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Helen Verran is an Australian historian and empirical philosopher of science, primarily working in the Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS), [1] and currently Adjunct Professor at Charles Darwin University. [2]
Verran is from New South Wales, Australia.[ citation needed ] She trained as a scientist and teacher in the 1960s (BSc, DipEd, University of New England) and has a PhD in metabolic biochemistry (UNE, 1972). She then spent eight years lecturing in science education at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ifẹ, southwestern Nigeria. In the 1980s she became a lecturer and later Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, working in a unit dedicated to the study of history and philosophy of science. She retired in 2012. [3] On retiring she became Adjunct Professor at the Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University in Darwin, where she still teaches. [4]
Verran's book, Science and an African Logic (University of Chicago Press, 2001), received the Ludwik Fleck Prize in 2003. [5] It analyses counting, and its relation to the ontology of numbers based on her lengthy field observations as a mathematics lecturer and teacher in Nigeria. The book draws on her sudden realisation of the radically different nature of Yoruba counting, and discusses how this realisation grounded her post-relativist theorising. [6] Verran continues to nuance analytics of numbers and numbering as social and material practice (e.g. in the 2018 special issue After Numbers? Innovations in Science and Technology Studies’ Analytics of Numbers and Numbering). [7]
She contributed to actor-network theory, working with British sociologist John Law. Specifically, she is credited for contributing with postcolonial studies to nuancing STS. [8] Her work is also seen as part of ANT's ontological turn. [9]
Her work on Yolngu Aboriginal Australians understandings of the world, their use of technology, and their knowledge systems ranges from the 1990s to current engagement. Together with Michael Christie she has theorised digital knowledge technologies.
Starting with work on alternative modes of knowing nature management through fire, [10] Verran's recent work contributed to social studies of ecosystem services. [11]
Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Science and technology studies (STS) or science, technology, and society is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts.
Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans.
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).
The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology, philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the research of David Hull. Philosophers of science then began paying increasing attention to biology, from the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering. Other key ideas include the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions, and the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience.
Barry Smith is an academic working in the fields of ontology and biomedical informatics. Smith is the author of more than 700 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books, and he is one of the most widely cited contemporary philosophers.
Annemarie Mol is a Dutch ethnographer and philosopher. She is the Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam.
Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom, also known for her work at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 90s.
Stephen William Woolgar is a British sociologist. He has worked closely with Bruno Latour, with whom he wrote Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979).
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is a non-profit scholarly association devoted to the social studies of science and technology (STS). It was founded in 1975 and as of 2008 its international membership exceeds 1,200. In 2016, over 2,000 people attended the society's annual meeting in Barcelona, co-hosted by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). Its 40th anniversary celebration at Cornell University was attended by notable STS scholars such as Trevor Pinch, Sheila Jasanoff, and Bruno Latour.
Judy Wajcman, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Prior to joining the LSE in 2009, she was a Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She was the first woman to be appointed the Norman Laski Research Fellow (1978–80) at St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1997 she was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Sheila Sen Jasanoff is an Indian American academic and significant contributor to the field of Science and Technology Studies. In 2021 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. Her research has been recognized with many awards, including the 2022 Holberg Prize "for her groundbreaking research in science and technology studies."
Warwick Hugh Anderson, medical doctor, poet, and historian, is Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History and the Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, where he was previously an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (2012–17). He is also honorary professor in the School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences and the Royal Society of New South Wales, from which he received the History and Philosophy of Science Medal in 2015. For the 2018–19 academic year, Anderson was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. As a historian of science and medicine, Anderson focuses on the biomedical dimensions of racial thought, especially in colonial settings, and the globalisation of medicine and science. He has introduced anthropological insights and themes to the history of medicine and science; developed innovative frameworks for the analysis of science and globalisation; and conducted historical research into the material cultures of scientific exchange. His influential formulation of the postcolonial studies of science and medicine has generated a new style of inquiry within science and technology studies.
Critical realism is a philosophical approach to understanding science, and in particular social science, initially developed by Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014). It specifically opposes forms of empiricism and positivism by viewing science as concerned with identifying causal mechanisms. In the last decades of the twentieth century it also stood against various forms of postmodernism and poststructuralism by insisting on the reality of objective existence. In contrast to positivism's methodological foundation, and poststructuralism's epistemological foundation, critical realism insists that (social) science should be built from an explicit ontology. Critical realism is one of a range of types of philosophical realism, as well as forms of realism advocated within social science such as analytic realism and subtle realism.
Science and technology studies (STS) in India is a fast growing field of academic inquiry in India since the 1980s. STS has developed in the country from the science movements of the 1970s and 1980s as well as the scholarly criticism of science and technology policies of the Indian state. Now the field is established with at least five generations of scholars and several departments and institutes specialising in science, technology and innovation policy studies.
Michelle Murphy is a Canadian academic. She is a Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and Director of the Technoscience Research Unit.
Banu Subramaniam is a professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Originally trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she writes about social and cultural aspects of science as they relate to experimental biology. She advocates for activist science that creates knowledge about the natural world while being aware of its embeddedness in society and culture. She co-edited Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005) and Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (2001). Her book Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (2014) was chosen as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2015 and won the Society for Social Studies of Science Ludwik Fleck Prize for science and technology studies in 2016. Her most recent book, Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (2019), won the Michelle Kendrick Prize for the best book from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2020.
Tony Lawson is a British philosopher and economist. He is professor of economics and philosophy in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, a former director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, and co-founder of the Cambridge Realist Workshop and the Cambridge Social Ontology Group. Lawson is noted for his contributions to heterodox economics and to philosophical issues in social theorising, most especially to social ontology.
Feminist science and technology studies is a theoretical subfield of science and technology studies (STS), which explores how gender interacts with science and technology. The field emerged in the early 1980s alongside other relativist theories of STS which rejected the dominance of technological determinism, proposing that reality is multiple rather than fixed and prioritizing situated knowledges over scientific objectivity. Feminist STS's material-semiotic theory evolved to display a complex understanding of gender and technology relationships by the 2000s, notable scholars producing feminist critiques of scientific knowledge and the design and use of technologies. The co-constructive relationship between gender and technology contributed to feminist STS's rejection of binary gender roles by the twenty-first century, the field's framework expanding to incorporate principles of feminist technoscience and queer theory amidst widespread adoption of the internet.
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