ANT

In the book ‘Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society’ Bruno Latour describes some seminal concepts of his ‘sociology of translation’ – a study about the way things assume being spokesman of other things, translating their power into coordinated actions into a network. To analyze this, the book concerns to the everyday life of scientists and how they deal with each other, competing to achieve their findings, and enrolling things, actions, corporations, societies and so forth into a vast network of scientific research. Exemplifying some concepts, as for instance, the way each actor tries to betray their companion in order to evolve, how other networks came to be compacted into a black box or part of the net starts being regarded as punctual (punctualization process), Latour depicts the quotidian of scientists through his Actor Network Theory lens.



When I was reading, I pretty remembered some circumstances in Brazil during researches at EAUFMG, in which some trainee researches got stressed with the uncertainty of the route of the research. Mainly students, they usually start complaining about a lack of orientation and supervision in their jobs when working together with a researcher. This puts me thinking on how naïve some of us are to look through research as if it was a very straight procedure aiming a clear target, even claiming to a kind of ‘science’ of pure objectivism. I fed up attending to conferences in which one always enacted what is science, of course emphasizing a profitable particular point of view of his/her research, giving the impression the realm of science is fully illuminated and without any shadow of interferences from the social context.



In my opinion, despite being a tough book because the translation is horrible and Latour style lost its richness when translated, it is worthwhile. Discussions about advances in sciences should always include ANT and the way it focuses science as a key note.