Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist known for his work in science and technology studies. He taught at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole des Mines de Paris from 1982 to 2006, then became a professor at Sciences Po Paris, where he directed the Sciences Po Medialab, and later held a position as Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. He is best known for the books We Have Never Been Modern, Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar), and Science in Action, works that examined science as a practice built through networks of human and nonhuman actors rather than as a straightforward discovery of pre-existing facts. Along with Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich and John Law, Latour was one of the primary developers of actor-network theory, an approach he built out of influences including the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel, the generative semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas, and the sociology of Gabriel Tarde. In his later career he said he was interested in helping rebuild the public authority and trust that science had lost.