Science without flight recorders and politics without experiments capable of being repeated: talking with Bruno Latour about science and politics at the time of the mad cow disease

Abstract

Bruno Latour has been one of the pioneers of science studies within the so-called “new sociology” of knowledge. His book, La vida de laboratorio, coauthored by Steve Woolgar, has been one of the first contributions that help to understand scientific practices developed “from within” an organization, a task he continued in his La ciencia en acción. Starting from the ideas expressed in Nunca fuimos modernos (published in French, in 1991), Latour develops an interest in other problems: the sociology of everyday life and the “hybrids” and their relation to humans and non-humans. In this interview Latour explains his new approach, a continuation of his last reflections. In it he adds a new scaling to the relations between science and politics, on the one hand (true to his style) the role of science studies, and on other endorsing them.