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Contributed articles

Women in the History of Science brings together primary sources that highlight women's involvement in scientific knowledge production around the world. Drawing on texts, images and objects, each primary source is accompanied by an explanatory text, questions to prompt discussion, and a bibliography to aid further research. Arranged by time period, covering 1200 BCE to the twenty-first century, and across 12 inclusive and far-reaching themes, this book is an invaluable companion to students and lecturers alike in exploring women's history in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, medicine and culture.
While women are too often excluded from traditional narratives of the history of science, this book centres the voices and experiences of women across a range of domains of knowledge. By questioning our understanding of what science is, where it happens, and who produces scientific knowledge, this book is an aid to liberating the curriculum within schools and universities.

Agassi has undertaken the challenge of performing a microanalysis of the works of several scientists, pointing out areas of complexity, raising questions, and criticizing current histories of science. Among the topics he has tackled are Bacon's philosophy of science, Boyle's ideology, the rationale of Galileo's work, Newton's declared methodology—influential, but misleading—, Faraday's emancipatory enterprise; and the roots of the quantum revolution. He attempts to reconstruct what scientists did in the immediate context, rather than what they said they did, and highlights difficulties and points of scepticism. Agassi considers many neglected factors that influenced science, taking in the metaphysical, social, anthropological, and even psychological spheres.

The measurement of science and technology (S&T) is now fifty years old. It owes a large part of its existence to the work of the National Science Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the centrality of S&T statistics in science studies, it is surprising that no history of the measurement exists in the literature. This article outlines such a history. The history is cast in the light of social statistics. Like social statistics, S&T indicators are produced mainly by governments but differ in a number of aspects. First, they have not been developed to control individuals. Second, they have taken shape from the start at the international level. Third, they reflect a consensus among states and their organizations. This article shows that this specificity is due to the sociopolitics that drives S&T measurement.

The increased popularity of the label "cultural" within science studies, especially in relation to "cultural studies, " invites consideration of how it is and can be used in historical work. A lot more seems now to be invested in the notion of "cultural history. " This article examines some recent historiography of science as a means of considering what counts as cultural history in that domain and attempts to coordinate it with the sociologically informed studies of the past ten orfifteen years. The label "sociocultural" seems a more useful term by which to capture recent developments.

In recent years explicitly utopian visions have reappeared across the political spectrum. To a surprising degree these visions have drawn on histories and science and technology. What should scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) make of these developments? The concept of utopia has often been treated with considerable distrust in these fields, as an indication of closed end-directed blueprints, or as an indication of fantasies of limitless technological improvement and purification of categories. Alongside this uneasiness, however, HPS and STS scholars have also projected transformative ambitions, seeking to recover from the past different ways of knowing and relating to the human and non-human world. By engaging with critiques of utopia from thinkers including Karl Popper, Otto Neurath, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers and Donna Haraway, and exploring some of the utopian strands which have recurred in studies of science and technology—including the longing for integration, the association of science with planning, and the ways in which feminist scholars have envisaged alternative forms of science—we can understand the ongoing, and often unrecognised, utopian dimensions of HPS and STS.