STICERD Distinguished Visiting Professor – BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society, London School of Economics (2004).

More recently, Rabinow developed a distinctive approach to what he called an "anthropology of the contemporary" that moves methodologically beyond modernity as an object of study or as a metric to order all inquiries.

Rabinow's work consistently confronted the challenge of inventing and practicing new forms of inquiry, writing, and ethics for the human sciences.

In response, he designed modes of experimentation and collaboration consisting of focused concept work and the explorations of new forms of case-based inquiry.

In view of the fact that the organization and practices of the social sciences and humanities in the U.S. university system have changed little in recent decades, they are unlikely to facilitate the composition of contemporary equipment.

The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory was founded by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier, and Andrew Lakoff as part of an effort to create new forms of inquiry in the human sciences.

Rabinow held that concepts are tools designed to be used on specified problems and calibrated to the production of pragmatic outcomes, both analytic and ethical.

Rabinow's work on the anthropology of the contemporary was formally initiated by his diagnosis of anthropos (Greek, “the human thing”) as a problem today for thought, equipment, and venues.

[14] Modes of inquiry, methods of narration, and principles of verification must be designed in view of the “apparently unavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi.”[14] It follows that in order to pose and eventually answer the question “What is anthropos today?” modes of thought are needed which not only open up new possibilities, but also discriminate significance and form truth claims into practices for the ethical life.

Using a classical formulation, Rabinow argues that anthropos today is in need of paraskeue, or equipment, for forming logos into ethos.

In his 1981-82 lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault provided an extensive meditation on the classical notion of equipment.

If the challenge of contemporary equipment is to develop a mode of thinking as ethical practice, it also involves the design or redesign of venues within which such formation is possible.

In that work, Rabinow and Bennett argue that the question of where and how the composition of equipment takes place is itself a primary problem site.

Rabinow called for the invention of new modes of collaboration where problem-spaces are unstable or emergent and where prior problems and their significance can no longer be taken for granted and can fruitfully be contested.

With Gaymon Bennett, he had been part of a collaborative effort to re-think the relationship between ethics and science within this NSF-funded Engineering Research Center.

In SynBERC, the mandate from the NSF was to invent a collaborative mode of engagement such that the relationship between ethics and science might be reconceived and reworked.

Rabinow, working with Talia Dan-Cohen, then an undergraduate at Berkeley, took up the challenge of chronicling Celera Diagnostic's efforts to turn the complete sequence of the human genome into tools for diagnosing molecular predispositions for pathological developments in health.

His task was to identify the formation of constellations of value judgments around new forms of scientific knowledge and to make that process available for further debate and modification, not to adjudicate disputes.

Contrary to narratives of invention and discovery as the work of individual geniuses, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology highlights the assembling and governing of scientific and technical prowess, sustained teamwork, management skills, legal input, and material resources, all of which were necessary for this fundamental molecular biological tool to emerge, be stabilized, commercialized and to rapidly become a fundamental tool for all biological research.

French Modern demonstrates the century long process of bringing these domains of knowledge and practices of power slowly into a common frame of rationality and eventually into an operative apparatus characteristic of the welfare state.

Encounters with Robert Bellah and Hubert Dreyfus at UC Berkeley in the context of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship year (1976–77) led to a focus on interpretive social science and ethical practice on the one hand, and an education in Heidegger and the question of technology and modern philosophy on the other.

The importance of colonial history, the self-understanding of descendants of an Islamic saint, the dilemma of tradition and modernity, as well as fieldwork itself, as a practice, rite, and site of self-formation, became case material for reflection.

The major themes that Rabinow planned to consistently pursue for the next decades are all incipiently present in these untimely reflections: ethics as form giving, motion, and care.