Event

Faculty and graduate student open-ended discussion group exploring major themes, topics, and puzzles in the history of science, technology, medicine, and the environment. Each month focuses on a different theme, with topics ranging from agency, biography, and the definition of science. This month will be hosted by Professor Zehra Hashmi.

Please bring your own lunch and enjoy coffee and pastries from the History and Sociology of Science Department.

Abstract:Large scale socio-technical systems offer a potent site to study not only experts but also how experts become bureaucrats, and vice versa. If one of the tasks of investigating such systems has been to denaturalize the technoscientific knowledge they produce and rely on—to unsettle “common sense” by showing its constructed nature—then one line of questioning to follow is: how do the practices of bureaucratic power and normative knowledge-making mutually reinforce each other? 

I’ve come to think of this process through the idea of bureaucratic realism. The perniciousness of bureaucratic realism lies in its very attentiveness towards the intractability of historical and social structures. By bureaucratic realism I refer to the tautological mode of thinking (and doing) which says, “this is how the system was constructed, which is why it works this way… and so, this is how it must (almost always) work.” The explanation for the system (with profuse acknowledgements of its cumbersome, even unjust, nature) can become the very means of perpetuating it.

Can bureaucratic practice be a useful lens for considering how ways of knowing become systematized and entrenched? What characterizes a bureaucratic sensibility in the context of producing scientific and technical knowledge? Are some of the worst qualities that we associate with government bureaucrats in fact to be found elsewhere, among experts of other kinds? As we live through “anticipatory compliance,” can we think through how such a mode of bureaucratic thinking became so pervasive?