ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter presents the key ideas behind the book. The book uses sustainability to explore the interfaces between translation studies, the cultural history of knowledge, and science and technology studies (STS). Our objective is to examine various material, cultural, and epistemic translation practices, where sustainability serves as a boundary object between natural and cultural inquiry. By turning to the intellectual traditions that influenced but were left behind by STS and actor-network theory (ANT), we aim to challenge and expand the Sociology of Translation developed in ANT. Concepts such as ‘inscription’ (Derrida), ‘actant’, ‘narrative’ (Greimas), and ‘world/worlding’ (Heidegger, Spivak) were reemployed—translated—in the canonical STS texts. What networks of meaning were left behind in this reemployment? Our combination of a cultural and knowledge historical perspective on the construction of the Sociology of Translation and practical experiments across the registers of nature and culture is novel. There have been brilliant individual attempts to realign the Sociology of Translation with narratives and modes of enunciation, but none has related the Sociology of Translation to the networks and traditions which enabled it but to which it erased its relations and debts.
