also an afinity with the material cultural perspective associated with cultural anthropology, see Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
STS is a very broad field with distinct theoretical positions that have often rubbed against one another quite sharply. See, for example, some of the debates about the nature of STS in the Social Studies of Science journal. There is no space to go into the details of these debates here—and anyway it’s the commonality of the approaches that I want to emphasize. A broad sample of the research can be found in journals such as Science, Technology, & Human Values and Science as Culture; the book series Inside Technology (MIT Press); and Edward Hackett, Olga Amsterdamska, Michael Lynch, and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and Invention in America,” Technology and Culture 20, no. 1 (1979): 52.
William Dutton, Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and William Dutton, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
See STS studies, such as Wiebe Bijker and John Law, Shaping Technology/ Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); MacKenzie and Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology; Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
See Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay,” in Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1986); Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, “A Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies,” in Bijker and Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society, 259–64; Bruno Latour, Aramis, or The Love of Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); John Law and John Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
Some scholars have now moved from a focus on interaction to an interest in “intra-action” in order to get a better grasp of the way that distinct things like humans and machines get formed through their interactions in the first place. See Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–31; and Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). STS scholars have deployed the concept of “performativity” to encapsulate the idea that the properties of and boundaries between humans and technologies are not fixed in advance but enacted in recurrent activities. This concept is a familiar one in feminist theory through Judith Butler’s argument that gender is a performance, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
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