The Society for Social Studies of Science annually awards the Bernal Prize to an individual who has made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. The 2025 Prizes go to Paul N. Edwards and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.
The 2025 Bernal Prize Committee: Anne Pollock, Chair, Warwick Anderson, Monamie Bhadra Haines, Wen-Hua Kuo, Nassim Parvin.
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hrough critical studies of scientific infrastructures and large-scale data systems, Paul N. Edwards has transformed our understanding of climate science and the Anthropocene. Awarded a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Edwards taught in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Stanford, before moving to the University of Michigan where he founded the Science, Technology, and Society program there. He returned to Stanford in 2017 as the William J. Perry Fellow and Senior Research Scholar, while retaining an emeritus professorship in Information and History at Michigan. At Stanford, he directs the flourishing STS program. Edwards’ first book, The Closed World (MIT 1996), illuminated the mutual shaping of computers, Cold War military strategy, and the cognitive sciences after World War II. It received an honorable mention for the Rachel Carson Prize and has been translated into French and Japanese. His second book, A Vast Machine (MIT 2010), a wide-ranging history of climate data infrastructure, received major awards from the Society for the History of Technology and the American Meteorological Society. Additionally, Edwards has been a Carnegie Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Senior Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows. He has held visiting positions in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, South Africa, and Australia. Through his rigorous scholarship and inspiring teaching and mentorship, Paul N. Edwards has consistently demonstrated the power of STS to address and to reshape planetary predicaments and societal challenges. In our fraught times, his work is a model for how critical inquiry might transform governance and policy.
Image credit: Paul N. Edwards, 2025
Acceptance Statement
I am awed and humbled to accept the J.D. Bernal Prize, joining extraordinary intellectuals who taught, encouraged, and inspired me throughout my life. Among the many on that long list – including some no longer with us – I thank Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Leigh Star, Trevor Pinch, and most especially Geoffrey Bowker, my close colleague, co-editor, and friend for over 30 years. Yet further thanks are owed to my mentor, the brilliant, tireless climate scientist Stephen Schneider, who poured his life into saving our planet from the fiery fate we now endure. Above all, I owe a never-ending debt of gratitude to my partner in life, love, research, travel, and writing, my ripple in still water, Gabrielle Hecht.
As I write, a reckless, lawless administration seeks to kneecap American science, abetted by cackling billionaires who see empathy as a weakness and ordinary people as expendable drones. It is shredding, in days, rights, knowledge, and safeguards that built up through generations of struggle: of black and brown people, of women, of LGBTQ+ humans, of indigenous peoples, and of the climate and environment that feeds and sustains us all. The intellectual communities that comprise 4S have played no small part in teasing out injustice and toxicity in science, technology, and medicine. We have helped hold scientific institutions to account, making them more equitable, more aware of human difference, and more legible to broad publics.
Yet in accepting this prize, I call for our Society to rise to the defense of the scientific enterprise in its hour of greatest need. STS critique and questioning are not a game, not a contest to be won by the sharpest, most righteous critic. Their value lies in shaping and improving the lumbering Golem (Collins and Pinch) that is our science. I am alive to accept this prize thanks to researchers, doctors, and nurses at the National Institutes of Health, who cured me of a rare leukemia, one that invariably killed its victims only 35 years ago. My research on the history of computers and climate science relied on the openness, generosity, and honesty of hundreds of scientists I interviewed and worked with, and who welcomed me into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a co-equal colleague. You too, perhaps, have so benefited.
Now it is our turn to speak out for them.
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nna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an environmental anthropologist whose innovative ethnographic writing has recast and transfigured science and technology studies. Trained at Yale and Stanford, she has held appointments at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and she is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also at Aarhus University. From her first book, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (1993) and continuing in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004), Tsing’s work has been attuned to the politics of scalability, illuminating the multifaceted ways in which the global is also local, and vice versa - both with regard to the destructiveness of extractive capitalism and the vitality of individuals and communities finding ways to survive. Her pathbreaking multispecies ethnographic work, notably her extraordinarily reflective and deeply felt book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015), not only takes up the classic STS imperative to attend to agency of nonhuman actors but kaleidoscopically expands our perspective on what such approaches can offer. In all of her scholarship, including her edited collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017), Tsing writes in a distinctive feminist voice that makes esoteric ideas accessible, with a profound impact in anthropology, STS, and beyond. Her latest collaborative works are the digital project Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (2021) and the book Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene (2024).
Image credit: Drew Kelly, Future Observatory, Anna Tsing 2025