Introduction

240 241Social studies of science, situated in various disciplines, have long pointed to the artificiality of dichotomies between nature and culture, life and death, male and female, and the social and the biological. Canonical works in science studies, such as Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock’s Remaking Life and Death (2003), Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women (1991), and Marilyn Strathern’s After Nature (1992), show the ways in which the reification of dichotomies shapes understandings of the world, both in and beyond science and medicine. This section explores emergent sciences in which many of these commonly held epistemological and ontological boundaries are breaking down. A broad array of disciplines increasingly research scientific objects that cross boundaries through techniques that do the same.