Of Bridges,Translations,and Practical Necessities

I came late to Science and Technology Studies. And it was not until after I heard about the passing of Adele Clarke that I realized it was in fact her work that allowed me to think with science and technology studies (STS) and to adopt this field as my new intellectual home. Trained in cultural sociology at the University of Amsterdam and the Centre for Cultural Sociology at Yale, I ended up in the sociology department at the University of Sydney, where I was struggling to conceptualize my new project on transnational adoption in an age of reproductive technology. My empirical material indicated that the practice of adoption was changing amid the standardization of reproductive services in Northern contexts. My new colleague (and now dear friend) Warwick Anderson directed me to Clarke's widely cited article on “biomedicalization,” which she wrote collectively with her colleagues from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) (Clarke et al. 2003). The piece shifted not only the analysis of my case but also the argument of my book as a whole (Van Wichelen 2018). Their important intervention in the American Journal of Sociology bridged not only disciplinary divides but also scalar dimensions:

[T]he concept of biomedicalization offers a bridging framework for new conversations across specialty divides within sociology and more broadly across disciplinary divides within the social sciences. Biomedicalization engages the concepts of structure and agency, stratification, and the complex intersectionalities of culture, political economy, organization, and technoscience. The transformations of biomedicalization are manifest in large, macrostructural changes as well as in new personal identities and subjectivities, but especially at the meso-level of new social forms and organizational infrastructures. (Clarke et al. 2003, 184)

Within the context of my research, this conceptualization of biomedicalization revealed how the neoliberal context of biomedicine advanced the idea of infertility as a disease, naturalizing the desire to procreate. Indeed, my ethnographic material showed that when measures to assist biological conception are unsuccessful, procreative desires are transported to other options, such as adoption. Clarke's work allowed me to assert that the biomedicalization of infertility firmly shifted adoption's legitimacy from humanitarian ideals to a new vocabulary of “procreative rights.” The biomedicalization of infertility did not merely intervene from the outside in; it transformed reproductive desire from the inside out (Van Wichelen 2018). Family-making became a fundamental right, to be accessed by everyone—including single parents and same-sex couples—and through a variety of socio-technical means.

Shortly after reading Clarke's other work—particularly Situational Analysis (2005)—I firmly placed myself in the growing field of STS and joined my first 4S meeting in 2015, which took place in Denver. I vividly remember how, during those cold but sunny Coloradan winter days, I felt like a kid in a candy shop, high on intellectual stimulation, moving from a theory roundtable on “feminism and postcolonialism,” to inspiring award speeches from Lochlann Jain and John Law, to the excitement around the launch of the feminist technoscience journal Catalyst, to Clarke's panel “Make Kin Not Babies,” and to so much dancing as 4S was celebrating its Fortieth anniversary. Revisiting the archival photos of that special meeting, I stumbled upon a photo of Adele dancing (Figure 1). Much later, I learned from Warwick, who was very close to Adele, how generous of a person she was. How I wished I had known her personally.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Adele Clarke dancing at the 2015 4S meeting in Denver. Image Credit: Society for Studies of Social Science (4S) https://members.4sonline.org/photo_album/gallery_slideshow.php?org_id =4S&pv_id=6016807&number=0

In hindsight, I ask myself why it was Clarke's work that enabled me to make the switch to STS. I had read key STS texts and found them exhilarating, but I think what Clarke's work allowed me to do was to see how STS can be integrated—disciplined—into the history and practice of sociology. Unlike her contemporaries who ventured into cultural studies, Clarke did not abandon sociology; she put in the hard intellectual and conceptual labor to transform sociology from within. This could not have been an easy feat. Postmodern theory was under heavy attack when Situational Analysis was published. Regardless, it embraced and owned the concept, addressing misconceptions about postmodernity and revisiting methods to expand grounded theory—qualitative sociology's Holy Bible for the discipline's methodology—not necessarily beyond its modernist confines (since we have never been modern) but at least critical of them. Drawing from the work of her close interlocutor Susan Leigh Star (1989), Clarke (2021, 226) advocated for the mutual imbrication of theory and methods:

[F]or pragmatists, theories imply methods. They come “prepackaged” with assumptions about “how we can know” (epistemology) and “what can be known” (ontology), and vice versa. Epistemology and ontology are joined at the hip.

Clarke's Situational Analysis was a much-needed hands-on guide at a time when scholarship provided a sea of intellectually enlightening—albeit thoroughly non-practical—poststructuralist critique.

Rather than engaging with long-established and conventional social science methods, postmodern scholars often avoided discussion of methodology, pointing to methods’ complicities to positivist tenets of research that eschewed relations of power and legitimacy. Against the grain, Clarke's book gave qualitative researchers the tangible tools to think through and do methods in a way that responded practically to the questions raised by postmodern theory:

If empirical work is to move toward rather than away from difference(s) and complexities—to me the heart of the postmodern project—we need tools that enable us to see difference(s), handle them analytically and represent them in fathomable ways that can travel. (Clarke 2005, 292–3)

It is this practicality that I still turn to in my current academic life, particularly when supervising graduate students, notably those coming from lower- and middle-income countries in the South. Although settler Australians still attach their cultural imagination to Europe and the UK in particular, Australia is located right at the doorstep of Asia, neighboring the Pacific and Southeast Asia. A large contingent of students come from the region, with Australian universities increasingly dependent on the (exorbitant) fee-paying international undergraduates to fund their research. Graduate students from the region are less desirable in that monetary sense, but when they come with their own pot of money, institutions accept them to fulfill performance indicators for diversity and internationalization. Behind my sarcastic view on Australia's treatment of international students lies a deep (and personal) commitment to genuinely engage with young scholars from the region. Born from a Flemish father and Solonese mother, and raised between the Netherlands and Indonesia, the postcolonial was a constant presence in my life, history, and relationships. It is a vocational and intellectual privilege to work together with Southeast Asian young scholars and to do, as Clarke so eloquently suggested, the work of carefully mapping the situational, relational, social, and positional conditions informing their site(s) of research, whether that pertains to institutions, histories, communities, controversies, or phenomena. Those concrete cartographical exercises open up the black boxes of empirical data and illuminate the great comparative analysis of differences in cultural and ontological practice.

One of the insights coming out of my supervisory experience is that—for better or worse—many Southeast Asian students trained in the region do not espouse disciplinary knowledge; namely that sense of historical narrativity vis-à-vis the formation of a discipline that usually involves a mapping of core concepts and theoretical development. The development of “theory,” understood as a hermeneutical reconstruction of core problems and debates within a discipline, is not commonly encouraged. Rather, theory works more as a proposition through which to discuss empirical phenomena in the social world. For many Southern researchers, the pinnacle of scientific progress includes those forms of applied science that progress the nation-state in its economic development. These differences in the history of discipline-forming also affect how interdisciplinarity is understood and practiced in spaces outside Euro-America. The common understanding of interdisciplinarity in the North is that it involves the connecting, integrating, and transgressing of established disciplines. By contrast, interdisciplinarity in the South is an empirical necessity, one that precedes theory as a form of pragmatic infrastructure for a state of continued precarity and dependency (see Burawoy 2013).

Clarke was acutely aware of differences in knowledge production and the ways theory and concepts moved awkwardly across borders and worlds. A staunch defender of postcolonial STS, she insisted on the expansion of STS beyond Europe and Northern America. Situational Analysis fittingly works as a “theory-methods” package within postcolonial contexts, where researchers encounter “messy, uneven politics and diverse, contending agents amid the historical debris” (Anderson 2015, 652). Moreover, her work as an editorial board member of the journal East Asia Science and Technology Studies (EASTS) advanced the mission, and journal members describe how greatly she contributed to cultivating community and scholarship in the EASTS networks (see Chen, Kuo, and Wu 2024).

Clarke's contribution to methodology most poignantly illustrates that, rather than a “universalistic pluralistic” proffered by those who still believe in the modernist project, we need both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity to forge a collaborative or connected social science (Bhambra 2014; Burawoy 2013). One could argue, by way of Malaysian sociologist Syed Farid Alatas (2001), that Clarke's translational and bridging work of theory and methods allows us to conceptualize the relevance and irrelevance of Western social science for the rest of the world. Here, Alatas refers to the way in which prescriptive calls to make social science more relevant to developing countries often remain elusive, and equally so, he argues, do calls to decolonize, indigenize, or nationalize the social sciences. Regrettably, more than two decades on from his intervention, bar some excellent ethnographic and historical studies, this elusiveness remains the status quo in the broader social sciences.

It is true that (postcolonial or decolonial) rejection of Western social science should not be based on origin but should instead be valued for its relevance (Alatas 2001). Clarke's work is firmly rooted in a Californian history and place that commenced with Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss's work on grounded theory in the 1960s. Four decades later, she and her contemporaries were able to reconfigure grounded theory to make it (more) relevant to those lives marked by differences both within and outside of Euro-America. Her contributions have left an indelible mark on our field. From the bustling corridors of UCSF to the travels of social science methods across Asia, Clarke's work has resonated far and wide.

As we celebrate Clarke's contributions, including to this journal (e.g., Clarke and Montini 1993), we honor not only the scholarship that criticized modernist premises of classical social science methodology, but more so the pedagogical lessons of making our approach and (messy) methods known. These concretized ethical and political sensibilities have made us more accountable in the uneven world of global academia and knowledge production. I join Clarke's unwavering commitment to advancing STS scholarship beyond the North, and in this quest will continue to honor her intellectual rigor, her advocacy for equitable knowledge production, and a legacy that continues to guide our efforts.