Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies
Sandra Harding
Abstract
Since the beginning of the end of formal European colonial rule in the 1960s, a new kind of global history has emerged—one that has charted the continual encounters and exchanges between cultures from the beginnings of human history through the present day. In the older accounts the history of Europeans and the European diaspora overseas was represented as largely isolated from the histories of other cultures around the globe. In contrast, the postcolonial accounts have made visible the continual interactions and exchanges between cultures around the globe, and the effects of such interactions on how cultures emerge, are transformed, and decline. Postcolonial science and technology studies have origins separate from the innovative northern science and technology studies that began appearing during the same period, and for which the publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions can serve as a convenient starting point.