Abstract

“We can avoid, above all, the mistake of thinking that unless one is big one is negligible.”This paper tries to think about the contexts of scientific practices in peripheral spaces, spaces that exist outside the domain of the resource-rich and well-established scientific communities. I ask the question whether contributions from such modest circumstances can give rise to any creative expertise that is capable of producing novel outcomes in science, and whether exploring such contexts might give us reasons for changing our current mental model of what we take science to be. I assume, of course, that scientific thinking can be present in modest as well as in resource-rich circumstances, and little-known episodes...