Abstract

‘What could and should the relationship be to our subject matter in science studies – especially when we increasingly work on the same sorts of topic as the people we study?’ This is the question that Trevor Pinch (2011: p. 1) places at the center of his review of Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad, 2007). The nature of the relationship between science and science studies is an important issue that I care about a great deal, and the opportunity to engage this question constructively motivates my response. While Pinch and I agree on the question’s importance, I depart from his theoretical assessment of the issues, his approach to answering the question, and the answer he proffers. Since my focus is upon this question, I only address misunderstandings of my project that speak to it, and then only some of the more important ones. The pattern and nature of these mis-understandings are significant and telling of important and long-standing differences between feminist and other approaches in science studies. Pinch delivers his answer to the question of the relationship between science and sci-ence studies in the form of an ‘uncertainty principle’. As someone who studied quantum physics, Pinch no doubt knows that uncertainty principles represent an absolute in prin-ciple limit on the possibilities for knowledge-making, not a practical limit that might be overcome. According to Pinch (p. 10), there is a ‘paradox of mutual exclusivity between science and science studies’: in particular, he says that the practices of doing and writing about science as a scientist and doing and writing about science as a science studies practitioner are mutually exclusive. As empirical evidence for his proposed foundational principle, he points to failures of past attempts to practice science studies and science ‘as part of the same project ’ (p. 9) and also to the difficulties of getting scientists and science studies practitioners to engage in productive dialogue.1