The last half century has brought great changes to the science-society relationship. Unconditional acceptance of scientific expertise has been replaced by challenges to scientific authority and public socio-technical controversies. Social researchers have made efforts to understand the tensions in science and society relationship, trying find ways to resolve them. These efforts have broadly contributed to transformations in science and technology policy that got underway at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries. However, controversies have not faded into the past. In this article, the author provides a comparative analysis of the explanations of the above-mentioned dynamics of the science-society relationship in social constructivism and actor-network theory. The explanation of social constructivism is the most accredited perspective in Public Engagement with Science (PES) and science communication studies. It considers the dynamics of the science-society relationship by appealing to the local social identities of heterogeneous publics and their expertise, opposed to institutionalized assumptions of science. This perspective formed the basis of the dialogue model which is the primary reference point for modern science communication. In contrast, the explanation provided by actor-network theory, which highlights a deepening crisis of the division between specialists and non-specialists, remains, rather, on the periphery of scholarly attention. To introduce the approaches, the author refers to the key works of Michel Callon and Brian Wynne. The comparison is arranged around three main lines: 1) what are the reasons for challenging scientific authority and the emergence of public controversies; 2) how science and technology policy should be built; 3) what role social scientists play in the dynamics of the science-society relationship. By contrasting the arguments of the two approaches, it is demonstrated that scholarly disregard of actornetwork theory in PES and science communication studies is unmerited, as it has potential for addressing and resolving the major issues in these domains.

This paper addresses cases of social situations that can be identified as sexual harassment in Russian healthcare. Drawing on the intersectional approach and some prerequisites of the sociology of professions, the article reveals several dimensions of power asymmetry in the context of medical professions and organizations, and analyzes their synergistic effects. In particular, it examines the symbolic inequalities of different medical professions, emphasizing their gendered character. The paper draws on mixed-method data consisting of 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews with nursing staff and 23 interviews with those medical professionals who agreed to share their experiences of sexual harassment. Additionally, results of an online survey (560 responses) on workplace interactions is drawn upon in the analysis.

Focusing on the emotional experiences of the research participants, the paper demonstrates that some health professionals find themselves in a vulnerable position on multiple grounds: gender, specialization, position in the professional hierarchy, age (generation), and others. Some local features of Russian healthcare and specific organizational cultures further amplify the effects of structural inequalities, reproducing additional — and mostly informal — dimensions of power. Under such conditions, the experience of sexual harassment is most often silenced both in the organizational context and in the public, yet remains emotionally sensitive for the victims. The article analyzes effects such as the privatization of personal experience, which renders the issue of sexual harassment in medicine methodologically and epistemologically uninvestigable, and in practice — unsolvable.

The subjective well-being of the population — or the ‘level of happiness’ — is a popular topic for scientific research and socio-political discussions both domestically and internationally. In this regard, a direction of research is gaining traction; its proponents consider the level of happiness to be a predictor of the current socio-political stability. An analysis of the literature revealed that, despite the abundance of works on the topic of subjective wellbeing, its relationship with income — as well as with the political activity of the population — there are only a few articles devoted to the analysis of the impact of this indicator on socio-political instability. This article attempts to carry out a cross-country analysis of the impact of deviations in subjective well-being below the value that would be expected at the given level of economic development. The proposed quantitative analysis has made it possible to reveal the presence of a statistically significant influence of this deviation on the revolutionary activity of both an armed and unarmed nature. It is noteworthy that the identified patterns do not apply to all groups of countries — only to middle-income economies — and that each subgroup also has its own patterns. Thus, the mean values of subjective life satisfaction, which are lower than what could be expected with the given level of economic development, are significant predictors of the risks of armed revolutionary insurgencies in lower middle-income countries. At the same time, in upper middle-income countries, they are already predictors of unarmed revolutionary uprisings.

The article analyzes attempts to “normalize” disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities, in contemporary Russia. The NGOs that emerged in the 1990s put a lot of work into reforming the long-term state residential care system and changing the principles of care for people with disabilities. They offered so-called assisted living as an alternative — specially created conditions in which people who have no experience of living outside the state institutions can become familiar with a “normal” life. However, as the author shows, due to the depoliticization of their activities and ongoing financial crises, initiatives that could have influenced the integration of people who spent most of their lives in residential institutions — and could have put an end to Soviet segregationist policies have radically transformed the Western idea of “normalization” by adapting it to the local context. By drawing on Patrick McKearney’s theory of “transparency” on the one hand and Vincento Carpanzano’s “realistic” imagination on the other, the author examines the epistemology of NGO staff and investigates why, even in an intended normalizing project, intellectual disability still serves as a marker of radical alterity. Focusing primarily on practices of imagination and fantasizing about the future, the article demonstrates how the staff of one specific NGO, instead of advocating for their clients’ rights and expanding socializing opportunities, essentialized the psychiatric diagnoses and intellectual differences of its clients and fetishized the hope of financial security, locking former orphans with intellectual disabilities into the status of “disabled.”

The paper examines the body as a stake in space exploration at the intersection of technology, material practices and utopian imaginaries. Based on an interpretation of the film “Gattaca” in the light of the problem of access to space, the paper opposes two techno-utopian regimes — cosmopolitics and biopolitics. Cosmopolitics assumes an equality of access to space for all beings, while biopolitics links bodily restrictions to the problem of regravitation. Regravitation is the biopolitical practice aimed at preserving the “terrestrial” conditions of the body’s existence. The problem of access to space is exemplified by the debate over the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space in the NewSpace movement. A radical step here is taken by space amateurs, defining the stratosphere as “almost space”. In this sense, the amateurs' space techno-utopia turns out to be cosmopolitan — not so much in the sense of space as a political order equal to all beings and entities, but in the sense of a politics of equal access to space beyond Earth. K. E. Tsiolkovsky’s amateur techno-utopia proposes a radical transformation of the body and its liberation from terrestrial gravity. People will become “citizens of the ether” with the help of an extreme environment and gain additional opportunities.

This article focuses on the issues related to obtaining the status of a military invalid and the changes in the policies and rules of this process in Russia in the post-revolutionary period. Particular attention is paid to the process of medical examination, its bureaucratic practices and forms of documentation. The key role of the examination for the material well-being and stability of the status of a military invalid led to several demands, dissatisfactions and calls for changes in the system that had been in place since the beginning of World War I. This became possible with the emergence of new state aid institutions in 1917 (from the Ministry of State Patronage to the later People’s Commissariat of Social Welfare) and forms of self-organisation (the Union of Maimed Warriors). The problem of military invalids during the organisational changes of 1917-1918 is analysed from the perspective of the actors involved, their institutional positions and their motivations. These discussions are seen as a space to produce knowledge about the disabled body, as well as to control over it, and raise a number of questions about existing and proposed taxonomies of disease and injury, methods of diagnosis, and communities of experts involved in determining disability. Special attention is paid to the position and role of the military invalids themselves, who, in the conditions of the postrevolutionary period, expanded their sphere of action by referring to the “conquered” right to vote. On the basis of archival material from state relief institutions and departments of the Union of Maimed Warriors, legislative acts and periodicals, the article shows how the increasing concretization of the affected body was justified as a benefit to the state and to the disabled warrior, what community of experts was gathered around the disabled body, and what role the Act on the Results of Medical Examination played in the communication between a military invalid and state relief institutions.