10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17568
Science and technology museums and centres are usually conceived as settings for science communication. In the STS tradition of Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST), galleries and exhibitions represent the museum side most exposed to research. However, these museums are complex organisations where artefacts are not only exhibited but also collected, stored, studied, and preserved because they make the technoscientific heritage of a place. In this Scenario, I review the literature in PCST/STS and Museum Studies to show how the PCST approach is insufficient to study science and technology museums because issues about the private side and heritage are not addressed. I argue for the need for STS to enter the private sides of science museums and study them as places of technoscientific knowledge production. The Scenario suggests an STS approach situated in sociomaterial ecologies to study museum practices which, as discussed by Museum Studies, are the sites where narratives about science and technology arise.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17568
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en
Roberta Spada
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
narratives
Science and Technology Museums Meet STS. Going Beyond the Galleries and Into the Practices
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
13
Scenarios
2022-07-07
2023-06-30
2022-07-07
2023-10-26
129-145
TS
Roberta Spada
2022/07/07
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17568
129
Politecnico di Milano and National Science and Technology Museum “Leonardo da Vinci”
2038-3460
1
narratives
en
145
Science and Technology Museums Meet STS. Going Beyond the Galleries and Into the Practices
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17568/16418
13
                                                                         Scenario
Science and Technology Museums Meet
STS
Going Beyond the Galleries and Into the Practices

Roberta Spada
Politecnico di Milano
National Science and Technology Museum “Leonardo da Vinci”


     Abstract: Science and technology museums and centres are usually con-
     ceived as settings for science communication. In the STS tradition of Public
     Communication of Science and Technology (PCST), galleries and exhibi-
     tions represent the museum side most exposed to research. However,
     these museums are complex organisations where artefacts are not only ex-
     hibited but also collected, stored, studied, and preserved because they
     make the technoscientific heritage of a place. In this Scenario, I review the
     literature in PCST/STS and Museum Studies to show how the PCST ap-
     proach is insufficient to study science and technology museums because is-
     sues about the private side and heritage are not addressed. I argue for the
     need for STS to enter the private sides of science museums and study them
     as places of technoscientific knowledge production. The Scenario suggests
     an STS approach situated in sociomaterial ecologies to study museum prac-
     tices which, as discussed by Museum Studies, are the sites where narratives
     about science and technology arise.

     Keywords: science and technology museums; museum artefacts; heritage;
     sociomaterial ecologies; museum practices; narratives.

     Submitted: Jan 15, 2022 – Accepted: March 11, 2022
     Corresponding author: Roberta Spada, Department of Design, Politec-
     nico di Milano, Via Durando, 10, 20158 Milano (MI), Italy.
     E-mail: roberta.spada@polimi.it



1. Introduction

   Science and technology museums and centres are usually conceived as
places where to engage with hands-on science and technology or the his-
tory of great accomplishments in these fields. In Science and Technology
!
TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
13 (1) pp. 129-145 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2022
130                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


Studies (STS), studies in Public Communication of Science and Technol-
ogy (henceforth, PCST) have fully embraced this view and thoroughly
studied their contributions to science communication. Nevertheless, gal-
leries, exhibitions, and public events are only one of the many layers that
make up the complex organisations that are science museums and cen-
tres.
    In this Scenario, I review the literature in PCST and Museum Studies1
to analyse key issues around object-based science and technology muse-
ums2 and argue that the PCST approach is insufficient to study them as a
whole. STS must mobilise other traditions to go beyond galleries and en-
gage with the practices of S&T museum practitioners’ daily work. The
reflections in Museum Studies about science museums and how their
practices and materiality affect narratives about science and technology
are very similar to what STS ask about other organisations such as labora-
tories. Thus, an integrated approach can help answer critical questions
about the practices, objects, and people that participate in the construc-
tion of the narratives about technoscience within and beyond exhibitions.
    In the first section, I position science and technology museums in the
debate of PCST to show that, despite the invaluable theoretical tools de-
veloped to understand how science and technology are publicly displayed
in such museums, the field generally misses an understanding of the mu-
seum that goes beyond the gallery. Instead, Museum Studies attend to the
private sides of museums. In the second and third sections, I address two
recurrent topics in science museums literature – the role of museum prac-
tices and the role of objects in science museums – to show their value in
understanding the construction of narratives about science and technolo-
gy. Finally, by drawing from these insights, I propose an integrated ap-
proach based on conceiving the S&T museum as a sociomaterial ecology.


2. Science and Technology Museums and Science Commu-
nication

    Studies in PCST tend to refer to science and technology museums and
centres in relation to their publics, as they consider these places as one of
the possible settings of science communication, where questions about
the relationship between science, technology, and society unfold (Bucchi
and Trench 2014, 1-14; Davies and Horst 2016, 4). According to Bernard
Schiele (2014), S&T museums and centres have several public objectives
that range from making the publics aware of the latest discoveries of sci-
ence and displaying a history of inventors and discoveries to contributing
to science education and helping the publics develop skills and compe-
tences. Thus, the role of science museums and centres in society is “to
make science and technology present in the social imagination and in the
public space” (Schiele 2014, 44).
Spada                                                                   131

    These institutions, too, have been influenced by the changing para-
digms of deficit, dialogue, and engagement in science communication.
Since the second half of the 20th century, museums have shifted their at-
tention towards visitors. This shift goes hand in hand with the loss of safe
resources, forcing museums to opt for marketability and a logic of profit
in their internal activities, such as choosing blockbuster exhibitions over
the valorisation of collections (DesRoches 2015; Poulot 2008, 24-28). The
birth of Visitor Studies – a discipline focussing on why visitors go to the
museum and how they behave in the gallery (Gregory and Miller 2000,
210-214) – and the expansion of science centres are also part of this shift
(Schiele 2014). However, according to curator Robert Bud (2017), sci-
ence centres have challenged the legitimacy of object-based science mu-
seums in a time of defunding and shifting perspectives towards these in-
stitutions. In fact, at the beginning of the 1990s, the “New Museology”
paradigm called museums to prove their social relevance and to redefine
their very methods and objectives as institutions, shifting the theoretical
reflection towards understanding that the meanings of objects and collec-
tions are not value-free but contextual (Macdonald 2011; Vergo 1989).
Therefore, while science centres demonstrated their social and market
value by presenting themselves as places where to showcase cutting-edge
science and technology and educate the publics about it, science muse-
ums could not count on that asset, leading to a major sense of crisis
among practitioners (Bennett 2005; Bud 2017).
    Today, S&T museums and centres have strengthened their relation-
ship with the publics by adapting to the new participatory and dialogic
conceptions of science communication (Bandelli & Konijn 2015). Some
approaches entail co-curation and conceiving these places as “sites of de-
liberative democracy” that embrace broader social goals than just science
communication (Cameron and Deslandes 2011; Pedretti and Navas Ian-
nini 2021). Simultaneously, PCST has investigated the many social issues
surrounding science galleries – e.g., matters of access and inequality in
science museums and centres, that generate different attitudes towards
the institution depending on the visitors’ gender, class, and race (Dawson
2014; 2019) and how such issues contribute to configuring science com-
munication as a “white, Western paradigm” (Finlay et al. 2021). Ultimate-
ly, one of the key objectives of PCST is to understand how science com-
munication in museums and centres works. Therefore, whether they are
interpreted as “brokers of participation” (Bandelli and Konijn 2015), safe
places where to engage with contentious topics (Cameron 2005), or ex-
clusive white, middle-class venues (Dawson 2018), the centre of the re-
flection for science communication is the public space of the muse-
um/centre and its relationship with visitors. This is understandable since
these studies focus on unveiling the very issues of presenting science in
public and have developed invaluable frameworks and concepts to do so.
132                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


Nevertheless, such focus misses at least two important points that would
bring more depth and context to what emerges from the galleries.
    The first point is a lack of attention to the museum beyond its public
facade, both in its physical spaces and its people. A museum is a complex
organisation, where galleries – its public side – are only one part of its
components, communication and exhibition being only two of its many
duties. Indeed, according to the current International Council of Muse-
ums definition, a museum “acquires, conserves, researches, communi-
cates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its
environment” (ICOM 2007). Although this definition is currently under
revision – due to the ongoing debate about the changing social role of
museums (Brown and Mairesse 2018) – we can consider it an operative
description of the actions that museums put in place. In the case of sci-
ence and technology museums and centres, the situation is no different.
As demonstrated by Sharon Macdonald (Macdonald 1998b; 2002) in her
ethnography of the making of the Food for Thought gallery at the London
Science Museum, the narratives encoded in an exhibition stem from
complex negotiations that entail both the team involved in its making and
the many constraints that the museum poses as an organisation and insti-
tution, such as sponsorship, managerial rearrangements, and practical de-
cisions about what competences and professional figures ought to design
an exhibition.
    Macdonald’s account is in line with what research in Museum Studies
has been doing for at least thirty years, and that I will present in the next
section: investigating from within the practice how museums construct
knowledge and narratives about what they display. At the same time, STS
have been studying the emergence and circulation of scientific knowledge
and narratives in laboratories and industries, such as in the case of Labor-
atory Studies (Latour 1987), and in public arenas where technoscience is
co-produced with society and politics and is part of an imaginary for the
future (Jasanoff 2004; Jasanoff and Kim 2015), although they have not
given enough attention to science museums and centres as institutions
that construct imaginaries and knowledge about technoscience.
    The second element that current science communication approaches
miss applies primarily to object-based science and technology museums.
Current studies discard aspects about heritage and artefacts, which are
vital from a museological perspective because they represent the very rea-
son why museums exist as institutions, as I will argue in the fourth sec-
tion. Science communication contemplates objects, too, and many science
educators and practitioners have asked how objects and their affordances
– mostly interactive exhibits – invite experiences and learning (Davies
and Horst 2016, 159-185). Yet, both its study and practice in the museum
have not looked in depth at object-based galleries and at how presenting
material objects as “texts” of a specific story generates certain narratives
and understandings of the history of science and technology (Boon 2011).
Spada                                                                  133

3. From the Gallery to the Storeroom: The Practitioners’
Point of View

    Museum Studies have looked more reflexively at the role of museums
as institutions and producers of knowledge, especially after movements
like the “New Museology” at the end of the 1980s. The museum started
to be conceptualised as a medium, with the same issues of authorship,
framing, and encoding/decoding as television or newspapers (Gregory
and Miller 2000, 196-219). However, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2000,
12) remarks, “[i]n beginning to consider the museum as a communicator,
we realise that we are just at the beginning of finding the answers”, mean-
ing that we should go beyond considering museums as institutions only
devoted to communication and link the theoretical understanding of
communication models to museum practice in general. For media scholar
Roger Silverstone (2003), the museum-medium has three distinctive fea-
tures: it holds objects and constructs precise biographies that are re-
inscribed by the visitor into their personal experience; it constructs its
texts according to different logics and ways of ordering and classifying
both collections and exhibitions; it mediates content through time and
space.
    Answering the call by Ludmilla Jordanova (1989) for exploring how
museums constructed the idea that objects tell a univocal story about ab-
stract concepts (e.g. childhood), museum scholars have developed histor-
ical perspectives about museum practices related to knowledge. The sem-
inal work by Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge
(1992), asks precisely what counts as knowledge and rationality in the
museum. Following Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, the forms of
reason and regimes of truth of the museum lie in the practices of collect-
ing, ordering, and classifying objects. Thus, three different discourses
about objects and knowledge unfold along with the three épistèmes – the
Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity – reflecting different circu-
lations of power and different understandings of the truth (Hetherington
2013).
    Drawing from Hooper-Greenhill, Macdonald (1998a) develops a his-
torical perspective on science museums and their changing role. If, during
the 16th and 17th centuries, collections were developed around ideas of
observation, mathematisation, and natural order, in the 19th century, mu-
seums built their presence and collections upon the modern idea of dis-
playing progress and the order and control of nature. Much of this
demonstration of power came about with the World Fairs, which have
influenced museums in many ways since the 19th century. Not only do
many collections of modern science museums come from what was exhib-
ited at these expositions; Fairs also granted public endorsement and
funds to S&T museums, inserting them in their moral and political econ-
omy, due to the shared mission to disseminate science (Canadelli et al.
134                                                             Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


2019; Friedel 2019). Such mission is prioritised during the 20th century
when science museums moved away from the institutional analogy with
libraries and started looking for appealing narratives to make science at-
tractive to the public (Macdonald 1998a, 11-12). These narratives of he-
roes, innovation, and progress create a mythology about both present and
past science and technology. Representing myths and heroic figures is
understood by curators both as problematic – because it serves precise
interests by presenting a morally charged idea of science – and as a great
source of science museums and centres survival, because the publics
crave such stories (Jordanova 2014). Similarly, Gregory (2016) shows how
presenting a rhetoric of progress associated with technology and innova-
tion in science centres is problematic, especially if presented as a socially-
oriented dialogue. Indeed, these tendencies reveal how science museums
depend on a wide range of stakeholders, like scientists and science enthu-
siasts, whose opinion counts as much as that of curators.
    These historical works highlight how certain discourses about
knowledge, science, and technology have been intertwined with discours-
es about exhibitions and collections. Most of all, they bring forth the in-
valuable viewpoint of the curators and heritage experts working in muse-
ums. However, their effectiveness falls short when studying the present
state of science museums and centres, and especially when it comes to
processes and narratives within them that still have not been historicised.
    This is not to say that scientific museology completely lacks sociologi-
cal perspectives. Concerning science practitioners and enthusiasts, Soraya
Boudia and Sébastien Soubiran (2013) explore the relationship between
these interest groups and heritage in France and conclude that scientists
have an ambiguous relationship to heritage and the history of science: on
the one hand, heritage is a means for scientists to make themselves intelli-
gible; on the other hand, they wish to talk more about present science
and technology rather than the past. Even Macdonald’s The Politics of
Display (1998c) goes towards a more sociological approach. In line with
the claims of New Museology, she asserts that both scientific facts and ex-
hibitions are publicly presented as unequivocal and objective rather than
as outcomes of specific processes:

      By analogy with the use of the term “black box” […] in the sociology of
      science […], we might suggest that exhibitions tend to be presented as
      “glass-cased” – that is, as objects there to be gazed upon, admired, and
      understood only in relation to themselves. (Macdonald 1998a, 2)

    For example, in describing his experience with the controversial exhi-
bitions Science in American Life and The Crossroads: The End of World
War II, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War, Thomas
Gieryn (1998) analyses the internal political negotiations and compromis-
es that the directors and curators of the Smithsonian Institution, the pub-
Spada                                                                     135

lics, the press, and stakeholders went through, linking the debate to the
broader context of the Science Wars and the question of which interest
group between curators and veterans’ organisations had authority over
the history of the Hiroshima bombing.
    STS traditions such as the Social Construction of Technology and La-
boratory Studies have referred to black boxing as a common practice in
science and technology. They understand the act of opening the black
box as going into the private, inaccessible places where technoscience is
constructed (e.g., laboratories, industries) to understand what happens
from within the practices, and to grasp the tacit knowledge and assump-
tions that are discarded or deliberately concealed when presenting tech-
noscience to the public (Latour 1987; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999,
22). Instead, for Macdonald, opening the black box of exhibitions means
asking questions of power, authorship, exclusion, political and economic
interests in exhibitions, and the relationship between the values we attach
to science and the representations we make by exhibiting it. In the black
box metaphor, this is still looking at the surface of the box, i.e. the public
presentation of science, technology, and their history and social value.
The practices that happen inside the box besides exhibition-making –
and that, even indirectly, allow galleries and public narratives to exist –
remain understudied, despite their utmost importance to museum practi-
tioners who have underlined how the private side of the museum is hardly
ever an object of scholarly attention, both in museums of science (Alberti
2017) and of other disciplines (Brusius and Singh 2018, 2; Domínguez
Rubio 2020, 15).
    What is worth asking now is what are the practices and private places
of science museums and centres that would benefit from an STS analysis
beyond PCST, and what is their impact on public narratives about sci-
ence and technology in the museum. Curator Sam Alberti (2017) identi-
fies three practices besides exhibiting and engaging the public in the sci-
ence museum: to collect, to store, and to study. Criteria of collecting vary
and are not always logical or scientific; they do not always respond to the
mission of illuminating a particular historical period or aspect of science
and technology. For instance, scientific instruments have been collected
with many different scopes in mind; some are kept for aesthetics and
spectacle, others are performatively collected as expressions of power or
pride (Alberti 2019). Collections are ultimately made by individuals who
may have personal motivations to collect certain items, while institutional
reasons may involve national identity and public good (DeVorkin 2006).
These values and motivations impact how an object will be classified and
catalogued in the museum or presented to the public. Strong emphasis is
also put on contemporary collecting and how it makes collections dynam-
ic, more relatable to contemporary science and technology, and open to
participatory approaches, while also posing practical issues (Alberti et al.
2018; Boyle et al. 2017, vi-ix): How to collect enormous research equip-
136                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


ment such as colliders or immaterial objects such as software? How to
make the uncertainty of science-in-the-making intelligible through arte-
facts? What stories will come out?
    The acts of collecting and studying objects are united by the venue
where they happen: storerooms. Although such places have become a
metaphor for the confiscation of artefacts from the public domain (Poulot
2008, 24-28), they deserve an STS study for two reasons. First, museum
practitioners view storerooms in quite the opposite way, as places for
conservation and research. Secondly, they are the place where many ob-
jects spend their whole museum life, another aspect that practically im-
pacts and reflects the narratives circulating in the museum. Storerooms
hold objects that are not displayed for many reasons: they could be too
fragile, too big, too small, morally sensitive, controversial, collected ran-
domly, or unknown. People who have access to these spaces develop
unique relationships with objects. Object-love, the affection and emotions
that keepers attach to objects, shape storerooms as affective places and
influences the work ethically and practically in conservation (Geoghegan
and Hess 2015). Storerooms are also liminal spaces for scholars and mu-
seum practitioners who are granted access (Brusius and Singh 2018, 1-
33), and the same scholars and curators who access storage are the ones
who construct narratives about science and technology for displays and
dissemination. Many questions arise: how is meaning maintained in store-
rooms? Who and what concurs to the production of meaning? How does
object-love or other emotions affect the stories taken out of stores and
into the gallery? Answers to these questions lie in the practices happening
in storerooms, from everyday curation and conservation to allowing do-
nors into the storage and establishing a relationship with them centred on
the object they are donating and what the museum will make of it.
    In conclusion, museology has been able to develop critical perspec-
tives on science museums, by being careful to represent their many layers
and by inserting them and their contentious role in the context of society.
As the exhibition is only the tip of the iceberg-museum, I suggest that the
relationship between science, technology, and society in the museum
starts way before the exhibition, which is the cementing of a specific nar-
rative through the display. However, although the many historical per-
spectives on science museums have illuminated the evolution of ideas
about the S&T museum, its practices, and professions, we could look
more attentively at the present through an STS lens based on Laboratory
Studies or, as I argue below, sociomaterial ecologies. In fact, science mu-
seums are yet another organisation where narratives and knowledge about
technoscience are constructed. Practices such as collection, donation,
study, and conservation, happening in collection sites, storerooms, and
research areas, are well known by practitioners in the intimacy of their
institutions, and they ultimately impact the stories that are told through
the collections and the very image of technoscience kept in science muse-
Spada                                                                    137

ums. Relevant questions for STS would be: how do narratives form in the
study, conservation, and curation of a collection of objects? How do ob-
ject classifications contribute to creating a specific narrative of science
and technology? Engaging with such questions would show S&T muse-
ums in their process of producing results and stories about science and
technology. As I will argue in the discussion, STS have their traditions of
understanding ecologies of practices, people, and objects, especially in
organisations, which would give unity to the understanding of the muse-
um-institution, where all the practices are intertwined together, whether
they refer to exhibition-making or curation and research.


4. The Role of Objects in Science Museums
    As Sandra Dudley puts it, “Museums are about things” (2012a, 1),
meaning that the very reason why museums are distinct institutions from
libraries and archives is that they hold, preserve, and exhibit collections
of objects. Thus, including objects and materiality in an STS study of sci-
ence museums is necessary because they are the centre of museological
practices. Indeed, one could argue that STS have developed invaluable
theoretical lenses to integrate materiality and ask why we need to inte-
grate Museums Studies approaches with already consolidated material
theories in STS. Museum Studies attend to a particular kind of materiali-
ty: material culture. And as I argue in this section, being sensitive to this
concept allows us to look at materiality from within the practice.
    Material Culture Studies permeate museology, increasingly demystify-
ing the misconception that objects in the museum are dead. For practi-
tioners and scholars, objects have value beyond the stories they can bring
due to their physical and sensible properties, which are fundamental to
their nature and the possibility of engaging with them (Dudley 2010, 1-
17). Reviewing the dense debate around materiality in this field goes out
of the scope of this paper. Yet, it is worth noting that “material culture”
does not refer to a univocal definition or approach. Prown (1996) de-
scribes two kinds of practitioners approaching it: one, the “farmer”, is
more interested in material and tangible aspects of the artefact – e.g., its
shape, colour, size, material, chemical composition, structure – while the
other one, the “cowman”, is more interested in the social and cultural
context that can be derived from the artefact and its material form. The
two approaches, either emphasising more the material or the culture of an
artefact, span across the whole literature (Dudley 2012a, 5; 2012b, 4), and
they also pertain to science museums.
    Out of the many approaches to material culture, science museum
practitioners generally refer to the biographical approach to objects dis-
cussed by Sam Alberti in his seminal paper Objects and the Museum
(2005). Drawing from The Cultural Biography of Things by Igor Kopytoff,
138                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


he argues that science artefacts should be studied as sources of their two
lives: the one in their context of use and the one in the museum, which is
no less important. Through the movements of artefacts from their context
to the acquisition, from the storeroom to the display and across collec-
tions and classifications, we can follow both the object in its changing
meaning and status and the museum in its transformations. Artefacts be-
come the standpoint from which to study the museum, the people, and
the relationships between them:

      In doing so, we study a series of relationships surrounding objects, first on
      the way to the museum and then as part of the collection. These are rela-
      tionships between people and people, between objects and objects, and
      between objects and people. We encounter not only collectors, curators,
      and scientists but also visitors and audiences. (Alberti 2005, 561)

    The biographical discourse is familiar to STS. In parallel to Alberti,
objects’ biographies have been used by Lorraine Daston (2000) to talk
about scientific objects, not just as material entities but broadly speaking
as what scientists invent and discover. Daston’s and Alberti’s claims reso-
nate with material semiotics. Materiality is relational; it cannot be sepa-
rated from the enactment of relations, which is done through the practic-
es. In other words, through the practices, the performance of the material
goes hand in hand with the performance of relations (Law 2009). Alberti
refers to Actor-Network Theory when talking about the agency of muse-
um objects and claiming that biographies do not animate things but allow
to study the meanings and values attributed to them, in line with the the-
ory (Volonté 2017).
    So, if we want to study S&T museum practices and materiality, ob-
jects’ biographies allow us to do so from a museological perspective akin
to material semiotics. By looking into the biographies of museum objects,
we can explore the reality enacted in the relations between objects and
people. Thus, studying the biographies of objects in their museological
life allows us to enter the materiality of everyday practices in science mu-
seums and, ultimately, the construction of narratives and knowledge
through objects.
    When we look at the museum practices, we see that they are highly af-
fected by the materiality of an object, which offers peculiar affordances
that shape museum work. Science museums collect objects that enor-
mously vary in terms of shape, dimension, fragility and conservation, ma-
terials, and texture. If one must exhibit a space aircraft, collect a tele-
communication infrastructure, or preserve a personal computer com-
posed of different plastics and circuitry, every object will impose distinct
possibilities, bans, and conditions. Studying these practices biographically
is what best allows us to make sense of material culture in science muse-
ums because it puts the objects at the centre of the study as much as they
Spada                                                                     139

are central to the communities of practice of the museum. As I will argue
in the next section, this allows us to define museum practices as particular
sociomaterial practices.
    !
    !
5. Museums as Sociomaterial Ecologies?
    In the previous paragraphs, I argued how current approaches in
PCST and STS only look at museums’ public side due to their necessity
to study how science is performed in public. I claimed that S&T muse-
ums are a fascinating object of study for STS because they are complex
organisations, like laboratories, where narratives about science and tech-
nology are enacted. Thus, an STS question that is worth asking is what
kind of shape technoscience takes in the narratives and knowledge pro-
duced in the museum, not only in exhibitions but in all the hidden prac-
tices of the museum.
    I showed how Museum Studies have produced historical reflections
from the practitioners’ perspective about the context and role of science
museums in relation to knowledge and practices such as collecting, stor-
ing, and studying objects. These practices are interesting to investigate
from an STS point of view because they allow us to see how narratives
practically circulate in the museum environment. At the same time, STS
cannot overlook the attention that Museum Studies pay to materiality as
material culture, because materiality in the museum is not contingent on
the work; it does not only lie in its infrastructures and tools. It is the ob-
ject of the museum practices and what makes it an institution of its own.
    What kind of STS perspective could better understand science muse-
ums in their entirety? Surely it cannot leave out either the role of S&T
museums and their practices and relationship to knowledge or artefacts
and materiality. My suggestion is to study S&T museums as sociomaterial
ecologies. The ecological approach (Star 1995; Star and Ruhleder 1996)
allows us to see the museum as a unitary organisation where the practices
are intertwined and inseparable from the social and material infrastruc-
ture, which entails material and immaterial modules made of technolo-
gies, standards, know-hows, and visible and invisible labour to maintain
the ecology and its equilibrium. Concretely, this means that the practices
of collecting, storing, curating, and exhibiting a particular collection or
artefact are entangled together and to other practices related to other ob-
jects that collectively construct narratives and knowledge about science
and technology. The relationship between the private space and the gal-
lery also offers reflections about the boundaries of the organisation and
the work required to trace them, made of other practices not strictly re-
lated to collections such as exhibition design, public relations, fundrais-
ing, and science communication.
140                                                         Tecnoscienza – 13 (1)


    The unit of analysis of a similar study should be the objects because
material culture is what makes constitutes museums as institutions. While
organisation studies akin to STS see technological artefacts as what helps
workers do their jobs, in museums, artefacts are not a tool but the object
of practitioners’ work. The practices are performed with the objects but
also on the objects. For this reason, one should understand the ecology of
the museum as sociomaterial (Barad 2007; Orlikowski and Scott 2008).
Sociomateriality helps put artefacts at the centre of the analysis because it
methodologically demands cutting the object out of the broader ecology,
without discarding the latter’s value (Bruni 2020), in line with the object’s
shadowing through its biography in the museum (Alberti 2005).


6. Conclusions: STS and Science and Technology Museums
    In this Scenario, I claimed the value of considering science and tech-
nology museums as venues for STS ecological approaches and how inte-
grating STS with Museum Studies helps to be sensitive to issues regarding
material culture and knowledge in the museum and the practitioners’
point of view, shifting artefacts and their biographies at the centre of the
analysis to investigate how the hidden practices in the museum’s “black
box” participate in the construction of narratives about science and tech-
nology.
    The current general shift in Museum Studies and practice towards re-
flexivity profoundly resonates with the STS call to understand science,
technology, knowledge, and expertise as situated in a cultural, social, and
political environment. They are organisations that produce narratives and
imaginaries about science and technology. Moreover, the exchange be-
tween the fields would be bilateral. Science museums are not interesting
organisations to study per se. An STS ecological perspective on S&T mu-
seums would benefit museum practitioners by offering an external con-
tribution to museum work that could foster a reflexive understanding of
the museum in relation to the broader environment of science communi-
cation and the relationship between science, technology, and society.


Acknowledgements

    I am grateful to Simona Casonato, Chris Hesselbein, and Antonia Belli for
their precious advice and support while writing the manuscript.
Spada                                                                             141

Notes
     1
       The PCST literature that I review represents the mainstream anglophone tradi-
tion of studies in Science Communication in Europe and North America. As far as
Museum Studies are concerned, I refer to the British and American mainstream tradi-
tions of the last forty years in Museology and Material Culture Studies.
     2
       Unless otherwise stated, when writing “science and technology museum”, “sci-
ence museum”, or “S&T museum”, I will refer to object-based science and technology
museums, which differ from science centres because they keep collections of historical
artefacts (Friedel, 2019; Friedman, 2010). When writing only “museum”, I will refer to
all museums in general, regardless of their disciplinary orientation.


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