In June 2012, Renault turned Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, a town on the outskirts of Paris, into a experimentation and demonstration laboratory. The company introduced a fleet of 50 electric cars as part of a car sharing system without fixed stations called Twizy Way. This scheme falls in line with the manufacturer's development strategy for the electric car market. According to one of the main project managers, this program is a “first step into new mobilities”. In this paper will try and present what we consider a quite poorly documented aspect of the STS debate on experimenting and related to boundary work for the experiment. We will therefore take into account the ontological work the experiment will produce as well as its demonstrative ability and the way it intertwines knowledge, as part of this boundary drawing within the framework of the experiment itself. We do not aim at challenging the countless works focusing on the performative effects of experiments, werather reflect on the fact that its limits are often taken for granted and analyse moments of doubt and negotiation concerning what is considered experimental or not. We do not plan on using definition for any social, technical, economic, ecological, urban or political element involved in the experiment and will consider them, on the contrary, as the temporary and negotiated result of this very operation of laboratorisation. That is why we will speak of a form of flexible laboratorisation affected by doubtand constant reorganisation of the elements making up, overflowing and interfering with the experiment

Drawing on fieldwork in four condition areas (rare diseases, childbirth, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease), this article shows that patients’ organizations’(POs) engagement with knowledge is neither limited to a set of diseases nor restricted to biomedical knowledge. Their work on and with academic and experiential knowledge contributes to an understanding of their conditions and the problems they induce, and to the shaping of the causes they defend. This results in the production of new evidence for grounding research and health policies in their condition areas. The authors propose the notion of “evidence-based activism” to capture the centrality of knowledge activities in contemporary POs.

We report on the development of a method for observing and recording the uses of mobile communications‘on the move’, based on the combination of context-oriented recordings made with user-worn camera glasses with mobile screen capture data. We show how this allows the temporal organization of gaze switches (to and away from the mobile screen) to beobserved and documented, thus providing crucial empirical information to understand how users actually manage mobile communication as well as other activities in everyday multi-activity settings. We report on the findings of an empirical study of smartphone use in transport situations. Being oriented towardsmulti-activity appears as a particular form of attunement to the potential sequential implicativeness of events occurring both in the navigation of mobile communication applications or the mobility environment, i.e. as possible occasions to switch the orientation of one’s gaze from one activity-relevant field of activity to another.

This article proposes the notion of ‘evidence-based activism’ to capture patients’ and health activists’ groups’ focus on knowledge production and knowledge mobilisation in the governance of health issues. It introduces empirical data and analysis on groups active in four countries (France, Ireland, Portugal, and the UK), and in four condition areas (rare diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and childbirth). It shows how these groups engage with, and articulate a variety of credentialed knowledge and ‘experiential knowledge’ with a view to explore concerned people’s situations, to make themselves part and parcel of the networks of expertise on their conditions in their national contexts, and to elaborate evidence on the issues they deem important to address both at an individual and a collective level. This article argues that in contrast to health movements which contest institutions from the outside, patients’and activists’ groups which embrace ‘evidence-based activism’ work ‘from within’ to imagine new epistemic and political appraisal of their causes and conditions. ‘Evidence-based activism’ entails a collective inquiry associating patients/activists and specialists/professionals in the conjoint fabrics of scientific statements and political claims. From a conceptual standpoint, ‘evidence-based activism’ sheds light on the on-going co-production of matters of fact and matters of concern in contemporary technological democracies.

By turning private homes and community spaces into sites where biological experimentation can be carried out , do-it-yourself biology promises a democratization of science. This democratization is based upon material processes : efforts to increase the affordability, the accessibility and the mutability of scientific equipment can be observed. In particular, do-it-yourself biology relies on ‘creative workarounds’ around objects (to transform and combine them in novel ways) and around institutions (to circumvent established university - industry business linkages). By tinkering with objects and by sharing knowledge via various communicative devices – websites, blogs, wikis , forums, videos – do-it-yourself biologists aim to create a new, collective and open economy of scientific equipment and render biology more accessible to citizens. A distinct form of individuality is constituted by providing people access, transforming them into active makers of science, making their bodies/aliments more knowable and demonstrating that one can do it oneself . Do-it-yourself biology thus offers a site for exploring the ethics , the boundaries and new forms of sociability for biology.

This article considers how EPOs contribute to Europeanization from below and its promises. Based on an analysis ofthe projects, pronouncements and politics of three EPOs – EURORDIS (European Organization on Rare Diseases), Alzheimer Europe, and ADHD Europe (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) –, we investigate their role in the Europeanization ofpatient advocacy, moving it beyond national level organizing and acting. We also explore EPOs’ role in Europeanization bypatient advocacy, their contribution to debates and policies on healthcare at European level. Our argument is that Europeanization from below does not consist merely of bringing national claims up to the European level, nor simply enriching national debates with EU issues. Crucially, it also entails a compounded multilevel process whereby EPOs give shape to health issues they deem important to address at European level, and build European communities of patients. This approach, which echoes Delanty and Rumford’s (2005) questioning on the construction of Europe, is particularly relevant here. Indeed, healthcare remains the preserve of Member States, which implies that EPOs have to form European communities of patients and define the causes they stand for as European for them to effectively and meaningfully act at European level. This is what we show in the first section, drawing on interviews with representatives and staff members of these organizations, website and document analysis, workshops, conferences and events that they organized over the three year duration of our research project. In the second section, we turn to the forms of activism that EPOs develop and the Europe for patientsto which they give rise. We highlight their intensive activity for producing facts, statistics and indicators in order to calibrate and justify their intervention at the crossroads of the ‘Europe of markets’ and a ‘social Europe’. This ‘evidence-based activism’, as we may call it, points to the importance of metrological activity for the making of Europe, as Barry (2001) has demonstrated. In the conclusion, we revert to the promises of Europeanization from below and if and how they are advanced by EPOs.

In this paper, we sketch a pragmatist model of authority. We show that, as authority is concretely performed through interaction, it contributes to the constitution of organizational boundaries. Through the case of a six-month consultancy assignment at a large French energy group, our study highlights that authority is not only the result of a mandate or a particular endowment of the consultant, but has constantly tobe established as everyday work unfolds. We argue that a consulting assignment involves a large share of ambiguity which, while being a source of uncertainty, also allows the consultant to position himself as acting on behalf of a variety of figures that lend weight to his actions and authorize them. We identify three different forms that these figures can take: people, material artifacts and abstract entities. Finally, we show that it is the mobilization of some figures rather than others that situates the consultant either within or outside organizational configurations, thus allowing him to tactically act as an outsider or an insider.

Différentes évolutions institutionnelles suggèrent qu’on ne peut plus penser les rapports entre activités marchandes et action étatique sans prendre en considération les activités de recherche et d’innovation, c’est‐à‐dire toutes ces pratiques qui génèrent en continu des flux intenses d’incertitudes ontologiques. Mettre entre parenthèses ces activités, comme le fait l’écrasante majorité des travaux et des réflexions qui sont consacrés aux relations entre Etats et marchés, conduit à une impasse, tant est crucial, pour le dire autrement, le rôle structurant des incertitudes dans le fonctionnement de ces institutions. Il faut donc se méfier des discours qui vantent les mérites d’une de ces trois institutions et assignent aux deux autres une fonction subalterne. Peut‐on raisonnablement croire Steve Jobs, lorsqu’il assure de façon arrogante que ce sont lesinnovateurs et les 25entreprises qui révèlent aux gens ce qu’ils veulent ? Faut‐il suivre ceux qui vitupèrent l’alliance contre nature entre sciences et marchés et exigent un Etat impartial qui dit ce qu’est le bien commun et qui l’impose ? Faut‐il demander plus d’autonomie pour les scientifiques et transformer la décision politique et l’innovation marchande en simples activités d’adaptation et de sélection ? Chacune de ces positions, en faisant comme s’il était possible de confier à une institution particulière (qu’il s’agisse du marché, de la science ou de l’état) la tâche de calculer les décisions qui comptent, vise à rejeter sur les autres institutions la gestion des incertitudes radicales qu’elle génère, mais dont elle ne sait que faire. Ce que j’ai essayé de montrer, c’est qu’une telle position n’est pas tenable. Définir les biens et leur allocation, identifier et circonscrire les maux qui pourraient nous assaillir, exige une articulation constante et bien réglée de ces trois institutions. Pour penser cette articulation, il faut renoncer à considérer les incertitudes comme une sorte de patate chaude que chacun rêve de passer à son voisin. Les sites de problématisation et les incertitudes ontologiques qu’ils travaillent et qui les travaillent ne sont pas à la périphérie mais au cœur de nos institutions dont ils assurent à la fois la vitalité et l’articulation. Telle est, me semble‐t‐il, un des enseignements à portée générale que livre l’examen du paradoxe de sciences et de techniques ambivalentes, porteuses de biens et de maux, à la fois sources de certitudes et d’incertitudes.