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animate various strands of modern geography.
During the 1960s, some geographers with
scientific aspirations turned to the language
of logical positivism to underwrite (after the
event, as a matter of fact) their project to
create aspatial sciencegrounded in natural
laws of spatial relations and expressed in
numerical language (seelocational analy-
sis;quantitative revolution). Critics of this
trajectory accused its practitioners of indiffer-
ence to questions of social inequity, a lack
of political engagement, and an inclination to
use mathematical vernacular as a shield to
deflect establishment suspicion of social sci-
ence during the McCarthy era (Harvey,
1984) – though some of its advocates, such
as William Bunge, mobilized spatial statistics
for radical purposes.
More recently, geographers have begun to
bring science within the discipline’s scope
both by deploying the insights and methodolo-
gies ofscience studiesand by enquiring into the
spatialityof science as itself a cultural prac-
tice (Livingstone, 2003a). As an enterprise,
science studies largely developed in the wake
of Kuhn’s rejection of purely logical models of
scientific development and his insistence that
scientific change was inherently discontinu-
ous. By allowing a variety of social–communal
factors into the understanding of the evolution
of science, by emphasizing the under-
determination oftheory by empirical data
and by highlighting the role of tacit knowledge
in scientific practice, Kuhn opened the door to
empirical studies of scientific procedure.
While he himself expressed concern about
more extreme versions ofrelativism, his work
did open the door to the social history of sci-
ence. This project has taken various forms,
notably the so-called Edinburgh ‘strong
programme’ associated with writers such as
Steven Shapin and David Bloor, which sought
to locate the cognitive claims of science in its
wider social setting; theactor-network the-
oryandethnographicperspectives of figures
such as Bruno Latour, Michael Callon and
Steve Woolgar; and the interventions viafemi-
nismof figures such as Donna Haraway and
Sandra Harding (Hess, 1997; Golinski, 1998).
These, and numerous other strands of thought
from figures such as Simon Schaffer, Michel
Foucault and Joseph Rouse, have resulted in a
tradition of research working with the notion
of science as fundamentallylocalknowledge
(seelocal knowledge).
Geographers have engaged with these devel-
opments in several ways. Thus some have
turned to the proposals and methods ofscience studies to interrogate geographical
knowledge itself. Barnes’ scrutiny of eco-
nomic geographyand the quantitative revo-
lution (Barnes, 1996, 2004b), Demeritt’s
(1996) reflections onsocial theory, science
and geography, Thrift’s (1996) interest in the
social formations of knowledge, Whatmore’s
(2002a) elucidation of ‘hybrid natures’ and
Amin and Cohendet’s (2004) examination of
the ‘architectures of knowledge’ in firms and
economies are just a few investigations that are
deeply informed, in one way or another, by
these perspectives. At the same time, geog-
raphers have been in dialogue with practi-
tioners of science studies in their enquiries
into the part played byspace,place and
location in the production, consumption and
circulation of scientific knowledge itself
(Livingstone, 2003c). These latter currents in
the spatiality of science stem from an interest
in the role of venues such as the laboratory,
the museum and the field in knowledge pro-
duction; the significance of location in the
reception of scientific knowledge; and the
ways in which the universality of science has
been accomplished through the management
of various circulatory mechanisms.
Several critical statements by historians of
science, such as Schaffer (2005), Ophir and
Shapin (1991: see also Shapin, 1998), Kohler
(2002) and Agar and Smith (1998), have firmly
placed space on the science studies agenda,
and this has been reinforced by the work of
geographers on the geographies of scientific
knowledge and on science as an inherently
hermeneutic undertaking (Livingstone, 2002b:
see alsohermeneutics). The interface that
has been developing is proving to be fertile.
Geographers and others have thus been vari-
ously engaged in elucidating the ‘geographies
of science’ in a range of ways and at a range
ofscales(see alsogeography, history of).
Anindicative samplingof this work would
include examinations of the geographies of
enlightenmentand scientific revolution(s);
the significance of museums, lecture halls
and botanical gardens in the production and
display of scientific knowledge (Naylor, 2002;
Johnson, 2006); the practices of making
science in the field (Withers, 2004; Lorimer
and Spedding, 2005: see fieldwork); the
geography of geographical knowledge itself
in the constitution of national identity
(Withers, 2001); the different ways in which
the glacier theory was construed in different
cognitive spaces (Finnegan, 2004); the role
of spatial practices in fisheries science
(Evenden, 2004); the social topography ofGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_S Final Proof page 667 1.4.2009 3:23pmSCIENCE/SCIENCE STUDIES