Troubling the canon: Language, geography, and the politics of STS publishing in five decades of journal publications

STS is now a global endeavour, with journals, scholars, and associations in a wide range of regions, languages, and transnational networks of knowledge. Building on recent debates about decolonizing research, we contribute to debates about epistemic injustice and asymmetries in the discipline by analysing a large sample of articles in 17 STS journals, published between 1976 and 2023. Our goal is to understand the multiplicity of factors that shape processes that lead to hegemony and canonization. Drawing on a database of 12,045 articles, we describe the language of publication and geography of authorship, in addition to the language policy of the journals and location of their editorial offices. We then analyse the 350 most cited articles (ca. 3%) in our sample and focus our analysis on the 40 most cited publications, looking at the processes of canon-formation in the discipline. We argue that while STS has always emphasized the situatedness of knowledge and promoted epistemic pluralism, there is still significant work to be done to analyse how asymmetries in publishing and circulation of knowledge take place. To address epistemic injustice, more needs to be done to undo the processes through which canon formation takes place, moving the field further away from the Euro-American networks of knowledge and power in which it is still primarily embedded.