10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17355
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2038-3460
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Mariacristina Sciannamblo
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Simone Tosoni with Trevor Pinch, Entanglements: Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound, MIT Press, 2017
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Book Reviews
2017-07-20
2023-06-22
2017-07-20
2023-08-21
171-175
TS
Mariacristina Sciannamblo
2017/07/20
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17355
171
Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute
2038-3460
1
en
175
Simone Tosoni with Trevor Pinch, Entanglements: Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound, MIT Press, 2017
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17355/16204
8
Book Review                                                                  171
Knorr Cetina, K. (1999) Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge,
       Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1989) La science en action, Paris, La Découverte.
Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
       Facts, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Pontille, D. (2004) La Signature scientifique: une sociologie pragmatique de
        l’attribution, Paris, CNRS Éditions.
Shapiro, S. (1994) A Social History of the Truth: Civility and Science in Seven-
       teenth-Century England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Star, S.L. and Strauss, A. (1999) Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The Ecology
        of Visible and Invisible Work, in “Computer Supported Cooperation
        Work”, 8 (1-2), pp. 9-30.
Wray, B.K. (2006) Scientific Authorship in the Age of Collaborative Research, in
       “Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A”, 37 (3), pp. 505-
       514.
Zuckerman, H.A. (1968) Patterns of Name Ordering among Authors of Scientific
      Papers: A Study of Social Symbolism and Its Ambiguity, in “American
      Journal of Sociology”, 74 (3), pp. 276-291.



                                        ***


   Simone Tosoni with Trevor Pinch
Entanglements: Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound, Cambridge,
MA, MIT Press, 2017, pp. 200

Mariacristina Sciannamblo Madeira Interactive Technologies Insti-
tute

    Science and Technology Studies (STS) are a compelling and hetero-
geneous interdisciplinary body of knowledge that has come a long way
and continues to attract new generations of researchers. Despite in some
geographical areas, such as Southern Europe, they are still relatively new,
the maturity acquired after decades of intellectual debate and research
efforts in the field are spurring moments of reflection and reflexivity
among STS leading scholars, who do not dodge providing their own sto-
ries and viewpoints on the development of the field through conversa-
tions and interviews. In reading them, we come to know that, for exam-
ple, Donna Haraway started reading St. Thomas when she was about
twelve years old because of the advice of a Jesuite priest (Lykke et al.
172                                                        Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

2000), that a young PhD candidate Michael Lynch, like most of Ph.D
candidates, mastered “the dubious arts of writing” that combined “defen-
siveness and intellectual pretense” (Lynch 2016), and that, in her encour-
agement to be “wild, innovative, inventive, sharp” as STS scholars, Anne
Marie Mol thinks that guerrilla tactics are far more effective models than
“old fashioned battles over regionally demarcated pieces” when it comes
to sex-struggle (Bauchspies and de la Bellacasa 2009). It is precisely this
blend of personal anecdotes, daring claims, and intellectual commitment
that characterizes “Entanglements. Conversations on the Human Traces
of Science, Technology, and Sound” between Simone Tosoni and Trevor
Pinch.
    The two voices of this extended dialogue belong to an Italian media
scholar – Tosoni – with a large knowledge of STS, and to one of the lead-
ing figures in STS – Pinch – also known in neighbouring fields for being
the co-founder of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), and for his
substantial contribution to the development of the field of Sound Studies.
    The book is the outcome of four rounds of conversations that took
place physically in Ithaca (USA), Paris, and Milan between 2012 and
2014, and that were subsequently transcribed, edited, and enriched with
supplemental material from epistolary exchanges. The content is divided
into four sections that cover Pinch's career, intellectual and personal
path, from his early steps in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK)
as Ph.D and postgraduate scholar to the funding of SCOT and the dis-
pute with other schools of thought in STS, to his more recent interests in
sound studies.
    The volume takes the reader in a rich and lively “guided tour” of
SCOT, as well as of the past and present history of STS as experienced
and recounted by Pinch through the wise and often challenging inquiries
of Tosoni. The editorial work undertaken by the latter is very accurate, so
that each reference mentioned in the conversation (books, papers, au-
thors, approaches) is associated to clarifications and quotations in the
footnotes which, therefore, take up a remarkable amount of space. For
being of great interest, I would have preferred a bigger font-size for the
quotations, which might become hard to read after the first pages.
    The first round of exchanges between Tosoni and Pinch begins with
the dawn of STS within the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and
the Strong Programme developed by the Edinburgh School, which coin-
cides with Pinch's early work within the Bath School and the Empirical
Programme of Relativism (EPOR) in collaboration with Harry Collins.
These were the days in which the metaphor of the “black box” came out
written by Richard Whithley, who probably did not foresee the huge suc-
cess that the “opening of the black box” would have achieved within and
beyond the STS community.
    Pinch's memories of his encounter, relationship, and work with Harry
Collins are rich of intellectual inquiries and personal tales. One of the
Book Review                                                              173
most unexpected passages of the book is, in fact, the strong link between
the intellectual adventure taken up by a group of then unseasoned Euro-
pean scholars and the meaningful connections among them. This appears
clear in the first place by looking at the mentorship relationship between
Collins and Pinch, or “a discipulus-magister relationship” as Tosoni eru-
ditely defines it. Like many of the things happened in those years, their
collaboration starts by chance on the one hand, and because of their
common work on the study of scientific controversies in physics and par-
anormal on the other. As Pinch recalls: “Turns out I was very lucky be-
cause Collins had this projects on Uri Geller and the paranormal […] I
was the only guy in the world who could possibly do this! Unbelievable!
He was interviewing all these postdocs with degrees and books, and sud-
denly this naive guy, Trevor Pinch, steps in saying ‘[…] I am working on
this wild idea of scientific controversies from the sociology of science per-
spective. I don't know what it all means, but this is what I am interested
in’, and I was just perfect” (p. 24). Then Collins decided to hire him and
teach him everything as Pinch gratefully claims: that included how to
properly interview scientists, how to set up field work trips, how to write
scientific articles. And Collins' intention to instruct Pinch did not stop at
the methodological training, but it went on with some advices about how
to build a reliable academic appearance, which, in that case, meant for
Pinch to dismiss his hippie clothes, get rid of science fantasy readings,
and start to approach “some decent stuff” such as Flann O'Brien and
William Faulkner. The relationship between research work and personal
bonds goes beyond the University of Bath where Collins and Pinch were
based, and involves a wider academic community starting from the Edin-
burgh School with Barry Barnes, Donald MacKenzie, Steve Shapin, An-
drew Pickering, and David Bloor, and people working in the area of la-
boratory studies such as Karin Knorr-Cetina, Steve Woolgar, and Bruno
Latour. Personal relationships were crucial in order to reinforce the net-
work and the newborn field of study, and defend it from the hostility of
philosophers of science. As Pinch explains, it is easy for people who are
in a new field surrounded by scepticism and hostility to develop a strong
new feeling like “Hey, we’re on something important, a whole new view
of science” (p. 26). It is striking to learn that the people who are now
deemed as some of the preeminent scholars in STS have been regarded as
“a wild, weird French guy”, “an incomprehensible German”, “under-
grads with physics envy”, and “old hippies” back in the day. On second
thought, the rejection of “the new” is a common trait of all avant-guard
movements that challenges what has been considered “the canon”.
     The approach developed by Collins and Pinch for the study of scien-
tific controversies in the 1980s, and then exposed in the Golem Trilogy in
the 1990s, was also applied to the study of technology in the seminal arti-
cle “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts” that Pinch authored
with Wiebe Bijker in 1984. This paper set out a new approach for the so-
174                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

cial studies of technology with the formulation of three fundamental con-
cepts: relevant social groups, interpretative flexibility, and closure. The
account of the development of SCOT covers the third and longest section
(over 50 pages) of the book, with Pinch clarifying the terms whereby
SCOT should be taken, that is not as a list of fixed concepts to be applied
mechanically to the study of technological phenomena, but rather as a
methodological approach that aims to tell people how to think about
technology, rather than what to think about it. This is a crucial point as it
marks out the discussion around SCOT’s most recent developments and
its dialectic relationship with Actor-network theory (ANT). In explaining
his position about the understanding of the role of materiality and the
nonhumans, Pinch claims that while Callon and Latour agree with SCOT
in many respects, their treatment of humans and nonhumans as equiva-
lent is “too radical”. Perhaps this is anything but new for STS scholars,
but it becomes important because such discussion is interestingly framed
in political terms. Thanks to Tosoni’s shrewd observations that articulate
the idea of morality and social responsibility delegated to nonhumans by
picking up the famous example on the speed bump by Latour, the two
conversationalists agree that such delegation is problematic because social
responsibility and morality are not plans that can be granted by an arte-
fact and because the detachment of functions, meanings and values is not
a methodological move as it is in Latour’s treatment, but it pertains to the
political domain. As Tosoni points out, one may slow down with her/his
car because she/he is forced by an artefact, but then this course of actions
does not account for the contextual decision of, for example, avoiding
honking or throwing the cigarette butt on someone else’s yard: we need
more than the engineering repertoire to explain this set of actions, that is
a view that takes into account the set of cultural values, motivations, and
social goals that coexist with technical scripts. Therefore, the entangle-
ment of all these elements represents a pivotal point of reference in order
to think about technology in political terms as it calls into question the
practice of drawing boundaries between something/someone that is in,
and something/someone that is left out.
    “Entanglement” is not only an analytic category whereby to interpret
the epistemological inquiries and disputes that characterize the develop-
ment of STS as experienced by one of its key proponents. “Entangle-
ment” is also a lens whereby to read the important role that colleagues,
friends, mentors, chance encounters, students, intellectual contenders,
and significant others play within Pinch’s professional and personal jour-
ney, which, accordingly, appears to be full of unexpected consequences,
inspiring, and funny.


References
Bauchspies, W.K. and de La Bellacasa, M.P. (2009) Feminist Science and Tech-
Book Review                                                                  175
        nology Studies: A Patchwork of Moving Subjectivities. An Interview with
        Geoffrey Bowker, Sandra Harding, Anne Marie Mol, Susan Leigh Star
        and Banu Subramaniam, in “Subjectivity”, 28 (1), pp. 334-344.
Lykke, N., Markussen, R. and Olesen, F. (2000) There Are Always More Things
       Going on Than You Thought! Interview with Donna Haraway, in
       “Kvinder, køn og forskning”, 4, pp. 52-61.
Lynch M. (in conversation with Lucy Suchman) (2016) Michael Lynch / Part II:
      That Delicate Balance, in “Backchannels. Society for Social Studies of Sci-
      ence” (available at: http://www.4sonline.org/blog/post/michael_lynch_-
      part_ii_that_delicate_balance.




                                       ***


    Teun Zuiderent-Jerak
Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Health Care, Cam-
bridge, MA, MIT Press, 2015, pp. 248

Stefano Crabu Institut des sciences de la communication CNRS / Par-
is-Sorbonne / UPMC

     Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Health Care is cer-
tainly a book that the community of S&TS scholars interested in studying
health care as sociomaterial knowledgeable doing could use to get a new
promising outlook. In this book, Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, undermining the
rigid opposition between basic and applied sociological knowledge, de-
velops an interesting new methodological perspective for researchers en-
gaged in studying and changing medical practices. Even from the opening
pages, Situated Intervention outlines a fascinating challenge addressed to
contemporary social scientists to advance the current understanding of
medical work by actively being immersed in the health care organizations.
     From the first moment I began to read the book, it brought to mind
the seminal article, “The Human Sciences in a Biological Age”, in which
Nikolas Rose (2013) offered a deep discussion about some crucial impli-
cations to the social and human sciences stemming from the most relevant
technoscientific transformations occurring in the field of contemporary
life sciences. In his work, Rose was interested in discussing (and, in a cer-
tain sense, eroding) the epistemological boundaries traditionally erected
between social sciences and life sciences to highlight how these two do-
mains may have profitably contaminated each other. Conceptually speak-
ing, Teun Zuiderent-Jerak’s book can be considered a further and inno-
