A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration

It was that quintessentially Victorian book, The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer, published in 1890, that first led an immigrant to England, Bronisław Malinowski of Poland, to rethink the foundations of anthropology. Frazer was the son of a chemist but excelled in classics at Cambridge and remained there as a scholar for the rest of his life. Beginning from a loathing for Roman Catholicism, he investigated ancient practices of human sacrifice, fertility rites, and the murder of gods to explore the relationships between magical thinking, religious belief, and scientific thought. But Frazer's was an armchair anthropology, using historical sources and never once requiring that he step out of the library. Malinowski arrived at the London School of Economics with a burning desire to study cultures other than his own by means of what he called “participant observation.” He set out during World War I to the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea to live among the Indigenous peoples and to study their mores and practices. Following Malinowski's lead, anthropology became a battleground for theoretical arguments about what it means to “know” other cultures. Is knowledge of a culture that is different from one's own even possible, and if so, what kind of distance from her subjects is necessary, or appropriate, for the ethnographer to seek?As social, cultural, and physical anthropologists as well as other kinds of social scientists continued to debate these matters, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the birth of a new field, outside philosophy, that sought to examine the very foundations of knowledge. The discipline of science, technology, and society (STS) professed to look carefully at the contingency of knowledge-claims and the assumptions that frame them, uncovering power relations and viewing with skepticism the divide between values and facts. With the advent of technologies with huge effects on both human life and the environment, the enterprise soon bifurcated: one strand of scholarship went into a normative, activist, interventionist mode, whereas the other chose a more academic path, retreating into a theoretically fecund though increasingly arcane preoccupation with the nature and practice of science. This latter strand, as University of Edinburgh STS scholar Calvert reminds us, argued in particular that “social factors” were not contaminants but, rather, constituent features of scientific knowledge.Calvert herself began with a more academic orientation but then came upon synthetic biology, which demanded that she rethink her position. Already at the turn of the century, government funders of the Human Genome Project stipulated that 3 to 5 percent of grant budgets go to experts on the relevant ethical, legal, and social implications of the science involved. Without necessarily appreciating what an STS scholar might contribute to their projects and perhaps only to check the box of second-order, nonscientific participation, engineers and biologists engaged in redesigning organisms approached Calvert to join them. It was participant observation gone rogue, and Calvert found herself being paid as a working member of a technoscientific group that she herself was studying (the British public sector invested £300 million between 2008 and 2016).While Calvert was interested in access to research sites to observe how facts, artifacts, and mores relate to each other in the production of technoscience, the scientists, engineers, and policymakers who had invited her expected that she would pronounce on the ethical, legal, and social implications of their research. The dual nature of the engagement led to much soul-searching, as well as discomfort. Could she “stay clean” and resist “selling out”? Could she do her job properly and remain loyal to funders, coworkers, and her own heart? And what kind of positive input was even possible? She was an STS scholar wielding STS tools, and the stakes could not be higher.To help students and practitioners in the field think through such matters, Calvert offers us A Place for Science and Technology Studies in the hope that a new, hybrid kind of STS scholar may use it as a guide. She invites us into the different physical rooms she inhabited during her sojourn in the otherworld of synthetic biology — the lab, the conference room, the classroom, the coffee room, the art studio, the bioethics building, and the ivory tower — giving us her sense of the dynamics and opportunities within each. What she ends up concluding is that the distinctive advantage of the STS scholar stems precisely from the perspective gained by roaming between rooms. Interacting in different ways with engineers, biologists, ethicists, art- and policymakers, lawyers, and her own STS community — each with different goals and power dynamics — allowed Calvert to see that “things could be otherwise.” “Multi-sitedness,” to use her word, is the key to developing a unique normativity, one that arms the STS scholar with the ability not only to observe and collaborate but also to intervene.Calvert tells her story in the first person but implies that her experiences are relevant to other scholars of her kind. Nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, stem-cell research, and neuroscience are the Trobriand Islands of our times. But unlike Malinowski, who did his best not to leave a mark on his subjects, a new breed of STS-ers can aspire to become coconstructors of these scientific fields. Calvert argues that much depends on resisting the “service” role cut out for them, one that currently expects them to provide deliverables according to externally imposed agendas. I agree but would add that even more depends on the intellectual and moral talents of these highly trained, itinerant “roamers.” STS scholars will need to prove their worth in contexts not designed for their convenience.