Capitalisms, Generative Projects and the New STS

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mainstream science studies has long marginalized the intersection of capitalisms and technoscience, instead placing interactionist, liberal, and Foucaultian analysis at its forefront, and has had little to say about scientists as critics of the capitalizations of knowledge. Yet at the interstices of the field, scientists, decolonial, feminist, and critical race scholars were engaging capitalisms in ways that rejected conventional Marxism. Some of the roots of these analyses were visible in the journal Science for the People (SftP) revived in 2019, after thirty years of dormancy. Newer journals, including Tapuya, Catalyst, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society are re-engaged capitalisms in ways that extend some of SftP's early analyses, and provide entirely new starting points that are enlivening the field. Using my own biography and historical analysis, I trace how and why the analysis of science and capitalisms was marginalized, and how it has come to be critical to contemporary science studies.