Leandro Rodriguez Medina

• Universidad de las Américas Puebla

While internationalising scholarly careers is an imperative in current academia, literature has focused on the impact of such a process at the institutional, national, and international levels. Yet, internationalisation is connected to the personal dimension of careers and, consequently, it might defy academics’ understanding of their working life....

In the context of increasing internationalization of the science and technology studies (STS) field, and reflections on post-coloniality and provincialization of STS, we examine to what extent a set of twelve leading journals of the field have published papers from different regions worldwide. In this exploratory work, based on information retrieve...

Si bien la investigación sobre prácticas y proyectos artísticos colaborativos suele enfatizar los lazos sociales e, incluso, la producción de comunidad que estos generan, es frecuente que no se atienda a la singularidad de las formas de sociabilidad que ahí se articulan. Este artículo propone un doble ejercicio, de definición teórica y de aplicació...

Les régions périphériques de la science, telles que les pays d'Amérique latine, ont souvent entretenu des relations complexes avec les centres d'expertise scientifique et technique. Dans ces régions, on espère que les connaissances scientifiques contribuent à la résolution de problèmes publics, alors que, dans le même temps, elles doivent satisfair...

In the context of the 2020 world pandemic of covid-19, many professional and scientific associations have had to change the way they gather and reorganize their scholarly conferences. For many of them, conferences are the main source of income and important occasions for business meetings and managerial decisions. Yet, with trips and face-to-face e...

It is frequently claimed that cultural agents are necessary to sustain and strengthen the social fabric, to guarantee economic growth and social development and to consolidate knowledge economies based on innovation. These arguments tend to avoid inquiring what kind of sociality these cultural actors are enacting. To address this point, we research...

Due to the interest in formal relationships at work or to the difficulty to define what personal means, personal bonds in the social sciences have been an understudied topic. Even less has been the interest in connecting such bonds with the internationalization of careers and knowledge. In this article, the authors aim at filling this gap by studyi...

Book review ofHeilbron, Johan, Sorá, Gustavo, and Boncourt, Thibaud (eds). 2018. The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations. London: Palgrave. 371 pp.ISBN 978-3-319-73298-5Price: €128,39

The field of science and technology studies (STS) has introduced and developed a “sociotechnical” perspective that has been taken up by many disciplines and areas of inquiry. The aims and objectives of this study are threefold: to interrogate which sociotechnical concepts or tools from STS are useful at better understanding energy-related social sc...

Epidemics have traditionally been viewed as the widespread occurrence of infectious disease within a community, or a sudden increase above what is typical. But modern epidemics are both more and less than the diffusion of viral entities. We argue that epidemics are ‘fire objects’, using a term coined by Law and Singleton: They generate locative fea...

This research brings together digital inequality scholars from across the Americas and Caribbean to examine efforts to tackle digital inequality in Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica, the United States, and Canada. As the case studies show, governmental policy has an important role to play in reducing digital disparities, particula...

This article analyses the creation of a cultural urban assemblage in Puebla, Mexico, between 1987 and 2017. For three decades, Puebla city officials have relied on different understandings of culture to justify and implement public policies aimed at stimulating economic development and urban reorganization. New museums, parks, bike paths, multimedi...

The study of the internationalization of science seems to be focused on the natural and formal sciences and on networks of the Global North. A shift towards the social sciences and a peripheral region (Mexico) is proposed here and shows that two different types of networks are enacted to face the challenges of internationalized research. On the one...

El llamado a una apertura en relación con el acceso a la literatura científica en la actualidad se ha generalizado. Desde consejos de ciencia y tecnología hasta instituciones universitarias, pasando por las recomendaciones de organizaciones intergubernamentales, los principales actores en la producción de conocimiento parecen convencidos de que el...

In recent decades, scientific knowledge has been increasingly expected to contribute to the resolution of public and controversial issues in Latin America. However, in peripheral sites of knowledge and economic production, the dynamics of both science and society have been complicated by tensions between the demands of local stakeholders and the ti...

Where Is East Asia in STS?Wen-yuan Lin; John Law ABSTRACT The international spread of STS has reshaped the discipline in many ways, pushing it from its original core focus on technoscience in Euro-America to embrace new and wider agendas in other locations. For the practitioners of STS in East Asia, the complex relations between geographical region...

After the World Health Organization declared a state of emergency due to the zika virus between February and November 2016, a great deal of research has been done to analyze it. Nevertheless, this research displays two significant gaps. First, these projects are carried out in epidemiological and public health frameworks, but lacking a perspective...

C Collaboration in scientific knowledge production has been historically dominated and driven by hegemonic (Northern) countries, while non hegemonic countries tend to take on secondary roles.The growing discourse on Open Science provides the opportunity to look critically at the roles and outcomes of collaborative knowledge creation.Drawing on four...

The article analyzes the connection between urban assemblage and cultural policy, taking Puebla as a case study. For almost three decades, culture was used to justify and implement public policies that aimed to economic development. More recently, the international dimension of this connection has been highlighted, since capital and symbolic value...

In this article, we propose the concepts of “generalized” and “specialized” soft power through an analysis of the effects of Latino power in the United States. By focusing on demographic features, mass media, education, science and technology, and business, we attempt to provide a snapshot of the subtlety of Latino power in terms of flows and degre...

This article presents a brief history of how computing started and evolved in Mexico. From the first computer installed in 1958 to the present day, the authors analyze the role computer science has played in Mexico, looking at its limitations, opportunities, academic programs, government, and related industries as the motor of computer science deve...

This article explores how texts that go from from the centers to the peripheries, in accordance with an international division of academic labor, contribute to structuring the less institutionalized fields of study. The article describes and analyzes four capacities: 1) organizing syllabuses and canonizing ideas; 2) creating themes for lectures; 3)...

El libro aporta distintas perspectivas sobre la transferencia internacional de conocimientos y los intercambios intelectuales así como sobre las movilidades científicas y estudiantiles, con foco principal en la circulación de saberes y personas entre América Latina y Europa.

Chapter 2 shows that three generations of scholars have been involved in the reception of Luhmann’s systems theory in Hispanic America. While the first one was oriented toward teaching, translating, and writing introductory studies on Luhmann’s works, the second and third, more research-oriented than the previous one, have been involved in putting...

In Chapter 4 I compare my study of the reception of Luhmann with others, which have dealt with Euro-American theorists such as Weber, Freud, Marx, Dewey, Bourdieu, Lacan, Klein, Foucault, Sartori, and the Frankfurt School. I try to find similarities and differences between my investigation and these other analyses and recognize shared concerns rega...

In Chapter 3 I explore shared features of these generations. I show how dealing with Luhmann’s theory has forced scholars to comprehensive reading; that is, a reading of his entire work (or at least the more relevant parts of it) in order to apprehend the vocabulary and the basic theoretical relationships. The second similarity refers to embodied e...

Chapter 1 introduces a theoretical framework based on Baert’s (2012) idea of intellectual interventions, Science and Technology Studies’ (STS) approaches to boundary work (in particular Gieryn 1999; Lamont and Molnar 2002; Star and Griesemer 1989), and the geopolitics of knowledge circulation (Alatas 2003; Connell 2007; Mignolo 2000; Rodriguez Medi...

This book examines the circulation of knowledge within globalization, focusing on the differences between centers and peripheries of knowledge production in the social sciences. it explores not only how knowledge is appropriated in peripheral fields but also how foreign ideas shape those fields and the trajectories of scholars, and uses actor-netwo...

La teoría social y política ha subestimado, cuando no abiertamente ignorado, dos tipos de relaciones que podríamos denominar no-sociales en su sentido tradicional. La primera de esas relaciones incluye el vínculo entre humanos y no-humanos entendidos estos últimos como objetos y tecnología. La segunda de esas relaciones es la que conecta a humanos...

In social studies on science and technology, abundant literature has emerged on the importance of space in the production and the circulation of knowledge. The very idea of the circulation of knowledge has received more attention, particularly because of the need to analyze the transformations it undergoes as it travels from its place of origin to...

Sensitive to the differences between centers and peripheries of knowledge production, this article explores how scholars in peripheral fields use knowledge from central fields to structure their academic careers. The article presents the findings of a case study of career choices of political scientists in Argentina. In order to understand the inte...

After presenting a brief history of philosophy in Hispanic-America since the XVI century, we discuss whether the idea of province and empire is applicable to contemporary Hispanic-American philosophy, investigate the form these ideas adopt in this region, and inquire into the ways in which provincialism i s present in philosophical work. We conclud...

As a result of a qualitative approach study based on interviews, this article analyzes the relationships between fulltime officials and those people who work on a nonremunerative basis in the political science careers in Argentina, showing that those actors who don't receive a salary for their professional activities need the establishment of some...