EDITORIAL CROLAR 5 (1)
Raquel Velho and Laura Kemmer
University College London and University of Hamburg
The story behind the production of this volume of CROLAR is extremely biographical. We, the co-authors Laura Kemmer and Raquel Velho, met at a fortuitous occasion at the University of Lancaster (UK) for the annual postgraduate meeting. Curiously, we found that over the course of our doctoral work, we were playing a constant game of trading places: Velho, Brazilian, is based at University College London (UK) and is doing her research on accessibility in public transport in London. Meanwhile, Kemmer, German, though based in the University of Hamburg (Germany), is currently carrying out fieldwork on the last remaining tramway (bonde) of Rio de Janeiro. Though we never physically met again, we crossed paths over the Atlantic Ocean having coincidentally booked tickets to visit our respective families in the two continents.
The irony of these exchanged places was not lost on us as it
became a point of conversation both at the meeting in
Lancaster and throughout the editorial process of this volume.
Indeed, it helped shape the call for this volume of CROLAR
since the very first day: the fact that transport technology
has developed in such a way that a European and a Latin
American swap positions, develop parallel interests on similar
topics in cities across an ocean from each other, and have the
means to maintain contact during months through digital means…
Today, this does not sound remarkable at all. And perhaps this
is precisely what is remarkable about it. Yet despite our
personal surprise at the situation, our insertion into
different academic traditions and worlds led us to ask
questions about what we were seeing and the new thought
traditions we were now embedded in.
In September 2015 we put out the call for reviews for this
edition of CROLAR, “Science, Technology, Society – and the
Americas?”. The intention was to explore the array of
knowledge being produced in Latin America on the topic of
science(s) and technology(ies) and how these interact with
society, and vice versa. In addition, we wondered whether
there was a particular regional approach to the discipline of
Science and Technology Studies (STS), given their somewhat
different academic origins compared to the global North. We
also wanted to interrogate the potential of these studies for
countering social and political inequalities. We are happy to
share the result of the call with the readers of CROLAR, and
believe it to be an interesting sample of the diversity and
breadth of the Latin American field of social studies of
science and technology while simultaneously demonstrating some
regional tendencies.
In the Focus section of this edition we have a variety of book
reviews, in which we have identified three, rather broad,
categories. These categories serve primarily as an
introductory tool for the editorial, but we do not believe
they are particularly binding. Firstly, we have books, which
put Latin America at their very core, be it in their choice of
case studies or in its comparison with local vs. global
themes. The edited volumes Beyond Imported Magic (Medina et al.) and Perspectivas Latinoamericanas en el
Estudio Social de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Sociedad (Kreimer et al.) are both extraordinary in their
breadth and worth a category in themselves as, through
numerous chapters they contrast and compare sciences and
technologies produced in Latin America, as well as the field
of STS. Meanwhile, Adriana Feld’s historical overview of
science policy in Argentina through the 1940s-1980s (Ciencia y política(s) en
Argentina (1943-1983)) shows how
important local socio-historical contexts and ideologies are
in the development of institutions. A fruitful confrontation
of regional with global processes can be found in the edited
volume Made in
Latin America (Alperin and
Fischman), which contextualizes the specific challenges, but
also accomplishments of Open Access publications through Latin-American platforms and
journals.
A second group of books focuses on policy, politics,
technologies and resistance (of various kinds). In Shirley
Franco’s book, Sobrevivendo
ao Mito da Destruição Total, the
author explores how, despite government officials claiming its
destruction, archives manage to survive through networks
created by the authorities themselves in a process she calls
“ramification”. Despite the different policy fields, the cases
in Risco,
Ambiente e Saúde (Di Giulio) and Assembling Policy shine light on how moments of risk, failure and
disruption reassemble the social and the political in a
variety of ways.
The last group explores technology and social inclusion,
innovation and quality of life. The edited volume Políticas Tecnológicas y
Tecnologías Políticas (Hernán et al.)
concentrates on the markeddisparity in Latin American between
investment in research and development of technologies and the
population’s lack of access to this modernity. In a similar
manner, Tecnologia
Social (Dagnino) uses a Marxist
approach to analyze technology and proposes that new forms of
innovation need to be proposed, based on solidarity and
self-management. Alberto Nieto’s book (La ciencia no puede ser sin pecado un
adorno) covers a similar topic,
provoking discussions on the role of innovation in improving
citizens’ quality of life.
We are pleased to present Renato Dagnino’s review of Amílcar
Herrera’s classic book Ciencia y Politica en America Latina in the section of Classics Revisited. Herrera is a
pioneer in Latin American social studies of science, this book
in particular having been published over 40 years ago, it
still proves to be a relevant read. Herrera was
unapologetically a leftist who perceived Latin America as
still subjugated to an imperialist role in which it still
played a feudal role to the global North. As Dagnino
discusses, Herrera’s work on science policy and many of his
ideas on technological innovation anticipates work then
developed in the North, particularly in his resistance to
simplistic notions such as the linear model of innovation – in
which scientific research results in technological development
and therefore a market product.
The Interventions section in this volume proposes two
interesting cases, both about the introduction of foreign
programs or developments into a Brazilian context and how they
are translated/transformed in the process of being imported.
The first case is that of Masterclass, a
science engagement program developed by CERN (Switzerland)
which proposes to teach children about particle physics. The
second example takes on Uber (USA), a
taxi dispatch application, which has been making waves the
world over. In both cases, the Brazilian reaction towards
these programs has caused resistance to or subversion of their
original application.
An exciting addition to this volume is the new model of review
articles with a thematic focus, in which several books on a
given topic are reviewed together on a current topic. Debuting
this novel way of joining both discussion and reviews are Nils
Brock, revisiting current debates on networks, media and
communication in light of technological changes and power
shifts, as well as Fernanda Rosa and Diego Vicentin, who cover
three books on the subject of internet governance and science
policy, particularly in its relation to privacy and
cybersecurity.
We have also been fortunate enough to have secured interviews
with two prominent academics from Brazil who have seen the
development of the social studies of science in Brazil: Dr
Márcia Regina Barros da Silva and Prof Léa Maria Leme Strini
Velho. The same questions were asked to each of them
concerning their interests in the field, how they perceive it,
whether they perceive differences and inequalities between
national and international approaches, and their perspectives
on being women within the discipline.
The Current Debates section of this volume deals with the
novel approach of understanding the city through its sounds,
elaborated on in Torsten Wissman’s Geographies of Urban Sound. With Punishment in Paradise (Beattie), a rich historiographical account of how
mass imprisonment in 19th century Brazil sheds light on
current debates around racial discrimination in the country.
The editing of this volume was nothing short of a challenge,
as it was constantly caught somewhere over the Atlantic and
between faltering internet connection (unexpectedly, primarily
on the European side). It served as a constant reminder of the
society we live in, with its technological innovations
constantly shifting our perceptions of time, distance, and
each other. More important, this volume has a joining thread
woven through the books reviewed and stories told – a story of
politics, and a story of impact. Despite the diversity in the
works presented here, the origins of Latin American STS are
political ones, as Dagnino describes in his review of Herrera
and both Dr da Silva and Prof Velho discuss in their
interviews. These are stories, which discuss beyond the
sciences or the technologies, they discuss the limits, what
goes wrong, how subversion and resistance happen to reshape
and reform things imported from the global North. The Latin
American STS can be an act of resistance itself.
As editors, we hope this volume provides a new door through
which you might venture into this world of society, politics,
technologies and science. One which challenges simplistic
tales of inventions and creators and that prizes the battles
underneath, opening spaces and crossing oceans.