This session brings together sociological and historical scholarship about ‘using life to support life in space’. More specifically, we look at the relationships between plants, humans, microorganisms, and technologies in the domain of human spaceflight. Those involved in this endeavour establish links between “sustainable, boundless space habitation and exploration” and “sustainable living on spaceship Earth” (Escobar 2024), but there are many open questions here that our disciplines have just recently started to address (Olson 2018, Munns and Nicklesen 2021, Mackowski 2022). In this panel, we contribute to this emerging conversation with a focus on bioregenerative life support systems, space food, and experimentation in plant space biology. We ask the following questions: How are different notions of ‘sustainability’ mobilised in these fields? What are some tensions between these notions when applied to Earth and to space habitation? What are the relationships between visions of the future and practical operations regarding resources and infrastructures that can sustain humans in space? How does the development of these resources and infrastructures connect biological questions with engineering constraints? What are some important and unresolved ethical questions in these efforts about human habitation in space and the associated pressures for its commercial exploitation?

The session features three presentations and one commentator. The first presentation by Ilenia Picardi and Marco Serino examines the European Space Agency’s Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative programme in terms of its imagined futures and current dilemmas. The second presentation by Mónica Truninger proposes a reconceptualisation of space food with Earthly considerations that go beyond the focus on astronaut consumption. The third presentation by Paola Castaño addresses the epistemic, institutional, and ethical dimensions of plant biology’s transition from microgravity to experiments on the Moon. Finally, Professor Kärin Nickelsen will offer a comment on the three presentations.

For the past twenty years, plant experiments in Low Earth Orbit have primarily focused on how these organisms react to microgravity. Despite the appearance of orbiting platforms as controlled laboratories, scientists have faced challenges separating the gravity effects from other environmental factors like radiation, atmospheric conditions, temperature, vibration, and the equipment used. Now, with planned crewed Lunar missions, plant space is shifting the focus from the still ambiguous concept of “cabin ecology” (Anker 2005) to the Moon as a more complex ecosystem. This presentation examines this transition through two experiments. The first involved planting Arabidopsis thalianaseeds in Lunar regolith samples collected during Apollo missions to test their viability as soil (Paul et al. 2022). The second is the Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF), a growth chamber set to be deployed on the Moon in 2026 to observe growth and stress responses in three plant species (SpaceLab 2024). First, I characterize their understandings of the environment as they attempt to isolate experimental factors. Second, I trace their novel intersections of governmental funding and expertise with commercial and academic research. And, third, I ask how the teams involved in these experiments position themselves ethically in the current visions of human habitation and commercial exploitation of the Moon.
Interrogating the relationship between these three dimensions in the experiments, I revisit sociological accounts of scientific change (Fuchs 1993, Foster et al. 2015) and propose an interpretation that considers scientists’ epistemic, organizational, and normative commitments and not only their responses to funding incentives. The presentation is based on oral histories with plant space biologists, and participant observation from 2022 to 2024 in the NASA Open Science Data Repository Plants Analysis Working Groups, the Space Ecology workshop, and the American Society of Gravitational and Space Research and European Low Gravity Research Association conferences.

A key challenge in generating and sharing data across diverse research fields concerns uncertainty around the interpretation of data and the outcomes of data-intensive research. Uncertainty can mean very different things, however, in different contexts and even between different case studies. Our discussion proposes to address this issue from multiple perspectives, with reference to concrete cases drawn from biomedicine and the life sciences. We will touch on how levels of acceptable uncertainty differ widely across fields in medicine and biology (Rena Alcalay) and examine the varying levels of uncertainty that arise when interpreting diagnostic information generated by algorithmic facial recognition. When algorithmic analysis is used to detect rare diseases, the issue of explainability presents challenges for data sharing across different actors such as geneticists, scientists, clinicians, and patients (Paul Trauttmansdorff). In international “mega” brain projects involving multiple national, institutional, and community actors, harmonising (meta-)data standards remains a key challenge (Anna-Lena Rüland). Narrative forms of data sharing offer the potential to incorporate a range of points of view and epistemic assumptions, however, as does greater attention to the textual form in which data is communicated and circulated (Kim Hajek). With our case studies in mind, we also explore how experts can identify reliable expertise across diverse research fields.? When it comes to evaluating data, we ask what qualities of the specific experts and their broader research contexts may count as markers of reliability (Richard Williams). By approaching uncertainty in data-intensive research from multiple perspectives, we hope to present a new framework from which to analyse the risk of uncertainty in data sharing. This framework enables researchers to take seriously the plurality of expertise involved in data sharing and the particularity of their interests when managing uncertainty.

Staunton et. al. (2021) argue that the increasing reliance on repositories for data exchange complicates the ability to monitor research practices, environments, techniques, and technologies. This challenge in tracking data exchanges undermines the quality and completeness of metadata, as well as the appropriateness of the data for potential application (p. 115, see also Rajesh et al., 2021). I examine a specific aspect of this issue, which I call the Problem of Risk Variability. Across disciplines, norms for acceptable levels of uncertainty–or sigmas–when annotating metadata vary significantly. For example, in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), require highly stringent significance levels to minimise false positives due to the sheer number of comparisons involved. However, when GWAS data are applied in diagnostic medicine, the acceptable level of uncertainty may be relaxed, especially when the goal is to initiate treatment. This discrepancy suggests that different scientific domains may prioritise distinct epistemic values when assessing whether a hypothesis is true (Davis-Stober et. al., forthcoming). By highlighting these differences, I aim to illuminate how epistemic norms shape research practices and complicate the proper annotation of metadata across disciplines.

From recipes for creating chemical mixtures (buffers, tissue culture media) to computational procedures and systems (software documentation, accession number formats), the landscape of scientific practice in biology is full of protocols. In a concrete research setting, protocols are coordination mechanisms that formalize and systematize procedures and know-how required to conduct research (whether in the lab or field), including ways to develop and handle materials, instruments, setups, systems, and pipelines in ways that facilitate coordination towards research goals. They can be either highly standardized and common across contexts (e.g., MS medium, IPEN), leading to problems of lack of appropriateness, or highly contextualized, leading to problems of lack of interoperability. Given their centrality for research practice in applied biology, focusing on protocol practices is crucial for addressing issues of technology transfer, reproducibility, and effective epistemic coordination both inside the local research environment and across geographically distributed settings.

This symposium encourages researchers to think about cooperative processes in biological practice through the design, use, and modification of protocols. Its aims are both critical, exploring pertinent ethical and technical issues related to protocol use, and constructive, by facilitating creative imaginings for a future of protocol design through appropriate digital formats and diverse technologies. These aims are pursued by creating a space for a transdisciplinary “trialogue”, merging three different worlds: a) academic studies of scientific practice, b) applied biology practice in agriculture c) and forefront innovation in decentralized science infrastructure.

The practice-turn in science studies has illuminated how scientific knowledge production operates as a dynamic and local process. Case studies of lab environments have highlighted the ways in which experimental and analytical procedures involve all kinds of contingencies, mishaps, on-the-spot solutions and accidents but at the same time contain such contingencies by being, as a whole, highly regimented and standardized systems. One of these elements that are used to foster stability are protocols. Protocols come in many different forms, dwelling in a continuum from material procedures (e.g. buffer mixtures for tissue culture of endemic species) to digitalised distributed mechanisms (genomic databases). Their main function is coordinative and rests in reducing the need for “articulation work”, that is the work of making research practices legible through ordering, sorting, codifying and documenting. In contrast to other domains of collaborative activity, scientific articulation work is not just operational but has epistemic import, since the object of articulation is mostly the production of data and knowledge. The informational explosion in contemporary science dominated by a push towards data-intensive methods makes scientific coordination highly complex and scientific protocols reflect this complexity, often by producing unexpected results which invite a range of non-standard coping strategies that break the flow of the procedure (interpreting, retro-fitting, discarding, explaining etc). This view approaches protocols not only as record keeping media but also as dynamic objects with their own impetus, prioritizing their performative rather than representational nature (exemplified especially by algorithmic protocols). Ethnographic research between lab and field, helps to keep track of protocol modifications and the factors that govern the decision-making that underlies these decisions. In this paper, grounded on empirical fieldwork of Greek plant science, I investigate protocols as means of inviting cross-domain collaboration, encouraging individual agency as well as improving or shattering communication, interoperability and reproducibility.

The fate of humanity is increasingly recognised to be connected to the fate of the ocean: rising sea levels, ‘Ocean Decades’, deep sea mining, and new ‘blue’ disciplines all speak to a rising interest in further understanding and exploiting the sea. But what places do the ocean and the marine sciences have in the various disciplines represented at ISHPSSB? What does it mean for a discipline to be ‘marine’? Why do marine sciences exist in the first place, and why have some humanities disciplines been slow to engage with the marine environment and the sciences that study it? In this talk, we discuss these issues, drawing together considerations around the nature of the ocean with reflections on the nature of the disciplines that do, or might, study it.

The SARS-CoV-2 and Zika virus outbreaks have reshaped global perceptions of effective scientific practice during public health crises. Building on these experiences, this diverse session presents a filmed dialogue between interdisciplinary researchers from the Centre for Data and Knowledge Integration for Health (CIDACS) in Salvador, Brazil. The film interrogates how systemic inequalities—in data access, funding structures, and healthcare delivery—shape both the trajectory of scientific inquiry and the questions that can be asked and answered. This session encourages attendees to engage with the ethical and epistemological dimensions of equity in the study of infectious disease outbreaks and their consequences. The first half of the session will feature an introduction by the session organizers, followed by a showing of the film and then a commentary by Lukas Engelmann aimed at placing these contributions in historical perspective. The second half of the session will involve a discussion with attendees around the issues raised by the film and speakers. The session is funded and supported by the PHIL_OS project (www.opensciencestudies.eu).

Philosophers and scientists have previously shown the influence of social values – ethical, political, and cultural – on scientific concepts and practices. Conservation biology – aimed at protecting specific biological and ecological entities – is an obvious case where non-epistemic considerations are relevant. A much harder question is which social values should guide scientific practice in a given case, something which should also consider the specific context of conservation (e.g., in India, where the frameworks and paradigms of the field are still drawn from the West). In contrast, Western ecological sciences, when not explicitly about conservation, tend to embrace the “value-neutral” ideal. Even when scientists publicly engage for the protection of severely threatened ecosystems, they still mainly see their political engagement and their research practice as two separate things. As a result, few ecologists acknowledge the role of social values in how they do research. Hence, it is often on researchers from marginalized groups or non-Western countries to show how legitimate or problematic this role might be. This session contributes to this effort from three diverse positions and perspectives, with varying relations to conservation and ecological sciences. Hari Sridhar will explore directly the case of non-epistemic values in Indian conservation biology, showing how this might in turn have epistemic impacts on the knowledge production process. Elis Jones will use the coral reef crisis to show that in at least some cases, ecological concepts (such as ‘ecosystem health’) are indexed to the interests of specific organisms, as well as other non-epistemic factors, even when not used directly in conservation. Ely/iott Mermans will take an important concept from ecology – ‘keystone species’ – and show why its history and non-exclusively epistemic content matter to today’s uses, both in ecology and in conservation. 

Many people have been critical of the concept of ‘ecosystem health’. Others have uncritically adopted it. Here I present a view of ecosystem health which neither reduces it to human preferences (making it purely evaluative) nor reduces it to facts about an ecosystem. I argue that ecosystem health can be understood as relative to a set of organisms – including humans – and the ways in which the ecosystem is valuable for them. As a result, there are multiple ways an ecosystem can be healthy, depending on the organisms and relations being considered. I suggest this kind of indexing of concepts to a specific organism or group of organisms is common in ecology, including for concepts which are less obviously evaluative than ‘health’, and that this organism-relativity improves, rather than undermines, the reliability and usefulness of such concepts (and the practices related to them)

Conducting agroecological research in the field demands choosing or modifying natural places to tailor them to machines and quantitative measurements, ensuring the production of reliable, consistent data while navigating the myriad challenges inherent in unpredictable environments where unexpected occurrences are commonplace (Kohler, 2002). Preparing the field for AI and data intensive agroecological research involves the meticulous construction of objects that can be investigated (cf. Wylie (2015) on fossil construction). These encompass a diverse array, from fruits and insects to data and technologies. Although not always acknowledged as scientific labor, such activity plays a pivotal role in laying the foundation for meaningful research outcomes. When examining pest-plant interactions (Giron et al., 2018; Parker and Gilbert, 2004), the complexity intensifies because it involves the dynamic interplay between different living organisms, each with distinct physiological needs essential for survival and biological constraints that limit the extent to which they can be altered. This symposium, organized as part of the Phil_Os project (https://opensciencestudies.eu), closely investigates the ways in which fields and objects are prepared for AI and data-intensive agroecological research, with a specific focus on the construction of plants, pests, and their interaction. To these aims, the first presentation by Cavazzoni explores three key dimensions that significantly influence the process: social relations, the environment, and the methods employed. The demands of both plants and pests, along with the added complexities of their interactions, pose unique challenges when preparing the field for AI and data-intensive research. Giannetti et al. give an overview of the current state of new technologies used for monitoring and studying insects in both natural and agroecosystem environments. Finally, Leonelli and Ankeny investigate how organisms themselves can be developed as technologies, exploring practices associated with their use both as material tools and as representations.

This presentation closely investigates the ways in which field and objects are prepared for AI and data intensive agroecological research. The discussion is centered around three key dimensions that significantly influence the process. The first one pertains to the intricate tapestry of social relations. This includes how the division and integration of labor and expertise, along with the resulting dynamics, shape the direction of object construction and field preparation. The second axe revolves around the environment. The preparation of the field for automated agroecological research is shaped by factors such as unpredictable weather patterns and the lack of model species due to high biodiversity.  Being concerned with pests and plants in natural fields rather than in controlled lab environments results in researchers having limited control over parameters such as temperature, humidity, and light exposure (De Bont, 2015; Knorr-Cetina, 1992; Kohler, 2002). The third crucial dimension to consider is the methodsemployed. Decisions regarding which aspects to monitor and how to integrate technologies with field elements such as territory, species composition, ecology, and climate greatly influence the preparation of the field and the construction of the objects involved. To effectively address challenges in agricultural development and food security, it is fundamental to align the construction of pests and plants to technological advancements that are not only technically achievable but also useful given pest control methods already on the ground. I ground my reflections on six months of ethnographic work and collaborations with Haly.Id, a Horizon project based in Northern Italy which deals with a plethora of objects such as data, insects, and fruits, and develops innovative technologies for a targeted monitoring of the presence in crop fields of the highly invasive pest Halyomorpha Halys (H. halys) (Ferrari et al., 2023; Giannetti et al., 2024).

(co-authored) The increase of technology advances like drones, rovers, trail cameras, and acoustic sensors that integrate artificial intelligence, along with their higher accessibility, holds the potential to revolutionize the study of animal ecology. Automated monitoring and species recognition in both natural habitats and agroecosystems already represent an important tool in biodiversity management and conservation. However, the application of these technologies for invertebrate monitoring remains relatively limited. The expansion and optimization of such tools would allow for more efficient use of operators’ time by reducing sample management and determination times, offering a greater temporal resolution compared to traditional monitoring systems, and facilitating and speeding up necessary control and management actions. This overview aims to present the current state of new technologies used for monitoring and studying insects in both natural and agroecosystem environments, highlighting their challenges, criticisms, and potential for future development.

(co-authored with Rachel Ankeny) This paper explores an emerging set of scientific practices associated with the use of model organisms in toxicological bioremediation both as tools and as representations. Organisms such as Daphnia are developed and used as technologies to monitor and assess chemicals in polluted waters, and hence serve as sentinel species and diagnostic agents. They also can be used for bioremediation for instance to reduce hazards in chemical mixtures contained in waterways in the environment. At the same time, organisms thus instrumentalised are studied to assess which strains are most well-adapted to chemical pollution – with the ultimate goal to develop models for reduced chemical sensitivity that can be projected onto and investigated in other organisms, notably humans. Hence in this domain, these organisms bridge the field and the lab through the simultaneous use of novel data-intensive approaches appropriate in complex real-world settings and of traditional practices and understandings associated with model organisms from the lab. We argue that such organisms can be viewed as material technologies that nevertheless retain their representational power, and provide an important example of a type of hybridity that will be increasingly common as field-based research leverages the knowledge, data, and technologies created in lab settings.

This symposium examines the multifaceted dynamics involved in agricultural research development and policy formulation in Ghana, highlighting the roles of various institutions, particularly the Crops Research Institute (CRI), the Centre for Agricultural and Biosciences International (CABI)-West Africa, the Centre for Indigenous Knowledge and Organisational Development and the Millar Institute for Trans-disciplinary and Development Studies. The first presentation explores how Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and institutional theory illuminate the intricate relationships between human and non-human actors in the policymaking process. It highlights the negotiation of scientific knowledge among various actors, exploring power relations, institutional norms, and international development agendas. The second presenter focuses on the importance of Indigenous Leafy Vegetables (ILVs) in promoting food and nutritional security for subsistence farmers. Grounded in participatory action research, this study showcases how stakeholder engagement and open selection processes enhance the acceptance and production of ILVs. The final talk challenges mainstream agricultural development, presenting “endogenous development” as a counter-narrative. It critiques the dominant agricultural system promoted by actors like the Gates Foundation and CABI for perpetuating economic and epistemic exploitation; and explores how endogenous development in Ghana emphasises both local and external knowledge that aligns with cultural and material needs, addressing not only economic but epistemic justice as well. Together, these presentations provide an extensive analysis of the intersection between agricultural research and policy, underscoring the necessity of collaborative approaches and integration of local knowledge to foster sustainable agricultural development in Ghana. This session brings together scientists, sociologists, and philosophers working in and between Ghana and Europe, thereby building on their fieldwork and interview experiences with Ghanaian agricultural research and policy. The participation of the Ghanaian invitee is funded by the ERC project “A Philosophy of Open Science for Diverse Research Environments”, www.opensciencestudies.eu.

This paper examines how agricultural research in Ghana is transformed into actionable policy through the lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and institutional dynamics. Focusing on two pivotal institutions—the Crops Research Institute (CRI) and the Centre for Agricultural and Biosciences International (CABI)—the paper explores the complex processes that shape the translation of scientific knowledge into policy recommendations. CRI, as a national research body, and CABI, an international organization, both play key roles in influencing agricultural policies, particularly around issues of food security, pest management, and sustainable farming. However, these institutions must navigate a web of collaborations involving farmers, researchers, extension officers, government agencies, and international stakeholders, each with their own priorities and agendas. Using ANT, as articulated by Latour (2005), this paper analyses the relationships between human and non-human actors that drive these collaborations, revealing how knowledge and policy are co-produced. Simultaneously, institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991) provides insight into how CRI and CABI respond to the pressures of political, social, and funding demands, while balancing their scientific agendas with the practical needs of farmers and policymakers. Previous studies (Ghosh, 2010; Scoones and Thompson, 2011; Kerr, 2012; Adenle et al., 2019; Stone, 2019) have shown that international development agendas often misalign with local needs particularly in the Global South. By focusing on CRI and CABI, this paper highlights the intersection of local and global influences in Ghana’s agricultural research ecosystem. CRI’s national mandate allows for an examination of how research aligns with the needs of smallholder farmers, while CABI’s international scope reveals how global development agendas shape local policy implementation. Together, these case studies offer a nuanced understanding of how scientific rigor and practical applicability are negotiated in the process of translating research into policy and the sociological dynamics behind the policy-making processes in agricultural research.