Abstract
Overview
Sandra Harding, professor of education, women’s studies, and science studies at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has published several ambitious edited volumes. Her latest, The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, is no exception especially if considered a synthesis of earlier attempts to catalyze these important dialogues. This collection of twenty-five essays simultaneously disrupts and bridges science and technology studies (STS), postcolonial, and feminist theories previously scattered across “many disciplines, languages, and regional publications” (p. xi). Its primary intervention is a critical examination of Western science and technologies’ role in postcolonial histories and policies, and vice-versa.
The Reader is positioned as addressing “different kinds of epistemological, scientific and technological struggles over priorities, goals and strategies” (p. 22) from what Harding argues to be the whiggish narratives of Western scholars. While striving for a “postcolonial science theory” (pp. 5-6) that expands the boundaries of STS beyond the “Global North,” the reader runs short of presenting a coherent whole to those interested in an integration of science studies and postcolonial feminist critiques.
The tremendous potential of this volume lies in identifying the multiplicity of local struggles that historicize symbolic postcolonial violence and in exposing the ways in which powerful actors continue to authorize the marginalization of indigenous knowledge systems. To do so in a single volume, especially one intended for undergraduate instruction, limits the possibilities for deeper engagement with previous STS theories, for example, the transience (Latour 2005) of knowledge production networks.
Organization
The Reader’s substantial organizational framework is a significant strength. “Counterhistories” challenges conventional historical accounts of past and current Western scientific and technological projects. Analyses of the relationship between Western philosophies of science and historically disavowed “Other Cultures’ Sciences” comprise the following section. “Residues and Reinventions” assesses the consequences of male-dominant colonialist and imperialist scientific enterprises and “Moving Forward” attends to the democratization struggles of grassroots movements.
The Introduction and Works Cited pages for each section are particularly useful for tracing work by scholars from the various theoretical traditions referenced but not included in the collection. The absence of a List of Contributors, however, is both surprising and unfortunate, provided the authors’ geographic, disciplinary, and institutional diversity.
Counterhistories
This section highlights the participation of both Europe and the rest of the world in the production of scientific knowledge. This research uncovers macro-histories like the role of both Eastern agency and the West’s appropriation and assimilation of the Orient as “resource portfolios” in rise of the “oriental West” (Hobson), the enduring effect of “long-distance sciences,” a by-product of colonial exploration, on knowledge-seeking practices (Harris), and the persistence of the “heroic masculine figure of the risk taking explorer” trope in normalizing gender composition of scientists (Terrall). In this light, accounts of European dependence on and valorization of indigenous practices exemplify the gendered undertones of postcolonial knowledge production. These works rightly focus on global power structures, although somewhat at the exclusion of other objects of inquiry long central to STS: credibility, truth, objectivity, evidence, fact, scale, and so on.
Other Culture’s Sciences
Partially correcting the aforementioned exclusion, this section focuses on alternative “knowledge systems.” These works claim the legitimacy of sciences “defeated but not disproved” (p. 152) by Western expansion, such as indigenous knowledge that endows traditional production with comparative advantage (Appleton et al.) and close linkage between linguistic and biological diversities (Muhlhausler, Brush). In juxtaposing the “Other” with the “Western,” however, these readings neglect what Knorr Cetina (1999) and others have said about the discontinuity and multiplicity within Western science. Furthermore, the presentation of local knowledge systems, whose logic is often made legible via Western scientific practices, as isolated is disputable. Nevertheless, the seeming contradiction between historicized narratives of science and culturally isolated scientific logics opens additional avenues of research.
Residues and Reinventions
“Residues and Reinventions” unpacks the genealogical accounts of influential concepts like “development” (Escobar) and “modernization” (Scott) that still mediate transnational practices, policies, and subjectivities (p. 276). Feminist activists and public scholars draw attention to forms of (post)colonial gendered violence, and the scientific discourses authorizing them, to tackle contemporary environmental challenges such as documenting human genetic diversity (Reardon). These readings address the complex ethical dilemmas created by historical entanglements of race, science, sexuality, class, and gender that make up common sense explanations for questions deemed to have global import. Intersectionality research, particularly the embodied geographies of knowledge vindicated in Ethnic Studies scholarship, would greatly enrich this section.
Moving Forward
The last section offers future directions based on “an understanding of the relationship between science and the series of suppressed ‘Others’ and the role of science in such suppression” (Odora Hoppers 390, 391). Moving forward also means contending with questions raised by grassroots movements as well as exploring analogous contemporary debates animating Other systems of knowledge such as Islamic science (Sardar). Reflecting on a hopeful yet uneven process of “epistemic modernization” (Hess) characterizing contemporary Western science generates promising albeit contested concepts such as “civic science” and “sustainability.” These make clear the necessity of “reframing the role of experts, policy-makers, and citizens in environmental governance” (Bäckstrand). Although STS has been tackling these issues since the late 1990s, this section calls for a systemic effort to account for historically suppressed actors and knowledges.
Concluding Remarks
This volume draws out the already productive intersections of feminist research and postcolonial studies and highlights their relevance for STS. STS, in turn, emerges as unfairly monolithic and unsophisticated in ways this review has tried to point out. While the Reader successfully integrates various substantive topics it is less able—perhaps due to its intention for the undergraduate classroom—to explicitly place the three theoretical frameworks into conversation.
The works of scholars such as Donna Haraway, Michele Murphy, and Karen Barad is one way to breach the theoretical gaps and more fully integrate the three traditions. A future edition could also consider adding Sandra Harding’s chapter on “Gender, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science” from Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World (Narayan and Harding 2000) as an introduction to these genealogies of interdisciplinary work.
Nevertheless, the reader’s primary mission—a postcolonial STS grounded on the historical lesson that “[f]eminist and postcolonial projects will always have to be multiple and distinctively local” (p. 9)—is laudable. Can science studies study these local multiplicities and the systems of knowledge that inform them while remaining reflexive of its participation in writing these histories? In the attempt to strike this complex historicizing balance much can get overlooked, yet the insights collected in the reader can function either to introduce three promising interdisciplinary fields or to further advance the transdisciplinary praxis that postcolonial science theory will necessarily entail.