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This paper argues that Bruno Latour’s work on translation provides an alternative to dominant anthropocentric, individualistic and managerial approaches in career studies by considering careers as precarious effects of networks instead of the implicit assumption of individual strategic career actors in extant career research paradigms.

The article first compares the three main current approaches to studying careers – structural functionalist, interpretivist and critical – illustrated by three exemplary empirical studies. Subsequently, three concepts from the sociology of translation that are relevant for the study of careers are introduced: career making as translating interests, careers as effects of networks and career action as dislocated and overtaken. Taken together, these three concepts allow us to conceive of careers as practices performed by human and nonhuman actors. Finally, an example from an ethnographic case study in the field of contemporary art illustrates how a Latourian approach can be used.

Latour’s work on translation provides conceptual and methodological tools to investigate career processes and practices in an era of unpredictability.

The paper introduces Bruno Latour’s work on translation to the study of careers.

This section begins with the story of Raul, a young homeless man who dwells in the streets of Buenos Aires city. Raul is 25 years old and has four children who live with his former wife. Divorced because of a problem with drinking, he sleeps here, there, and everywhere but prefers bus stations or tourist destinations. In this way, he not only feels safer but also lives on the charity of foreign tourists. Hotels or bus stations offer safe shelter in case of rain or the ruthless winter. Because of the currency exchange gap between pesos and dollars, tourist destinations are targeted by many homeless men in Buenos Aires City. Having said this, he works as “reciclador urbano – urban recycling” a new nomenclature associated with persons who sort trash to collect recyclables. Known as cartoneros (litter-pickers) as well, these persons started to become a part of Buenos Aires city. At first glimpse, many cartoneros never come back to their homes, located in Provincia de Buenos Aires they sleep and live roaming Buenos Aires traversing from one to another point of the city. The opposite is equally true, like Raul, Buenos Aires airport has turned into an unofficial homeless shelter receiving more than 50 persons each night.

Effective communication is crucial in the medical field where different stakeholders use various terminologies to describe and classify healthcare concepts such as ICD, SNOMED CT, UMLS and MeSH, but the problem of polysemy can make natural language processing difficult. This study explores the contextual meanings of the term “pattern” in the biomedical literature, compares them to existing definitions, annotates a corpus for use in machine learning and proposes new definitions of terms such as “Syndrome, feature” and “pattern recognition.”

Entrez API was used to retrieve articles form PubMed for the study which assembled a corpus of 398 articles using a search query for the ambiguous term “pattern” in the titles or abstracts. The python NLTK library was used to extract the terms and their contexts, and an expert check was carried out. To understand the various meanings of the term, the contextual environment was analyzed by extracting the surrounding words of the term. The expert determined the appropriate size of the context for analysis to gain a more nuanced understanding of the different meanings of the term pattern.

The study found that the categories of meanings of the term “pattern” are broader in biomedical publications than in common definitions, and new categories have been emerging from the term's use in the biomedical field. The study highlights the importance of annotated corpora in advancing natural language processing techniques and provides valuable insights into the nuances of biomedical language.

The study's findings demonstrate the importance of exploring contextual meanings and proposing new definitions of terms in the biomedical field to improve natural language processing techniques.