John Desmond Bernal Prize

Abstract

The 2019 Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science goes to Emily Martin, professor emerita of anthropology at New York University. She will be delivering the following lecture:

Crystals, language, and science: from experiment to surveillance

By triangulating the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, JD Bernal, and Piero Sraffa in 1930s Cambridge, this lecture explores the productive space between the philosophy of language and the sociology of science. Although Wittgenstein , Bernal, and Sraffa appear to have worked toward different ends, their views converged in telling ways. This convergence provides fertile ground for the seeds of an emerging anthropological project on the historical relationship between experimental psychology and internet surveillance.




The John Desmond Bernal Prize is a career award for distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Professor Martin’s contributions to STS have been expansive, highlighting the role of gender in science and the importance of feminist studies of science.

Emily Martin received an undergraduate degree in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1966 and completed her PhD at Cornell University in 1971. Since then, she has had an amazingly rich career with positions at several US universities (including Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Yale, and University of California Irvine), where she taught a wide array of courses. She has conducted field work in different settings and lectured in many countries. She has served as board member in commissions inside and outside the university, and has been the President of the American Ethnological Society. She has also played an active editorial role in many journals, including Science, Technology and Human Values, Science as Culture, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, Subjectivity, Anthropology Now and Anthropology Book Forum. Throughout her career, Emily Martin has published 10 books and over 100 articles, some of them reprinted several times and translated into different languages.

One of Martin’s articles “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” is especially widely taught and is one of the most widely taught articles STS. It has been translated into eight languages and reprinted in twenty-one edited volumes. In this piece, as in much of her writing, Martin makes evident how deeply entrenched gender stereotypes give shape to laboratory science—which, in turn, return with powerful force to shape society.

Emily Martin’s work helped shape feminist studies of science and her mentoring has influenced a generation of feminist science studies scholars working on a wide array of topics (sexuality, race, pregnancy, mental illness, money, nationalism, and immunology, for example). The work documents the role of power in science and exhibits a strong commitment to social justice. As one of her former students puts it: “Martin’s scholarship exemplifies the practice of questioning vested categories for which science studies has become known. At the same time, she has never just destabilized science— she is also involved in the project of reassembling science in ways to make for better worlds.” For her commitment to her students, she was awarded the NYU Faculty Award for Teaching and Mentoring Graduate Students in 2007.

Martin’s work has been characterized by methodological and analytic innovation. In Flexible Bodies, for example, she mixed ethnography with history and cultural studies to offer insights into the production of science in/as capitalism. In Biopolar Expeditions she took this experiment further, mixing thick description of the researcher’s own positionality -- and the very notion of the human-as-subject -- into the fold of questions to be explored.

In December 2018, Martin and her work were profiled by The New Yorker, bringing to wider public attention her current research on experimental psychologists and the field of STS at large. Her engagement in the public sphere will continue to inspire new generations of STS researchers.

Bernal Prize Committee Members: Joan Fujimura (4S President Elect), Aadita Chaudhury (4S Council), Hsin-Hsing Chen (4S Council), Noela Invernizzi (4S Council, Chair).

Session Organizers

• Noela Invernizzi, Universidade Federal do Parana

• Kim Fortun, University of California Irvine

• Joan Fujimura, University Of Wisconsin-Madison

• Aadita Chaudhury, York University

• Hsin-Hsing Chen, Shih-Hsin University Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies