Paper short abstract:

This paper suggests incorporating a global sociology perspective into STS to conceptualize “global technoscientific fields” that materially and discursively operate through globally connected and historically situated relations.

Paper long abstract:

Global sociology, particularly the "connected sociologies" approach (Bhambra 2014), which is rooted in postcolonial and decolonial thinking, provides a framework for understanding interconnected, spatially expansive, historically situated global social relations (Go and Lawson 2017). Scholars engaging with this approach draw upon Bourdieu's field theory and methods to conceptualize "global fields" despite Bourdieu's limited exploration of global phenomena. While Bourdieu briefly touches upon the concept of "the scientific field," technology traditionally falls outside the purview of this subfield in global sociology (Go and Krause 2016, 8).

This theoretical presentation explores the implications of conceptualizing "global technoscientific fields" and proposes an agenda for a global sociology of technoscience. This agenda expands on globally connected technoscientific histories, addresses the ideological and epistemological implications of coloniality, and examines the materially and discursively co-constitutive relationship between global politics and technoscience.

By doing that, my aim is twofold: first, to confront the dominant trend in mainstream STS that obscures the historical situatedness of hegemonic knowledge producers, who occupy positions of power within global hierarchies of knowledge production while pretending to be with no "geopolitical determinations" (Spivak 1988, 271). Second, to challenge the tendency to consider locality only relevant in cases from (semi)peripheries or "elsewhere" to serve them as complementary examples, coloring and spicing up the implied Euro-American universalities that assume "East and West as separate and pre-established foundations" instead of acknowledging "the connections and circulations that have made one world, unquestionably unequal and uneven, but kinetically joined" (Abraham 2023, 18).