230152 SE Dangerous liaisons? Tracing society in contemporary knowledge production (2012W)

Contemporary debates about knowledge production often diagnose changes in the interrelations between science and society. These debates, however, are far from being merely of academic interest. Much more science increasingly engages in collaborations with a variety of actors such as activists, engineers or artists, just to mention a few. This means that scientific rationales pervade societal areas, while at the same time extra scientific rationales become ever more important in knowledge production practices.
In our seminar we will discuss these debates and trace some of the liaisons in which contemporary (scientific) knowledge is produced. Such liaisons can be observed for example in areas like sustainability research or climate science where researchers are supposed to work together with extra-scientific actors. Liaisons are also formed between science and art, science and (new) media or science and the military.
Such collaborations raise a range of questions that we will be addressed in the seminar: What are the attractive forces that make different actors engage in such relationships? What are assumed potentials and possible risks? To what extent are these liaisons a contemporary phenomenon? Furthermore we will explore social and epistemic consequences of such liaisons. How do they feed back and thus how do they influence knowledge production? How do the collaborations challenge the credibility of the knowledge produced or the authority of science in society? What do these changes mean for the researchers involved?
The seminar will be organized in three phases: (1) in the first units we will deal with STS debates concerning contemporary changes in the ways knowledge gets produced. We will read literature on concepts such as ‘Mode 2 knowledge production’, ‘postnormal science’, or the ‘triple helix of university-industry-government relations’ and critically reflect their potential and limitations. We will then (2) devote several units to look at different science-society liaisons. Students will have the opportunity to present case studies. The last unit will be utilized to (3) bring different case studies together and discuss similarities and differences of various liaisons and what the emergence of such hybrids might mean for knowledge production practices.