Author Meets Critics: Fleck Prize

Abstract

The Fleck Prize committee is delighted to award Michelle Murphy the 2019 Ludwik Fleck Prize for her book The Economization of Life (Duke University Press 2017). The Fleck Prize recognizes an outstanding book in the area of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The committee evaluated nominated books on their contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies, their novelty, and their overall scholarly quality.

The book makes major contributions across many fields of STS, combining gender studies, laboratory studies, history of science, economic history, and post-colonial studies, keenly demonstrating that core STS insight that the metaphors we think with matter. Murphy incisively cuts through the phantasms that “economy” and “populations” are inevitable by showing how they are cobbled together from poorly evidenced theories, epistemic-infrastructures that demand their own replication while never producing accurate representations, extractive systems of data-gathering, irresponsible experimentalization of life that perpetuates gross inequity, and a very limited imagination of what living within this world possibly could be and perhaps alway has been. Moreover, by implicating both scientific and social scientific expertise in expanding and enacting these harmful epistemic infrastructures, her work pushes us to imagine how social scientific and scientific experts could act more responsibly and generate more just forms of knowledge production and sharing.

Fleck Committee 2019: Sara Wylie, Oscar Maldonado, Lesley Green, Hsin Hsin Chen.

Discussants

• Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

• Kalindi Vora, University of California Davis

• Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Lourdes Annette Vera, Northeastern University

Session Organizer

• Sara Wylie, Northeastern University