On 20 March 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Singapore government released a new app called TraceTogether. Developed by the Ministry of Health, SG United, and GovTech Singapore, the app uses the Bluetooth capability of smartphones to store information about other smartphones that have come into close proximity with your own. These data facilitate the government’s process of “contact tracing” through which they track those who have potentially come into contact with the virus and place them in quarantine. This essay attempts to understand what kinds of citizens and civic behavior might be brought into being by this technology. By examining the workings and affordances of the TraceTogether app in detail, the authors argue that its peer-to-peer and open-source technology features mobilize the rhetorics and ideals of citizens science and democratic participation. However, by deploying these within a context that centralizes data, the app turns ideals born of dissent and protest on their head, using them to build trust not within a community but rather in government power and control. Rather than building social trust, TraceTogether becomes a technological substitute for it. The significant public support for TraceTogether shows both the possibilities and limitations of citizen science in less liberal political contexts and circumstances.

STS scholars studying anti-nuclear activism in the context of nations in the Global North have observed the critical role of science to mediate relations of domination and resistance. Through a historical examination of anti-nuclear activism in India, this article investigates the instrumentalization of science as a liberal democratic rationality. In doing so, the article shows how elite Indian activists-many of whom are scientists, engineers, journalists and academic professionals-will never be seen as scientifically knowledgeable in nuclear matters, because of their non-state educational pedigrees. If activists cannot hold the state accountable through science, they have attempted to anticipate what other kinds of arguments and modes of contention may gain traction. As such, they have deployed more 'guerilla' tactics grounded in bureaucratic rationalities in the hopes of installing themselves as alternate sources of expertise in India's nuclear landscape.

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