Trading Zones, Peripheral Science and Contributory Expertise:A Framework for Exploring Science Outside the Western Contexts

This article is a contribution to the problem of how a small peripheral scientific community enters in contact with another larger scientific group, first, in order to establish its own independent existence, but then also to found a new ongoing practice. Before such a new scientific community could be recognized as an independent contributing member however, it must go through some intermediate stages, and those stages could be illuminated by a philosophical analysis. This paper, a short research communication about our collaborative work on how to understand scientific practices outside the standard Western contexts, seeks to capture those intermediate stages in the form of a trading zone framework.