August 25, 2011
In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights have not yet been synthesized or presented in a form that systematically highlights the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field attempts to fill that gap. The book develops the theme of co-production, showing how scientific knowledge both embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectives on the nexus of science, power and culture.
Contributors: Michel Callon, John Carson, Peter Dear, Michael Dennis, Yaron Ezrahi, Stephen Hilgartner, Sheila Jasanoff, Michael Lynch, Clark Miller, Vololona Rabeharisoa, William Storey, Charis Thompson, Claire Waterton, Brian Wynne.