John Law

John Law


Starting in 1973, I was a teacher and researcher in three British universities: Keele, Lancaster, and the Open University. I was also welcomed into the CSI in the 1980s and 1990s, when I learned about material semiotics, and wrote with Michel Callon and Madeleine Akrich about the heterogeneity of technologies. I’m now retired, and work on postcolonial issues. I collaborate with Sámi academic friends on indigenous struggles about land, resources, and the politics of mistranslation in sub-Arctic Europe. I also work with Taiwanese colleague Wen-yuan Lin to imagine the possible contours of a less colonial STS that reflects the practical and explanatory strategies of Chinese medicine.

Contribution to ‘Une Journée avec Bruno Latour’

In the 1980s I was thrilled when Bruno circulated the draft of Irréductions, and I went on to (mis)translate this into English. Preparing for ‘Une Journée avec Bruno Latour’ I reread this text. It’s different, but it is still stunning. For me his argument about multiplicity is as powerful as it was back then. But forty years on, what strikes me even more is the puzzle that Irréductions poses for a politics of academic translation. Traduction, trahison, the book is about difference. Or better, about similarity/difference. STS journals are filled with beautiful case studies that translate other practices into English or French. They also lever those practices into the spaces afforded by our academic conventions. Exposed to anthropology, postcolonialism, and indigenous studies, I have come to find this colonisation problematic. So for me this is now the most urgent challenge thrown down by Irréductions. Can we write social science in other, possibly less colonial, ways? Can we practise knowing differently? And if so, then how?

The drawing is a self-portrait.


Speakers in Session 1: Science and Technology Studies with Bruno Latour

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