With this critical reply, I am pleased to engage in conversation with Social Epistemology’s special issue on ‘Absences.’More specifically, I engage in conversation on absences in science and its ensemble of epistemic (cf., knowledge and ignorance) practices with Jennifer Croissant (2014) and Scott Frickel’s (2014) contributions.

Before I launch into the reply, however, I clarify my starting point. Here, I do not take what I deem to be a mostly Eurocentric view that technology can always be conflated with science (cf., technoscience). I avoid this view because in Canada, for example, engineers do not hold the same educational training as engineers in Europe where engineer researcher educational credentials can be closer to those of scientists in the natural sciences. I advance that the absence of a technical/scientific education and practices distinction has sometimes led social scientists to conflate risk and epistemic issues and conflate the roles of engineers and scientists (where engineers mainly focus on risk and scientists typically focus on epistemic dynamics). 1 Although I do not tackle the conflations per se, I do so implicitly by focussing squarely on scientists and science practices. By extension, this means that empirical research into absences should take account of contextual actor education when constructing practices as scientific or technological.