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SOCL906: Science, Technology & Society

Course Convenors: Vicky Singleton & Adrian MacKenzie

This is a core module for all three pathways on MA STN.

This Module offers an introduction to the discipline of Science, Technology and Society, and in particular to:

• the major theoretical approaches for understanding and explaining scientific knowledge and technological change;
• the implications of these approaches for the analysis, including the political analysis, of science and technology
• the implications of these approaches for the status of explanation, and the character of explanations appropriate to the social analysis of science and technology.

Weekly Topics

• Introduction to STS
• Enculturation, or Science as Culture
• Knowledge Shaping and Social Interests
• Modest witness: the Gendering and Classing of Science
• Building Knowledge, Building Reality: Discourse, ANT, and the Dissolution of the Social
• Narratives and Sociotechnical Relations: Cultural Studies of Science and Technology
  Ethics
• Situated Knowledges and Cyborg Visions: Knowing as Partial Connection
• Post-Colonial Science and Technology Studies: Ontological Softening
• Mutable Mobiles and Fluids: Ontological Fluidity

At the end of this module you will have gained a working knowledge of the major approaches to technology and science, and the debates between these different positions. You will have explored the way in which different theoretical approaches may be applied to exemplary case materials, and will understand how different approaches to analysis imply political and epistemological presuppositions. Finally, you will have developed the capacity to criticise different approaches to science and technology studies, and have the initial knowledge necessary to develop and justify your own approaches.

Reading

• Mario Biagioli (ed.) (1999), The Science Studies Reader, New York and London: Routledge.
• Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (eds) (1987), The Social Construction of Technology, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press
• Donna Haraway (ed.) (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books.
• Donna Haraway (1997), Modest Witness @ Second Millennium: femaleMan meets Oncomouse: Feminism and Technology, New York, Routledge.
• Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (eds) (1990), Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, New York and London: Routledge.
• Sheila Jasanoff et.al. (eds) (1995), Handbook of Science and Technology Studies,Thousand Oaks, Cal: Sage.
• Bruno Latour (1987), Science in Action, Milton Keynes, Open University Press.
• Bruno Latour (1999), Pandora’s Hope, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press
• John Law (1994), Organizing Modernity, Oxford, Blackwell.
• John Law and John Hassard (eds) (1999), Actor-Network Theory and After, London, Routledge.
• Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds) (1999), The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd Edition,  Buckingham, Philadelphia: Open University Press.

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