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Invisible Labour in Modern Science is about the people who are concealed, eclipsed, or anonymised in accounts of scientific research. Many scientific workers—including translators, activists, archivists, technicians, curators, and ethics review boards—are absent in publications and omitted from stories of discovery. Scientific reports are often held to ideals of transparency, yet they are the result of careful judgments about what (and what not) to reveal. Professional scientists are often celebrated, yet they are expected to uphold principles of ‘objective’ self-denial. The emerging and leading scholars writing in this book negotiate such silences and omissions to reveal how invisibilities have shaped twentieth and twenty-first century science.
Invisibility can be unjust; it can also be powerful. What is invisible to whom, and when does this matter? How do power structures built on hierarchies of race, gender, class and nation frame what can be seen? And for those observing science: When does the recovery of the ‘invisible’ serve social justice and when does it invade privacy? Tackling head-on the silences and dilemmas that can haunt historians, this book transforms invisibility into a guide for exploring the moral sensibilities and politics of science and its history.
Published | 01 Sep 2022 |
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Format | Ebook (PDF) |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 1 |
ISBN | 9798881849627 |
Imprint | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers |
Illustrations | 19 b/w photos; |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Over the past four decades, scholars who study science have demonstrated that assistants, technicians, field guides, Indigenous elders, and research subjects become invisible in public accounts of science. Reflecting the concern to recover these persons, this volume's contributing authors seek to describe "science as a social and cultural activity" (p. 255) more accurately by examining the processes that obscure or erase. Collectively, the 25 short case studies cover representative sites where knowledge has been produced (laboratory, field, museum, archive) in a range of disciplines around the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bangham, Chacko, and Kaplan successfully bring together a volume that will spark debates over methods and ethics within their own disciplines and beyond. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty.
Choice Reviews
What do we not see? A lot! Invisible Labour in Modern Science brilliantly uncovers the layers of global infrastructures of people, power, process, and practices behind the production of science. Rich, expansive, detailed, and nuanced, this is an invaluable collection.
Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Many sorts of people are involved in making scientific knowledge; only a few appear as its authors. Invisible Labour in Modern Science is a wide-ranging collective effort to draw attention to those many and to say why their work has attracted so little notice.
Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University
The history of modernity is often told as a fable about the triumph of vision enabled by science. This collection rewrites that familiar story as a parable about invisibility. By shadowing the various forms of labor that mediate between the seen and the unseen, the authors draw out the many scales, techniques, uses, abuses, and essences of invisibility haunting both science and the history of science.
Projit Bihari Mukharji, professor of history of science, University of Pennsylvania
This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.
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