Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour (1947–2022) was a French philosopher and sociologist whose studies of science and technology helped develop actor–network theory and reshape debates about modernity.

Actor–network theory: An approach that traces how human and nonhuman actors form networks and produce effects through their associations. Latour developed this approach to explain how scientific facts and technologies gain force through networks.
Laboratory Life: A 1979 ethnography by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar examining daily work in a biomedical laboratory. This study shows Latour tracing how laboratory practices turn statements into scientific facts.
Modernism: A broad intellectual and cultural orientation that treats modern society as distinct from the past and committed to progress. Latour challenges the modernist claim that nature and society have been cleanly separated.
Steve Woolgar: A British sociologist whose work in science studies examined how scientific knowledge is produced in practice. Woolgar co-authored Laboratory Life, Latour’s influential ethnography of a biomedical laboratory.
We Have Never Been Modern: Latour’s 1991 book arguing that modern societies produce hybrids while claiming to separate nature from society. This book gives the clearest statement of Latour’s critique of modernity.
Science and technology studies: An interdisciplinary field examining how science and technology are shaped by social, political, and material conditions. Latour’s research became a major influence on this field’s study of scientific practice.
Aramis, or the Love of Technology: A 1992 book by Latour investigating the failure of a proposed automated transit system in Paris. The project’s collapse lets Latour analyze how technical objects depend on shifting alliances.
Social constructivism: An approach explaining knowledge or reality as shaped by social processes and shared conventions. Latour resisted reducing scientific facts to social construction, while still studying their production.
Michel Callon: A French sociologist who helped develop actor–network theory through studies of science, technology, and economics. Callon and Latour independently shaped the approach’s early concepts and vocabulary.
Politics of Nature: Latour’s 1999 book proposing a renewed political order that includes nonhuman entities in collective deliberation. It extends Latour’s account of networks into a proposal for reorganizing democratic politics.

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