Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses

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DAVINCIMEDALADDRESS Good Fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses

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I am very honored by receiving SHOT’s Leonardo da Vinci Medal. It was also a bewildering experience to listen to Arne Kaijser, immediate past pres- ident of SHOT and chair of the da Vinci Committee, reading the citation: Is this about me?1 I shall try to answer this question by taking up the invi- tation by Bernard Carlson, SHOT’s secretary, to use this da Vinci lecture to provide “a mix of major ideas as well as autobiographical reflections.” So, I will look into the mirror; but as a dyed-in-the-wool social constructivist, I will especially describe what then appears as the context in which I have been working. How has the history of technology during the past three decades shaped me? The bottom line of my story is that I have been extremely fortunate. I have been fortunate to meet Thomas Hughes and I have been fortunate to meet Trevor Pinch. How different they are: Trevor is the Irish-British “rock star of the STS community,” while Tom is the southern gentleman; Trevor always emphasizes that “a good presentation makes one and only one point,” while Tom sees wider around and farther beyond than I could ever imagine.2 But they are similar too: both pushed to include a reference to pink champagne in our joint introduction to the SCOTS volume.3 For me, Trevor and Tom epitomize the sociology and history of technology. But on which stage did these actors meet? The history of technology in the Netherlands was almost nonexistentbefore the 1980s. One outstanding exception was the Scottish-Dutch chemist and historian Robert Jacobus (or James) Forbes (1900–1973), who actually was SHOT’s very first da Vinci medalist in 1962. Then there was Harry Lintsen’s Ph.D. thesis on the his-

Wiebe E. Bijker is professor of Technology and Society, Maastricht University, the Neth- erlands. ©2013 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/13/5403-0006/600–618

1. “Awards,” 139–43. 2. Personal communication about Trevor’s status in music and scholarship from one of the Cornell STS (Science, Technology, and Society studies) students. 3. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P.Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construc- tion of Technological Systems.

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tory of Dutch engineers (1980) and the research project on the history of the synthetic dye industry in Nijmegen with Wim Hornix and Ernst Hom- burg.4 In 1984, we established, with Harry Lintsen and some others, the Dutch Yearbook for the History of Technology and Business (Jaarboek voor de geschiedenis van bedrijf en techniek)—a yearbook because we did not see enough potential articles for a full journal, and a combination of business history and the history of technology because either field seemed too small DA VINCI to sustain a scholarly publication on its own. MEDAL

The history of technology in the Netherlands really took off when Lint- ADDRESS sen, Arie Rip, and Johan Schot established, in 1988, the Foundation for the History of Technology, which produced the six-volume series History of Technology in the Netherlands—the Making of a Modern Society, 1800– 1890, followed by an equally monumental seven volumes on Technology in the Netherlands in the 20th Century.5 The current Tensions of Europe pro- gram was built on these two programs and extended Dutch history of technology into international collaboration.6 Back to my looking into the mirror. I was trained as a physicist and engineer: So how did I end up in the history and sociology of technology? Before my big fortune in meeting Trevor and Thomas, I had the small fortune of being kicked out of school. I was teaching physics in a secondary school in Rotterdam (1974–80) when the decreasing number of students made me redundant. (Also, getting into that teaching job was quite acci- dental: studying in a technical university, I had no intention of becoming a teacher, but this school needed a temporary substitute and I liked it and stayed on.) I then found a part-time job on a history-of-technology project at the University of Twente (while during the other half of the week I par- ented my first daughter, who was born in 1981). The Twente project, funded by the German Volkswagenstiftung, aimed at developing a theoretical understanding of technological change. It was designed to study sixty to eighty inventions, to code these and then perform a quantitative analysis on the coded data set. I accepted the job on the con- dition that I could turn it into a qualitative, historical analysis of a few case studies. (I was not desperate to get the research job, since I really liked teaching physics and would have been happy to find another position in a secondary school. The principal investigator at Twente, however, was desperate enough to take me on.)

4. Harry Lintsen, Ingenieurs in Nederland in De Negentiende Eeuw. H. van den Belt, H. G. J. Gremmen, E. Homburg, and W. J. Hornix, De Ontwikkeling van de Kleurstofindus- trie (The development of the dye industry) is a case study of the social factors that deter- mine the development of the sciences, of the technological-scientific factor in industrial development, and on the social role of the scientist. 5. For a compilation in English, see Johan Schot, Harry Lintsen, and Ar ie Rip, eds., Technology and the Making of the Netherlands. 6. See http://www.tensionsofeurope.eu/.

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Joining this project constituted what I would later call my “academic detour.”As an engineering student, I had been active in protests against the arms race and nuclear energy, and against what we then perceived as a lack of social responsibility among scientists and engineers. This science and society movement was quite successful within the institutions—for example, in realizing reforms in university and secondary school science curric- JULY ula. It was less successful outside, in the real world. That spurred my detour 2013 into academia: by first studying the relations among science, technology,

VOL. 54 and society, one might perhaps reach a better understanding and then be politically more effective too. Ellen van Oost was hired at the same time, and together we started to do historical case studies of the bicycle, Bakelite, fluorescent lighting, the transistor, the Sulzer weaving machine, and alu- minum. A year later, in 1982, we presented our first paper on the social construction of technology at the founding meeting of EASST (the Euro- pean Association for the Study of Science and Technology) in Burg Lands- berg in Austria. It was at that meeting that Trevor and I met for the first time. In addition to presenting our paper, Ellen and I had come to Austria with another task. Our department at the University of Twente had some extra money to invite a guest researcher and we had been asked to look for candidates. Trevor’s contract at the University of Bath happened to be running out in a few months. Over some glasses of pink champagne, we agreed that Trevor would join Twente for six months, starting from the 1st of January. The rest, I am tempted to say, is history. When Trevor arrived in his Volkswagen Beetle on the Harwich–Hoek van Holland boat in the first week of January, we felt that combining his social construction of science work with my social construction of technology work was worth a try—but we did not have a grand plan. A detailed comparison of Trevor’s study of solar neutrinos and mine of the bicycle, however unlikely, sparked creativity and proved fruitful to build the larger argument that would be published in Social Studies of Science one year later. But we certainly did not yet think of such an ambitious publication at that moment. Although I cannot remember how we identified the occasion, suddenly there was the possibility to test our first explorati ons in Paris, at a workshop organized by Pandore, Techniques, Sciences, Sociétés, a small newsletter in which Bruno Latour and Michel Callon participated. We decided to present our work there. I would go alone: we had only money for one train ticket and my French was better than Trevor’s. I vividly remember looking forward to it and not really being nervous. After all, if this would blow up in my face, I would quite happily return to secondary school and teaching physics. It was different for Trevor: he knew Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Steve Woolgar, and David Bloor—who would all be there—as key figures in the emerging field of the sociology of scientific knowledge, in which he

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had just received his Ph.D. and was keen to make a living. Almost up to the train platform, Trevor was anxious to give me advice and warn me how not to make a fool of myself. Anyway, probably because of his advice, my presentation went quite well; I had made my overhead transparencies with a series of successive overlays to present the line of argument dynamically (quite similar to what PowerPoint animations now do), as I was used to do as a schoolteacher. And whatever they thought of our paper, the audience DA VINCI liked the dynamic transparencies. MEDAL

This was the kind of encouragement we needed. We reworked the paper ADDRESS into an article that we then dared to submit to Social Studies of Science. Later, we learned that it had been a quite difficult decision for David Edge, editor of SSS, to publish a paper on technology at all. A positive review by Donald MacKenzie, and some subsequent discussions between the two of them in Edinburgh, must have helped David to do so. We also must be grateful to David for coming up with the acronym SCOT while editing our paper. He said to us: “You can’t call it Joint Programme in the Sociology of Science and Technology; why not call it Social Construction of Technology, or SCOT for short?” A nice coup by the Scot David Edge: I vividly remember Trevor’s warning to always address letters to David to “Edinburgh, Scot- land” rather than to “England,” as a Dutchman might naively do.7 Stimulated by this success, we ventu red to present our paper to the 1983 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Blacks- burg, Virginia—my very first trip to the United States. Since 4S was starting to experiment with ways to accommodate more participants, they asked me to also present a poster. Having no idea what a proper scientific poster looked like, I again fell back on my schoolteacher’s skills and cut, pasted, and painted a huge display on wallpaper (fig. 1). After the meeting, I traveled to Philadelphia and Cambridge and presented at the research seminars of Penn and MIT. The U.S. trip also produced quite positive reactions, especially our argument to study technology from a perspective similar to the one the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) had recently developed for science, which did generate enthusiasm. Harry Collins, for example, had been quite skeptical when Trevor, after returning to the UK in mid-1983, told him about our adven tures, but he now concluded that this turn to technology might not be such a bad idea after all. We considered organizing a workshop on this new sociology of technology and approached the various sociologists of science we had been meeting over the past few months. The reactions were positive, but Donald MacKenzie made a crucial suggestion: that we should get historians of technology onboard because they know how to analyze the contents of technology. And he specifically pointed to some SHOT scholars. (Judy Wajcman

7. Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Arte- facts.”

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VOL. 54 Poster, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts,” at the 1983 annual Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) meeting in FIG. 1 Blacksburg, Virginia. (Source: Photo by author.)

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and he, by that time, were starting their reviewing of history-of-technology scholarship for the reader The Social Shaping of Technology, which was to be published in 1985.8) We approached Tom Hughes, Ruth Cowan, Ed Con- stant, Harry Lintsen, and Henk van den Belt, who all accepted. In setting up the workshop, again, we did not have a specific goal in mind. The push came much more from the excitement encountered during the various meetings and the wish to continue the discussions than DA VINCI from a pull towards a concrete outcome. Those were the days when inter- MEDAL

national workshops were still quite rare, and the aim to have passionate ADDRESS scholarly discussions was a perfectly good reason to receive funding from the research councils ZWO (the Netherlands), ESRC and British Council (UK), and Twente University. Once word got around, we started to receive many more requests for participation than we could accommodate. As we have reported in the introduction to the SCOTS volume, we felt like foot- ball trainers who have to decide which players are allowed on the field and who has to stay on the substitutes’ bench. We drew primarily on personal relationships and followed our intuition about someone’s work being interesting, and this worked out well: the group of some thirty scholars who gathered in Twente in July 1984 was committed and engaged (fig. 2). It may have helped that we had provided rental bikes to commute between the hotel and the conference location: col- lectively surviving Dutch traffic has a bonding effect. We had a great time. One hilarious moment was when Bruno Latour volunteered to do a direct translation of Michel Callon’s paper (presented in French, since his English was not yet as good as it is now), and gradually began to give his own gloss on what Michel was arguing (“what Michel actually means is . . .”)—much to the amusement of the Dutch, who could understand both the French and the English (fig. 3). At the end of the workshop, it was decided that Trevor and I would in- vestigate the possibility of an edited volume. Two crucial decisions then shaped the rest of the project. The first was to ask Tom Hughes to join us in editing the volume; the second to approach MIT Press’s Larry Cohen. Only last year, when Trevor and I sat down to write a new preface to the twenty- fifth anniversary edition of the SCOTS volume, we fully realized how amaz- ing it was that both said yes. As we reflected and wrote in the new preface: “Some seasoned American academics later commented that they had been surprised that such a prominent scholar as Tom Hughes had been willing to add his name to such a wild project and to collaborate with two young and unknown Europeans. We can only think that it testifies to Tom’s broad vision and the true excitement generated during the workshop.”While writ- ing the new preface, when we asked Larry about his recollections, he said that “I’d like to think it was positive, but most likely it was ‘Oy, another

8. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology.

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VOL. 54 Sociology of technology workshop participants, University of Twente (July 1984). (Source: Photo courtesy of Ellen van Oost.) FIG. 2

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FIG. 3 Translation in action. Sociology of technology workshop participants, University of Twente (July 1984) (left to right): Gerard de Vries, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Trevor Pinch, and Wiebe Bijker. (Source: Photo courtesy of Ellen van Oost.)

edited volume. What’s the kindest way to make it go away?’” But Larry signed us up and played a crucial role in further shaping the volume.9 Only while working to mold the volume into a coherent book did we start to use the three new approaches to the study of technology for struc- turing the argument: the social construction of technology (SCOT), the large-technological-systems approach (LTS), and actor-network theory (ANT). Later, others have distinguished these three approaches much more sharply that we did ourselves. For us then—and for me still now—the common traits were much more important: a turn to studying technology, the constructivist approach, the metaphor of the seamless web of technology and society, the idea of interpretative flexibility, and an integration of empirics and theory. The turn to technology evidently had already been made by the historians, and the SCOTS volume clearly built on the work of such eminent SHOT scholars as Tom Hughes, Ruth Cowan, Ed Constant, and Joan Rothschild.10

9.“Preface to the Anniversary Edition,”in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems. 10. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother; Edward W. Constant II, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution; Joan Rothschild, Machina Ex Dea.

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The constructivist approach, even if not labeled so explicitly by everyone, pervaded our thinking. After all, tracing the work by engineers and other actants that goes into the development of technologies—rather than analyz- ing machines as given—informed Hughes’s concept of “technological momentum” as much as ANT’s focus on translation in actor networks. The seamless-web metaphor caught on as a buzzword during the workshop, JULY although I later realized that the three approaches use the metaphor in inter- 2013 estingly different ways: LTS to highlight that the social is as important as the

VOL. 54 technical; SCOT as heuristic advice to not make a priori choices about whether to label something as technical or social; and ANT as an ontological claim that there is only sociotechnical stuff to start with.11 “Interpretative flexibility”—again, also when not stated explicitly—provides the conditio sine qua non for any sociology of technology: without machines being interpreta- tively flexible, they would have only one meaning, which thus could best be read by engineers—exit sociologists and historians to make sense of technology. And finally, those who were primarily interested in asking theoretical questions about technology’s development and its place in the world would only do so on the basis of empirical research; and those primarily inclined to ask empirical, historical questions about technology would do so with much sensitivity to conceptual analysis. The publication of the SCOT article and then the SCOTS volume met with enthusiasm. When we heard, some years after publication, that Amer- ican students were referring to the volume as “the school-bus book” because of its yellow color with black graphics, we realized that it was becoming a hit. That the volume is now an exhibit in MIT’s museum and that, in 2011, the MIT staff selected it as one of the thirty most influential books ever published by the MIT Press was then, of course, completely beyond our imagination. The most direct and exciting consequence was that Larry Cohen asked Trevor, Bernie, and me to start a new monograph series for the MIT Press. The series, “Inside Technology,” kicked off with books by Harry Collins, Pamela Mack, and Donald MacKenzie in 1990, and now lists more than fifty volumes.12 There has been criticism too. In the new preface to the anniversary edition of the school bus book Trevor and I reviewed these criticisms, and I shall restrict myself here to a summary in keywords. From the sociologists’ angle there was the critique of downplaying the role of societal structure and over-valuing the role of actors; then there was the criticism of being much too human-centered and giving too little attention to materiality; third, constructivism was accused of being too naively neutral and of ignoring the normative dimensions of technology; and, finally, SCOT and

11. Wiebe E. Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs. 12. H. M. Collins, Artificial Experts; Pamela Etter Mack, Viewing the Earth; Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy.

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ANT were especially criticized for largely ignoring the question of (social, political, and economic) power; they were even accused of being biased towards favoring the powerful. From the historians’ angle, there have been several interesting ex- changes in Technology and Culture, together providing a nice portfolio for teaching students in the history of technology about the role of theory in research.13 The interesting debate was over the balance between narrating DA VINCI “what actually happened” and using theory to interpret and explain the MEDAL

course of events. A second criticism came from historians of bicycling that ADDRESS our account was not historically accurate. Although I think I have shown that this critique was invalid, there is no question about the need to meet the highest standards of historical craftsmanship—also when making a more theoretical argument. There is never an excuse for “factual” errors, however sophisticatedly a socialcon structivist may put inverted commas around factual. The third criticism was more generally leveled against soci- ological studies of technology and science, and I wholeheartedly agreed with it: there is too much use of obfuscating jargon and neologisms in STS. I advocate that whenever an author introduces a new concept, she or he should explicitly demonstrate two things: first, that none of the existing concepts can do the job; and second, what precisely the explanatory work is that the new concept carries out in the analysis and argument. Much has happened since the 1980s; at least four ways of broadening research have occurred. This happened in my own work, but was undoubt- edly influenced by developments in the history and sociology of technology at large. The concept of technology was broadened to also include social technologies such as decision-support techniques, classification, and bureaucracies.14 Hand in hand with this broadening of the object of research went a conceptual broadening of constructivism: everything could be analyzed as constructed, the technical as well as the social. Most clearly, this was exemplified by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar dropping the word “social” from the subtitle of their seminal book Laboratory Life in 1986; and the title of the second Twente workshop (held in 1987, its volume published in 1992) highlighted that in addition to the social construction of technology, we now wanted to analyze the technical construction of society as well.15 Scholarly alliances have also emerged, resulting in new and

13. R. A. Buchanan,“Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology”; John Law, “Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology”; Philip Scranton, “Theory and Narrative in the History of Technology”; Nick Clayton, “SCOT” and “Rejoinder”; Wiebe E. Bijker and Trevor J. Pinch, “SCOT Answers, Other Questions.” 14. Marc Berg, Rationalizing Medical Work; Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out; Thomas R. Wellock, “Engineering Uncertainty and Bureaucratic Crisis at the Atomic Energy Commission, 1964–1973.” 15. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society.

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exciting possibilities: new collaboration is now being extended to organization researchers, economists, and philosophers.16 And finally there is a broadening of the agenda, from understanding to also intervening. The Tensions of Europe project not only studies the history of European technologies, but it also engages with contemporaneous debates on innovation policy and European infrastructural integration. And SHOT itself has cre- JULY ated additional publication s and resources to make insights from the his- 2013 tory of technology relevant to current debates in society.17

VOL. 54 All this leads to new challenges—for STS, for the history of technology, and for myself. (Several of you have been so kind to affirm that being awarded the da Vinci Medal does not imply that I should retire and shut up.) For me, these challenges boil down to three turns: the turn to norma- tivity and politics, the turn to globalization, and the turn to societal chal- lenge s. The first turn really only consolidates and explicates what has been implicit in much technology studies anyway: from Langdon Winner’s asking whether artifacts have politics to David Noble’s social history of auto- mation, and from Gabrielle Hecht’s account of French nuclear power to my own analysis of dikes and dams.18 For me, this turn ends the academic detour that I had started with my Ph.D. in 1980. The second turn towards global questions implies more than a geogra phical extension, as I argued at the occasion of SHOT’s 50th anniversary.19 It raises radically new questions and suggests—when we collaborate with our colleagues in the global South and East—innovative conceptual frameworks and even new styles of research. The third turn is towards engaging with society, addressing the so- called grand societal challenges such as hunger, vulnerability, health, sustainability, and social inclusion. This turn follows from taking ourselves seriously within academia, as well as from the issues in the world outside; as historians and sociologists of technology, we have something to con- tribute to addressing the challenges that our societies are facing. I will conclude by giving two examples of research projects in which I collaborate with Indian researchers: the first is on the history of one of the first Indian scanning tunneling microscopes (STM), and the other on the history and politics of handl oom weaving. With these examples, I hope to illustrate how these challenges for technology studies—these three turns— can be translated into fruitful research.

16. Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision; Trevor Pinch and Richard Swedberg, eds., Living in a Material World; Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Exper- ience. 17. See http://www.historyoftechnology.org/. 18. Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”; David F. Noble, Forces of Pro- duction; Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France; Wiebe E. Bijker, “Dikes and Dams, Thick with Politics.” 19. Wiebe E. Bijker, “Globalization and Vulnerability.”

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The first example draws on a European project to conceive two mani- festos for science and technology: one for India, and one for Africa.20 In- dian and African researchers, in collaboration with some Europeans, ex- plored how to take control over one’s own science and technology to serve Indian and African agendas rather than following developments in the global North and West. Let me elaborate a bit on the Indian manifesto. Its title, Knowledge Swaraj, or “Self-rule on Knowledge,” refers to Mahatma DA VINCI Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj.21 In that small though hugely influential book, MEDAL

which was written on the boat from England to South Africa, Gandhi ADDRESS argues for self-rule for India. In doing so, he also reinvents Europe and is inspired by his ongoing struggles for emancipation in Africa. In our project, we asked: What might Gandhi have said a century later when thinking about Indian and African self-rule of science and technology? My Indian colleagues havecon structed their answer in Knowledge Swaraj around four pillars: a new STS-inspired conception of expertise and knowledge; the Gandhian idea of trusteeship for rethinking the relationship between science and society; the three central values of sustainability, plurality, and justice; and the application of these ideas to an ethics of technoscience. Inspired by this manifesto, I am currently working on a project on nanotechnology for development, asking how, with democratic governance and serving their own agendas, India and Africa could take control of their own nanotechnology development.22 In one of the doctoral projects, Pan- kaj Sekhsaria investigates the culture of innovation in nanotechnology laboratories in India.23 He found the very first Indian STM, which was built in 1988, only seven years after the first one, for which the inventors were awarded a 1986 Nobel Prize. Sekhsaria shows how the making of this first Indian STM can be seen as a successful application of what he calls “technological jugaad.” Jugaad is an Indian word that does not have an easy equivalent in English, although “tinkering” and “bricolage” come close: it means reconfiguring materialities to overcome obstacles and find solu- tions; it can also mean working the system to one’s advantage and thus sometimes has negative connotations related to gambling and corruption. Sekhsaria traces the history of this technology and describes how “[d]is- carded refrigerators, stepper motors from junked computers, tubes from car tyres, bungee chords, Viton rubber tubing, weights from the grocers’ shop, aluminium vessels generally used in the kitchen and bobbins from

20. Knowledge Swaraj: An Indian Manifesto on Science and Technology and The African Manifesto for Science, Technology and Innovation. Both can be downloaded from the project’s website, http://www.set-dev.eu/ (accessed 13 April 2013). 21. Mahatma Gandhi, M K Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. 22. See http://www.nano-dev.org/ (accessed 13 April 2013). 23. Pankaj Sekhsaria, “The Making of an Indigenous STM & Technological Jugaad in an Indian Laboratory.”

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FIG. 4 One of the first Indian scanning tunneling microscopes (STM), built inside of an old refrigerator by Chandrakant Dharmadhikari in 1988—an example of jugaad in the laboratory. (Photo: Courtesy of Pankaj Sekhsaria.)

sewing machines were only some of the components that went into the making of the first prototype and the other probe microscopes that followed”24 (fig. 4). It is important to emphasize that there is nothing second- rate about this STM and the research it allowed. Chandrakant Dharma- dhikari’s research group has published its findings with this STM in top-tier, international journals, and the doctoral graduates involved found postdoc positions in the most prestigious laboratories in both Europe and the United States.

24. Ibid., 1155.

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Still, there is always an initial reservation among scientists when hear- ing this story. When we presented the analysis of this jugaad STM in Nairobi, Kenya, to a group of nanoscientists, their first reaction was “we don’t want instruments made from junk. Why should we be satisfied with anything less than the best?” A crucial intervention then came from Pro- fessor Bernard Odhiambo Aduda—the leading nanoscientist in Kenya and a member of the governmental committee for nanoscien ces—when he re- DA VINCI minded the other scientists in our workshop about that iconic picture of MEDAL

the first transistor made at Bell Labs: it had a very similar look of being tin- ADDRESS kered with, and indeed of jugaad. The response was enthusiastic, and it was quickly realized that the Swahili language has a term, jua kali (meaning “hard work in the hot sun”), which is similarly used for roadside and im- provised industries in the informal economy.25 What happened in this example? We hel d up a mirror to the scientists in which they saw their own work and innovation culture. But they saw it in a new light because mirrors are never innocent; for instance, mirrors in a clothes shop may take a little off your weight or add a little to your tan, and an STS mirror may similarly highlight certain aspects more than others. Pankaj Sekhsaria highlighted that while these Indian nanoscientists followed their own very “Indian” style of working around scarce resources, sti ll they were able to produce superb, internationally recognized research. At the end of the Nairobi workshop we were interviewed by Kenya NTV on its pan-African news show26 in which Professor Kevin Urama, director of the African Technology Policy Studies Network (ATPS), proudly an- nounced the discovery of a truly African style of doing cutting-edge science—jua kali.27 My second example is about reinventing Indian handloom weaving. I do this research together with doctoral student Annapurna Mamidipudi. First, a preliminary question: Why look at handloom weaving at all? Be- cause in India it is still the second largest rural employer, after agriculture; so there is no way that one can afford to ignore this sector when trying to address rural development and the alleviation of poverty. This, then, is the paradox that we want to understand: the common view, which is also held by Indian policymakers, is that handloom weaving is traditional, outdated, and unsustainable, although many of the weavers’ children are attending college, therefore these families evidently do find a proper livelihood in weaving (see figure 5). Annapurna Mamidipudi, originally trained as an

25. UNEVOC, Under the Sun or in the Shade? 26. Nanotechnologies for African Development, interview on NTV Kenya; see http://www.nano-dev.org/news/nanotechnologies-for-african-development-video- interview-on-ntv-kenya/215/ (accessed 13 April 2013). 27. The ATPS is a pan-African organization for science and technology policy and is a partner in our nanotechnology-for-development project; see http://www.atpsnet.org/ (accessed 13 April 2013).

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FIG. 5 Family of handloom weavers in V.savaram, East Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, India. (Source: Courtesy of Dastkar Andhra, photo by Margriet Smulders.)

engineer, worked for more than fifteen years in Dastkar Andhra with handloom weavers, and now carries out doctoral research to reflect on that experience and to further develop our understanding of the science and technology involved in such important livelihoods.28 The standard story, supporting the view that handloom weaving is unsustainable, is that weavers move out of their villages to work in the cities in low-level jobs in the informal economy like construction and cleaning. Instead, Annapurna’s research showed that weavers move in and out between village and city and between weaving and other work depending on the circumstances. The standard story is upheld by three forms of theoretical lock-in: from the state’s perspective, handloom weaving is stuck because it cannot compete with mills and powerlooms and is thus a fossilized culture; from the economists’ perspective, handloom weaving is stuck because weavers’ incom es are above the poverty line though below the mini- mum wage; and from the technologists’ perspective, handloom weaving is stuck because it is a traditional technology that belongs in the museum. To “unstick” this theoretical lock-in we have used our STS perspective to highlight: the sophistication of the technology in pre-loom, loom, and post-

28. Annapurna Mamidipudi, B. Syamasundari, and Wiebe Bijker, “Mobilising Dis- courses.”Dastkar Andhra is an NGO that supports the livelihoods of vulnerable handloom weavers in rural Andhra Pradesh; see http://www.dastkar.org/ (accessed 13 April 2013).

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loom processes; the technical expertise of the weavers; the role of social networks; the institutional innovations that regularly happen; and the role of design interventions. In other words, we analyze handloom weaving as a sociotechnical system “that is elastic and resilient to changes in the market- place, absorbing new people and new knowledge when the demand ex- pands, and shrinking when demand comes down.”29 This analysis has implications. The first can be described , again, by the DA VINCI metaphor of holding up a mirror to the weavers and the policymakers: “If MEDAL

one accepts our thesis of handloom as a socio-technical system with knowl- ADDRESS edge, skills, technologies and social relations, new possibilities of systemic sustainability emerge. Such a system has the capacity to change but at its own measured pace. It allows for reflexivity, learning, experimentation and innovation.”30 However, in this case, there is more than can be captured by the mirror metaphor. We do not only hold up the mirror, but also continue to work with those communities. Here, I need the “kiss metaphor.” Think of the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty, who has to be awakened by a kiss. In the story, the prince does not leave after awaking the beauty of insight and reflection, but he marries her and they journey together henceforth. Sim- ilarly, the STS researcher not only holds up a mirror to her subjects, but also engages with them and helps to translate insights into concrete policies and actions: “From studying the success of handloom, rather than its failure, the problem of the weaver is now understood differently. . . . No charity is called for, but support in innovating the weavers’ knowledge, technology, and social systems.”31 To address the three key words in this lecture’s title—fortune, mirrors, and kisses—I want to conclude with a final autobiographical reflection. Yes, Arne Kaijser’s citation was about me; however, it was not about my personal accomplishments, but about the sheer good fortune of just being in the right place at the right time. This becomes even more evident if we compare the shifts in focus of my work with the larger flow of events: in the 1950s and ’60s, the Netherlands was rebuilt with all the optimism and positive expectations of the impact of science and technology on society (mirroring early technological determinism); in the 1980s and ’90s, the wave of democratization set in (mirroring social constructivism); and in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are now engaged in a critical reap- praisal of the role of science and technology (mirroring engaged STS). Ad- ditionally, my career has also been very Dutch: the constructed nature of the Netherlands is in my bones and brain, and I seem to have all the (bad) habits of the Dutch as travelers, traders, and missionaries—hence the “good fortune” in the title of this lecture.

29. Mamidipudi, Syamasundari, and Bijker, “Mobilising Discourses,” 50. 30. Ibid., 50–51 31. Ibid., 51.

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And then I tried to hold up a mirror to you, reflecting upon how the history of technology has developed over the past three decades and arguing that my work is reflected in and has benefited from that development. And finally, if it were not deemed improper behavior, I would now have expressed my gratitude to the SHOT community by showering all of you with kisses, thus mirroring what fortune did to me. JULY

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