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Article ID: CBB949567754

Boundary-work that Does Not Work: Social Inequalities and the Non-performativity of Scientific Boundary-work (2019)

Pereira, Maria do Mar (Author)

Science, Technology and Human Values
Volume: 44
Issue: 2
Pages: 338-365

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243918795043

DOI: 10.1177/0162243918795043

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Equality Social theory Justice Technoscience; science and technology studies Academic disciplines Gender Social sciences--Philosophy Expertise Epistemology Portugal

Although the STS literature on boundary-work recognizes that such work unfolds within a “terrain of uneven advantage” vis-à-vis gender, race, and other inequalities, reflection about that uneven advantage has been strikingly underdeveloped. This article calls for a retheorizing of boundary-work that engages more actively with feminist, critical race, and postcolonial scholarship and examines more systematically the relation between scientific boundary-work, broader structures of sociopolitical inequality, and boundary-workers’ (embodied) positionality. To demonstrate the need for this retheorization, I analyze ethnographic and interview data on scientific boundary-work in the natural and social sciences in Portugal, showing that scholars’ gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality affect the success of their boundary-work. I suggest, therefore, that in unequal societies where credibility is unevenly distributed, the conditions are not in place for some scholars’ boundary-work to work. I draw on Sara Ahmed (and J. L. Austin) to argue that we must conceptualize scientific boundary-work as always potentially performative, but not always successfully so, and explicitly interrogate the actual conditions of performativity. Recognizing the links between inequality, embodiment, and non-performativity in scientific boundary-work will enable STS to better understand, and hopefully transform, the relations between contingent struggles over scientificity and entrenched structures of power.

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