Anthropological STS involves (a) the skills of ethnographic detection—investigative description, evocation, provocation, the finding of strategic intersections of scale (conjunctures, multicausality, interferences, blockages, deflections); (b) deep and broad historical tracing of networks of technological and scientific exchange and influence, of cultural knowledges, of local resiliences and resistances, of governance imaginaries of better possibilities, and of the transferences (in psychological as well as material senses) of migration, new beginnings, and recuperations of lively pasts; and (c) the increasing use of digital technologies and mapping (as in the SafeCast dissemination of reliable portable Geiger counters and other sensing instruments to create independent, public, and verifiable maps of radiation danger post-Fukushima both in that prefecture and elsewhere and as in new research platforms for data production of air pollution and infrastructure decay, being pioneered in the Asthma Files at RPI with sites in Bangalore, Delhi, Beijing, and elsewhere). These are civil society endeavors that build community and that can verify or dispute official stories, thereby contributing to more robustness and plurality in the governance of society, again a matter of our common biopolis and life-worlds. (193)
