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"Sandra Harding fills significant gaps in three crucial, overlapping, yet strangely independent scholarly literatures on science and technology: feminist analyses of science, "traditional" science and technology studies, and postcolonial science studies. This is a unifying and strengthening project of great significance both practically (for the future of science throughout the world) and within academe."--Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of "Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality"

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SCIENCES FROM BELOW

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Why Focus on Modernity?...............................................................................11. Modernity's Misleading Dream: Latour.............................................................................232. The Incomplete First Modernity of Industrial Society: Beck.......................................................493. Co-evolving Science and Society: Gibbons, Nowotny, and Scott.....................................................754. Women as Subjects of History and Knowledge.......................................................................1015. Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies: Are There Multiple Sciences?........................................1306. Women on Modernity's Horizons: Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies..............................1557. Multiple Modernities: Postcolonial Standpoints...................................................................1738. Haunted Modernities, Gendered Traditions.........................................................................1919. Moving On: A Methodological Provocation..........................................................................214Notes...............................................................................................................235Bibliography........................................................................................................257Index...............................................................................................................281

Chapter One

Latour

FEW NORTHERN SCIENCE STUDIES have focused critical attention on the modernity of modern sciences. Innovative as these studies have been in undermining central foundations of still prevailing exceptionalist and triumphalist philosophies of science, modernity remains as a kind of horizon in this field. It restricts analysis to Western sciences and technologies and leaves the most powerful arguments of feminist and postcolonial analyses as seemingly unintelligible or irrelevant to science studies projects. In this respect, Western scientific and technological research remain understood in large part as positivism understood them, namely, as the complete terrain of what should count as scientific rationality and technological expertise. Indeed, by referring to them as "Northern" here, I intend to delimit the field on which we focus to the studies, whoever their authors may be, constrained by this kind of horizon.

However, within the field of those who keep their gazes within this horizon, there are beginning to appear some critical foci on how problematic the modernity of the field so circumscribed is-on the modernity of Western sciences and technologies. This chapter and the next two will consider arguments by three Northern critics of modernity who have provided distinctive and extended analyses focused on the natural sciences and their philosophies. These are the French ethnographer and philosopher of science Bruno Latour (We Have Never Been Modern; Politics of Nature), the German sociologist of "risk society" Ulrich Beck (Risk Society; Reinvention of Politics; World Risk Society), and the team of European sociologists of science headed by Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, Re-Thinking Science; Gibbons et al., New Production of Knowledge). Each provides a distinctive focus, yet their arguments overlap in important respects. Let us begin by considering each of these features in turn.

First, each represents a particular influential focus in the field of contemporary postpositivist science studies. Latour's early study with Steve Woolgar, in Laboratory Life, of the social construction of results of research ("truth") in a biochemical laboratory was perhaps the earliest of the ethnographic studies of Northern sciences which so powerfully shaped the field of mainstream science studies. His subsequent interventions have again and again redirected the conceptual practices and debates within the field. Another important concern relevant to this project is with the ways scientific projects advance only by extending their technoscientific and bureaucratic networks greater and greater distances from their "centres of calculation" (Latour, Science in Action). Latour insists that attempts to explain scientific successes in terms of only their social causes are no more accurate than the older attempts to explain such successes in terms only of nature's order.

Beck's earlier studies were focused on the sociology of work. However, he is familiar with the findings of at least some of the post-Kuhnian work in the history and sociology of science, and specifically finds affinities in Latour's work with his own projects. Beck's work is in the lineage of classical sociological theory in ways Latour's (and the work of the Gibbons, Scott, and Nowotny group) is not. Beck also approaches issues of science and modernity from his activist experiences with the German Green Movement. Along with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, his work on "risk society" has been influential in Europe and North America (Beck, Giddens, and Lash, Reflexive Modernization). Most mainstream science studies scholars would probably not consider Beck part of their field since he does not do the laboratory or field site studies (or the equivalents in the history of science) which have come to dominate the field. Yet, as we will see, his work is highly pertinent to understanding what happens in laboratories and field sites.

Gibbons, Scott, and Nowotny, whose original study was commissioned by the Swedish government to aid in its science policy planning, are concerned especially with sociological and philosophical implications of the new ways in which European and North American sciences and technologies are being organized and practiced since the end of the Cold War in 1989. This work is in the lineage of science policy studies. So these three Northern science studies projects represent different approaches to rethinking modernity's sciences and politics.

Their arguments also overlap. First, while all are severe critics of modernity, its philosophies, and its effects, they all find postmodernism an unattractive alternative. For all three of them, postmodernism remains a valuable symptomology of problems with conventional thinking about modernity, but is stuck there. They each think that it does not have the intellectual or political resources to move beyond that critique in order to generate a positive program to transform modernity and its sciences. Thus their arguments demonstrate that post-modernism is not necessarily the inevitable landing site of critics of Western modernity.

Second, all three argue that (Western) science has become a kind of governance which illegitimately bypasses democratic processes. Thus "the scientific" and "the political"-science and politics-are inexorably intertwined. Science appropriates to itself as merely technical matters decisions that are actually social and political ones. However, a democratic ethic requires that everyone affected should participate in such decisions about how we will live and...