Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a subdiscipline of Sociology, and to some extent it's the scholarly context of my PhD research. Sometimes I'm a bit embarrassed because it sounds like a way of doing humanities work while passing for a STEM specialist, but it's actually a very important discipline for the world we live in today. Science and technology studies began in the 1970s, as workplaces where scientific knowledge is produced became fieldwork sites for anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, and other people who study people. Studying science in this way is part of a decolonial act of redirecting the anthropological gaze away from co-called "primitive societies" and towards places of power - sometimes referred to as "studying up". One of the most important early observations of this research was that scientific knowledge is not something existing out there which is objectively "discovered" through the scientific method; instead, it is produced through social systems of validation and authority, and these systems are not objective at all, but reflect the biases of the society in which they are situated. This doesn't mean that nothing is true and there is no such thing as scientific fact - it just means that the process by which scientific facts are made is open to critique. From here, it is easy to imagine how feminist technoscience studies came into being as another subdiscipline, as we live in a society that enacts gendered ways of being a person. But it would be a mistake to suggest that feminist technoscience studies is about criticising science for being sexist. Feminist technoscience studies is engaged in an intellectual project that aims to explore other ways of thinking science and technology. For example, what if we didn't see nature as a thing "out there" over which humans are destined to exert power and control, and instead saw ourselves as part of it? This leads us on to material semiotics and New materialism. Work in these areas often combines "empirical" work (observation and analysis of data) with critical writing, and even branches out into speculative fiction and political theology. Person: Bruno Latour
Person 1: Annemarie Mol
Person 2: Donna Haraway