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February 2, 2007 > News > Undergrads focus of scholar’s visit

Undergrads focus of scholar’s visit

Bruno Latour known for study of science and technology

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

The Humanities Research Center has been advertising a weeklong lecture and discussion series with internationally recognized French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher of science Bruno Latour. Latour’s status as an HRC Distinguished Visiting Scholar means he will spend Feb. 5-9 giving lectures and seminars on campus and spend time seeing Houston and meeting students.

A prestigious speaker coming to Rice is not in itself novel: It is hard to find a weekday when a visiting scholar is not lecturing somewhere on campus. The length of Latour’s stay may pique some interest. But many students do not go to lectures in their free time.

However, a few things are special and new about Latour’s visit, HRC Assistant Director Melissa Bailar said, and she hopes students will take the time to engage in his discussions.

Will Rice College junior Ashley Allen, one of two undergraduate fellows working closely with Latour and the HRC to coordinate next week’s series of events, said Latour’s ability to unite discussions from disciplines as diverse as anthropology and neuroendocrinology may foster interdisciplinary contacts among undergraduates.

Encouraging students to attend the lectures by Latour is a first step in the HRC’s initiative to reach out to the undergraduate population, Bailar said. And Latour’s weeklong stay will include museum tours, discussions and lunches with undergraduates as well as large audience lectures, Allen said, which she hopes will engage students outside a formal setting.

Latour’s Research

Anthropology Professor Chris Kelty, who nominated Latour for the Distinguished Visiting Scholar honor with History Professor John Zammito over a year ago, said Latour’s focus on science and technology studies should interest undergraduates of all majors.

Latour is currently a sociology professor at l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, but he has held positions in anthropology and began his academic career in philosophy. The majority of his published work focuses on the relationship between science and culture, and his 1987 book Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society is used as a key text in sociology of scientific knowledge contexts. The book provides an example of Latour’s ability to explain and engage students in discussing science as both an object and a method of study — one of the abilities Kelty said is unique to Latour among scholars of his prestige.

“Bruno is one of few academics who is conversant in contemporary science and engineering,” Kelty said. “He understands science and technology and has something to say about how it relates to politics, and how it relates to the transformation of society, about how to think about it and how to study it.”

Latour’s broad-ranging understanding underlies his most famous cultural commentary: in the 1980s Latour proposed Actor-Network Theory, which asserts that societies work as networks of relationships between objects and people, who all act and are acted upon to create culture. The idea can apply to scientific communities, bodies of government or any group that can be considered to have a culture of its own.

English graduate student David Messmer, who is assisting Latour next week, said the combination of Latour’s prestige and accessibility makes him particularly unique among academics.

“Anybody on campus should have some connection with his work,” Messmer said. “He does work with philosophy, anthropology, history. You’d be hard pressed to find a discipline in which he hasn’t engaged.”

The HRC and undergrads

The Humanities Research Center, which changed its name last year from the Center for the Study of Culture, is beginning an effort to engage undergraduates more intimately in intellectual and academic activity, Bailar said. In addition to Latour’s visit, Bailar said the HRC is offering up to 20 undergraduate fellowships in the next year, each of which will allow an undergraduate to work closely with a visiting scholar.

HRC Distinguished Visiting Scholars are sponsored by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Latour is one of two NEH-funded speakers to visit Rice this semester. Social theorist Paul Gilroy will come to campus March 26-30, and the HRC may choose undergraduate fellows to assist his stay.

Allen said Latour’s visit will include a number of opportunities for students to talk with Latour one-on-one, over lunches, in seminar-style discussions and during a tour of the Museum District Sunday afternoon.

Latour and Undergraduates

Kelty said he hopes these discussions will have a lasting impact Rice’s intellectual culture, especially among undergraduates.

“The advantage of including undergraduates in this thing is that it raises the level of intellectual discussion on campus,” he said. “It may change the intellectual climate on campus … that’s what I hope.”

Kelty said Latour’s engaging lecture style may help.

“Bruno is quite well known for being an extraordinary lecturer and especially a teacher in an undergraduate setting, so the seminars … won’t be arcane or completely outside people’s experience,” he said. “Students should be able to access them.”

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