Welcome to Ask a Professor, our series that offers an insider’s view of life in academia. This month we interviewed Caitlin D. Wylie, Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.
Caitlin Wylie is a social scientist who understands how people work together to gather, assess, and share knowledge. With a PhD in History & Philosophy of Science from University of Cambridge, Wylie uses her skills and experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze interactions between members of knowledge-production communities—local people(s), scientists, engineers, technicians, and students—to help determine what effective collaboration looks like and how traditional power structures can be interrupted to facilitate meaningful exchanges of knowledge.
Wylie’s current work focuses on interdisciplinary collaborations and community-engaged research; she recently co-edited a special issue of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, and her analysis of “knowledge co-production” in Arctic science can also be found in that issue. Her earlier work drew on interviews and site observations to highlight the contributions of lab technicians to natural history museums. More on that—and her book!—below.
What’s something most people don’t know about your field?
That it exists? Science and technology studies—also known as science, technology, and society—is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding science and tech as work done by people within social contexts. It’s so very fun. Most STS scholars have backgrounds in STEM as well as in the social sciences or history or philosophy. We’re broad thinkers, and we believe that science and tech are crucial components of society. That’s why it’s so important to study the ethical, social, and political worlds that inform how research communities produce knowledge about nature, and how people design and use technology.
What’s the best discovery you’ve made in your research?
That many kinds of workers contribute to scientific knowledge. I love calling attention to underrecognized workers, who aren’t authors of papers or PhD-holding professors or PIs of grants or leaders of research groups but without whom we could not learn about the natural world. Specifically, I wrote a book about technicians who use their skillful hands and creative problem-solving to make it possible for scientists to study fossils as data (available open-access here); this project touched on issues of inclusivity in science, the black-boxing of work and the roles of hierarchy and mutual trust in science museums, and how lab technicians improve their social roles by emphasizing the creativity in their work. I’ve studied undergraduate workers who provide important questions and learning opportunities as well as labor to their lab communities. Now I’m studying community members who offer key expertise to environmental research drawn from their lived experiences and generations-old Indigenous knowledges. It’s very rewarding to learn about all the work and workers that make research possible. Realizing that scientists, technicians, students, and community members are ordinary people, and that all of them are crucial for scientific work and knowledge, invites anyone and everyone to participate in science.
More to Explore
What We Lose When We Lose Indigenous Knowledge
Do you have a favorite classroom moment?
I teach required courses on STS and ethics for fourth-year undergraduates in engineering. Most students arrive uninterested and even annoyed at having to take a class outside their major. So, my favorite moment every semester is winning them over, one by one, as they begin to understand how crucial the world around engineering is for doing good engineering. One activity that is a joy for me every semester is showing them photos of various technologies—e.g., a bridge, a COVID vaccine, lines of computer code, a circuit diagram—and asking what is social about each one. I do this on the first day of class, and they look at me blankly for several seconds. Then they give incredibly insightful answers, somewhat to their surprise, about bridges as community-connecting tools, vaccines as sources of controversy about health care access and acceptance, code and diagrams as reflections of the specialized knowledge needed to design and build technologies, etc. (I adopted this activity from my colleagues Brian Helmke and Lisa Messeri.)
Weekly Newsletter
What’s the next big thing in your field?
Applied STS is my favorite emerging part of our field, which we also call “making and doing.” It means using our expertise to make society better, such as through community-engaged research, policy-relevant research, pursuing critical pedagogy with students, supporting public discussions of science and technology, creating art, etc. etc.
What’s on your bedside table? What’s your next read?
Literally, Goodnight Moon and Charlotte’s Web for my kids. Figuratively, I love novels about scholars in unlikely scenarios, e.g., Marie Brennan’s books about a natural historian of dragons, Heather Fawcett’s series about a professor who studies faeries, Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway mysteries about a murder-solving archaeology professor.
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