Epistemic

In a growing number of destination countries state authorities have started to use various digital devices such as analysis of data captured from mobile phones to verify asylum seekers' claimed country of origin. This move has prompted some critics to claim that asylum decision-making is increasingly delegated to machines. Based on fieldwork at a reception centre in Germany, this paper mobilises insights from science and technology studies (STS) to develop a framework that allows for more nuanced analyses and modes of critiques of the digitisation of asylum procedures...

Neurodegenerative diseases (ND) pose significant challenges for biomedicine in the twenty-first century, particularly considering the global demographic ageing and the subsequent increase in their prevalence. Characterized as progressive, chronic and debilitating, they often result in higher mortality rates compared with the general population. Research agendas and biomedical technologies are shaped by power relations, ultimately affecting patient wellbeing and care. Drawing on the concepts of bio- and necropolitics, introduced by philosophers Foucault and Mbembe, respectively, this perspective examines the interplay between the territoriality and governmentality around demographic ageing, ND and death, focussing on knowledge production as a dispositif of power by highlighting the marginal role that the phenomenon of mortality plays in the ND research landscape...

We engaged in a content analysis of 10 years of scholarship about students of color, students with disabilities, and queer and/or trans students and sexual violence (SV). Our findings indicate that most of the scholarship centering students with minoritized identities focuses on prevalence and risk factors associated with SV and lacks theoretical frameworks relevant to the populations being studied. Employing epistemic injustice as a framework, we argue the implications of excluding students with minoritized identities in the scholarship about SV results in ineffective research and practice, which ultimately results in continued high rates of SV for all students...

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Obstetric violence is an urgent global problem. Recently, several studies have appeared on obstetric violence in the Netherlands, indicating that it is a more widespread phenomenon in Dutch maternity care than commonly thought. At the same time, there has been very little public outrage over these studies. The objective of this qualitative research is to gain insight into the working and normalization of obstetric violence by focusing on the moral and epistemic injustices that both facilitate obstetric violence and make it look acceptable...

In an age of mass communication, citizens need to learn how to detect and transmit reliable scientific information. This need is exacerbated by the transmission of news through social media, where any individual has the potential to reach thousands of other users. In this article, we argue that fighting the uncontrolled transmission of unreliable information requires improved training in broad epistemic integrity. This subcategory of research integrity is relevant to students in all disciplines, and is often overlooked in integrity courses, in contrast to topics such as fraud, plagiarism, collaboration and respect for study subjects...

BACKGROUND: Stereotype about Black people contribute to nurses and healthcare providers gaslighting and dismissing of their health concerns. Despite the popularity of the term medical gaslighting in mainstream literature, few studies have explored the experiences of Black women during pregnancy and childbirth. PURPOSE: This paper aims to provide an in-depth insight into Black women's experiences of anti-Black medical gaslighting when accessing care during pregnancy and childbirth...

Unfair knowledge practices easily beset our efforts to achieve health equity within and between countries. Enacted by people from a distance and from a position of power ('the centre') on behalf of and alongside people with less power ('the periphery'), these unfair practices have generated a complex literature of complaints across various axes of inequity. We identified a sample of this literature from 12 journals, and systematised it using the realist approach to explanation. We framed the outcome to be explained as 'manifestations of unfair knowledge practices'; their generative mechanisms as 'the reasoning of individuals or rationale of institutions'; and context that enable them as 'conditions that give knowledge practices their structure'...

Epistemic uncertainty in data-driven landslide susceptibility assessment often tends to be increased by the limited accuracy of an individual model, as well as uncertainties associated with the selection of non-landslide samples. To address these issues, this paper centers on the landslide disaster in Ji'an City, China, and proposes a heterogeneous ensemble learning method incorporating frequency ratio (FR) and semi-supervised sample expansion. Based on the superimposed results of 12 environmental factor frequency ratios (FFR), non-landslide samples were selected and input into light gradient boosting machine (LightGBM), random forest (RF), and convolutional neural network (CNN) models for prediction along with historical landslide samples...

This study explores how bereaved families of organ donors become participants in an 'imagined epistemic community' of organ donor families, amidst a national conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel. Utilizing a media case study approach, we identified factors contributing to the creation of this bi-national community and examined what the families received in return for their part. Additionally, we explored the reasons behind the community splitting into two separate entities. Based on the media reports, we suggest that entry into the community is conditional on donating organs during wartime, granting these families a special moral status in return, resonating messages of altruism, solidarity and coexistence...

As the price of pharmaceuticals and biologicals rises so does the number of patients who cannot afford them. In this article, we argue that physicians have a moral duty to help patients access affordable medicines. We offer three grounds to support our argument: (i) the aim of prescribing is to improve health and well-being which can only be realized with secure access to treatment; (ii) there is no morally significant difference between medicines being unavailable and medicines being unaffordable, so the steps physicians are willing to take in the first case should extend to the second; and (iii) as the primary stakeholder with a duty to put the individual patient's interests first, the medical professional has a duty to address cost-barriers to patient care...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Long Covid is often stigmatised, particularly in people who are disadvantaged within society. This may prevent them from seeking help and could lead to widening health inequalities. This coproduced study with a Community Advisory Board (CAB) of people with Long Covid aimed to understand healthcare and wider barriers and stigma experienced by people with probable Long Covid. METHODS: An active case finding approach was employed to find adults with probable, but not yet clinically diagnosed, Long Covid in two localities in London (Camden and Merton) and Derbyshire, England...

BACKGROUND: Phronesis is a way of knowing, implying wisdom, experiences, and reflections that guide our judgements. Phronesis, important for learning, is a neglected form of knowledge when applied to research. AIM: To examine how phronesis is conceptualised and practiced in three research projects. METHOD: Data from eight interviews with researchers involved in three research projects was generated. The interview material was analysed. A theoretical matrix of contemporary understanding of phronesis was applied to the material...

Laser Thomson scattering (LTS) is a measurement technique that can determine electron velocity distribution functions in plasma systems. However, accurately inferring quantities of interest from an LTS signal requires the selection of a plasma physics submodel, and comprehensive uncertainty quantification (UQ) is needed to interpret the results. Automated model selection, parameter estimation, and UQ are particularly challenging for low-density, low-temperature, potentially non-Maxwellian plasmas like those created in space electric propulsion devices...

According to many, we live in "posttruth" times, with the pervasiveness of falsehoods being an existential threat to democracy and the functioning of free societies. Why do people believe and propagate falsehoods? Current accounts focus on psychological deficiencies, heuristic errors, self-enhancing motivations, and motivations to sow chaos. Here, we advance a complementary, outwardly (vs. inwardly) oriented, and ultimate (vs. proximate) account that people often believe and spread falsehoods for socially functional reasons...

Deliberative dialogue (DD) may be relatively new in health research but has a rich history in fostering public engagement in political issues. Dialogic approaches are future-facing, comprising structured discussions and consensus building activities geared to the collective identification of actionable and contextualized solutions. Relying heavily on a need for coproduction and shared leadership, these approaches seek to garner meaningful collaborations between researchers and knowledge users, such as healthcare providers, decision-makers, patients, and the public...

This article examines the political history of tobacco control policy in South Africa from 1948 to 2018 by drawing on available historical documents, media reports, published books and articles, the grey literature, and face-to-face interviews with key policy actors. Tracing the historical evolution of tobacco control policies in South Africa reveals how embedded opposition from vested interest groups at every stage of the policy process complicates responses to the tobacco issue. This case study demonstrates how, despite such embedded difficulties, a confluence of regime change, evidence-based messaging, political will, policy entrepreneurs, and advocacy coalitions have led to the gradual transformation of tobacco control policy in South Africa over time...

This study combined ecological, environmental, nature-based, and epistemic interpretations of older adulthood to gain a previously unresearched look at how older adults feel that their relations with nature are treated by others. Sixty older adults were interviewed in-depth, and data was analyzed using the Eco-Appreciation framework and Thematic Content Analysis. The results indicate the concurrence of processes of withdrawal of older adults from spaces of nature and discourse about nature. These processes obstruct older adults' wellbeing; entail the infliction of existential epistemic injustices and "eco-ageism" toward them; and emphasize the crucial role social work can play in responding thereto...

The thriving field of comparative cognition examines the behaviour of diverse animals in cognitive terms. Comparative cognition research has primarily focused on the abilities of animals - what tasks they can do - rather than on the limits of their cognition - tasks that exceed an animal's cognitive abilities. We propose that understanding and identifying cognitive limits is as important as demonstrating the capacities of animal minds. Here, we identify challenges that have deterred the study of cognitive limits related to epistemic, practical and publication problems...

Active Learning (AL) has the potential to solve a major problem of digital pathology: the efficient acquisition of labeled data for machine learning algorithms. However, existing AL methods often struggle in realistic settings with artifacts, ambiguities, and class imbalances, as commonly seen in the medical field. The lack of precise uncertainty estimations leads to the acquisition of images with a low informative value. To address these challenges, we propose Focused Active Learning (FocAL), which combines a Bayesian Neural Network with Out-of-Distribution detection to estimate different uncertainties for the acquisition function...