233032 VO Techno-Science and Society: Communicating and Interacting (2025S)

We live in societies to which science and technology are central. Our lives are shaped by the technologies that we use (from energy infrastructures to mobile phones) and the knowledge that science provides (whether about our health or the nature of the wider universe), whilst human choices simultaneously construct and are embedded in technoscience. The aim of this lecture course is to explore these relations between technoscience and society, and to equip students to critically reflect on the role and place of technoscience in their day to day experiences.

The course will cover a range of different sites, actors, and processes through which we see technoscience and society being mutually constituted. Our starting point is exactly that science and society are not separate, but should be understood as always intertwined. Technoscience is social, and the 'human' is always entangled with the technical. Based on this, we examine diverse examples of this entanglement, ranging from discussions of the role of expert knowledge in society to public representations of science within science communication, science policy and governance, knowledge in crisis situations, epistemic diversity and Indigenous knowledge, and the co-consitution of science with capitalism. Concrete empirical cases and examples are used throughout the course to illustrate the key concepts and ideas we will discuss. The lecture course is accompanied by a discussion class (KO 233033).