On lowering guardrails

I am pleased and honored to introduce myself as successor to renowned STS Scholar and colleague in the multiversity known as the University of California, Sandra Harding (UCLA), in the role of international senior advisor to the new Editor-in-Chief of Tapuya, Prof. Vivette García-Deister. Vivette reminded me that we met about 20 years ago, in a coffee shop inside the Coyoacan bookstore of El Fondo de Cultura Económica, when she was working on her Master's degree, to talk about developmental systems theory, distinctions between theories and perspectives in science, and most importantly, to lower the hidden guardrails on how to pass as a philosopher while doing STS. I am delighted to reformalize that informal relationship in this new role. Since Sandra is an impossible act to follow, I will simply say here that I will try my very best to uphold her tradition of advice-giving: opinionated and forceful when called upon, and with the journal, its people, and most especially its authors and readers foremost in mind. I am grateful to Vivette for inviting me into this role and honored that Sandra thought me worthy.

What I am most excited about in this role is to take up a position at the periphery of a center of action in the vibrant community of Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad (CTS) scholars in Latin America doing important work in important places at an important time in the history of STS globally. The meanings, problems and projects of understanding, making and unmaking of relations of technological asymmetries, economics of regional development, and the very natures of techno-sciences in different times, places, and settings – to echo Hebe Vessuri’s themes repeated by Vivette in her Vessuri Lecture and inaugural editorial for Tapuya – are interestingly flipped if we regard Latin America as a center and the North (specifically the US) as a periphery for a whole range of social, cultural, political, economic, and techno-scientific movements and questions. Questions of climate change science, of genomic knowledge and DNA testing, of vaccine invention and production, of public health, of materials development for the electrification and de-carbonization of economies, for example, look quite different if we ask these questions while shifting standpoints and perspectives on what is center and what is periphery in any specific case.

For my part, I increasingly want to ask bridging (and boundary-breaching) questions about how techno-science works in a variety of regional contexts and how regions relate to one another. Tapuya is a great journal to think with and about such topics, for readers in the North and South and, I hope, together rather than apart and separately. I think my interests are a good fit for Tapuya’s mission.

What follows are a few paragraphs to introduce myself to readers of the journal with the aim of offering some reflections on “the how” of my work. Since I am, institutionally speaking, a philosopher of science, I offer these reflections to emphasize that my title at the University of California, Davis – “Distinguished Professor of Philosophy (now emeritus)” does not exactly fit or cover my role in the institution as first hire (1983), and then first instigator in the development of a History and Philosophy of Science Program, and then first shepherd of its evolution into a Science and Technology Studies Department.

In my view, science and technology studies (STS) is best characterized, not as a canon, but rather as a diverse range of methods and approaches to understanding, interpreting, criticizing, and contributing to the situating of techno-science in contemporary societies. STS has, in a sense, always been “post-disciplinary,” with its reflexive attention to our ways and means as we sweep our gaze across diverse techno-scientific landscapes and question our own methods as we use them to implode, explode, critique, and transform understanding, meaning, access, and consequences of techno-science in action. Traditional terms like “inter-” or “multi-” disciplinary have never been a very good fit for the substance – or better, processes – of our works even though many of us use these words to describe what we do to the disciplinarians among our colleagues at the diverse places where STS scholarship is practiced.

Since science and technology are human endeavors, the methods and approaches we bring to bear have come from across the full range of social sciences and humanities, from anthropology and archeology, to history and geography, to economics, law, political science, and psychology; and from the arts, design, language and literary studies, media studies, and philosophy.

What unites us is not so much a shared methodology, but rather a common interest in sharing the fruits of embracing this diversity of methods and approaches, in engaging contributions that come from places other than our own starting places and standpoints, and in encouraging a willingness to entertain arguments, findings, and conclusions from multiple perspectives even if they lead to challenges and criticisms of our own methods and approaches. We may vigorously defend our own approaches while we try to keep hold of what we have found in the complexities, entanglements, and “mess” of contemporary techno-sciences, but the aspiration is to sustain healthy dialogue in a spirit of collegial, mutual examination, and critique.

My own work is anchored, not so much in the philosophy of science that has been my focal training and in my subsequent career as a professor in a philosophy department, after starting my academic career in genetics and evolutionary biology. Rather, my anchor is a desire to gain insight into the practices of biological sciences however I could manage it. Like the organismal biologists I often study (Griesemer 1988, 1990, 2013, 2015), my primary orientation is the subject-matter and I am willing to consider and maybe try any means that seem useful, worthwhile, fruitful, and ethical to deploy.

Sometimes, I call my discipline “biology studies” to signal that it is not specifically or restrictedly concerned with philosophical questions (nor any other discipline-based questions), but rather with questions that themselves call for crossing lines and boundaries. Long ago, I took to heart Donald Campbell’s observation that disciplines are ethnocentric while scholarship follows a kind of fish-scale pattern with many scholars working at the overlapping edges of adjacent “fish scales” rather than the centers where disciplinarians live (Campbell 1969).

Most often, my access to diverse methods and approaches has been through reading the work of colleagues and scholars trained differently than I have been (which is eclectic enough as it is). I number sociologists, historians, economists, psychologists, and anthropologists of a variety of stripes (not to mention biological scientists of various proclivities) among colleagues, collaborators, and friends who have influenced my thinking about techno-science in addition to philosophers of science. When I am lucky, my starting points lead to collaborations: with sociologists (Star and Griesemer 1989; Griesemer and Gerson 1993, 2006) and more recently with anthropologists (Griesemer and Barragán 2022). My contributions are “philosophical,” in a way, but my tendency to “color outside the lines” of philosophy makes my work philosophically naive and sophisticated at the same time: childlike in the sense that children’s pictures and drawings can be naive and yet sophisticated in form as a kind of “primitivism.” My aim in this approach is not simple-minded, but rather heuristic: to use simple, ordinary, mundane starting points as “false models” as means to “truer theory” (Wimsatt 1987).

The approaches I take would be better called “journeys” since I rarely know my destination when I set off. Approach suggests I have a target in sight and the issue is to choose a way to get at “it” while journey suggests travel to unknown destinations, to be enjoyed, suffered, and made sense of along the way and afterward. My approach is most often to start small and simple. I use simple, ordinary ideas, such as materiality in a mundane sense of what something that crosses my field of attention is made of, as tissues are made of cells, or viruses are made of molecules, or museum specimens are made of dead bodies, labels and string, or experimental ecological populations are made of beetles and flour and vials and stoppers, or labs are made of people and equipment and furniture. Then, I make a simple conceptual tool or navigation instrument to advance from the idea of a method to a procedure, e.g. from “follow the stuff” to tracking as a conceptual tool for identifying points of study entry for scientists and for STS analysis, to see how the re-situation of materials affects what scientists do and how I, as an STS analyst think about it, e.g. tracking genes through development or virus parts through infection (Griesemer 2007, 2014).

When philosophers of biology in the 1970s and 1980s made a big deal of the mathematical models of population genetics and their role in evolutionary thinking, I looked instead for the materialities of the experimental and empirical field studies biologists used to engage such theoretical thinking (e.g. Griesemer 1991a). Where were the material models and material experimental systems with which biologists track the variables, concepts, and principles that make up their theories? How does tracking such materialities within and among projects, as they are re-situated among scientific laboratories, field sites, specialties and disciplines, geographic regions, historical epochs, and social movements reveal features of what I might call “tracking epistemology” for a “process ontology” of techno-science in action?

Making simple conceptual tools for tracking has led me to think and write about how the pedigree and genealogy diagrams biologists draw reflect their empirical work of tracing organism and population materialities at the same time they develop into major theories that become the levers of “applied” sciences: in agriculture, medicine, conservation (e.g., Griesemer 1991b). These simple conceptual tools, applied in a mundane way to track and navigate through biosocial thickets (Wimsatt 1974; see Griesemer 2021), led me to big STS and philosophical topics such as how heredity and development intertwine in the conceptualizations of “organism” (in my work on reproduction in the evolutionary process) and historical topics such as how the “informational turn” in biology mid-twentieth century was led by re-readings of diagrams made by nineteenth-century embryologists from a twentieth-century genetic perspective (Griesemer 2005, 2007).

One of my current projects, on the re-situation of scientific knowledge in the production of population genomic ancestry studies reflects this approach of starting small and turning “philosophical” questions into post-disciplinary questions. In collaboration with anthropologist and STS scholar Carlos Andrés Barragán, we ask how re-situations happen when empirical findings, datasets, theoretical models, software, and visualizations are made to travel among population genomics labs. We track the various pathways of travel and journeys of these “objects of knowledge” among scientists and beyond to realms from “recreational” use of genomic data in personal ancestry reconstructions to biomedical startup companies trying to monetize such data. While our project started with mundane questions of how scientists keep track of their datasets as their datapoints journey from project to project (see Griesemer 2020), it expanded into questions of how re-situation looks when more than just scientific facts travel between labs and regions with different perspectives on the phenomena (Griesemer and Barragán 2022). Our project is now exploding with questions that call for study using the full range of STS methods and probably more perspectives than the two of us can directly take on regarding how the people and their objects move between organizations, nations, and regions and, in turn, how all this journeying amounts to globalization of knowledge production. For example, we start small and local with the production of genomic knowledge gleaned from individuals in indigenous communities or gathered and extracted from fossil specimens collected in one region and track the re-situations into globally accessible genomic databases and back again into quite different research settings, commercial enterprises, and national and international policy arenas.

This work started with a focus on a few researchers coordinated at Stanford University in California, but quickly led to studies by researchers and research subjects in Colombia and Brazil, to Latin America more widely, to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, elsewhere in Asia, and both North and South America. “Global,” for purposes of this work is both multi-regional and fully, globally distributed across regions.

According to the journal’s webpage (https://tapuya.la), “Tapuya is a project that seeks to challenge current science, technology and society (STS) scholarship while, at the same time, making visible STS research undertaken from Latin America as well as in other peripheral regions.” I am eager to learn from reading the excellent work published in the pages of this exciting young journal and to offer what advice someone of my background can contribute to its editorial process. At the very least, I can express what this sympathetic “Northerner” finds interesting and valuable in fostering cross-region dialogue and collaboration.