July 6, 2019
By Aadita Chaudhury
The 1994 4S meeting at New Orleans took place at a crucial time in what is now known as the science wars. In these wars, scientific realists and social critics of science were often involved in heated debates about the fundamental basis of scientific inquiry, how facts come to be and are reified and how they go on to create social worlds. The 1990’s in the United States were also a time marked by a re-evaluation of the Cold War ethos that had dominated science, technology, and public policy in the decades before. At such a juncture, sociologist of science Donald Mackenzie’s book Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance provided rich grounds to think about and with the technosocial landscapes of this time. Prof. Mackenzie was awarded the Fleck Prize for this book by the Society for Social Studies of Science.
In his book, Mackenzie explored the development of guided nuclear missiles in the United States, starting with its 19th century theoretical conception to its full-scale realization in the 20th century. Mackenzie unpacks the evolving technosocial imaginaries that enabled the support from the ground up for the development of novel formulations of nuclear weapons, how it informed policy and politics beyond technology and invoked a new form of techno-nationalism in the US and beyond that ran parallel to military technology development. Mackenzie’s intervention into this history and sociology of nuclear guidance has implications for much of STS at large through his conception of accuracy and inventability with regards to military technology testing, which may be applied to contemporary technologies such as AI, synthetic biology, and many more. Indubitably, Mackenzie’s contributions created a significant point of discourse for the 1990s science wars as well.
Mackenzie currently is a professor at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science where he holds a chair in sociology. His recent research concerns the sociology of financial markets and automated trading.