Professor Andrew Pickering PhD, physics, London; PhD, science studies, Edinburgh

Extension: 3279

Telephone: 01392 723279

Professor

Andrew Pickering is internationally known as a leader in the field of science and technology studies. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science and Kybernetik und Neue Ontologien, and he is the editor of several collections of research essays, including Science as Practice and Culture and (with Keith Guzik) The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. He has written on topics as diverse as post-World War II particle physics; mathematics, science and industry in the 19th-century; science, technology and warfare in and since WWII. His most recent work has focussed on the history of cybernetics, and his book, Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain, 1940-2000, will appear soon. Sketches analyses cybernetics as a distinctive form of life—spanning brain science, psychiatry, robotics, the theory of complex systems, management, politics, the arts, education and spirituality—which offers a promising alternative to currently hegemonic cultural formations. Pickering has held fellowships at MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Princeton University, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Having moved from Britain to the United States in 1984, he was for many years professor of sociology and director of an interdisciplinary STS graduate programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before moving to the University of Exeter in 2007.