Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
The COVID-19 pandemic underlines a fact that was already manifest before, but now, since the beginning of the pandemic, is more evident than ever: contemporary society is significantly shaped by tests; there is in fact hardly a person who has not been tested in their life, hardly an area of society in which tests do not play a significant role (Pinch, 1993; Hanson, 1994; Marres/Stark, 2020).
From an STS perspective, tests are particularly relevant not only because of the considerable social consequences they are capable of evoking, but also due to the fact that they are inevitably sociotechnical instruments that do not test for extra-worldly phenomena. Instead, they always utilize indicators, which have to be understood as defined and stabilized by conventions (MacKenzie 1989). Test procedures are therefore inescapably subject to epistemic fractures since they per se only indicate a representation of what is in fact the target information of the test procedure – which applies to the testing of people (Hanson, 1994; McNamara, 2003) as well as the testing of technology (Downer, 2007). Consequently, testing implies closing epistemic gaps between the test result and the actual target information.
However, tests have hardly been systematically researched in STS. This panel will therefore attempt to conceptualize the role of tests in modern society, with a special focus on the similarities and differences between testing people and testing technologies.
