Introduction

Abstract

The introduction recognizes the interactivity and fluidity of natural sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which helps scholars of science and literature to highlight the often speculative nature of literatures that engage with scientific knowledge. Against the grain of claims about the radical separation of scientific and humanistic forms of scholarship and writing, the introduction argues that different modes of writing co-produce scientific discourses, requiring scholars of literature and science to critically analyze the worldviews, historical contexts, geopolitics, and social inequalities that form and influence scientific representation. In turn, literary texts dealing with phenomena ranging from environmental problems to futuristic technologies reflect how social inequalities based on race, nation, gender, class, and other categories of difference shape and emerge within public visions of science. Given this crucial fluidity of scientific knowledge, the introduction also recognizes how the fields of science and technology studies and literature and science are today increasingly shaped by complex institutional agendas at universities, which both link these fields to capitalist transformations of education and open new pathways for developing socially just forms of critique.