First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Introduction to Science and Technology Studies

Catalog description

In this course you will be introduced to the interdisciplinary study of science, technology, and medicine. Since the early twentieth century, historians, philosophers, anthropologists and allied scholars have asked consequential questions about what science is, how it is practiced, and how it is related to society. Our first objective is to learn about the authors, methods, concepts, and approaches that together comprise what might be (or should be?) thought of as canonical to Science and Technology Studies. These include works by Arendt, Popper, Merton, Fleck, Weber, Kuhn, Fanon, and Foucault. We will then address various schools of thought that emerged around the social study of science in the 1970s and 1980s, whose acronyms include SSK (sociology of scientific knowledge), SCOT (social construction of technology), and ANT (actor-network theory). Our focus will then shift to our second objective, which is to examine how STS is now in conversation with a constellation of areas of inquiry that includes postcolonial studies, critical race theory, new materialisms, indigenous knowledges, and queer theory.