Steve Woolgar


Stephen William Woolgar is a British sociologist. He has worked closely with Bruno Latour, with whom he wrote Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.

Education

Stephen Woolgar holds a BA in engineering and a PhD in sociology, both at the University of Cambridge.

Career

Woolgar wrote Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, a social constructionist account of the practice of science, together with Bruno Latour. Woolgar has subsequently adopted an even more relativist stance, for example in his 1988 book . Woolgar can be counted among just a handful of academic thinkers who espouse a radically relativist and constructionist position, along with Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.. In 1985 he wrote a paper proposing a sociological approach towards Machines and AI, in which he outlined the importance of tacking AI from the field of Sociology
He has been Professor of Sociology and Head of the Department of Human Sciences and director of CRICT at Brunel University. He holds the Chair of Sociology and Marketing and is a professor of marketing at the University of Oxford and a fellow at Green Templeton College. He is the former director of Science and Technology Studies within Oxford's Institute for Science, Innovation and Society. He is an important contributor in the fields of science studies, sociology of scientific knowledge and the science and technology studies . Woolgar is a recipient of the 2008 John Desmond Bernal Prize, awarded annually by the Society for Social Studies of Science to an individual judged to have made a distinguished contribution to the field.

Selected bibliography

Books

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