Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1996, volume 14, pages 659 - 682
<font size=6>Technology, power, and space -- the means and ends of geographies of technology</font><br>
<font size=4>Steve Hinchliffe</font><br>
Department of Geography, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs ST5 5BG, England
Received 6 February 1996; in revised form 26 June 1996
<b>Abstract. </b>This paper is about the means and ends of geographical inquiries into technology and technoscience. In working through a body of literature commonly grouped together under the collective phrase 'science, technology, and society', and in seeking to work upon empirical research on electricity networks, the author draws attention to the ontological and representational issues that are confronted when thinking through geographies of technology and geographies of techno-scientific knowledge. In the first part of the paper the ontological status of nonhumans and the politics of representation are discussed as a consequence of a rejection of technical and social determinisms. In the second part, the author turns to review some of the analytical metaphors that are conjured with in order to address the issues raised in the first part. In the third part of the paper the more overtly spatial metaphors of the literature of science, technology, and society are confronted and the move from a measured and ordered managerialist approach to the spatiality of technologies and technoscience is reviewed. In the fourth section, some lessons for the politics of a reconfigured geographical engagement with technology and technoscience are raised.<br>
© 1996 Pion Ltd