The Mangle in Practice

“Andrew Pickering is a major figure in the field of science studies. In the original, widely cited and widely admired but still controversial The Mangle of Practice, he developed a number of important concepts that are strongly resonant for many members of the current generation of scholars, researchers, and theorists in the social sciences and humanities. This new, very substantial, highly readable collection will be illuminating for readers interested in science studies, post-humanist approaches to ethical-pragmatic issues, and/or new directions in ontology.”—Barbara Herrnstein Smith, author of Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human

“Andrew Pickering’s ‘mangle of practice’ is one of the key contemporary interpretive frameworks that question the society/nature dichotomy. His proposal makes distinct contributions not only to science studies but to all disciplines engaged in post-humanist projects of knowledge production and committed to bypassing the sterile dichotomy between rationality and relativism. Applying Pickering’s mangle to problems ranging from natural resource management to the dynamics of police work, this timely collection demonstrates the power and flexibility of Pickering’s proposal.”—Mario Biagioli, author of Galileo’s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy

“This excellent collection offers cutting-edge theorizations of cultural practice, showing how science and society work with and against each other across a broad cultural landscape. It is especially welcome that the essays explore, often profoundly, a number of phenomena—practices—which have rarely if ever been addressed previously, but which are shown here to possess unexpected complexity and significance.”—Arkady Plotnitsky, author of Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida