I offer a story of a memorable encounter with Bruno Latour when he visited Houston, TX, in 2007. I take this opportunity to reflect on the central role that relativism played in his thinking and writing, and how it related to my own experience in science studies. The reflection also raises the question of how relativism might still be a problem that haunts Latour’s more recent work on composing common worlds in the wake of climate change.
LatourBruno. 1988a. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2.
LatourBruno. 1988b. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by SheridanAlan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
3.
LatourBruno. 1990. “Drawing Things Together.” In Representation in Scientific Practice, edited by LynchMichaelWoolgarSteve, 19–68. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
4.
LatourBruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by PorterCatherine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5.
LatourBruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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LatourBruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
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LatourBruno. 2010. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” New Literary History41 (3): 471–90.
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LatourBruno. 2014. An inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Translated by PorterCatherine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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LatourBruno. 2021. After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
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LatourBrunoWoolgarSteve. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton Paperbacks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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MarresNoortje. Forthcoming. “How to Turn Politics Around: Things, the Earth, Ecology.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. Accessed September 30, 2023. https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/sthd/0/0
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ToddZoe. 2016. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology29 (1): 4–22.
