Invisible Labour in Modern Science is about the people who are concealed, eclipsed, or anonymised in accounts of scientific research. Many scientific workers—including translators, activists, archivists, technicians, curators, and ethics review boards—are absent in formal publications and omitted from stories of discovery. Scientific reports are often held to ideals of transparency, yet they are the result of careful judgments about what (and what not) to reveal. Professional scientists are often celebrated, yet they are expected to uphold principles of ‘objective’ self-denial. The emerging and leading scholars writing in this book negotiate such silences and omissions to reveal how invisibilitieshave shaped twentieth and twenty-first century science. Invisibility can be unjust; it can also be powerful. What is invisible to whom, and when does this matter? How do power structures built on hierarchies of race, gender, class, and nation frame what can be seen? And for those observing science: when does the recovery of the ‘invisible’ serve social justice and when does it invade privacy? Tackling head-on the silences and dilemmas that can haunt historians, this book transforms invisibility into a guide for exploring the moral sensibilities and politics of science and its history.

Table of Contents:
Series Editor’s Note Acknowledgements Introduction I. PEOPLE Commentary: Sabine Clarke: People and the processes of erasure 1. Julia Rodriguez: Under the Mexican sun: Zelia Nuttall and eclipses in Americanist anthropology 2. Lan A. Li: Escaping immortality: science, civilization, and Lu Gwei-djen 3. María Fernanda Olarte-Sierra: Producing and delivering truth: The (in)visibility of forensic scientists in Colombia 4. Margaret Bruchac: Of animacy and afterlives: Material memories in Indigenous collections 5. Alexandra Noi: The ex-prisoners of Gulag in the Siberian Expeditions 6. Laura Stark: The bureaucratic ethic and the spirit of bio-capitalism 7. Elise Burton: ‘They Say They Are Kurds’: informants and identity work at the Iranian Pasteur Institute II. POWER Commentary: Gabriela Soto Laveaga: (Em)powering narratives of technology 8. Mihai Surdu: Categorizing Roma in censuses, surveys and expert estimates 9. Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes: Situated knowledge and the genetics of the Brazilian Northeastern population, 1960–1980 10. Sarah Blacker: The invisible labour of translating Indigenous Traditional Knowledge in Canada 11. Omnia El Shakry: Invisible bodies: psychoanalysis, subjugated knowledges, and intimate ethics in postwar Egypt 12. Susannah Chapman: The (in)visible labour of varietal innovation 13. Stuart McCook: Coffee breeders, farmers, and the labours of agricultural modernization III. PROCESS Commentary: Susan Lindee: Invisible, secret, and social, 14. Elena Aronova: Citizen seismology, Stalinist science, and Vladimir Mannar’s Cold Wars 15. Jenny Bangham: Blood, paper and invisibility in mid-century transfusion science 16. Xan Chacko: Invisible vitality: the hidden labours of seed banking 17. Judith Kaplan: Oneida inscriptions, 18. Whitney Laemmli: Making movement matter, 19. Caitlin Wylie: Invisibility as a mechanism of social ordering: How scientists and technicians divide power IV. PRACTICE Commentary: Judith Kaplan: Teaching practices with invisible labour 20. Joanna Radin: Collecting human subjects: ethics and the archive 21. Lara Keuck: Locating sources, situating psychiatry, complicating categories: a journey through three German archives 22. Boris Jardine: Turing, or: an exhibition should not mean but be 23. Alexandra Widmer: Reproductive labour and indigenous hospitalities in post/colonial fieldwork 24. Rosanna Dent: Invisible infrastructures: A’uwẽ-Xavante strategies to enrol and manage warazú researchers 25. Michaela Spencer: Cultivating a northern Australian public for Yolŋu Cosmologies: ‘Keeping visible’ Yolŋu research practices and their effects Index About the Editors and Contributors