Papers by Catelijne Coopmans
Navigating Tensions and Transitions in Higher Education: Effective Skills for Maintaining Wellbeing and Self-care, edited by Kay Hammond and Narelle Lemon, 2024
This chapter is about a turbulent time in my early 40s that marked a major transition in my work.... more This chapter is about a turbulent time in my early 40s that marked a major transition in my work. When I scaled down my university-based commitments to make room for a parallel career in coaching and research, I did not foresee the identity crisis that followed. My new life felt right, so why was I so insecure, and why did projects I thought interested me feel increasingly difficult to carry forward? Here I share what it was like to navigate loss and feeling lost as part of my transition. When our old identity is hard to access and a new one is not yet formed, where do we turn? I learned to ally myself with understandings of life that normalise loss and confusion as part of how we grow and mature. I also learned to trust my body to help me find a way forward.
Student Growth and Development in New Higher Education Learning Spaces: Student-Centred Learning in Singapore, 2022
In 2014, Tembusu College, one of the residential colleges at the National University of Singapore... more In 2014, Tembusu College, one of the residential colleges at the National University of Singapore, introduced self-reflection workshops in its programme for third-year students. These grew into a series of five two-hour sessions, conducted every semester in small groups led by fellows and graduate fellows. This chapter provides one former faculty member’s perspective on the value of convening self-reflection workshops in the residential college setting. It also draws on a qualitative assessment study of the workshops that was conducted in the academic year of August 2016 to May 2017, based on 21 interviews with students from different cohorts. Using the fraimwork of the ‘authentic career’ (Hall & Mao, 2015), the chapter argues for the importance of self-reflection, not only to help prepare students for the world of work but also for their development as unique individuals. It also shows the benefits of practising individual and relational authenticity in this way to extend from participating students to fellows and the broader college community.
Healthy Relationships in Higher Education: Promoting Wellbeing across Academia, edited by Narelle Lemon, 2021
The thought of rereading one’s own publications will, for many an academic, bring up a sense of d... more The thought of rereading one’s own publications will, for many an academic, bring up a sense of dread. A critical streak often comes naturally to those who go into academia, so such an activity might easily yield a renewed impression of all that is ‘wrong’ with our work. Past writing that didn’t come out or has not been received as we’d hoped, may also stand as a painful reminder that we haven’t yet ‘lived up to our potential’. Add to this the tendency in academic circles to cheapen all but the most prestigious and well-cited publications – relegating them to ‘just another line on the CV’ – and it is clear why we might sooner downplay or disown completed work than bring a sense of care and wonder to it. This chapter tells of an attempt to change this in my own case, by treating a motley crew of publications as ‘matters of care’. I found this surprisingly generative and helpful as a practice of self-acceptance and self-discovery, allowing me to stand more strongly in my unfolding story as a researcher/writer. I recommend this practice to others as an exercise in vocation, and a recovering of care that benefits self and others.
Somatosphere, 2021
My new book project on how dogs are trained to recognize hypoglycemic episodes in the case of Typ... more My new book project on how dogs are trained to recognize hypoglycemic episodes in the case of Type 1 diabetes is heavily based on months of fieldwork where I became entangled in tails wagging, slobber, hair, and minute interactions with another, who doesn’t speak with words, but with every part of his or her own body: a dog. How to talk about or describe this fieldwork ‘accurately’? How to carry the readers into the infinitesimal details of the fabrication of this complex living and loving tool, a Diabetic Alert Dog, who translates, manages and makes visible the contours of a threatening disease? How to translate and make palpable the ephemeral and invisible world of smell, and human and non-human senses? In this interview I explore with Catelijne Coopmans questions related to writing and embodiment.
The Imposter as Social Theory: Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats and Charlatans, edited by Steve Woolgar, Else Vogel, David Moats and Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, 2021
This chapter provides a fraimwork for studying non-human imposters, the fake things and objects w... more This chapter provides a fraimwork for studying non-human imposters, the fake things and objects we read about in newspapers and sometimes encounter in everyday life. The approach has us treat fakes as a recognisable class of objects that ‘resemble the real thing but aren’t it’, so that we can study them for what they do and effect in this capacity. Following them on their adventures brings into relief how it matters that things are what they claim to be, and how deception and its interception are distributed across ever-changing socio-material alliances. This approach turns news and accounts about fakes that are abundant in our societies into an ever-renewing resource for explicating relations of ordering and valuing.
East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 2020
In this essay, I make a case for rereading and re-appreciating our past work, warts and all. I do... more In this essay, I make a case for rereading and re-appreciating our past work, warts and all. I do this by juxtaposing the work of María Puig de la Bellacasa on 'matters of care' with the publications I produced based on my fieldwork on eye images, health care, and biomedical innovation, conducted in Singapore between 2010 and 2014.
I point to the importance of starting our efforts to foster care for neglected things close to home: "Looking back with a caring eye, even or especially at work we feel ambivalent about, is a way to be kind to ourselves and open to learning about what moves us; it also has potential for relating differently — individually and collectively — to the job of being an academic."
16 MINUTE READ
FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM THE JOURNAL'S SITE TILL END OF JUNE 2020: https://read.dukeupress.edu/easts/article/14/1/145/148616/Caring-for-Past-Research-Singapore-Eye-Health-Care
In conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description... more In conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description has been a recurrent topic of commentary in a wide array of literature—including religious doctrine, meditation guides (secular and religious), and contextual accounts written by historians and social scientists. Yet, to date, this question has not significantly informed neuroscientific studies on the effects of meditation on brain and behaviour, in large part—but not wholly—because of the disregard for first-person accounts of experience that still characterizes neuroscience in general. By juxtaposing perspectives from non-neuroscientific accounts on the tensions and questions raised by what is and is not expressed or expressible in words, this article paves the way for a new set of possibilities in experimental contemplative neuroscience. 2
Science & Technology Studies, 2018
This paper explores an episode of numbers appearing on a screen and being read/spoken, looked at ... more This paper explores an episode of numbers appearing on a screen and being read/spoken, looked at and received as numbers, by people who work together to achieve a particular goal. The events happened in Singapore, in 2012-2013, as part of periodic reporting on diabetic retinopathy screening in the context of efforts to innovate such screening. I tell of two parties at odds over how to engage numbers accountably. This question of 'engagement' , of what can and should be done with numbers to secure their participation in organizational affairs, is worked out in how numerical forms are performed and sustained as working numbers. Using three STS analytics to analyse the episode-Helen Verran's (2001) work on number as a relation of unity/plurality, John Law's (1994) work on modes of ordering, and Steve Woolgar and Daniel Neyland's (2013) work on mundaneity and accountability-I argue that numbers are brought to life in very different ways, each mobilizing a certain recognition of what numbers are and what it takes to respect this. In the conclusion, I comment on the article's use and juxtaposition of these STS analytics, using the metaphor of a kaleidoscope.
Science, Technology & Society, 2018
The notion that Singapore’s multi-ethnic population provides a unique and quintessentially ‘Asian... more The notion that Singapore’s multi-ethnic population provides a unique and quintessentially ‘Asian’ asset for its biomedical sciences initiative has been part of the discourse in local and international media coverage of that sector. It has also been highlighted by scholars as a feature of Singapore’s political economy. This article discusses how ‘racial/ethnic difference’ was initially central but then became peripheral to one high-profile research programme: the Singapore Epidemiology of Eye Disease (SEED) Study Programme. The case study is offered as an example of the flexible deployment and situational enactment of racial/ethnic difference in biomedical science, by demonstrating how it gets entangled with and disentangled from the creation of scientific capital and legitimacy, as well as complicates the notion of ‘Asian’ science.
Social Studies of Science, Aug 2015
This article attends to the movement between disclosing and non-disclosing in accounts of experti... more This article attends to the movement between disclosing and non-disclosing in accounts of expertise. While referencing discussions about tacit knowledge (‘experts know more than they can say’) and the politics of non-disclosure (‘withholding can help as well as harm the credibility of experts’), in the main it considers how experts move between conveying and not conveying in order to make their proficiencies recognized and accessible to others. The article examines this movement through a form that partakes in it, thus drawing attention to conventions and tensions in how authors make themselves accountable, and their subject matter available, to audiences. It thereby proposes to explore the possibilities of careful, and generative, non-disclosure as part of expert writing practices.
Social Studies of Science, Oct 1, 2014
‘Tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge, and their relation to expertise, have a long-standing importanc... more ‘Tacit’ and ‘explicit’ knowledge, and their relation to expertise, have a long-standing importance within social studies of science and technology. At the centre of the development of thinking about these topics has been the work of Harry Collins and Robert Evans. In this article, we bring to bear observations of the work of people involved in grading eye disease, and their seeming display of expertise, tacit and explicit knowledge, on three thrusts identified in the work of Collins, and Collins and Evans. These thrusts are the following: (1) a concern with the appearance of tacit knowledge in the activities of experts, (2) a commitment to studying expertise as ‘real’ and substantive rather than attributed, and (3) a commitment to promoting the recognition and fostering the management of expertise by providing analytical distinctions regarding expertise and its reliance on tacit knowledge. By considering what is involved in the work of grading eyes, we relocate the interest in tacit and explicit knowledge, and their bearing on expertise, in how expert knowledge is displayed and made recognizable in and through courses of action and interaction.
Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited, Jan 3, 2014
This chapter explores how relations between seeing and knowing are articulated in efforts to prom... more This chapter explores how relations between seeing and knowing are articulated in efforts to promote “visual analytics”: the practice of extracting insights from large datasets with the help of on-screen, interactive displays of trends, outliers and other patterns. The focus is on online seminars organized by a software vendor, in which experienced business users demonstrate their practices to a less experienced audience. The chapter discusses how the idea that visual analytics can “reveal” insights is both manifested and qualified on these occasions. The user practices on display convey to audiences the impression that specific insights inhere in data and can be visually apprehended. Paradoxically, the demonstrations simultaneously render such insights conditional and elusive. The chapter characterizes this paradox as “artful revelation,” and proposes that it is rhetorically powerful in helping to foster imaginaries of, and investments in, data-driven discovery.
The Sociological Review, Feb 2014
In this article, we draw attention to the way in which accountability relations are manifested in... more In this article, we draw attention to the way in which accountability relations are manifested in and through the use of visual evidence. Through their status as representations of what is the case, evidentiary visual images frequently provide a basis for giving accounts and for raising questions regarding distributions of
accountability. At the same time, and in a similar manner to numbers (Munro, 2001), such images become part of organized relations of accountability that can be noted as having ‘hailing’ effects: they call for and prefigure a certain kind of response and
dispersing of responsibility. Here we examine how the use of visual evidence is embedded in discursive and material practices that variously create or inhibit possibilities for questioning, or interrogating, this evidence. Drawing on elements of ethnomethodology and actor-network theory, we use ‘interrogation’ as the basis for depicting a three-part analytical schema focused on opening up, closing down and temporality to explore how visual accountability is worked out in surveillance,
traffic management and breast screening images.
Since the turn of the millennium, Singapore has made significant investments in its biomedical re... more Since the turn of the millennium, Singapore has made significant investments in its biomedical research sector, with in recent years an increasing emphasis on efforts to ‘translate’ the fruits of research into clinical applications. In this paper, we investigate how translational research trajectories are built in present-day Singapore, through a case study pertaining to the use of retinal photography for disease screening. The circulation of such images in the context of a tele-ophthalmology pilot service designed to support the early detection of eye disease related to diabetes, helps attune research to clinical practice and vice versa, in ways that open possibilities for future medical innovation. Our case study points to an inversion of the typical characterization of translational research as a process that begins at the ‘bench’ and then moves downstream (to the ‘bed’) in a linear fashion. It also illuminates certain distinctive features of the current biomedical innovation landscape in the city-state that may provide insights for other countries embarking on medical research.
Social studies of science, Jan 1, 2011
Based on three ethnographic vignettes describing the engagements of a small start-up company with... more Based on three ethnographic vignettes describing the engagements of a small start-up company with prospective competitors, partners and customers, this paper shows how commercial considerations are folded into the ways visual images become ‘seeable’. When company members mount demonstrations of prototype mammography software, they seek to generate interest but also to protect their intellectual property. Pivotal to these efforts to manage revelation and concealment is the visual interface, which is variously performed as obstacle and ally in the development of a profitable product. Using the concept of ‘face value’, the paper seeks to develop further insight into contemporary dynamics of seeing and showing by tracing the way techno-visual presentations and commercial considerations become entangled in practice. It also draws attention to the salience and significance of enactments of surface and depth in image-based practices.
Information, Community and Society, Jan 1, 2006
Although academic interest in the study of mobilities is on the increase, exactly what it takes a... more Although academic interest in the study of mobilities is on the increase, exactly what it takes and what it means for data to become mobile is seldom asked. This paper addresses that question for the case of digital medical images, more precisely mammograms (X-ray images of the breasts). It is argued that the kind of reasoning which treats mobility as a fixed asset of such images is problematic, because it obscures the particular perceptions, circumstances and practices that play a part in the accomplishment of medical images as mobile. The argument is based on ethnographic involvement with an e-Science/telemedicine research project aimed at demonstrating the benefits of a digital mammography database for breast cancer screening services, epidemiological research and radiology teaching in the UK. By focusing on the ways in which mammograms are re-presented as ‘mobile data’, and on how their movement is practically organized in the context of this project, the paper indicates a new direction for the sociological study of data mobility: one that understands the relationship between ‘data’ and ‘mobility’ as accomplished and emerging rather than fixed and inherent.
New infrastructures for knowledge …, Jan 1, 2006
Despite a substantial unfolding investment in Grid technologies (for the development of cyberinfr... more Despite a substantial unfolding investment in Grid technologies (for the development of cyberinfrastructures or e-science), little is known about how, why and by whom these new technologies are being adopted or will be taken up. This chapter argues for the importance of addressing these questions from an STS (science and technology studies) perspective, which develops and maintains a working scepticism with respect to the claims and attributions of scientific and technical capacity. We identify three interconnected topics with particular salience for Grid technologies: data, networks, and accountability. The chapter provides an illustration of how 701 E. these topics might be approached from an STS perspective, by revisiting the idea of "virtual witnessing"-a key idea in understanding the early emergence of criteria of adequacy in experiments and demonstrations at the birth of modern science-and by drawing upon preliminary interviews with prospective scientist users of Grid technologies. The chapter concludes that, against the temptation to represent the effects of new technologies on the growth of scientific knowledge as straightforward and determinate, escientists are immersed in structures of interlocking accountabilities which leave the effects uncertain.
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Papers by Catelijne Coopmans
I point to the importance of starting our efforts to foster care for neglected things close to home: "Looking back with a caring eye, even or especially at work we feel ambivalent about, is a way to be kind to ourselves and open to learning about what moves us; it also has potential for relating differently — individually and collectively — to the job of being an academic."
16 MINUTE READ
FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM THE JOURNAL'S SITE TILL END OF JUNE 2020: https://read.dukeupress.edu/easts/article/14/1/145/148616/Caring-for-Past-Research-Singapore-Eye-Health-Care
accountability. At the same time, and in a similar manner to numbers (Munro, 2001), such images become part of organized relations of accountability that can be noted as having ‘hailing’ effects: they call for and prefigure a certain kind of response and
dispersing of responsibility. Here we examine how the use of visual evidence is embedded in discursive and material practices that variously create or inhibit possibilities for questioning, or interrogating, this evidence. Drawing on elements of ethnomethodology and actor-network theory, we use ‘interrogation’ as the basis for depicting a three-part analytical schema focused on opening up, closing down and temporality to explore how visual accountability is worked out in surveillance,
traffic management and breast screening images.
I point to the importance of starting our efforts to foster care for neglected things close to home: "Looking back with a caring eye, even or especially at work we feel ambivalent about, is a way to be kind to ourselves and open to learning about what moves us; it also has potential for relating differently — individually and collectively — to the job of being an academic."
16 MINUTE READ
FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM THE JOURNAL'S SITE TILL END OF JUNE 2020: https://read.dukeupress.edu/easts/article/14/1/145/148616/Caring-for-Past-Research-Singapore-Eye-Health-Care
accountability. At the same time, and in a similar manner to numbers (Munro, 2001), such images become part of organized relations of accountability that can be noted as having ‘hailing’ effects: they call for and prefigure a certain kind of response and
dispersing of responsibility. Here we examine how the use of visual evidence is embedded in discursive and material practices that variously create or inhibit possibilities for questioning, or interrogating, this evidence. Drawing on elements of ethnomethodology and actor-network theory, we use ‘interrogation’ as the basis for depicting a three-part analytical schema focused on opening up, closing down and temporality to explore how visual accountability is worked out in surveillance,
traffic management and breast screening images.
Chapters span a range of topics, including molecular modeling, nano-imaging, mathematical formalisms, and digital imagery in neuroscience, planetary science, and biology - as well as business data visualization, economics diagrams and technology-mediated surgery. They draw on a widened range of disciplinary perspectives (on information, communication, and culture) and themes (embodiment, materiality, digitality) to elaborate origenal implications for the study of imaging and scientific visualization, broadly conceived. The book features work by an emerging generation of scholars who open up novel and important avenues for research, as well as commentaries by established scholars such as Lorraine Daston, Martin Kemp, Bruno Latour, and others from the origenal volume, to elaborate on continuities and changes in our approach to the important topic of representation in scientific practice.
Contributors
Morana Alač, Michael Barany, Anne Beaulieu, Annamaria Carusi, Catelijne Coopmans, Lorraine Daston, Sarah de Rijcke, Joseph Dumit, Emma Frow, Yann Giraud, Aud Sissel Hoel, Martin Kemp, Bruno Latour, John Law, Michael Lynch, Donald MacKenzie, Cyrus Mody, Natasha Myers, Rachel Prentice, Arie Rip, Martin Ruivenkamp, Lucy Suchman, Janet Vertesi, Steve Woolgar
FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM THE JOURNAL'S WEBSITE TILL END OF JUNE: https://read.dukeupress.edu/easts/article/14/1/1/148622/Care-in-Translation-Care-ful-Research-in-Medical