Dropping the Brand of Edinburgh School: An Interview with Barry Barnes

摘要

Professor Barry Barnes is not only a world's leading sociologist, but also a major founder in developing the discipline of Science, Technology and Society (STS). His career started in the 1970s at the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh. Before moving to the University of Exeter in 1992, he had become the director of the unit. In the by-now legendary unit, Barnes and his colleagues introduced a distinctive way to explore the relationship between knowledge and society. They suggest that as science itself is clearly a ‘human activity’, it should be analysed in the same way as any other human activities. Under this thinking, researchers from the unit started to analyse the practice of science, rather than what it ought to be. Their pioneering research soon invited severe debates and their research group was labelled as the Edinburgh School or the Strong Programme. Within the Edinburgh School, Barnes is especially known for his ground-breaking study on collective action, self-referring knowledge, and systems of power. His enormous influence helps transform the discipline of STS and won him the J.D. Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science (more details can be found in Mazzotti 2008; Henry 2008).