"More generally, public futures are at stake and reflexive social institutions need to be built where multiple technologies interact to create complex terrains or “ethical plateaus” for decision making. Reflexive social institutions integrate knowledge from multiple sources, often are self-organizing and learning organizations,and respond to new circumstances more easily than brittle, bureaucratic forms of agrarian empires, industrial societies, or closed system, input–output, command-and-control economies."
"Reflexive social institutions are also responsive to the evolution of democratic decision making in perforce multicultural worlds. We need an anthropology of science and technology that pays detailed attention to civic epistemologies and cultures of politics, to epistemologies and presuppositions of policy formulation, makingthemmorereflexive, inclusive,andopentoairingandnegotiatingconflicting interests, situations, requirements, and demands in ways that build legitimacy, without thereby making them unwieldy or formalistic."
“As we move into worlds that are increasingly dependent on linked databases and informatics infrastructures, that require new modes of reflexive social decision making, that are accountable not just to instrumental values but also to the differential cultural sensibilities of affected and invested people in different social and cultural niches, we will need enriched anthropologies of science and technology to inform, critique, and iteratively reconstruct the emergent forms of life already forming around us.”
“The cultural skeins, programming“object-oriented languages,”emergent forms of life,and cosmopolitical marshalling of ingenuity tracked by anthropologies of science and technology productively complicate and make more realistic the demand for attention to the reconstruction of public spheres, civil society, and politics in the technoscientific worlds we are constructing within and around ourselves.”
“With today’s shifts in scale, changes in chronotope, spatial relations, and social organizational forms facilitated by the Internet and other communication, transportation, and dissemination modalities, a more detailed, ethnographic eye is required. Anthropology perforce is becoming a third space, a space of comparative and entangled frames and of emergent forms of life(Fischer2003)”
Since this article essay/ article falls directly within the purview of STS, it draws on and alludes to a lot of things that have contributed to formation if STS as a discipline. It is difficult to make an exhaustive list of the particular texts that Fischer draws on from because allusions are aplenty. To give an overall gist --he draws from classical anthropological texts dealing with the political system, the philosophical and literary debates, new sociology, sociology of health and medicine, cybernetic culture, ecological health based anthropologies in local specific sites to name a few.
Fischer’s article contributes directly to the literature in STS. This article offers a grounding experience for the readers who do not have a background in STS and for the ones who are from the field, it offers an insightful retrospective account and suggests scope for its futures having collated diverse learnings from the past.
The article suggests a way forward for science and technology studies by suggesting that it draws from its four genealogies and work towards creating or producing knowledge that enables formation of reflexive social institutions (which are self-organizing, draw from multiple sources and quick in responding to newer circumstances) that are able to address the diverse and complex problems that engulf our lives in the twenty-first century. These institutions could help with issues in areas like health care, environment, computer infrastructure, critical technologies, and biomedical research and policy to ascertain democratic and inclusive decision making.
In elaborating the four genealogies he traces the discipline’s lineage historically and briefly etches out the various influences – intellectual and interdisciplinary -- that have shaped the multifaceted field of STS.
The first being debates over technology in the post-war period, (Heidegger vs the Frankfurt school, debates over the demarcation of unity and autonomy of science and phenomenology, then on the postwar successors like Structuralism, Hermeneutics, and Poststructuralism).
The second genealogy as the object-oriented languages like SSK, SCOT and ANT which offered the methods, tools, and vocabularies for STS and by conducting sociological and ethnographic inquiries about the contents of science, laboratories and production of epistemic objects.
The third as the anthropologically informed ethnographies of science and technology (the 1980s onwards) which involve collaborative work alongside technoscientists to come to terms with the rapidly changing networked worlds that are also seeing advances in fields of biology and life sciences. Fischer suggests that science studies around this time perhaps have taken on a role akin to critical theory in 1960s in shaping anthropology
The fourth genealogy is the emergent cosmopolitical technoscientific worlds of the twenty-first century: the new generation of ethnographies of scientific and technological developments, especially in the worlds outside Western Europe and North America, to assess political, financial, technological, cultural, institutional and human capital building blocks and barriers.
Learning from these four genealogies and acknowledging third spaces that are emergent and entangled, and have the potential to transform science, policy and technology and cosmopolitics within and beyond their geographical locations.
Michael Fisher is an STS scholar who graduated from John Hopkins with and Bachelors in Liberal Arts Geography and then went on to do his Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Anthropology. Since then he has held teaching and research positions at Chicago University, Harvard University (Social Anthropology and Middle East Studies), Rice University, where he became the Director Center of Cultural Studies before going on to MIT to become Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies. His sites for field study included African, Asian and the Middle Eastern countries. He has authored articles which examine a variety of subjects/themes: Technoscientific Infrasturctures and Narratives, Science Ethnic Groups and fights for representation, Public Spheres in China and Iran, Cultural Studies of Science and Medicine, Third World Poetics, Biosciences and Biotechnologies, and Islam . He teaches courses on ethical and legal dimensions of the electronic frontier, biopolitics and economics, and global medicine.