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<jats:p> Since World War II, scientific activity has grown significantly in Latin America, and with it there has been a modest development of the social study of science (SSS). This paper investigates the changing significance of the work of science planners and social thinkers with respect to the understanding of the social role of science in Latin America. On the basis of this study it is argued that, despite promising signs, institutional developments in SSS in Latin America are very fragile, and that the chances for their survival and success lie in their capacity to demonstrate their ability to bridge the `research gap' between academia, public decision-making and industry. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carried out by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of 1946—8; and second, the Scott Polar Research Institute's radio-echo sounding survey of 1967—79. Both surveys involved geoscientific data but the context in which the investigations and the exchanges of their results took place changed. We argue that the issue of control of data remained paramount across both cases despite shifting international political contexts. The control of data on Antarctic territory, once framed in terms of geopolitics and negotiated between governments, became a matter of science policy and credit to be negotiated among scientific institutions. Whereas the Ronne data were of potential strategic value for reinforcing national territorial claims, the radio-echo sounding data contained information of potential economic and environmental value. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This essay is a remembrance and also a reminder of Harold Garfinkel’s contributions to science studies. Garfinkel is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, the sociological investigation of the production and coordination of ‘methods’ in non-scientific as well as scientific settings. In addition to studying the tacit organization of everyday activities, Garfinkel and his students also investigated practices in the natural and social sciences that elude formal methodological prescriptions and reports. Garfinkel’s work sometimes is acknowledged as a precursor to early ethnographies of scientific laboratories, but this essay argues that his conceptual and methodological innovations continue to have a pervasive, though often unacknowledged, place in science and technology studies and related fields. </jats:p>