R.F. Kuang's 2022 novel Babel is a fantasy, set in a world in which the act of translation between languages can spark magic. But it is also a meticulously researched account of Oxford in the 1830s, a world in which knowledge production is entangled with the maintenance of colonial power. At the novel's centre is the Royal Institute of Translation, housed in a tower in the centre of Oxford – known as ‘Babel’ – that is eight stories high and the tallest structure in the city. The home of the translation work that powers the British Empire, it is a magically protected ‘gleaming white edifice’ accessible only to an elite cohort of scholars. It is the heart of translation scholarship, and thereby – in the logic of the novel – the seat of power that is used to exploit and dominate the world.

Intentionally or not, Kuang's Babel echoes images of academia as an ivory tower, a metaphor used to present universities as cloistered environments that are segregated from the societies in which they sit. As Steven Shapin has charted, the use of this metaphor intensified throughout the 20th century, increasingly becoming attached to research and researchers and being used to critique an attitude of academic detachment. ‘This is no time for any man [sic] to withdraw into some ivory tower’, Shapin quotes US President Roosevelt as saying in 1940, ‘and proclaim the right to hold himself aloof from the problems, yes, and the agonies of his society’. The image of the ivory tower continues to circulate and (Shapin suggests) is now almost entirely framed as negative, capturing the idea that research that is disengaged from society and its needs is morally problematic. In both Babel and wider discourse, ivory towers are dangerous.

To think of the relationship between science and society is, often, to reach for metaphors such as the ivory tower. Such languages are taken-for-granted means of expressing how academic knowledge production relates to wider society, and the assumptions that lie behind them are perhaps too rarely explored. In this chapter I would like to do so, and to situate and explore the things we call ‘science’ and ‘society’.