As a geographer interested in the relationships between science, technology, society and political economy, A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration is a timely contribution to the growing interdisciplinary fields of STS-geography and space-oriented STS. Recounting Dr. Calvert’s journey through the developments and mutations of synthetic biology during the last two decades, the book is organized around the role of different rooms as metonymy for different social and institutions relations that produce science and STS research. A Place for Science and Technology Studies is a multi-sited ethnography demonstrating the ways in which norms, discourse, practice and the production of knowledge are situated yet connected throughout an expansive terrain of place and space.

Calvert's first chapter foregrounds the Laboratory as the privileged room for both science and STS. Popular wisdom suggests that science happens in laboratories, and the etymology of ‘laboratory’ refers to ‘the place where scientific work is done’. STS also emerged in this space, turning the ethno-methodological gaze towards the situated production of science. This book problematizes the privileged place of the laboratory, introducing a plurality of other rooms that contribute to STS and the production network of scientific knowledge.

Chapter 2 zooms in on the Conference Room as the main place of direct, ‘overt’ engagement between STS scholars, synthetic biologists and, sometimes, the wider public. Gathering these diverse actors, conference rooms also bring ethico-political questions of distance, proximity, engagement, critique and political economy to the fore. These rooms are located as a new knowledge commons that gather an expanded range of actors to ‘confer’, often exceeding the privileged places of scientific experts and expertise. Oscillating between the methodological precepts of observation and participation, Calvert notes the open collaboration often generated in conference space.

Drawing upon Dr. Calvert’s pedagogical approach, Chapter 3 is a study of the classroom. Here, the book sheds light on teaching and learning spaces as field sites. Research and teaching are often kept separate in methodological research, and this book is a breath of fresh air revealing the power structures and insights that come from research-oriented teaching that treats students as active knowledge producers. The classroom is refused as a place set apart from critically engaged research, and resuscitated as a locus of participatory knowledge production.

Transforming commonplace conceptions of ‘water-cooler’ talk often dismissed as insignificant banter, Chapter 4 moves to the coffee room, an all-too-often overlooked space where some of the best ideas emerge, and where the first outlines of research projects are born out of informal conversations. It is precisely this informality and openness that often prevents this space from being acknowledged in STS as a field site. The coffee room is no longer a transient point of passage between formal sites of inquiry, but a place that troubles the positional place of researchers and their peer-interlocutors’. To share a cup of coffee is to share ideas in novel and unexpected ways.

Chapter 5 turns to the art studio, where “scientific tools and equipment are repurposed for artistic ends” (p. 18). Intervening within tenuous distinctions between the arts and sciences, this space allows for different and 'emergent' forms of critique that allow for scientific reason and reasoning to be subverted and injected with other forms of poetic thinking, opening space for new possibilities. Although art studios and laboratories share many features, artistic spaces are often feral in their efforts to repurpose forgotten corners of institutions, creating new forms of material and knowledge production in unexpected places.

Returning to Calvert’s disciplinary roots, Chapter 6 looks at the complex landscape and epistemic space of bioethics. These passages provide space to reflect upon her role as an STS scholar in synthetic biology projects, often presumed to be about bioethics. This chapter recapitulates and fleshes out her problematization of the division of labour between synthetic biology and STS—a demolition project that tears down the walls of normativity and expectations that often inhibit transdisciplinary work. At the same time, the chapter shows how bioethics itself cannot be limited to STS, and is instead produced by multiple professional figures outside academia including lawyers, legal professionals and more. Embodying the transitory organizatin of the text, this chapter demonstrates transdisciplinary work as the production of transdisciplinary space.

Chapter 7 looks at policy institutions and think tanks to navigate the fraught spaces of ‘power’ and impact”, asking how both synthetic biology and STS might influence the regulation of science and innovation. This room is where committed and engaged scholars should find themselves most at home while attempting to make real change through their research. Yet, Calvert reveals the perils and limitations that often and ‘otherwise’ confine social scientists to mainstream imaginaries and definitions of synthetic biology and innovation. These attempts are not without costs, as the book shows that unsuccessful attempts to trouble narrow understandings of innovation and ethics might result in guilt by association. Scholars can be accused of providing a fig leaf for regulatory efforts already captured by political and economic interests, rather than engaging in transformative research.

Lastly, Calvert turns the research gaze inwards and toward the ivory tower. This space is ambiguous, caught between providing the necessary distance to allow for critique and conceptual reflection, while risking the production of armchair scholars producing analysis without insights from the field. In the ivory tower, one is often shielded from the power and influence of the wealthy and elite, while also being thrown into the political economy of power and prestige of academia itself. The ivory tower is only a safe haven for a short time, and comes with its own costs. Although towers are architectural spaces designed to observe their surroundings, Calvert inverts the ivory tower as a place of critical reflection. Their conclusions provide methodological reflections on traveling between rooms and the hidden passages within, connecting them with each other while providing entrances/exits for engaged field research.

A Place for Science and Technology Studies is a rich and multi-faceted book that can be read through many layers, and takes different functions and shapes. On one level, it is an atlas and travel guide. In this capacity, the book provides a necessary methodological handbook for multi-sited ethnography and geography-inspired “follow the thing” approaches to STS. On another level, this book is almost a 'how it’s made' documentary detailing how both synthetic biology—and STS research on synthetic biology—come into being. This book is therefore a valuable contribution at the intersection between STS and political/spatial economy: outside every room in the book, there is a global production network of regulators and lobbyists seeing synthetic biology through rose-tinted and techno-solutionist glasses as a tool to 'heal us, heat us, and feed us'. There is also an economic world increasingly drawn to the profit opportunities of synthetic biology in agrifoods, materials, energy, and the like. It has been argued in fields including geography and finance that STS sometimes fails to foreground political economy and capital as much as it could. This book is once again a particularly important place to fill that gap.

As a geographer, I really liked the spatial sensitivity of this book: the eclectic, versatile and expansive view of STS. Through keen attention to place and the spaces between, the text asks us to rethink STS and geography 'canon' and their complementary research methods. Having said that, I wonder whether the cross-pollination between geography and STS could have been pursued further, by drawing more extensively on literature from geography and discussing in theoretical terms how the spatial division of labour in science is decided, and how it might be organised otherwise.

The book’s focus on synthetic biology, while far from my area of expertise on Artificial Intelligence, nonetheless showed remarkable similarities in the political and economic dynamics that have surrounded AI during the past two decades. Both AI and synthetic biology, operating on the building blocks of cognition and life, raise important ethical concerns. Yet in both fields we witness the risks of bracketing and narrowing the definition of 'ethics' itself. As Calvert states in the text: “I found continually having to battle expectations that I did bioethics, regulation, or public outreach while attempting to clarify the kind of work that I wanted to be doing, and its value.” Her book is valuable for all social scientists operating in ethically sensitive domains who nonetheless do not use traditional definitions of ethics to help them make their case for expansive views of social engagements with technology.

I could also relate with the assessment of the political economy and the regulatory imaginaries traversing synthetic biology. Both synthetic biology and AI, in their own 'hype cycles', are targets for enormous and speculative investment flows. These often carry hubristic techno-solutionist discourses and imaginaries, translated through highly permissive regulatory frameworks and fast-paced adoptions in public and private sectors alike. Where is the place of ‘ethics’ within this new paradigm, and which logics inform its newly produced terrain of digital and virtual assemblages? If the boundedness of physical and disciplinary space no longer apply to these domains, how might we rethink ‘place’ and STS?

These similarities also relate to the desires and dangers of translating research into impact: If AI and synthetic biology are so similar in political economy and ethico-political implications, what room is there for meaningful impact on regulatory decisions that question, problematize, and open up techno-solutionist and overtly (or covertly) colonial and imperialist imaginaries around the spatial division of labour of AI between centre and periphery? Similar questions apply to the ethics, politics, and economics of data extraction, synthesis and generation. How can we 'otherwise' AI regulation to protect the product of people’s artistic and intellectual work, while also preventing acritical adoptions of AI in higher education and the public sector that fail to account for repercussions in terms of integrity, accountability, citizenship and participation?

A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration makes a strong case for the role of formal and informal, artistic and scientific, public and private spaces in the making of science and technology, a role that needs to be more carefully incorporated into STS and that will hopefully spur more in-depth forms of geography-STS collaborations. Calvert provides important contributions on the spatial and political economies and institutional landscapes of science and technology. Scholars studying emerging technologies and the many places of knowledge production will benefit from making room for it in their methodological reading list, and as a field guide to the many rooms and places of STS.