Modernity and Science/Technoscience

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

There has been increasing interest among science studies scholars in cultures of science and technology. Still, the relationship of science/technoscience with modernity has barely been touched. Bruno Latour declared early in STS that we have never been modern, treating modernity as a myth and thereby taking its consideration off the table for studying science. To avoid cultural reifications more generally, many scholars in anthropology and sociology have avoided the concept of modernity, looking at scientific practices as cultural with a small "c." Meanwhile, even cultural analysts of technoscience have argued that technoscience is postmodern, making modernity irrelevant. But to the extent that both postmodernity and early modernity are aspects of modernity, science and technology have been at the heart of modernity, serving both the myth and historical formation. In this sense, modernity should matter to STS. Posing questions about modernity and its dynamics in practice can help us make cultural sense of technoscience as part of contemporary life.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Chandra Mukerji

Individual Presentations

• Science, Gender and the Modern Self - Chandra Mukerji

• Imagining Modern Forensics: Crime Scene Photography as Science and Art - Kelly Gates, University of California, San Diego

• The Distinct Modernity of Post-genomics - Stefan Timmermans

• Science Fiction and the Experience of Modernity - Charles Thorpe

• An Infrastructural Fish Story: Water and Reflexive Modernity in California - Andrew Lakoff, University of Southern California