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.
