sociology 596-API: New Perspectives in science and technology studies

 instructor: andrew pickering
 meets: tu th

We live in a technoscientific world, a world that takes its character from the many sciences and technologies that permeate it. New reproductive technologies, for example, problematise the nature of family relationships in ways that were unimaginable until a few years ago. New media have transformed our habits and patterns of communication—the chatter of cell-phones is everywhere; email has become indispensible. How should we think about this? One way would be to think of science and technology as externalities to the social world—as something given, to which people necessarily have to adapt. But this is misleading and there is a more interesting way to proceed. The field of science and technology studies (STS) explores the intertwining in practice of developments in science, technology and society, and this course surveys some of the most interesting recent empirical and theoretical writings by leading STS scholars. The aim is to offer some conceptual resources for thinking about what is happening today—in the scientific laboratory and in the world at large.

The course is organised as a seminar, focussed on open-ended discussion of assigned readings and current events, seeking to relate the two. Most of the readings will be individual essays made available over the web, but we will discuss two books in their entirety: Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004) and Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003).

Instructor : Andrew Pickering is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and a member of the faculty of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984) and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (1995), and the editor of an important collection of essays, Science as Practice and Culture (1992). He is currently completing a book on the history of cybernetics, provisionally entitled Ontological Theatre: The Cybernetic Brain in Britain, 1940-2000. Pickering has held major fellowships at MIT, Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He has also been a Guggenheim fellow, and in 2006-7 he will be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.