Unpacking a thing: a map from “Ten things – science, technology and design” February 23, 2006

I gave a lecture for Michael Shank’s Ten things class yesterday. I laid out a road map for taking a thing and unpacking it. I offered examples from my own work with maps. But in the lecture I worked closely with Bruno Latour’s excellent thesis (which pulls together work by S. Alpers, E. Eisenstein and…

Archaeology meets science studies head on at 4S

Matt Ratto, Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore organized a session at the Society for Social Studies of Science conference in Pasadena, CA this past weekend (October 20-22). The conference focus was on “The Representation of Controversial Objects: New Methods of Displaying the Unruly and the Anomalous in Science and Technology Studies.” Here is the abstract…

Archaeology and modernity

I recently attended Julian Thomas’ talk, “Archaeology and modernity: Depth and surface,” at the Archaeology Research Center at Berkeley. Julian’s talk highlighted the core argument of his recent book Archaeology and Modernity. In short, archaeology could not have existed prior to the modern era because modern thought created the very conditions for the existence of…