Bruno Latour was a world-renowned French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist who fundamentally transformed the study of science and technology in contemporary society. He served as Emeritus Professor associated with the Médialab and the Program in Political Arts (SPEAP) at Sciences Po Paris, where he held the Gabriel Tarde Chair from 2006 until his retirement in 2017. After earning his PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Tours in 1975, his doctoral research on exegesis and ontology established the philosophical foundations that would guide his entire intellectual career. He spent more than two decades at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris from 1982 to 2006, where he conducted groundbreaking ethnographic studies of scientific practice and established himself as a leading theorist in science and technology studies.
Latour's seminal work Laboratory Life, co-authored with Steve Woolgar and published in 1979, revolutionized the field by introducing ethnographic methods to document how scientists actually construct knowledge within laboratory settings, fundamentally challenging positivist assumptions about objective scientific discovery. His subsequent masterwork The Pasteurization of France analyzed Louis Pasteur's career as a political biography, demonstrating how scientific facts are produced through networks of actors and institutions rather than through pure empirical observation alone. Along with Michel Callon, Madeleine Akrich, Antoine Hennion and others, Latour developed Actor-Network Theory, originally called the sociology of translation, a transformative conceptual framework that became central to contemporary social theory and has generated thousands of citations across multiple disciplines. His later work on modes of existence and the Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) project explored fundamental questions about how different cultures and institutions establish what counts as real, meaningful, and worthy of concern, extending his intellectual reach far beyond traditional science studies into philosophy, anthropology, and environmental thought.
Beyond his research innovations, Latour was instrumental in institutionalizing science and technology studies as a legitimate academic field and shaping the intellectual landscape of contemporary French intellectual life. At Sciences Po, he created the Médialab as an experimental space for transdisciplinary work integrating digital methods with social theory, and founded the Master's program in Arts and Politics, establishing models for how universities might address contemporary challenges including climate change and digital transformation. His numerous international honors reflected his global influence, including the Kyoto Prize in 2021, the Spinoza Prize in 2020, and his election as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018. Though he passed away on October 9, 2022, his intellectual legacy continues to profoundly influence research across philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, science studies, and environmental humanities, with his conceptual frameworks remaining essential for understanding the politics of science, technology, and the environment in the twenty-first century.
