Fisheries scientists established institutions, engaged metropolitan ideas and local knowledge, and worked out particular spatial practices to produce fisheries science in early-20th-century British Columbia. Problems of distance and the mobility of scientific specimens shaped practices. The difficulties of operating in a peripheral location influenced the institutional development of the field and the emphases of science towards commercially important problems focusing on salmon migration and life history. In this case study I compare and integrate approaches to science and distance from Latour's work and postcolonial historiographies of science in an empirical context.
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