Lisa Garforth

In/Visibilities of Research: Seeing and Knowing in STS

In science studies the laboratory has been positioned as a privileged place for understanding scientific practice. Laboratory studies foregrounded local spaces of knowledge production in the natural sciences, and in doing so made the laboratory key to social science epistemologies. This article explores how laboratory studies and observational methods have been tied up together in the science and technology studies (STS) project of making scientific practice visible. The author contrasts powerful rhetorics of witnessing and revelation in some significant STS texts with the negotiated and partial ways in which observing science work is done in social science practice. Drawing on empirical material generated with bioscientists and social scientists, the article explores how researchers may resist the observational gaze and mark aspects of knowledge work as private and solitary. The author concludes by arguing that epistemologies of vision point to some unsettling parallels between the study of knowledge-making in STS and audit regimes in contemporary research, and considers how both might devalue invisible work. This analysis suggests that there is a need to reconsider the significance of thinking in the ensemble of knowledge production practices for methodological, epistemological, and strategic reasons.

No Intentions? Utopian Theory After the Future

This article examines the question of utopia and un/intention in relation to recent utopian theory and the changing socio‐historical conditions of utopianism. The notion of intentionality is rarely explicitly considered in utopian theory; however, it offers to shed new light on debates about the concept, form and function of utopia in late modernity. My principal argument is that intention has become increasingly irrelevant to theories of utopia. In the last 20 years, utopia has been reconceptualised as processual, critical, reflexive, open‐ended, and immanent. The utopics of heterogeneous spatialities have displaced temporal, future‐oriented utopianism; utopianism has been embedded in everyday life rather than displaced into formal representation; the possibilities of transformative, collective programmes for social change appear to have ceded to the free play of critique and desire. Insofar as intention implies a purposive orientation to action in the name of a predefined goal or object, it seems to have little to do with contemporary utopianism. I conclude by indicating some directions that an explicit attention to intention promises to open up in relation to the concept and politics of utopia.

Let's Get Organised: Practicing and Valuing Scientific Work inside and outside the Laboratory

Over the past thirty years there has been a significant turn towards practice and away from institutions in sociological frameworks for understanding science. This new emphasis on studying ‘science in action’ (LATOUR 1987) and ‘epistemic cultures’ (KNORR CETINA 1999) has not been shared by academic and policy literatures on the problem of women and science, which have focused on the marginalisation and under-representation of women in science careers and academic institutions. In this paper we draw on elements of both these approaches to think about epistemic communities as simultaneously practical and organisational. We argue that an understanding of organisational structures is missing in science studies, and that studies of the under-representation of women lack attention to the detail of how scientific work is done in practice. Both are necessary to understand the gendering of science work. Our arguments are based on findings of a qualitative study of bioscience researchers in a British university. Conducted as part of a European project on knowledge production, institutions and gender the UK study involved interviews, focus groups and participant observation in two laboratories. Drawing on extracts from our data we look first at laboratories as relatively unhierarchical communities of practice. We go on to show the ways in which institutional forces, particularly contractual insecurity and the linear career, work to reproduce patterns of gendered inequality. Finally, we analyse how these patterns shape the gendered value and performance of ‘housekeeping work’ in the laboratory.

Affective practices, care and bioscience: a study of two laboratories

Scientific knowledge-making is not just a matter of experiments, modelling and fieldwork. It also involves affective, embodied and material practices (Wetherell, 2012) which can be understood together as ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). In this paper we explore how affect spans and connects material, subjective and organizational practices, focusing in particular on the patterns of care we encountered in an observational study of two bioscience laboratories. We explore the preferred emotional subjectivities of each lab and their relation to material practice. We go on to consider flows and clots in the circulation of affect and their relation to care through an exploration of belonging and humour in the labs. We show how being a successful scientist or group of researchers involves a careful choreography of affect in relation to materials, colleagues and others to produce scientific results, subjects and workplaces. We end by considering how thinking with care troubles dominant constructions of scientific practice, successful scientific selves and collectives.

Latour, Bruno (1947–)

Beginning by presenting his 2005 book Reassembling the Social as a key text for social scientists, this article introduces Latours social material philosophy and exploration of a reality consisting of actants, networks, and lively relationships. It puts the metaphysical Latour side-by-side with the one interested in questions of environment, politics, and practical methods. It aims to pull diverse elements of Latours writings and associations together into a useful summary, while remaining faithful to his theoretical commitments to heterogeneity, translation, mutation, and hybridity.