Abstract
‘‘Undone science’’ refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politics of knowledge, wherein multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of alternative research agendas. Overall, the study demonstrates the analytic potential of the concept of undone science to deepen understanding of the systematic nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements that is characteristic of recent calls for a ‘‘new political sociology of science.’’
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Author Biographies
Mike Tapia is a criminologist at NMSU specializing in gangs, race, and juvenile delinquency. His latest works examine the changing structure of Chicano gangs in historical perspective.
Rubén O. Martinez is professor of sociology and director of the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University. His research interests include the workplace experiences of faculty of color.
Author Biographies
Julie Guthman is a geographer and professor of social sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz where she teaches courses in global political economy and the politics of food and agriculture. Her publications include two multi-award winning books: Agrarian Dreams: the Paradox of Organic Farming in California and Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism.
Sandy Brown is a geographer and a research affiliate at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has published several articles on the politics of fair trade and farm labor issues in both California and Latin America.
Author Biography
Alissa Cordner is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Whitman College. Her research focuses on environmental sociology, the sociology of risk and disasters, environmental health and justice, and public engagement in science and policy making. Her under-contract book manuscript examines the intersection of science, regulation, activism, and industry decision making related to environmental health risks and consumer exposure to chemicals.
Author Biographies
Céline Granjou is a director of research in sociology at the French national Institute for research in environment and agriculture in Grenoble. Her current research interests include science/policy interfaces, biodiversity, and wildlife governance, ecotrons (experimental infrastructures in ecology) and the production of scenarios of environmental changes.
Isabelle Arpin is a tenured sociologist at the Grenoble Centre of Irstea (French National Science and technology Institute for Agriculture and Environment). She studies the ways of investigating and managing nature at the biodiversity era. She is currently particularly interested in the interface between natural scientists and nature managers.
Author Biography
Jennifer L. Croissant is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. Recent works include studies of agnotology (ignorance, especially in relation to absence), and new work on the emergence of organizational structures and practices for managing post-docs.
Author Biography
Karen Hoffman is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her work is focused on the making and failure to make environmental regulations, and social and cultural reproduction in the community of practice of pollution control. Her current research is on the implementation of the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.
Author Biographies
Daniel Lee Kleinman is professor and chair of the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (USA). Kleinman is also an international scholar at Kyung Hee University in Korea. In addition to the project from which this paper comes, Kleinman is currently involved in studies of the commercialization of higher education and of the nature of interdisciplinarity in the 21st century.
Sainath Suryanarayanan (suryanas@entomology.wisc.edu) is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (USA). Suryanarayanan obtained his Ph.D. in Zoology studying social wasps. The kinds of experiments that Suryanarayanan's doctoral research entailed, led him to question how various biosciences institute particular relationships with experimented upon lives, and have spurred his current research in the social studies of science.
Author Biography
Gwen Ottinger is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell. She is co-editor of Technoscience and Environmental Justice: Expert Cultures in a Grassroots Movement (MIT Press, 2011), and author of Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges (NYU Press, 2013).
