Abstract

This chapter conducts a critical revision of mainstream STS (mSTS) models and the production of universalism and localism within global STS. We contend that mSTS undergoes a double process of veiling. On the one hand, mSTS veils its own provincial status, both at the level of its paradigmatic case studies, as well as within its context of production. This veiled provincialism is achieved through mSTS’ self-reification as universal. On the other hand, mSTS also veils geopolitics of knowledge, both internally (at the level of its theoretical models) and externally (at the level of its institutional success within STS). We pick Bruno Latour and Actor-Network Theory as a paradigmatic model of mSTS, and structure our critique at three levels: at STS accounts about science; about the global field of STS; and about the foundational categories of the history of science. In each of these levels we respectively mobilize a Latin American critical tradition in STS that helps us subverting claims of universality/provincialism and bringing to the fore the constitutive and foundational role of geopolitics in STS theorizations: postcolonialism; the Latin American Thought in Science, Technology and Society; and the new critique of historiographical categories.