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Technoscientific Imaginaries:
Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs

What is it like to be a scientist at the end of the twentieth century? How have shifts in power and in assumptions about knowledge affected scientific practice? Who are the people behind the new technologies, and how do they address the difficult moral and professional issues during a time of global change? Technoscientific Imaginaries explores these and other important questions at the approach of the new millennium.

In these penetrating essays, twenty-four distinguished contributors from a broad range of fields present the voices of the scientists themselves--through interviews, conversations, and memoirs. We hear from Lithuanian physicists who discuss science after Communism and their own fantasies about what Western science is; a Japanese-American woman struggling with her ambivalence over designing nuclear weapons; political activists in India who examine relations among science, environmental politics, and government ideology in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster; and many others, including biologists, physicians, corporate researchers, and scientists working with virtual reality and other cutting-edge technologies.

The scientists in Technoscientific Imaginaries are men and women deeply affected by, engaged in, and responsive to the concerns of a changing world. This bood is a vital contribution to the vibrant new field of cultural studies fo science. Like Perilous States, the acclaimed first volume in the Late Editions series, it will spur further duscussion of end-of-the-century changes in society and culture worldwide.