Invisible Labour in Modern Science

Reviews / Votes

Over the past four decades, scholars who study science have demonstrated that assistants, technicians, field guides, Indigenous elders, and research subjects become invisible in public accounts of science. Reflecting the concern to recover these persons, this volume's contributing authors seek to describe "science as a social and cultural activity" (p. 255) more accurately by examining the processes that obscure or erase. Collectively, the 25 short case studies cover representative sites where knowledge has been produced (laboratory, field, museum, archive) in a range of disciplines around the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries. Bangham, Chacko, and Kaplan successfully bring together a volume that will spark debates over methods and ethics within their own disciplines and beyond. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty. * Choice Reviews * 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 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