A distinctive form of anticolonial analysis has been emerging from Latin America in recent decades. This decolonial theory argues that important new insights about modernity, its politics, and epistemology become visible if one starts off thinking about them from the experiences of those colonized by the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas. For the decolonial theorists, European colonialism in the Americas, on the one hand, and modernity and capitalism in Europe, on the other hand, coproduced and coconstituted each other. The (...) effects of that history persist today. Starting thought from these LA histories and current realities enables envisioning new resources for social transformations. These decolonial insights seem to receive only a passing recognition in the Latin American social studies of science and technology projects that have begun cosponsoring events and publications with northern equivalents. My focus will be primarily on the decolonial theory and on just two of its themes. One is the critical resources it offers for creating more accurate and progressive northern philosophies and histories of science as well as social studies of science. The second is insights from Latin American feminists that carry different impacts in the context of the decolonial accounts. (shrink)

This essay examines the Mission paléontologique française of the 1920s, a series of scientific expeditions into the Ordos Desert in Inner Mongolia in which a team of Jesuit scholar-scientists worked with local collaborators to provide material for the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The case study shows that the global and colonial expansion of Western science in the early twentieth century provided space for traditional scientific institutions, such as universalizing metropolitan collections and clerical scholarly networks, to extend their research projects. (...) The linking of approaches, agendas, and geographic regions was facilitated by the concepts and practices of the deep-time sciences of geology, paleontology, and human prehistory. These were based on the interchange of expertise, common projects of unveiling the development of life, and the alignment of different regions and specimens. Moreover, the expeditions did not just conduct research based around global movement and transmission. They also conceptualized the ancient development of life in terms of movement, migration, and exchange. The act of forming research networks that linked Asia and Europe also led scientists to conceive of these regions as bound by deep natural processes. Circulation and transfer became important actors’ categories used to understand the origins and history of life. (shrink)

This article is based on a perspective on circulation of knowledge that allows the consideration of science as the result of the encounter between diverse communities. We tell a story that constantly changes places, scales, and cultures in order to stress the importance of networks as an alternative to the centre/periphery trope, which entangles world histories of science. The result is a picture much more complex and intertwined than the one suggested by these simplifying dichotomies. We focus on a case (...) study that illuminates the process of knowledge production in non-European spaces of modernity. The return of the Society of Jesus to the newly independent nation-states of Latin America is the point of departure to analyse the circulation of a specific scientific idea in Ecuador: Darwin’s theory of biological evolution through natural selection. The article follows the paths of three different knowledge makers whose encounters are seen as sites of knowledge production: a religious order, a Latin American... (shrink)