scholarly journals HOW TO USE THE VISUAL IN SCIENTIFIC STUDIES? (FOLLOWING PETER GALISON AND LORRAINE DASTON)

Author(s):  
Михаил Андреевич Новиков

В отличие от визуального как компонента научных практик, исследование научных визуализаций – достаточно молодая, совсем недавно начавшая набирать обороты область эпистемологии. Несмотря на свой «юный» возраст, данная сфера исследований уже успела обогатиться разного рода подходами, концептами и самостоятельными выводами. На наш взгляд, книгу Питера Галисона и Лоррейн Дастон «Объективность» можно рассматривать в качестве труда, который и привносит очевидные новшества в понимание того, как производится знание, в том числе знание о производстве знания, и суммирует все достижения современной эпистемологии и истории науки, в первую очередь эпистемологии визуального, или Visual Science and Technology Studies. Исходя из этого, делается вывод, что, помимо изучения объективности, авторы изобретают новый способ говорения о науке. Визуальное в науке, со всеми возможными способами его практиковать, позволяет авторам, так или иначе двигающимся в русле прагматических подходов, избежать экстерналистских вариантов объяснений производства знания. Это достигается благодаря тому, что исследователи рассматривают не какие-то локальные визуализации, но работают с целыми ассамбляжами образов, исходя из предпосылки, что визуальное – неотчуждаемая часть науки. Чтобы разобраться с тем, что из себя представляет «Объективность», невозможно не обратиться к работам, которые также исследуют визуальное. Оказалось важным продемонстрировать, что современные исследования зачастую проводятся на стыке разных дисциплин, причем предполагается, что строгие дисциплинарные различия для данных исследований столь же реальны, как и пасторальные идеалы. Возвращая статус отчужденным научным компонентам, подобные подходы демонстрируют, что наука отнюдь не сводится к каким-то исключительно априорным или трансцендентальным пропозициям. Напротив, подтверждается, что наука делается здесь и сейчас и невероятно близка к нам, а это значит, что нельзя просто так пройти мимо любого из практикуемых ею элементов. Unlike the visual as a component of scientific practices, the study of scientific visualizations is a young field of epistemology that has only recently begun to gain momentum. Despite its “young” age, this field of research has already been enriched by all kinds of approaches, concepts, and independent conclusions. In my opinion, Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston’s book Objectivity can be considered as a work which, besides bringing obvious innovations in understanding how knowledge is produced, including knowledge about knowledge production, summarizes all achievements of modern epistemology and history of science, first of all, epistemology of the visual or VSTS (Visual Science and Technology Studies). From this it can be inferred that, among other things, in addition to the study of objectivity, the authors are inventing a new way of speaking about science. The visual in science, with all the possible ways of practicing it, allows the authors, moving in one way or another in the direction of pragmatic approaches, to avoid externalistic versions of explanations of knowledge production. This is achieved by the fact that the researchers do not look at some local visualizations, but work with whole assemblages of images, based on the premise that the visual is an inalienable part of science. In order to understand what Objectivity is, one must refer to works that also investigate the visual. It turned out to be important to demonstrate that contemporary research often takes place at the junction of different disciplines, with the assumption that strict disciplinary distinctions for this research are as real as pastoral ideals. By reclaiming the status of alienated scientific components, such approaches demonstrate that science is by no means reducible to some exclusively a priori or transcendental propositions. On the contrary, it confirms that science is done here and now, and is incredibly close to us, which means that one cannot simply pass by any of the elements it practices.

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadhila Mazanderani ◽  
Isabel Fletcher ◽  
Pablo Schyfter

Talking STS is a collection of interviews and accompanying reflections on the origins, the present and the future of the field referred to as Science and Technology Studies or Science, Technology and Society (STS). The volume assembles the thoughts and recollections of some of the leading figures in the making of this field. The occasion for producing the collection has been the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Edinburgh’s Science Studies Unit (SSU). The Unit’s place in the history of STS is consequently a recurring theme of the volume. However, the interviews assembled here have a broader purpose – to present interviewees’ situated and idiosyncratic experiences and perspectives on STS, going beyond the contributions made to it by any one individual, department or institution. Both individually and collectively, these conversations provide autobiographically informed insights on STS. Together with the reflections, they prompt further discussion, reflection and questioning about this constantly evolving field.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Prasad

Science and Technology Studies (STS) by the very act of showing the multiplicity, contingency, and context-dependence of scientific knowledge and practice, provincialized modern science. Postcolonial interventions within STS have pursued this goal even further. Nevertheless, Euro/West-centrism continues to inflect not only scientific practices and lay imaginaries, but also sociological and historical analyses of sciences. In this article, drawing on my own training within STS – first under J.P.S. Uberoi, who was concerned with structuralist analysis of modernity and science, and thereafter under Andy Pickering, when we focused on material agency and temporal emergence and extensively engaged with Actor Network Theory - I emphasize the continuing role of Euro/West-centric discourses in defining the “self” and the “other” and in impacting epistemological and ontological interventions. More broadly, building on a concept of Michael Lynch’s, I call for excavation and analysis of discursive contextures of sciences. In the second section of the article, through a brief analysis of embryonic stem cell therapy in a clinic in Delhi, I show how with shifting transnational landscape of technoscience certain discursive contextures are being “deterritorialized” and left “stuttering.”


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Warwick Anderson

AbstractThis article offers an overview of science and technology studies (STS) in Southeast Asia, focusing particularly on historical formations of science, technology, and medicine in the region, loosely defined, though research using social science approaches comes within its scope. I ask whether we are fashioning an “autonomous” history of science in Southeast Asia—and whether this would be enough. Perhaps we need to explore further “Southeast Asia as method,” a thought style heralded here though remaining, I hope, productively ambiguous. This review contributes primarily to the development of postcolonial intellectual history in Southeast Asia and secondarily to our understanding of the globalization and embedding of science, technology, and medicine.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergio Sismondo

At several points over his career, Pierre Bourdieu articulated a framework for a sociology of science, derived mostly from a priori reasoning about scientific actors in competition for capital. This article offers a brief overview of Bourdieu’s framework, placing it in the context of dominant trends in Science and Technology Studies. Bourdieu provides an excellent justification for the project of the sociology of science, and some starting points for analysis. However, his framework suffers from his commitment to a vague evolutionary epistemology, and from his correlative and surprising neglect of science’s habituses, with their particular practices, boundaries, and political economies. To be productive, Bourdieu’s sociology of science would have to abandon its narrow rationalism and embrace the material complexity of the sciences.


1997 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 506-522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Hilgartner

The failure to consider the Sokal affair in light of other, related episodes has contributed to a wholesale misreading of its significance. The episode has often been offered as evidence for the bankruptcy of a broad and diverse collection offields, variously referred to as cultural studies of science, sociology of science, history of science, and science and technology studies. However, when viewed in context, the Sokal affair illustrates pre cisely why social scientific and humanistic studies of science are necessary. To develop this argument, the author explicitly compares Alan Sokal's experiment with a similar experiment, performed by William M. Epstein and published in this very journal. Comparing the research questions, methods, ethics, and reception of these two experi ments not only reveals the limitations of Sokal's critique but also shows that Sokal has unwittingly endorsed one of the central lines of research in science and technology studies.


2017 ◽  
pp. 9-12
Author(s):  
Y. O. Bytsykina

The article is devoted to introducing new theoretical frameworks and methodological concepts from the field known as science and technology studies (STS) and discussing their potential for design history. The concepts of design and culture are analyzed and compared within the article, providing the possibility of developing the complex concept of “design culture”. The study shows that design can be considered as a social and cultural phenomenon, that design historians may find that the sociology and the history of technology can provide an appropriate theoretical framework and methodological repertoire for studying design, not only as the part of art history. The article introduces main concepts from science and technology studies that might be of particular value to design history and culture, focusing on actor-network theory, script analysis and domestication.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casper Bruun Jensen ◽  
Atsuro Morita

Ontology has recently gained renewed attention in science and technology studies and anthropology (e.g. Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Yet, it has a considerably longer pedigree than these recent debates might lead one to think. Experiments, of course, have long held the attention of sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science (Collins 1985; Gooding 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). And infrastructures have been the focus of sustained inquiry in the sociology and history of technology (Bowker 1994; Hughes 1983). Once these terms are put into conjunction, however, each gets a somewhat different inflection. The following note briefly explores the conceptual purchase of considering infrastructures as ontological experiments. 


1995 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Ward

The debate between scientific realists and postmodern relativists has been generally treated as a philosophical disagreement over the status of epistemology. Here, however, I use material from Bourdieuian social theory and science and technology studies to illustrate how both scientific realism and postmodern deconstructionism can be seen as political and organizational strategies used in the historical and ongoing struggle between scientific and literary fields and camps. I argue that just as scientific realism and experimentalism were used to dismiss the knowledge contributions of literary fields and to relegate them to secondary status in the seventeenth century, postmodern deconstructionism and its turn to rhetoric and textualism is now being employed as a strategy to counter the political and intellectual dominance gained by the sciences over the last few centuries.


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