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Doing Science + Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine

Posted on: Friday, 29 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

RODDEY REID and SHARON TRAWEEK (eds.), Doing Science + Culture: How Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies are Changing the Way We Look at Science and Medicine. New York and London: Routledge, 2000. Pp. viii + 339. ISBN 0-415-92112-0. L16.99 (paperback).

DOI: 10.1017/S0007087403474979

Like many other edited volumes, this collection of essays started life as a series of conference papers. Some redrafting, polishing and a few discussion groups later, and we have a very reasonably priced paperback that shows how interdisciplinary studies (i.e. women's studies, queer studies, science studies, cultural studies) are influencing research into science and medicine carried out by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and scholars of literature and communication.

Traditionalists who usually recoil in horror @ the overuse(s) of unnecessary punctu/ation and unfamiliar, postmodernist jargon should not be put off from delving deeper into this work. A good deal of the discussion is frank, informative and oriented towards day-to- day matters of simply doing research, in a practical handbook for the confused academic. Reid and Traweek should find a ready market for this work amongst researchers who are simply curious about what the cultural study of science entails, as well as those who are grappling to legitimate their own interdisciplinary approach to research. And at only L16.99 it is surely destined to become a set text for many undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Doing Science + Culture is split into three distinct sections, each containing three or four chapters. The first section deals with the movement of people and ideas about knowledge or scientific practices, both within and across borders of nation states and regions. Section two provides a more personal insight into the rationale behind several quite different research projects. The thought processes each author went through at various periods of his/ her study and the obstacles s/he had to negotiate are set out clearly. In the final section, details are provided about new courses or modules that adopt these approaches to looking at science and/or medicine and have been set up at various universities in the United States. Once again, neither departmental and institutional politics nor logistical nitty-gritty are left out. These pages are likely to be well thumbed in library copies.

Readers can judge for themselves whether Reid and Traweek's insistence on 'jamming together ... elements that are usually kept quite separate' (p. 15) has produced either a hotch-potch of mismatched essays or a fine example of how disparate elements can be brought together as exemplars of cross-disciplinary scholarship. I personally found the collection to be somewhere in between these two extremes, becoming genuinely drawn into some chapters, while glossing over a couple of others that bordered on the self- indulgent. The eleven chapters are all highly self-reflective, with authors taking a 'this is how I see the question', or 'this is the way I did it' approach, rather than hiding behind hypothetical situations or theoretical arguments versed by others. That is not to say that the book is lacking in references. End-of-chapter notes are used to expand upon arguments and mention supporting studies and each contribution is rounded off with a comprehensive list of further reading which will be a valuable resource for any would-be cultural studies student or diligent scholar.

One potential criticism of Doing Science + Culture has to be its unashamed North American focus. While Europe and Japan get a look- in during the first three chapters, investigating globalized viewpoints, the subsequent case studies of research methodologies and undergraduate teaching logistics draw entirely on the experiences of US-based researchers. Appreciation of attempts to integrate cultural, gender and science studies into the curriculum at universities across the Atlantic (or Pacific) is sadly lacking. This would have added a valuable dimension to a work that prides itself on boundary-crossing, and should perhaps be borne in mind if and/or when a second edition is planned.

PAULA GOULD

Chester

Copyright Cambridge University Press, Publishing Division Mar 2003

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