ABSTRACT
While the term “cultural studies of science” designates a stream of research within the broader field of social studies of science, there is no clear consensus about what work is associated with this term. Joseph Rouse has defined “the term broadly,” suggesting that it includes “various investigations of the practices through which scientific knowledge is articulated and maintained in specific cultural contexts, and translated and extended into new contexts” (Rouse 1992: 2). In 1994 Susan Squier identified “cultural studies of science” as “extending from the early work of Thomas Kuhn to more recent work by Latour and Woolgar, Keller, Rouse, Schiebinger, Haraway and others”; for Squier, Kuhn’s “new understanding of how science produces knowledge launched by … [his] Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with its two crucial notions, the scientific paradigm and the paradigm shift” (Squier 1994: 11) opened up this new trajectory within social studies of science. In 1996, Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz issued their “Manifesto” for cultural studies of science, declaring that cultural studies was “the name we give to the transformation of social and cultural knowledge in the wake of an epochal shift in the character of life and thought whose origins and contours we only dimly perceive” (Menser and Aronowitz 1996: 16). For Menser and Aronowitz, Kuhn was not the founding father of cultural studies of science. Rather, they regarded cultural studies as ushering in a new radical epistemology which highlighted and explored the contextuality of all knowledge claims (Aronowitz 1993: ch.7) and which was generated and sustained by poststructuralism, postmodernism, and cyberculture. They deemed this new epistemology as having the potential to transform the study of science and technology. Although these commentators propose rather different visions of cultural
studies of science, they come together in foregrounding contextualization as one
of its key features. Squier pinpointed what she regarded as distinctive about cultural studies of science research when she observed:
These scholars have illuminated the processes by which scientific fields as diverse as cell biology, primatology, and physics have constructed both the questions they ask and the artifacts they accept as facts in relation to the cultural and historical milieu.
