ABSTRACT

Knowledge, space, travel, and narratives have deep natural affinities with one another deriving from the way we locate and conceive events, actions and our conceptions of ourselves and the world as we move through it. These affinities are reflected in the embracing of the spatial by sociology of science, of travelling theory by critical social historians and of the narratological by the human sciences generally. 1 As yet there has been little in science studies that attempts a theoretical reorientation through linking these themes. My aim, in a volume that reflects what might be called the ‘travelling turn' in the social history of science, is to explore the ways in which science can be conceived as being composed of ‘travelling narratives'.