Polish Science and Technology Studies in the New Millennium

Preface

The history of science studies in Poland goes back to 1910–1939. This early stage brought at least several great scholars including Florian Znaniecki, philosopher and sociologist, president of American Sociological Association (1953–1954); sociologists and philosophers Maria Ossowska and Stanisław Ossowski; or Ludwik Fleck, microbiologist and philosopher, whose Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact) from 1935 influenced Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution and offered an early ethnography of laboratory work, forty years before a movement with such a label emerged in science studies, in Californian fieldworks of Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour and Michael Lynch. Michał Kokowski, distinguished historian and STS scholar from Polish Academy of Science, tells detailed history of science studies in Poland, and notes a “destruction stage” in 1950s after the first stage of flourishing. The next development stage of science studies in Poland dates from 1960s to 1980s and ends roughly with the fall of the Eastern Bloc.¹ Political structures undergo deep transformation together with structures of knowledge, and that includes both scientific institutions and professional knowledge. One can but mourn when the disappearance of science studies departments and professional discourse turned out to be just a collateral damage – one among many in the academia – of structural adjustment of the institutions of the former Eastern Bloc to the capitalist world-system. Thus, the twentieth century history of science studies in Poland ends with another destruction stage in the 1990s. Traditionally, the Polish term “naukoznawstwo” used to be translated not as “science studies” but rather as “science of science.” Even one of the Polish Academy of Science committees is still translated as “Science of Science Committee.”

By stressing this, we want to underline the symbolic moment of rupture. Most authors in this volume started their university studies in 1990s, during the “destruction stage” of Polish science studies/science of science. Consequently, their knowledge came from singular texts by Fleck, the Ossowscy, or Znaniecki, ←7 | 8→and not from any systematic university course presenting the whole discipline (science of science or science studies). Therefore, when studying philosophy or sociology with an interest in studying science, they turned to western Science and Technology Studies (STS), which were gaining their momentum after great successes of the Edinburgh School’s strong programme, the ethnography of laboratory, the empirical programme of relativism, and the social construction of technology. As it happened, having abandoned their philosophical training, they became particularly interested in the Actor–Network Theory (ANT), which seemed to offer good conceptual tools to combine philosophical questions with sociological theory, particularly with the sociology of knowledge. At the same time, ANT avoided weaknesses of popular individualistic epistemology insensitive to social and cultural dimensions of knowledge. Back then, ANT seemed also like a good way out of postmodern discussions that were uninspiring and, in fact, half dead by the dawn of the new millennium.

Research units, institutes, undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs devoted to STS research have been established at many universities; each of them, depending on the circumstances and interests of researchers and researchers, has its own specificity. Today, their sheer number and diversity indicate how mature STS has become a research field. An example is the European Inter-University Association on Society, Science and Technology (ESST). It is an association of universities in Europe that offer a Master’s degree program in science and technology studies and allow for research exchange. The Faculty of Humanities of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń joined it in 2017, offering the specialization “The Theory and Practice of Risk Society” (http://esst.eu/specializations/).

Thanks to the efforts of researchers at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, the first Polish-language reader in the field of STS was created in Poland, ←8 | 9→entitled Reader in Science and Technology Studies, edited by Ewa Bińczyk and Aleksandra Derra (published by scientific publishing house of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń in 2014). They include translations of texts by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Karen Knorr-Cetina, John Law, Andrew Pickering, Michel Callon, Harry Collins, Steven Shapin, Ruth Hubbard and Ian Hacking along with an appropriate introduction and commentary.

The Disappearance of the Second World and “Suitcase Science”