Invisible Labour in Modern Science [Paperback]

Invisible Labour in Modern Scienceis about the people who are concealed, eclipsed, or anonymised in accounts of scientific research. Many scientific workersincluding translators, activists, archivists, technicians, curators, and ethics review boardsare absent in publications and omitted from stories of discovery. Scientific reports are often held to ideals of transparency, yet they are the result of careful judgments about what (and what not) to reveal. Professional scientists are often celebrated, yet they are expected to uphold principles of objective self-denial. The emerging and leading scholars writing in this book negotiate such silences and omissions to reveal how invisibilities have shaped twentieth and twenty-first century science.
Invisibility can be unjust; it can also be powerful. What is invisible to whom, and when does this matter? How do power structures built on hierarchies of race, gender, class and nation frame what can be seen? And for those observing science: When does the recovery of the invisible serve social justice and when does it invade privacy? Tackling head-on the silences and dilemmas that can haunt historians, this book transforms invisibility into a guide for exploring the moral sensibilities and politics of science and its history.

Jenny Banghamis a Wellcome University Award Lecturer in the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, where she researches the politics, meanings, and practices of genetics. She is the author ofBlood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics(2020), which explores the intimate connections between the infrastructures of blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. She is co-editor of the open access volume,How Collections End: Objects and Loss in Laboratories and Museums(2019).
Xan Chackois a lecturer in science, technology, and society at Brown University, whose research complicates narratives of scientific practices l³s