An unconventional Substackular journey launching in October 2025
Dear Bruno is a passion project. For over a decade it existed in my head, in notebooks and sketchbooks, in conversations with my spouse and select friends, and dispersed amongst digital files. It’s not for everyone, but my hope is that it is for someone (besides me). I’m getting older and I need to find out.
It’s a Substack newsletter aimed at educing a pedagogical dimension of the work of Bruno Latour, a highly influential–but frequently misunderstood–French philosopher who, sadly, passed away in October 2022. Any number of learned, intelligent, insightful scholars have previously attended to Latour’s innovative contributions to anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and technology—but also to architecture, law, politics, religion, and the humanities. To the best of my knowledge, however, far fewer people have noticed and boosted the value of his ideas to education. With this newsletter I aim to patch over this irksome crack.
I’ve been working in science and science education (including science teacher education) for over 25 years. It’s what I know best. My first in-person encounter with Bruno Latour was in 2006. This was also the year I read his Laboratory Life (1979/1986) for a graduate school course, a book in which he famously began transmogrifying Science (capital “S”) into science (lower case “s”). Since then, I’ve been trying to shepherd the aftershocks of his ideas and facilitate their rippling through educational domains such as curriculum and pedagogy. Dear Bruno is my public laboratory for this ongoing work.
The first issues of Dear Bruno are presently in development. The current plan is to publish the first ‘official’ post in October 2025 to mark the 3-year anniversary of Monsieur/Professeur Latour’s Earthly—or rather, Gaian—departure. Prior to, you can expect at least one teaser post introducing him.
I hope you’ll consider joining me on the Dear Bruno Stubstack for this formidable but promising voyage through the dynamic, enchanting archipelago of Bruno Latour’s life’s work.
