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For much of the twentieth century, historians of science treated their subject as a story of ideas. They traced how concepts like inertia, evolution, or the gene developed across time, or they explained scientific change by pointing to economic pressures and social structures. What they rarely did was ask what scientists actually did hour by hour, day by day—how they handled instruments, negotiated disagreements, wrote papers, built laboratories, or trained students. The subfield known as the history of scientific practices emerged from a growing conviction that this everyday work was not just a backdrop to intellectual history but the very stuff of knowledge-making. The central question became: how do the material, bodily, and social activities of scientists shape the knowledge they produce?
Before the practice-focused frameworks of the 1980s, a different kind of challenge to traditional intellectual history had already appeared. Historical epistemology, emerging in the 1930s and continuing today, argued that the very standards of what counts as scientific knowledge have a history. Thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem showed that concepts like objectivity, evidence, and proof are not timeless philosophical categories but norms that have been forged, contested, and transformed in specific historical contexts. Historical epistemology thus broke with the idea of a single, universal scientific method. It insisted that historians must study the historical conditions under which epistemic norms arise and change.
What historical epistemology did not do, however, was focus on the mundane, embodied routines of laboratory work. Its attention remained on the level of concepts and norms—on the intellectual frameworks that make knowledge possible. It prepared the ground for a practice-oriented history by showing that science is historically situated, but it left the actual doing of science largely unexamined. That gap would be filled by a new generation of scholars in the 1980s.
The practice turn of the 1980s transformed the historian's object of study. Instead of asking what scientists thought or what social forces influenced them, practitioners of this framework asked: what do scientists do? Drawing inspiration from the sociology of scientific knowledge, ethnomethodology, and laboratory studies, historians began to examine the fine-grained activities of scientific work—calibrating instruments, staining slides, arguing over data, building experimental systems. The practice turn treated knowledge as something that is made through material and social processes, not simply discovered or thought up.
This framework rejected the older division between internalist history (focused on ideas) and externalist history (focused on social context). For practice theorists, the internal content of science—its facts, theories, and methods—could not be separated from the practical activities that produced them. A key method was close ethnographic observation of laboratories, pioneered by scholars like Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar in Laboratory Life (1979). The practice turn argued that scientific facts are constructed through chains of inscription, manipulation, and persuasion. It did not claim that facts are arbitrary, but that their solidity depends on the robustness of the practices that generate them.
The practice turn opened a new terrain, but it also raised questions that other frameworks would take up. Three major approaches of the 1980s—cultural history of science, feminist history of science and technology, and actor-network theory—each accepted the centrality of practice while pushing the analysis in different directions.
Cultural history of science extended the practice turn by asking about the meanings embedded in scientific work. If scientists are engaged in practical activities, those activities are also cultural performances. Cultural historians examined how scientific practices drew on, and in turn shaped, broader cultural categories such as gender, race, class, and national identity. They studied the rituals of scientific societies, the rhetoric of scientific texts, and the visual culture of diagrams and instruments. Where the practice turn sometimes treated laboratories as self-contained sites of knowledge production, cultural history insisted that scientific practices are always entangled with the wider culture in which they occur.
Feminist history of science and technology shared the practice turn's focus on material activity but added a sharp critical lens: gender. Feminist historians asked how scientific practices have been shaped by assumptions about masculinity and femininity, and how those practices have in turn reinforced gender hierarchies. They showed that the exclusion of women from laboratories, the gendering of experimental virtues (objectivity as masculine, subjectivity as feminine), and the use of scientific authority to police gender boundaries were not incidental to science but central to its historical development. This framework did not simply add women to the story; it argued that the very content of scientific knowledge—its methods, questions, and standards—has been shaped by gendered practices.
Actor-network theory (ANT) , developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, took the practice turn in a radical direction by challenging the human-centered focus of most earlier work. ANT argued that scientific practices involve not only human actors but also non-human entities—instruments, specimens, chemicals, texts—that actively participate in the making of knowledge. A scientist's claim about a microbe, for example, depends on the microbe's behavior in the laboratory, the reliability of the microscope, and the persuasive power of a published paper. ANT treated all of these as actants in a network, each with its own capacity to shape outcomes. This symmetry between humans and non-humans was a deliberate break with frameworks that reserved agency for people alone. It also differed from the cultural and feminist approaches by focusing less on meaning or power and more on the mechanics of network-building and translation.
By the early 2000s, a new set of pressures had emerged. The practice turn and its elaborations had largely focused on European and North American science, often in well-funded laboratories. But what about scientific practices in other parts of the world? And what about the role of empire in shaping those practices?
Global history of science and technology responded by studying the circulation of knowledge, instruments, and people across borders. It emphasized that science has never been a purely Western enterprise; it has been made through exchanges, translations, and collaborations that span continents. Global historians traced how botanical specimens moved from colonies to European herbaria, how indigenous knowledge was appropriated or erased, and how scientific practices were adapted in different local contexts. This framework broadened the geography of the practice turn, showing that practices are not just local but also connected through networks of trade, empire, and communication.
Postcolonial history of science shared the global turn's interest in non-Western contexts but sharpened the focus on power, empire, and resistance. Where global history sometimes treated circulation as a neutral process of exchange, postcolonial historians insisted that scientific practices have been deeply entangled with colonial domination. They examined how European science was imposed on colonized peoples, how indigenous knowledge systems were marginalized or destroyed, and how colonized peoples resisted, adapted, or reappropriated scientific practices for their own ends. Postcolonial history thus challenged the assumption that the practice turn's methods could be straightforwardly applied anywhere. It argued that practices are always shaped by asymmetries of power, and that historians must attend to the violence and coercion that have accompanied the global spread of science.
Today, the history of scientific practices is a pluralistic field. Most historians agree that science is best studied through its material, embodied, and social activities rather than through ideas alone. The practice turn's core insight—that knowledge is made through doing—is widely accepted. There is also broad agreement that scientific practices are historically contingent, culturally embedded, and shaped by power relations.
Yet significant disagreements remain. One major axis of debate concerns agency: how far should historians extend the concept of agency beyond humans? Actor-network theory's insistence on non-human actants remains controversial. Critics argue that it risks obscuring human responsibility and the unequal distribution of power. Feminist and postcolonial historians, in particular, worry that ANT's symmetry can flatten the very hierarchies that need to be explained.
A second axis concerns the scale of analysis. The practice turn and cultural history have often focused on local, face-to-face interactions. Global and postcolonial historians argue that this localism misses the large-scale structures—empires, markets, institutions—that shape where and how scientific work happens. The challenge is to connect the micro-practices of the laboratory with the macro-practices of global exchange and domination.
A third axis concerns the relationship between practice and meaning. Cultural historians emphasize that practices are always symbolic and that historians must interpret the cultural frameworks that give them significance. More materialist approaches, by contrast, focus on the physical manipulation of objects and the constraints of the natural world. This is not a settled debate; it reflects a deeper tension about whether science is best understood as a form of culture or as a form of work.
Historical epistemology, meanwhile, continues as a living tradition, now often in dialogue with the practice-oriented frameworks. It reminds historians that the norms governing scientific practices—what counts as a good experiment, a valid observation, or a reliable instrument—are themselves historical products that deserve scrutiny. The field as a whole has moved from asking what scientists think to asking what they do, but it has not settled the question of how to connect that doing to the broader worlds of meaning, power, and knowledge in which it is embedded.