Academia.eduAcademia.edu

Outline

Title
Abstract
FAQs
Introduction
References
All Topics
Sociology
Science and Technology Studies

In, with and of STS

Profile image of Ingmar LippertIngmar Lippert

2020, Wie forschen mit den "Science and Technology Studies"?

https://doi.org/10.31219/OSF.IO/WBGJS
visibility

…

description

19 pages

link

1 file

Abstract

Abstract How do we narrate about how we ‘use’ STS for social scientific research? How do we study STS research practices? Do all research practices that involve STS concepts contribute to STS? This text constitutes the afterword to an edited volume that contributes to providing answers in the borderlands of these questions. The af­terword problematises how we perform reflexivity, how we are (not) analysing STS's own research practices, and how we tell simultaneous stories of what STS as a field is or might be. With this problematisation, this essay argues for a praxeography of STS, in­volving methodographic, conceptographic and cartographic analyses.

FAQs

sparkles

AI

What explains the multiplicity of STS as a discipline?add

The essay reveals that STS is not singular but multiple, emphasizing a diverse multiplicity of methods and concepts that are situationally enacted, as highlighted by the editors' articulation of 'STS Multiple' since 2015.

How does STS interact with traditional social science disciplines?add

The research illustrates that STS's engagement often results in contributions to classical disciplines like sociology and anthropology, challenging the notion that STS solely enriches its own field.

What methodologies are observed in using STS for research?add

Chapter analyses showcase diverse methodologies, including autoethnography and ANT application, indicating STS's effectiveness across various qualitative and quantitative approaches as seen in Wiedmann's and Meier zu Verl's studies.

How do quotation marks indicate the constructed nature of STS?add

The editors utilize quotation marks around 'STS' to preclude the assumption of coherence, emphasizing its socially constructed meaning and thus reinforcing the need for reflexivity in STS practices.

What are the implications of reflexivity in STS practice?add

Reflexivity enhances STS research by advocating for an analytical approach that scrutinizes the material-semiotic assemblages shaping research infrastructures, promoting deeper engagement with knowledge production.

Related papers

Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge
Marisa Cohn

2017

View PDFchevron_right
What is “(un)making” STS ethnographies? Reflections (not exclusively) from Latin America
Tania Pérez-Bustos

Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society

In a recent article published in a Colombian Journal, Cristóbal Bonelli invites us to "build on the ontological interest of ANT regarding the 'politics of things' by developing the politics of 'where'" 1 (2016, 24). It involves producing a conceptual space allowing the features of ethnographic materials to establish the conceptual terms used to ethnographically describe them. He draws on Annemarie Mol's invitation to rethink politics, as usual, concerned with who can speak and act. Mol and Bonelli encourage to redirect our attention towards what is enacted in every specific context of practice. Thereby, for Mol, politics is open to things in the process of its emerging existence. Bonelli elaborates this distinction for the case of concepts by avoiding the usual differentiation between meanings and materiality. Concepts, inasmuch as empirical objects of the world, are the outcome of the onto-epistemic practices that produce them. Hence, it is plausible to revisit their politics, not only regarding "who" and "what," but also by reflecting on "where." The article offered by Bonelli speaks, in its own way, to the provocations of several scholars about the need to "provincialize" STS concepts. According to Law and Lin (2015), it is necessary to exert a "postcolonial symmetry" given that STS is a "critter gestated in Euro America" to an important extent. There, at the very center of our disciplines, several entities emerge apparently without a place. Some of those entities include "boundary objects," "multiple realities," "sociomaterial networks," "coproductions," or "nature-culture hybrids." Whenever we use our STS lens, we often overlook how things, including concepts, emerge somewhere, and how every new location transforms those curious entities. The question about what a concept can make is importantly related to the location of its production and circulation. Consequently, its location should be included in our consideration of any concept at the core of our research from our own locations. Bonelli puts forward a reflection that echoes the famous quote: "it matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what knowledges know knowledges; it matters what relations relate relations; it matters what worlds world worlds" (Haraway 2016). "It matters" then, not only in the sense of what but also where. Indeed, we might argue that the ideas, knowledge and relations that we often use are also the outcomes of their localities of production. Such localities are most of the times overlooked precisely

View PDFchevron_right
Politics by other means: STS and research in education
Christian Lundahl

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

View PDFchevron_right
Anthropology and STS
Tess Lea

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2015

In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference-where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.

View PDFchevron_right
Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS
Noah Tamarkin, Kristina Lyons

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Tehnoscience, 2017

View PDFchevron_right
STS as participant in policy worlds
Michaela Spencer

EASST Review, 2019

What happens when STS scholars become active participants in the emergence of policy worlds? This question seems a natural corollary to the topic discussed in the last EASST Review editorial, where Andreas Kuznetsov (2019) suggested that there might be much that STS could offer when engaging with both science and social scientific research practices. It is also a question with which me and other STS colleagues working in a small regional university in northern Australia are frequently confronted with...

View PDFchevron_right
Techno-Anthropology: A new move in STS
Torben Elgaard Jensen

I am very honoured to be appointed professor in these two topics: Techno anthropology - a new education -- and in STS -- a fairly young research field. But this is also a fairly challenging appointment, since both techno anthropology and STS are relatively unknown and rather incomprehensible to the general public. In fact, a consultant from the Danish Federation of Industries recently declared that their member companies would almost certainly not want candidates with new strange combinations such as techno anthropology. The companies, she claimed, would prefer well--established educations such as lawyers, engineers and economists.

View PDFchevron_right
A Social Cartographic Mapping of Research Paradigms: Opening up Space for New Directions
Dr. Percy KWOK

Asian Qualitative Inquiry Association, 2022

Since the early 1970s, there have been ongoing debates between realist / postpositivist (quantitative) and interpretivist / naturalist (qualitative) research paradigms in the epistemological and ontological aspects of research methodology. Each camp has its advantages and defects in educational / social research (Howe, 1985; Stallings, 1995). Afterwards, some pragmatic researchers take mixed-methods approach by striking a happy medium between the two paradigms, and others look for emancipatory / transformative research paradigms by paying close attention to indigenous knowledge systems and disadvantaged people. The methodological debate continues onwards due to changing nature and landscape of educational and social phenomena. Notably, this paper endeavors to use Rolland Paulston (1997, 1999) ’s social cartography to map four research paradigms and to open up some new space for further development by ‘decentering’ them. Based on social cartograph, four dimensions are formulated, and...

View PDFchevron_right
Social Studies of Social Science: A Working Bibliography
Michael Mair

NCRM Working Paper Series, Working Paper 08/13

The social sciences are currently going through a reflexive phase, one marked by the appearance of a wave of studies which approach their disciplines’ own methods and research practices as their empirical subject matter. Driven partly by a growing interest in knowledge production and partly by a desire to make the social sciences ‘fit-for-purpose’ in the digital era, these studies seek to reinvigorate debates around methods by treating them as embedded social and cultural phenomena with their own distinctive biographical trajectories – or “social lives”. Empirical studies of social scientific work and the role of methods within it, however, remain relatively scarce. This paper draws together a literature scattered across various social science disciplines and their sub-fields in which social science methods have been studied empirically. It is available open-access via the NCRM website.

View PDFchevron_right
STS as a Lens to Study Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity
Knut H Sørensen

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. In this essay responding to Traweek's Bernal lecture, Sørensen draws on her critical understanding of academic disciplines to discuss how STS may develop the field’s understanding of disciplines, interdisciplinarity, and itself.

View PDFchevron_right

References (62)

  1. Albert, Gert/Sigmund, Steffen (2010): 'Soziologische Theorie kontrovers -Eine Einführung', in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50 (Sonderheft), 11-41.
  2. Balmer, Andrew S. et al. (2015): 'Taking roles in interdisciplinary collaborations: Reflections on working in post-ELSI spaces in the UK synthetic biology com- munity', in: Science and Technology Studies 28(3), 3-25.
  3. Berger, Peter L./Luckmann, Thomas (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. London.
  4. Boersma, Asher/Willkomm, Judith (2020): 'Chips, splinters and emails from a German workshop: On STS concepts in academic Justification'. In Wied- mann et al. 2020, 272-296.
  5. Bowker, Geoffrey C./Star, Susan L. (2000): Sorting things out: classification and its consequences, Cambridge.
  6. Collins, Harry M./Evans, Robert (2002): 'The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience', in: Social Studies of Science 32(2), 235- 296. De la Cadena, Marisol et al. (2015): 'Anthropology and STS: Generative inter- faces, multiple locations', in: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(1), 437- 475.
  7. Dear, Peter/Jasanoff, Sheila (2010): 'Dismantling Boundaries in Science and Technology Studies', in: Isis 101(4), 759-774.
  8. Deville, Joe et al. (eds.) (2016): Practicing Comparison: Logics, Relations, Collab- orations, Manchester.
  9. Fuller, Steve/Collier, James (2004): Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Know- ledge, 2nd ed., Mahwah.
  10. Gad, Christopher/Jensen, Casper B. (2010): 'On the consequences of post-ANT', in: Science, Technology & Human Values 35(1), 55-80.
  11. Gieryn, Tom (1996): 'Policing STS: A Boundary-Work Souvenir from the Smith- sonian Exhibition on 'Science in American Life'', in: Science, Technology, & Human Values 21(1), 100-115.
  12. Greiffenhagen, Christian et al. (2011): 'From methodology to methodography: A study of qualitative and quantitative reasoning in practice', in: Methodolo- gical Innovations Online 6(3), 93-107.
  13. Jasanoff, Sheila (2017): 'A Field of Its Own', in: Robert Frodeman et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, Oxford, 173-187.
  14. Jerak-Zuiderent, Sonja (2015): 'Keeping Open by Re-Imagining Laughter and Fear', in: The Sociological Review 63(4), 897-921.
  15. Keller, Reiner (2019): 'Die Untersuchung von Dispositiven. Zur fokussierten Diskurs-und Dispositivethnografie in der Wissenssoziologischen Diskursan- alyse', in: Saša Bosančić/Reiner Keller (eds.), Diskursive Konstruktionen: Kritik, Materialität und Subjektivierung in der wissenssoziologischen Diskur- sforschung, Wiesbaden, 51-73.
  16. Kneer, Georg (2010): 'Social Order from an Association Theory Perspective', in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50 (Sonderheft), 270- 278.
  17. Knorr Cetina, Karin D. (1981): The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science, Oxford.
  18. Kocksch, Laura. 2020. 'Knowing IT-Security Emergencies -Die Herstellung von Unsicherheit'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 174-208.
  19. Latour, Bruno (1987): Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society, Cambridge.
  20. Latour, Bruno (1999): 'Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest', in: Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge MA, 24-79.
  21. Latour, Bruno (2000): 'When things strike back: a possible contribution of 'sci- ence studies' to the social sciences', in: The British Journal of Sociology 51(1), 105-123.
  22. Latour, Bruno/ Woolgar, Steve Woolgar (1986): Laboratory life: The construc- tion of scientific facts, 2nd ed., Princeton, New Jersey.
  23. Law, John (2004): After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, London.
  24. Law, John (2008): 'On sociology and STS', in: The Sociological Review 56(4): 623- 649. Law, John/Lien, Marianne E. (2013): 'Slippery: Field notes in empirical ontology', in: Social Studies of Science 43(3), 363-378.
  25. Law, John/Singleton, Vicky (2005): 'Object Lessons', in: Organization 12(3), 331- 355.
  26. Lippert, Ingmar (2012): 'Carbon Classified? Unpacking Heterogeneous Relations Inscribed Into Corporate Carbon Emissions', in: Ephemera 12(1/2), 138-161.
  27. Lippert, Ingmar (2013): Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digital- isation and Naturalisation of Emissions, PhD thesis, Augsburg University, Philosophisch-Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät.
  28. Lippert, Ingmar (2014): 'Studying Reconfigurations of Discourse: Tracing the Stability and Materiality of 'Sustainability/Carbon'', in: Journal for Discourse Studies -Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung 2(1), 32-54.
  29. Lippert, Ingmar (2018): 'On Not Muddling Lunches and Flights: Narrating a Number, Qualculation, and Ontologising Troubles', in: Science & Techno- logy Studies 31(4), 52-74.
  30. Lippert, Ingmar/Douglas-Jones, Rachel (2019): ''Doing Data': Methodography in and of STS', in: EASST Review, 38(1), 35-39. https://web.archive.org/web/ 20190218103710/https://easst.net/ article/doing-data-methodography-in-and-of-sts/.
  31. Lippert, Ingmar/Mewes, Julie S. (eds.) (forthcoming): 'Ethnographic data gener- ation in STS collaboration', Science & Technology Studies.
  32. Lury, Celia/Wakeford, Nina (eds.) (2012): Inventive Methods, London, New York.
  33. Mair, Michael et al. (2013): 'Social Studies of Social Science: A Working Biblio- graphy', National Centre for Research Methods Working Paper (08/13). http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3219/1/ soc_studies_of_soc_science.pdf, 10.05.20.
  34. Marguin, Severine/Rabe, Henrike/Schmidgall, Friedrich (2020): Interdisziplinar- ität und Experimentalisierung als Chance für die 'STS'? Über die Entwicklung einer gestaltungsbasierten Forschungsmethodik'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 80-107.
  35. Martin, Ben R. et al. (2012): 'Science and technology studies: Exploring the knowledge base', in: Research Policy 41(7), 1182-1204.
  36. Meier zu Verl, Christian (2018): Daten-Karrieren und epistemische Materialität. Eine wissenschaftssoziologische Studie zur methodologischen Praxis der Ethnografie, Stuttgart.
  37. Meier zu Verl, Christian 2020. 'Referenzkarrieren und Indexikalitätsprobleme. Anmerkungen zur Medientheorie der Ethnografie'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 240-271.
  38. Meneghello, Laura. 2020. 'Die Rohrpost als kommunikations-und raumerzeu- gende Infrastruktur: Zur Kombinierbarkeit von Kulturgeschichte und 'STS''. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 26-50.
  39. Mol, Annemarie (2002): The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Durham, London.
  40. Mol, Annemarie (2010a): 'A letter to Georg Kneer: replik', in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50 (Sonderheft), 279-282.
  41. Mol, Annemarie (2010b): 'Actor-Network Theory: sensitive terms and enduring tensions', in: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 50 (Son- derheft), 253-269.
  42. Müller, Anna-Lisa/Reichmann, Werner 2020. 'Reflexivity, Sensitivity, and 'STS' - The Case of Architecture'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 108-141.
  43. Niewöhner, Jörg (2016): 'Yhteistyöstävä Antropologia: Kuinka edistää re- fleksiivisyyttä kokeellisesti', in: Jukka Jouhki/Tytti Steel (eds.), Etnologinen tulkinta ja analyysi. Kohti avoimempaa tutkimusprosessia, Helsinki, 81-125.
  44. Otto, Danny. 2020. ''STS' goes Sociology!? Chancen und Risiken der wis- senschaftssoziologischen Beforschung des eigenen Fachs'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 209-239.
  45. Restivo, Sal (1995): 'The Theory Landscape in Science Studies: Sociological Tra- ditions', in: Sheila Jasanoff et al. (eds.), Handbook of Science and Techno- logy Studies, Thousand Oaks, 95-110.
  46. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (1997): Toward a history of epistemic things: Synthesiz- ing proteins in the test tube, Stanford.
  47. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (2001): Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge: Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas. Göttingen. Rohracher, Harald (2015): 'Science and Technology Studies, History of', in: James D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Behavioral Sciences, Oxford, 21: 200-205.
  48. Schindler, Larissa (2017): 'The Ethnomethods of Ethnography: A Trans-situ- ational Approach to the Epistemology of Qualitative Research', in: Human Studies 41(1), 103-120.
  49. Sismondo, Sergio (2008): 'Science and Technology Studies and an Engaged Pro- gram', in: Edward J. Hackett et al. (eds.), The Handbook of Science and Tech- nology Studies, 3rd ed., Cambridge MA, London, 13-31.
  50. Sørensen, Knut H (2012): 'Disciplined Interdisciplinarity? A Brief Account of STS in Norway', in: TECNOSCIENZA Italian Journal of Science Technology Studies 3(1), 49-61.
  51. Spöhrer, Markus. 2020. 'Technische Dinge im Wechselspiel: Spielsituationen als Experimentalsysteme am Beispiel einer autoethnographischen Studie zu Tetris 99'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 142-173.
  52. Suchman, Lucy (2007): Human-machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Action, 2nd ed., New York.
  53. Suchman, Lucy (2012): 'Configuration', in Ceila Lury/Nina Wakeford (eds.), In- ventive Methods, London, New York, 48-60.
  54. van den Besselaar, Peter (2000): 'Communication between Science and Techno- logy Studies Journals: A Case Study in Differentiation and Integration in Sci- entific Fields', in: Scientometrics 47(2), 169-93.
  55. Vandermoere, Frédéric/ Vanderstraeten, Raf (2012): 'Disciplinary Networks and Bounding: Scientific Communication Between Science and Technology Studies and the History of Science', in: Minerva 50(4), 451-470.
  56. Verran, Helen (2001): Science and an African Logic. Chicago, London.
  57. Wagenknecht, Andreas et al. (2018): ''How to do research with Science and Technology Studies?' Workshop report on the empirical impact of STS', in: EASST Review 37(3), 57-61. https://easst.net/article/how-to-do-research- with-science-and-technology-studies-workshop-re- port-on-the-empirical-impact-of-sts/.
  58. Webster, Andrew (2007): 'Crossing Boundaries Social Science in the Policy Room', in: Science, Technology, & Human Values 32(4), 458-478.
  59. Wiedmann, Astrid. 2020. 'Follow the actor? Follow whom? Follow what? Die methodischen und praktischen Folgen der Umsetzung der Losung "follow the actor"'. In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 51-79.
  60. Wiedmann, Astrid, Katherin Wagenknecht, Philipp Goll and Andreas Wagen- knecht, eds. 2020. Wie forschen mit den Science and Technology Studies? Bielefeld.
  61. Wiedmann, Astrid et al. 2020. 'Wie forschen mit den "Science and Technology Studies"?, In Wiedmann et al. 2020, 7-25.
  62. Woolgar, Steve et al. (2009): 'Does STS Mean Business?', in: Organization 16(1), 5-30.

Related papers

TRANSnationalizing STS: Places, Spaces, and Politics
Duygu Kasdogan

Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Why, how, and for whom does it matter to walk through, attend and attune to plural and complex STS places/spaces? By building on the STS Across Borders and Innovating STS exhibits held at 4S 2018 and 2019 meetings, this thematic collection unpacks this question and explores the potentials of TRANSnational STS as a methodological orientation in these uncertain times, in a world where technoscientific knowledges and practices are constantly instrumentalized, reproducing colonial, imperialist, racist, nationalist and toxic relationships. The landscape of analysis in curating this thematic collection begins with the places of STS; this can be either a place where an STS meeting is held, an institution where STS scholars do research and teaching, or a formation that brings people together for social studies of science and technology. We invite readers to slowly walk through such a landscape, observing in detail particular places of STS. The contributors to this thematic collection highli...

View PDFchevron_right
AN UNREQUITED LOVE Social Sciences and STS
Pablo Kreimer

The relation between STS and the social sciences is far from simple. While including STS in the field of social sciences is an object of dispute for certain researchers, others have tried to involve, seduce, or debate with colleagues in other subfields to establish bridges across these two disciplinary fields. The majority of social sciences researchers however know very little about current developments in STS and some question or even attack it directly. In this article I take up the debate about these relations to ask why sociology has paid scant attention to the contributions of sociology of science. For the conclusion, I advance certain hypotheses to offer clues for the interpretation of these tensions without claiming to explain them in a more definitive manner. BRIDGES In the culture of Río de la Plata (a term referring to the cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires, both located on opposite sides of the river), the Uruguayans represent an ideal of " best civic practices " in the Argentinian imaginary. They are educated, polite, have low indices of corruption, the most equitable economy of the region and the most liberal, proven by the fact that marijuana consumption and abortion are legal. They have other qualities as

View PDFchevron_right
Call for Papers on “Ethnographic data generation in STS collaboration”
Ingmar Lippert

2019

STS scholars frequently engage in collaborative research, as groups of STS scholars as much as in collaborations with colleagues in other fields or non-academics. This SI explores how ethnographic data is generated and transformed for STS analysis in a range of such collaborative contexts. The special issues (SI) aims to lead beyond reflexivity accounts of positionality in STS ethnography and establish a benchmark for the STS ethnographic study of how ethnographic collaboration configures its data. This focus recognises that STS now build on and critically engage with a tradition of carefully scrutinising how scientists pursue their research-in the field, the laboratory, at desks and conferences. Recognising that textbooks' presentations of methods cannot be mirrored in their "applications" or "implementations", STS have questioned how to author STS accounts "after method"; and we may attend to "inventive methods" to pay attention to the various material and semiotic tools and devices (a) that configure research objects and (b) through which the researcher's data are achieved. Enacting our own STS ethnography's data involves a range of performances of "decisions", explicit and implicit assumptions and politico-normative inscriptions, contingent unfoldings and clashes with, potentially unruly, humans and non-humans; we have to "manage" our data as much as our relations within the research assemblages. Interestingly, however, STS have not yet developed a strong tradition for studying how our own collaborations are shaping the generation and transformation of our ethnographic data. The SI focuses on studying the relation between collaboration, ethnography and its data as it is configured in negotiations of different worlds, in collaborations across difference between researchers and other actants within their research assemblages. Who and what is accountable to what else and in what way in assembling researchers, our partners, subjects, objects, our devices and our data? How do these relations shape and effect not only data but also the objects we study? Ethnographically describing and analysing our method's data practices-this we call methodography. We deem developing and showcasing methodography a significant contribution to our field because this promises to equip STS not only with a resource that ethnograpically working STS scholars can well draw on to analyse their own method choices but also because this proposed SI performs exercising a genre, or a language, for presenting and telling such analyses.

View PDFchevron_right
Practices of Ethnographic Research: Introduction to the Special Issue
Andrea Ploder

Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

View PDFchevron_right
Constructivist Paradoxes Part 1: Critical Thoughts about Provincializing, Globalizing, and Localizing STS from a Non-Hegemonic Perspective
Pablo Kreimer

Engaging Science, Technology and Society, 2022

There is a certain 'failure' in what we could call the modern development of the STS field over the past decade, i.e. a large number of studies-particularly empirical-that were deployed from the 1970s onwards. Indeed, one of their original and crucial objectives was to emphasize the local, situated, contingent character of the processes of production and negotiation of knowledge. However, these studies mostly concentrate on one part of the world, i.e. the most developed countries, precisely where modern science, commonly referred to as "Western Science," developed. This limitation-surely intuitive or "natural"-has several consequences analyzed in this article. In summary, these limitations can be analyzed in terms of the objects of research (the various forms of knowledge) but also in terms of the theories and methods used to account for them. The aim is to discuss the construction of a double (or even triple) peripheral situation, which calls into question the old principles of symmetry and impartiality (Bloor 1976; Collins 1981): on the one hand, the peripheral character of the objects analyzed (i.e. science and scientific development outside Euro-America) and, in parallel, the peripheral situation of the communities of specialists who dedicate themselves to studying them. Connected to this, an additional question emerges: What are the theoretical frameworks and methodologies best suited to account for these objects in their respective contexts? Is it suitable to simply apply to these objects of study the same theoretical frameworks and methods commonly used to analyze hegemonic science? And last but not least, how to approach the (scientific, cultural, political) relationships between different contexts in a highly globalized world? This is the first of two parts: while in the first one I discuss the "failures" of the hegemonic paradigm in STS and its consequences in relation to non-hegemonic contexts. The second part-appearing in volume 8, issue 3-focuses on the consequences for the case of STS research in Latin America and the dynamics of its specific agendas.

View PDFchevron_right

Related topics

  • Science and Technology Studies
    • 580 California St., Suite 400
    San Francisco, CA, 94104
    © 2025 Academia. All rights reserved