Synthetic data is increasingly used as a substitute for real data due to ethical, legal, and logistical reasons. However, the rise of synthetic data also raises critical questions about its entanglement with the politics of classification and the reproduction of social norms and categories. This paper aims to problematize the use of synthetic data by examining how its production is intertwined with the maintenance of certain worldviews and classifications. We argue that synthetic data, like real data, is embedded with societal biases and power structures, leading to the reproduction of existing social inequalities. Through empirical examples, we demonstrate how synthetic data tends to highlight majority elements as the “normal” and minimize minority elements, and that the slight changes to the data structures that create synthetic data will also inevitably result in what we term “intersectional hallucinations.” These hallucinations are inherent to synthetic data and cannot be entirely eliminated without compromising the purpose of creating synthetic datasets. We contend that decisions about synthetic data involve determining which intersections are essential and which can be disregarded, a practice which will imbue these decisions with norms and values. Our study underscores the need for critical engagement with the mathematical and statistical choices in synthetic data production and advocates for careful consideration of the ontological and political implications of these choices during curatorial style production of synthetic structured data.

This article examines the shifting conditions for biomedical knowledge production by studying trends in the design of biomedical experiments. The basic premise of the study is that the very act of establishing a research design entails a process involving a series of valuations where different values are evoked, ordered, and displaced. In focus is the articulation and ordering of what counts as central values in research design for two kinds of biomedical treatment trials, namely the traditional randomised controlled trial (RCT) and the emerging new form of biomarker trials used to assess biomarker/treatment combinations (BTTs). The empirical material consists of textbooks (RCTs) and journal articles (BTTs). We ask how these materials articulate the various scientific, medical, and economic values at play. Among the differences uncovered are a difference in relation to what counts as ethical in relation to prior knowledge, differences in the flexibility in design as well as the valuation of the risk for false positives and false negatives. More broadly, the study shows how textual accounts of different ways of producing knowledge are linked to partly different valuations of ethics, flexibility, and risk as part of establishing the research design of biomedical experiments.

Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatist stance for studying the making of values in society, which means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals, and publics regularly do to define what counts as proper conduct, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing. The volume proposes the word valuography to indicate an empirically oriented research program into the simultaneous making of seemingly separate values. Exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine, this volume features in-depth studies ranging from how zoos make animal value to how health care administrators attempts to engineer fair and efficient health care markets.

The process of translation has both an excluding and including character. The analysis of actor networks, the process of mobilizing alliances, and constructing networks is a common and worthwhile focus. However, the simultaneous betrayals, dissidences, and controversies are often only implied in network construction stories. We aim to nuance the construc- tion aspect of actor–network theory (ANT) by shining the analytical searchlight elsewhere, where the theoretical tools of ANT have not yet systematically ventured. We argue that we need to understand every process of translation in relation to its simultaneous process of treason, and to add antonyms for Callon’s problematization, intressement, enrollment, and mobilization. This enables us to describe powerlessness not as a state but as a process. Our case focuses on the network building around mea- sures for disabled people in the construction of the Athens Metro, during the period 1991-1993. The discussion highlights the efforts of disability organizations to intervene in the initial construction works of the metro project and the simultaneous actions of the Greek government to exclude disability organizations from the design process and to disrupt the accessibility-metro actor network. 

The aim of this paper is to understand the ways in which the biosciences exist in a situation where values of pure and disinterested science meet imperatives to innovate on the basis of economic interests. I show how both these facets of the biosciences, purity and interest, are assembled in complex manners, with large consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated, socially, economically, and methodologically.

Here, I propose analyzing the dichotomous relationship between purity/interest through two modes of purification: temporal and organizational. These two modes of purification have different consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated as Good Science, and are tied to different valorizations of the "linear model" as well as "hybrid science". Thus, I attempt to complicate Boltanski & Thévenot's analysis of justification to stress the performative aspects of coordination and conflict between different orders of worth.

Concretely, the paper's focus is the studied actors’ performance of science as a moral or political project and the ways in which epistemological yardsticks – such as antibody-specificity or experimental replicability – are intertwined with and contrasted against other yardsticks – like production efficiency or medical utility. The questions that the actors grapple with are “What is Good Science?” and “What should the life sciences be concerned with?”

The aim of this paper is to understand the ways in which the biosciences exist in a situation where values of pure and disinterested science meet imperatives to innovate on the basis of economic interests. I show how both these facets of the biosciences, purity and interest, are assembled in complex manners, with large consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated, socially, economically, and methodologically. Here, I propose analyzing the dichotomous relationship between purity/interest through two modes of purification: temporal and organizational. These two modes of purification have different consequences for how the biosciences are evaluated as Good Science, and are tied to different valorizations of the "linear model" as well as "hybrid science". Thus, I attempt to complicate Boltanski & Thévenot's analysis of justification to stress the performative aspects of coordination and conflict between different orders of worth. Concretely, the paper's focus is the studied actors’ performance of science as a moral or political project and the ways in which epistemological yardsticks – such as antibody-specificity or experimental replicability – are intertwined with and contrasted against other yardsticks – like production efficiency or medical utility. The questions that the actors grapple with are “What is Good Science?” and “What should the life sciences be concerned with?”