Science and Technology Studies has become increasingly interested in the roles of affect and emotions in science and technology. Researchers have examined, for example, emotions in the production of scientific knowledge, patients' or users' affective experiences of technologies, and emotionally charged cultural representations of science. However, less attention has been paid to the underlying affective dynamics that connect these sites, experiences and representations. This article builds on the premises that, first, unpacking these underlying affective dynamics is pivotal to understanding emerging technoscientific phenomena, and, second, that such affective dynamics often need to be accessed through cultural texts such as media. This necessitates developing tools of textual analysis that can capture cultural emotions, affective intensities and the tensions and resonances that arise when affective intensities and culturally circulating emotions become entangled. To this end, the article develops methods of textual analysis through a case study: the affective dynamics underlying the Zika epidemic. Focusing on the New York Times coverage of the epidemic, the article identifies affective concentrations centering on temporality, invisibility, and the dissolution of material boundaries. It shows that there are considerable tensions both within and between these concentrations, and that such tensions engender affective intensities and emotional investments. By combining discursive and non-discursive dimensions of the affective dynamic of Zika, the analysis contributes to the growing STS methodological literature on affect and emotion in technoscience.

The study of ancient DNA (aDNA) has gained increasing attention in science and society as a tool for tracing hominin evolution. While aDNA research overlaps with the history of population genetics, it embodies a specific configuration of technology, temporality, temperature, and place that, this article suggests, cannot be fully unpacked with existing science and technology studies approaches to population genetics. This article explores this configuration through the 2010 discovery of the Denisovan hominin based on aDNA retrieved from a finger bone and tooth in Siberia. The analysis explores how the Denisovan was enacted as a technoscientific object through the cool and even temperatures of Denisova Cave, assumptions about the connection between individual and population, the status of populations as evolutionary entities, and underlying colonialist and imperialist imaginaries of Siberia and Melanesia. The analysis sheds light on how aDNA research is changing the parameters within which evolutionary history is imagined and conceptualized. Through the case study, it also outlines some ways in which the specific technoscientific and cultural entanglements of aDNA can be critically explored.

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This article contributes to discussions of methodology in gender studies by examining narrative analysis as a feminist method. Using direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry services as a case study, the author discusses the potential of narrative analysis in interrogating complex cultural phenomena. The analysis focuses on the commercial website of the UK-based genetics company Oxford Ancestors, which the author situates at the intersection of the cultural narratives of commercialization, scientific advance and personal quest. By interrogating the mutual embeddedness of these narratives, the author demonstrates how narrative analysis moves across structure and context capturing the processes through which facts about gender come into being. The author suggests that this focus on the tension between the abstract and the specific in cultural phenomena is what makes narrative analysis a particularly effective tool for feminist cultural analysis.