Returning to and Taking Up Classic "Studies" of Scientific Practice: A Domestication of What?

• In Event: Classic STS Papers, Re-incorporated, Reimagined, Re-enacted - II

Abstract

When reconsidering founding STS-Studies, “the laboratory” and “the manufacture” have become powerful displays, shaping the conception of science as practice, where to locate it and how to link it up with societal transformation. This momentum shifted scholars’ empirical attention from the academy to the laboratory, from theory to experimental practice, from a program of ‘Social Studies of Science’ to ‘STS’. There have been recurring attempts in arranging counter-perspectives into “Library Life”, calling for a “Sociology of Social Scientific Knowledge”, a “Study of Social Knowledge Making” or by assembling the scattered field of “Social Studies of Social Sciences”. This trend may be conceived as a reflexive movement, a treatment of the ‘crisis of representation’, or a reinvigoration of classic methodical debates. Notwithstanding these efforts, there is still a lack of substantive empirical studies into the practices of ‘our’ domestic epistemic cultures. Whereas sites and collectives of laboratories appeared rather accessible, this opportunity may not equally arise from fields, in which one is already ‘member’. By taking up central themes from the laboratory studies approach and fielding them differently, I wish to point towards emanating difficulties that have led to such marginalization and to resources that may be applied for overcoming it. In short, these themes attach to scientific practice as portrayed in laboratories – as collective, as public, as socio-material practice, as running observations, as data-driven and by optimistic careers of fact production.

Author

• Kornelia Engert, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Institute of Sociology