A Special Issue of Social Text
Science Wars
Andrew Ross, special issue editor
The eighties saw the advent of the "Culture Wars," led by Alan Bloom, William Bennett, Dinesh D'Souza, and others; now the nineties may bear witness to the "Science Wars," a conflict led by conservatives in science such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt against so-called science bashers. Science Wars presents research and commentary from scholars in the U.S. and the U.K., including natural scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and scholars in literary and cultural studies, to discuss the issues raised by the current debate.
This perceptive and absorbing volume testifies to the fact that in the mind of the public, science today is associated as much with destructive as with productive forces. In a world endangered by nuclear, biogenic, and chemical overdevelopment, what used to be characterized as knee-jerk technophobia has now become an everyday response to the industrial threats generated by science. Showing that rising technoskepticism forms the basis of public anxiety about everything from processed food to the prospect of a biologically engineered future, contributors examine the events that brought conservative scientists to join the backlash against multiculturalism and the left.
In asking how and why academic, corporate, and military science answers only to elite needs and interests, Science Wars argues persuasively for greater public accountability while providing explanations for the emergence of popular alternatives to establishment science. This controversial and insightful study will be of interest to all those engaged both in and with the sciences and to those involved in the revaluation of the arts and sciences within and outside the academy.
Contents/Contributors
Science is "Good to Think With"
by Sandra Harding
Does Science Put an End to History, or History to Science?
by Steve Fuller
Meeting Polemics with Irenics
by Emily Martin
My Enemy is-Perhaps-My Friend
by Hilary Rose
The Gloves Come Off: Shattered Alliances in Science and Technology Studies
by Langdon Winner
Responses to a Marriage Failed
by Dorothy Nelkin
What are Science Studies For and Who Cares?
by George Levine
Unity, Dyads, Triads, Quads and Coomplexity
by Sharon Traweek
Making Transparencies: Seeing Through the Science Wars
by Sarah Franklin
Gender and Genitals
by Ruth Hubbard,
Nine Propositions on Science and Anti-Science
by Richard Levins
Dispatches from the Science Wars
by Joel Kovel
The Politics of the Science Wars
by Stanley Aronowitz
Science Skirjmishes and Science Policy
by Les Levidow
Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Physics
by Alan Sokal
A Few Good Species
by Andrew Ross
Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2
254 pages
ISBN 0-8223-6433-6
paper, $17
APRIL 1996