General Information
Course Description
9546 - Writing Science - What is the role of writing in the production of scientific knowledge? Drawing on recent scholarship in the social studies of science, this course interprets writing, not as a way to communicate scientific information, but as one of the technologies used to manufacture scientific facts. The aim is to situate writing among the labour processes involved in the scientific work of stabilizing complex assemblages of heterogeneous elements, such as technologies, practices, people, institutions, and laboratory material. The course readings emphasize the disunity of science rather than conceptual coherence, material things rather than abstract representations, practical reasoning rather than an idealized scientific method, the significance of locality, contingency, situatedness, and historicity rather than universality, and a wide varieties of scientific activities at least as if not more important than theory production. Specific topics include the status of theory, observation, and experiment; the contingency of resource selection; the mangle of practice and disciplinary agency; inscriptions as actants; enrolment and translation; the motley of scientific practices; trading zones and boundary objects; the history of universality; the narrativity of scientific practices; the seventeenth-century literary technologies of science. Authors studies include Foucault, Latour, Hacking, Shapin, Schaffer, Knorr-Centina, Rousse, Daston, Rheinberger, Lenoir, Pickering, Galison, and Lynch.
