2020) The “Past Future”. Twenty Years of STS and Technical Uni-
   versities, in “Tecnoscienza” 11 (1), pp. 43-50.
