When does a field not become a field? An Interview with Dr. Jane Calvert on 'A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration' (MIT Press, 2024)

Author: Jane Calvert (University of Edinburgh)
Editor: Aaron Gregory (UC Riverside)
08/24/2025 | Review

“When does a field not become a field?” An Interview with Dr. Jane Calvert (University of Edinburgh) on A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration (MIT Press, 2024).

“When does a field become a field?” Since its inception as a Sociological approach, the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) found its place throughout a range of social and physical sciences, assembling a corresponding array of theoretical, methodological and analytical moorings. Although inquiries attending to science and technology span human history, its nascent beginnings as a field in formation recall early explorations of scientific facts and revolutions thereof (Fleck, 1935; Kuhn, 1962). The formalized field of STS emerged alongside place-based inquiries to sites of scientific knowledge production including examinations of laboratories (Latour & Woolgar, 1979) and situated scientific praxis (Latour, 1987). Studies of science and technology have since located a profusion of sites wherein scientific praxis and knowledge production take and make place, marking a contemporary point of inflection: How and where might we locate the place of STS?

Jane Calvert’s A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration (2025, MIT Press) responds to this timely inquiry with a text akin to a compass and fieldguide. 4S Backchannels recently published a review of this timely and insightful text (Rella, 2025), providing a geography-inspired discussion of Calvert’s multi-sited ethnography considering the ways in which scientific and technological norms, discourses, practices and knowledges are situated and interconnected as spatial matters of concern. Readers of Dr. Calvert’s new book are similarly invited to explore the ‘rooms’ introduced throughout the text. Including and exceeding the laboratory, A Place for Science and Technology Studies explores conference rooms, art studios, classrooms, break rooms, safe harbors, hallways and other sites of encounter and collaboration.

Dr. Aaron Gregory (Editor, 4S Backchannels) recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Calvert, generating additional insights to moments within the text, between the lines, and beyond its margins and binding. 4S Backchannels is pleased to publish an edited transcript of this interview for our readership, and for the readers of A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration.

AG: It’s so great to find ourselves in the same virtual room to discuss your new book. A Place for Science and Technology Studies has been traveling from place to place since its recent publication, celebrated for its timely interventions on STS and place. So, a few introductory questions: Why this book? And why now?

JC: Thanks so much. There’s a children's author who said that she writes the books she wants to read. So I wanted to write some kind of guidebook to all the places I was finding myself, some of which were quite bewildering. I have been in all these weird and different places, and had to ask: What am I doing here? I didn't find this book where I was looking for it. So I wanted to tell a story—an honest story of the difficulties and challenges of being buffeted around in these ways. The book came at a time where I had been involved in synthetic biology for nearly a decade, and I found myself asking: What have I been doing all this time? I needed to somehow make sense of it for myself. So these were the motivations behind the book. The idea of ‘rooms’ was also inspired by a paper written by the late Andrew Webster called ‘Crossing Boundaries: Social Science in the Policy Room’ (2007). Webster examined my PhD, and was an important figure in STS and for me personally. So I started thinking of rooms as an analytical way of thinking through my experiences in different places. And I also wanted the book to be helpful to others who might find themselves in similar situations.

AG: From a disciplinary perspective, we don’t always find STS programs at every university or institution. Many of us find ourselves in rooms that are not our own, where we continually negotiate what it means to practice STS using theories and methods that are often illegible to other disciplines. Moving from one room to another also demands constant re-negotiation of these terms of engagement. How do you negotiate these rooms, and does a sense of restlessness inspire you to move from room to room, between buildings, while building new forms of engagement?

JC: In a sense, there wasn't a choice. I wasn’t fed up with the laboratory or finding a need to move to other rooms. It was more about finding myself in these rooms, ending up in places which were very diverse. Some STS people do lab studies, some do policy-engaged work, and some people work with art and science. I was suddenly doing all these things, partially because of the opportunities that were provided to me, and also because synthetic biology as a nascent field is engaged in different ways with different people. So it wasn't necessarily a ‘restlessness’, but I do think there is a kind of restlessness within STS. In the book, I talk about being a liminal figure and being transient while moving around. And in the conclusion, I talk about safe harbors as places that are open to the world, not places that are closed with walls around them. So I wanted to think about what unites STS work in all these different locations.

AG: In its nascency, STS was envisioned as a field designed by social scientists to examine the places and practitioners of scientific knowledge production. A tenuous distinction was embedded within this approach, between social scientists and their objects of inquiry. Increasingly, practitioners of science and technology identify themselves as members of the STS community, troubling these disciplinary and methodological precepts. Extending the aphorism ‘it could be otherwise’ that continually guides STS, your book introduces the concept of ‘otherwising’ to trouble epistemic and normative distinctions of STS. How are the contemporary places of STS reconfigured by otherwising disciplinary norms and boundaries?

JC: STS can be an open place for people that don't necessarily adhere to specific theories or methodologies, but are engaging in the broader mission and vision of a loosely defined field. So at what point—when you have a diversity of people, thoughts, approaches in a room—does a field not become a field? A field is quite weak compared to a discipline. A field is obviously a spatial metaphor as well. A strength and weakness of STS is its refusal to disciplinarize—to become a discipline. I would say, loosely speaking, STS has a shared literature and applies the insights of the social sciences and humanities to the study of science and technology. So maybe it's about a kind of sensibility and critical reflexivity. But that doesn't mean STS people can't come from other disciplines. Many in STS began with degrees in the sciences before moving to STS. Questions about boundary work obviously come up here, but I don't really want to do that. A Place for STS isn’t trying to define STS or its place. It’s about doing STS and finding places for us to do that.

AG: That's a really useful way to think about what it means to collaborate in studies of science and technology, by being reflexive and thinking otherwise as a method and practice. And this might help us think about the rooms that organize your text as a multi-sited ethnography. These rooms seem to coincide with a more flexible, nuanced, and distributed understanding of the discipline and its methods. A Place for STS seems like a methodological fieldguide to assist navigation throughout new locations and orientations. How might the reader consider this methodological approach, not only in terms of place, but in terms of the methods and forces that place us in transit and demand translation between places? How might we read between the lines, between the pages, and between the places introduced in your text?

JC: That's a very interesting question. What are the forces that propel us? I didn't really have self-propulsion. I was invited into these spaces, and had opportunities to explore and meet people with overlapping interests. So the moving around wasn't intentional, but it was very beneficial because it provided a critical perspective. It’s not that everyone needs to do a multi-sited ethnography—they can stay in one place and do great work. But as an STS researcher, the people we often study or collaborate with are moving around themselves and involved in different places. And maybe it also relates again to the ‘restlessness’ we were talking about earlier, about a kind of restlessness of STS itself. We get funding from different sources, work on different projects with different people, which takes us to different places because we often don't have institutional and disciplinary security. We seek out ways of making a living by teaching and working and getting grants with other scientists from many different disciplines.

AG: Speaking of place, where do you prefer to write? What kinds of places best cultivate your writing praxis? Do you prefer certain rooms or places that encourage your writing and way of thinking? Or do your ways of writing and thinking map upon the kinds of journeys and encounters that inform this text?

JC: There are places where you have to sit down and be quiet, and I do like libraries. And as you can tell, some of the book was written during a pandemic that had its particular constraints on places of work. But I'm pretty flexible in terms of where I write. I write anywhere…anywhere I happen to find myself, which is often on a train. I'm often traveling for various reasons and spend a lot of time on public transport. And I think this kind of liminality—this kind of moving around—very much embodies the liminality that I advocate in the book. For me, this reflects the idea that writing has so many elements to it. The actual sitting and putting words on a page is only one bit of that. Also, much of this work was very collaborative. So I felt a slight discomfort with the idea of ‘sitting there on my own’ writing of my book because it is indebted to other people, particularly other STS researchers. So I think of my writing as taking place in collaboration.

AG: I wonder if we can wander into another room: the editorial room. Are there any ideas that didn’t survive the editorial process that still occupy this room? Any thoughts, insights, or components that didn't quite make it into the book?

JC: I had so many ideas that didn't make it into the book... I really wanted to think about creating spaces for collaboration and flourishing. This book is about places that already exist, and I would like to consider these other kinds of spaces. How do we create them? What do we put inside them? How do we furnish them? Are they on the edge of another space? Other places that didn’t make it into the book include passageways and secret underground tunnels. And I'm really drawn to interlinking and mobile spaces, in traveling places that you can call your own, and I briefly talk about boats at the end of the book, as a kind of mobile traveling place. And I had the opportunity to teach a course on this book at the University of Vienna before it was published. I asked the students to write about their own place for STS and they came up with such brilliant things. Some examples were the car mechanics’ workshop, the library, the museum, and the pharmacy. Someone wrote about fairy doors cut into trees. It was exciting to see so many imaginative engagements with this idea of a Place for STS.

Published: 08/25/2025