Cetina, Karin Knorr. Epistemic cultures: How the sciences make knowledge. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Karin Knorr Cetina, "Epistemic Cultures ", contributed by Parikshith Shashikumar, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 9 March 2019, accessed 24 April 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/epistemic-cultures
Critical Commentary
This is the foundational text of my research. The two words that make up the title function more as a compound of systemic concepts that feed into each other (like a dialectical binary). The object of the compound is to trace out and analyze "knowledge societies" a category used to denote a dominant aspect of social operation today, that being the 'expertise'. Both in isolated operations and systemic functions, the expert manner of conduct is a product of cultural operation, a natural aspect of human formation, and the manner of knowledge creation and warranting i.e epistemes.
The dominate epistemic form in our epoch being scientific in nature, the book looks at how 'knowledge societies', are modeled around the scientific method of knowledge creation by following inner and outer workings of two distinct scientific laboratories: high energy physics and molecular biology.