This seminar is a discussion of a pre-circulated paper. It can be found on the GIDEST site for attendees to read in advance.

Bruno Latour was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he was Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, Visiting Professor at UCSD, the LSE, and Harvard. Since 2006, he has been a Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, where he is Director of the médialab. Since October 2013, he has been the part-time Centennial Professor at the LSE, and in October 2015, he began a five-year appointment as Professor-at-Large at Cornell.

After field studies in Africa and California, Bruno specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work, producing a series of ground-breaking and extraordinarily influential books that include Laboratory Life, Science in Action, Aramis or the Love of Technology, The Pasteurization of France, We Have Never Been Modern, Politics of Nature, Reassembling the Social, the essay collection Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies, and, most recently, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. In these and other publications, he has undertaken a radical rethinking of the traditional topics and methodologies of the social sciences, most obviously in relation to religion, law, and social theory.
 
He has also co-curated a series of major international exhibitions at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany: Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Making Things Public: The Atmospheres of Democracy, and Reset Modernity! (all with catalogues from MIT Press).

Two current projects at Sciences Po are the médialab, a digital resource laboratory for the social sciences, and SPEAP, an experimental program in art and politics, launched with his longtime collaborator Valérie Pihet, which has led to his involvement in two theater productions, Cosmocoloss: A Global Climate Tragic Comedy and Gaia Global Circus.

This event is part of the bi-weekly GIDEST Seminars presented by the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought at The New School.