233020 VO Science, Technology, Society (STS): Key Questions and Concepts (2021W)

The aim of this lecture is to give students an overview of the basic questions and key issues at the core of the study of the relations of science, technology and society. Throughout the lecture you will be introduced to important approaches and concepts that can be used to address these questions/issues.
We will start by introducing five empirical cases which should give us a first feeling for the multifacetedness and the complexities of issues at stake when trying to understand the interactions of science, technology and society. They will accompany us through the lecture and discussion class and serve as shared reference points. STS master students will also use these cases in the other core classes for the case based learning approach.

In the subsequent lectures we will address the following issues:
- We will start by asking questions concerning the special status of scientific knowledge and explore what it means to understand science as a specific set of practices, performed in specific places and guided by social processes; this will also lead us to ask for the social organisation of science and its core values.
- We will then move to the area of technologies and investigate how we understand the emergence of new technologies, what societal values are inscribed into them, and how they change and structure our ways of living in contemporary societies. We will specifically also investigate standardization and classification as one powerful way of ordering the world.
- We will then move on to study how futures and pasts are related in embedding technologies into contemporary societies and study the challenges of controversies, risks and disasters.
- Finally, we will look into science-society relations, the governance of science and technology, and how citizens can participate in technoscientific societies.