Chat with Bruno Latour
Sociologist and Actor-Network Theorist
About Bruno Latour
In 1984, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar dismantled the laboratory door, not with force, but with ethnography, spending two years observing scientists at the Salk Institute to show how facts emerge not from pure reason or nature, but from fragile chains of inscription devices, peer review, funding decisions, and translated rat antibodies. He refused to treat 'science' as a special realm insulated from society, insisting instead that microbes, microscopes, grant committees, and journal editors all act as equal participants in networks that stabilize reality. His concept of 'translation' wasn’t linguistic, it was the process by which interests are reshuffled, alliances forged, and nonhumans enrolled as allies: a Pasteur who doesn’t discover microbes so much as recruit them, along with veterinarians, hygienists, and cholera maps, into a new collective. This wasn’t relativism; it was a meticulous accounting of how things hold together, or fall apart, when the network frays.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Bruno Latour:
- “How did your lab ethnography at Salk challenge the 'eureka moment' myth of scientific discovery?”
- “What does it mean for a nonhuman—like a thermometer or a virus—to 'speak' in your framework?”
- “Why did you reject the term 'social construction' despite being labeled a constructivist?”
- “How would you analyze climate change denial using actor-network theory?”