science

Paul Feyerabend - Against Method

Paul Feyerabend. Against Method. 3rd Ed. Verso, 1993.
This book is, as the title is saying plainly, challenging the idea that in science there is and has been a proper methodology for scientific research distinctive from non-science and pseudo-science. If only one methodology were allowed in science, we could not have had science as what we… »

Eugene Thacker - The Global Genome

Eugene Thacker. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. The MIT Press, 2005.
Although the main object of Thacker’s The Global Genome is biology (and body itself), the context in which he deals with the object throughout the book is more complex than simple investigation on scientific discipline (genomics) or biological matter (genome). Rather his context… »

Precarious Citizenship in the Late Capitalist Society

- Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl, Princeton UP, 2002.
- Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke UP, 1999.

How do self and social identities change in a state of transition? How does the relationship between individuals and the state change in a rapid or gradual social crisis? How… »

Sheila Jasanoff - The Fifth Branch

Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers, Harvard Univ. Press, 1990.
Under the democratic constitution, it is generally and traditionally recognized that there are three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) as we know already. With the expansion and complexity of modern society, people’s needs of the fourth branch have been brought up…. »

Dona J. Haraway - Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Dona J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991.

This book might be one of the most original, thought-provoking, and influential books in the history of social studies of science and technology since the 1980s, transversing from feminist theories and SF literatures to primate studies and military communication technology. Haraway tries to… »

Bruno Latour - The Pasteurization of France

Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Harvard UP, 1988.
What can we write on (the history of) invisible microbes? Maybe we can write on how the medical and biological sciences could have dominated and controlled the diseases and the bacteria. Considering that this book, The Pasteurization of France was originally published in France in 1984 with… »

Excerpts from Feyerabend’s Against Method

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, Verso, 1993 (third ed.).
From his 1987 “Preface” for the book:
“Again I want to make two points: first, that science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and, secondly, that non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand… »

Social Construction of Technological System

The Social Construction of Technological System: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Ed. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1987.
What is the social constructivism of science and technology? The basic postulate, on which the scholars in the science and technology studies (fields including philosophy, history,… »

Nikolas Rose - The Politics of Life Itself

Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century, Princeton University Press, 2006.
While reading Rose’s The Politics of Life Itself, I thought that it was complementing Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s Biocapital, where I had felt something was missing. If Biocapital focuses on the global-scale capitalist economy under the effect of… »

Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press, 1962 (1996).
In this small but influential book, Kuhn tries to perform two tasks at the same time: writing a history of science and making a theory on scientific revolutions. In some sense, the latter could be a result of the first task, but… »