Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (University of Florida Press 2020), a collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page is a wonderful and imaginative contribution to the fields of history of science, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. This volume assembles a broad and varied collection of chapters that span from the colonial period to the twenty first century, and explore diverse themes in varied Latin American regions: utopianism; science and the modern nation; Latin America as a site of knowledge production; the convergence between science and arts; critiques to modernity; among others. In this exciting conversation Blanco and Page tell us about the collaborative process that led to this book, the many topics and time periods they covered, and the specific contributions of their own chapters. Listeners will find in this book an exciting new addition to the literature, one that is particularly important today because, as the authors remind us, political actors use ‘science’ as a concept in varied and contradictory ways. This makes evident one of the most important claims of this book: the scientific and the political are always entangled. As the collection demonstrates, Latin America has been a site where this relationship has been explored, exposed and analyzed many times over.
Lisette Varón-Carvajal is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. You can tweet her and suggest books at @LisetteVaron
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