So what are cultural studies of scientific knowledge? I use the term broadly to include various investigations of the practices through which scientific knowledge is articulated and maintained in specific cultural contexts, and translated and extended into new contexts. The term "culture" is deliberately chosen for both its heterogeneity (it can include "material culture" as well as social practices, linguistic traditions, or the constitution of identities, communities, and solidarities) and its connotations of structures or fields of meaning. An extensional characterization might usefully help specify this still quite broad notion, at least for those familiar with the science studies literature. Among the practitioners of cultural studies of science I would include such diverse historians as Donna Haraway, Robert Marc Friedman, Simon Schaffer, Evelyn Fox Keller, Robert Proctor, and V. B. Smocovitis; sociologists and anthropologists such as Sharon Traweek, Bruno Latour, Paula Treichler, Leigh Star, Michael Lynch, and Karin Knorr-Cetina; philosophers like Ian Hacking, Helen Longino, Arthur Fine, Sandra Harding, and myself; and literary theorists such as Gillian Beer and Ludmilla Jordanova. (2-3)
