Overview

Invisible Labour in Modern Science is about the people who are concealed, eclipsed, or anonymised in accounts of scientific research. Many scientific workers—including translators, activists, archivists, technicians, curators, and ethics review boards—are absent in formal publications and omitted from stories of discovery. Scientific reports are often held to ideals of transparency, yet they are the result of careful judgments about what (and what not) to reveal. Professional scientists are often celebrated, yet they are expected to uphold principles of ‘objective’ self-denial. The emerging and leading scholars writing in this book negotiate such silences and omissions to reveal how invisibilitieshave shaped twentieth and twenty-first century science. Invisibility can be unjust; it can also be powerful. What is invisible to whom, and when does this matter? How do power structures built on hierarchies of race, gender, class, and nation frame what can be seen? And for those observing science: when does the recovery of the ‘invisible’ serve social justice and when does it invade privacy? Tackling head-on the silences and dilemmas that can haunt historians, this book transforms invisibility into a guide for exploring the moral sensibilities and politics of science and its history.

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9781538159958

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Many sorts of people are involved in making scientific knowledge; only a few appear as its authors. Invisible Labour in Modern Science is a wide-ranging collective effort to draw attention to those many and to say why their work has attracted so little notice.--Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University The history of modernity is often told as a fable about the triumph of vision enabled by science. This collection rewrites that familiar story as a parable about invisibility. By shadowing the various forms of labor that mediate between the seen and the unseen, the authors draw out the many scales, techniques, uses, abuses, and essences of invisibility haunting both science and the history of science.--Projit Bihari Mukharji, professor of history of science, University of Pennsylvania What do we not see? A lot! Invisible Labour in Modern Science brilliantly uncovers the layers of global infrastructures of people, power, process, and practices behind the production of science. Rich, expansive, detailed, and nuanced, this is an invaluable collection.--Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

What do we not see? A lot! Invisible Labour in Modern Science brilliantly uncovers the layers of global infrastructures of people, power, process, and practices behind the production of science. Rich, expansive, detailed, and nuanced, this is an invaluable collection.--Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Author Information

Jenny Bangham is a Wellcome University Award Lecturer in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, where she researchers the politics, meanings and practices of genetics. She is the author of Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics (2020). She is coeditor (with Emma Kowal and Boris Jardine) of the open access volume, ‘How Collections End: Objects and Loss in Laboratories and Museums’ (2019). Xan Chacko is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. A feminist science studies scholar, her research complicates the taken-for-grantedness of scientific knowledge production to argue for a feminist re-envisioning of science that is committed to justice. Her most recent book is The Last Seed: Colonial Legacies and Botanic Futures. Judith Kaplan is a historian of the human sciences who teaches in the Integrated Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). Her work focuses on the rise of modern linguistics in nineteenth-century Germany and on the subsequent development of comparative and historical approaches. She has published widely on topics from orientalism to sound studies and is currently completing a manuscript on Living Language and the Transformation of Linguistics, 1871–1918.

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