Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour was born in Beaune, Burgundy, into a celebrated winemaking family and earned degrees in philosophy and biblical theology before turning to anthropological fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire. Between 1975 and 1977, he conducted groundbreaking ethnographic observation inside Roger Guillemin's neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Salk Institute in San Diego. With Steve Woolgar, he published Laboratory Life (1979), demonstrating that scientific facts are socially constructed through instruments, citations, and laboratory practices.

Alongside Michel Callon and John Law, Latour developed Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which boldly granted agency to non-human entities ("actants") such as microbes, door-closers, and climate data. In We Have Never Been Modern (1991), he challenged the Enlightenment separation between Nature and Culture. In his later career at Sciences Po, he focused urgently on the ecological crisis, lecturing worldwide on Gaia, political ecology, and climate change in Down to Earth (2017) and Facing Gaia. In 2013, he was awarded the prestigious Holberg Prize in Norway.