everything.study
STS.350

Social Study of Science and Technology

Graduate · Historical course

Spring 2004

Topics

  • Introduction
  • Philosophy of Science I: From Logical Positivism to Antipositivism
  • Sociology of Scientific Knowledge I: The Strong Programme
  • Philosophy of Science II: From Realism to Constructivism and Halfway Back
  • Sociology of Scientific Knowledge II: Networks, Agency, Practice, Assemblage
  • Sociology of Scientific Knowledge III: Institutions and Culture
  • Feminism and Science
  • Cyborgs
  • Race and Science
  • Biosociality
  • Medicine
  • Rhetoric of Technology: Gramophone, Telephone, Tape, Sampling
  • Technoscientific Makings of Postcolonial Place and Space
  • Class Conference

Readings

  • Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986 (First Edition, London: Sage, 1979). ISBN: 9780691028323.
    Required
  • Knorr-Cetina, Karin. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge . Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780674258945.
    Required
  • Lock, Margaret. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780520228146.
    Required
  • Hayden, Cori. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780691095578.
    Required
  • Rouse, Joseph. “What Are Cultural Studies of Scientific Knowledge?” Configurations 1, no.1 (1992): 57-94.
    Recommended
  • Traweek, Sharon. “An Introduction to Cultural, Gender, and Social Studies of Science and Technology.” Journal of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 17 (1993): 3-25.
    Recommended
  • Haraway, Donna. “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.” Configurations 1 (1994): 59-71.
    Recommended
  • Hess, David. Science Studies: An Advanced Introduction . New York, NY: New York University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780814735640.
    Recommended
  • Biagioli, Mario, ed. The Science Studies Reader . New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. ISBN: 9780415918688.
    Recommended
  • Jasanoff, Sheila, Gerald Markle, James Petersen, and Trevor Pinch, eds. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies . Revised Edition. London, UK: Sage, 2001. ISBN: 9780761924982.
    Recommended
  • Fischer, Michael M. J. “Modules for a Science, Technology, and Society Curriculum: STS @the-Turn_[]000.mit.edu.” In Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 333-369. ISBN: 9780822332381.
    Recommended
  • Sismondo, Sergio. An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. ISBN: 9780631234449.
    Recommended
  • Galison, Peter. “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism.” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 709-752.
    Listed reading
  • Listed reading
  • Fleck, Ludwig. 1935. “Epistemological Conclusions from the Established History of a Concept.” In Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact . Translated from the German by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 20-51. ISBN: 9780226253251.
    Listed reading
  • Listed reading
  • Feyerabend, Paul. 1993. “Introduction to the Chinese Edition, Introduction, 1-3.” In Against Method. 3rd ed. London, UK: Verso (First Edition, 1993), pp. 1-4, and 9-32. ISBN: 9780860914815.
    Listed reading
  • Galison, Peter. “The Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief, 9.2-9.8.” In Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 784-840. ISBN: 9780226279176.
    Listed reading
  • Bloor, David. 1991. “The Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge.” In Knowledge and Social Imagery. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (First Edition, London, UK: New York, NY: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 3-23. ISBN: 9780710083777.
    Listed reading
  • Collins, Harry, and Trevor Pinch. 1998. “A New Window on the Universe: The Non-Detection of Gravitational Radiation.” In The Golem: What You Should Know about Science. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (First Edition, 1993), pp. 91-107. Excerpted and updated from Collins, Harry. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice . London, UK: Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985. ISBN: 9780521645508.
    Listed reading
  • Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (First Edition, London, UK: Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1986). ISBN: 9780691028323.
    Listed reading
  • Hacking, Ian. “Experimentation and Scientific Realism.” Philosophical Topics 13 (1982): 71-87.
    Listed reading
  • Latour, Bruno. “Opening Pandora’s Black Box.” In Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 1-17. ISBN: 9780674792906.
    Listed reading
  • ———. 1991. “Constitution & Relativism.” In We Have Never Been Modern . Translated from the French by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 13-48, and 91-129. ISBN: 9780674948396.
    Listed reading
  • Mallavarapu, Srikanth. 2003. The Idea of Incommensurability & Bruno Latour and the Modernity that Never Existed. In Possible Worlds in Science Studies: A Postcolonial Perspective . Dissertation in English at SUNY Stony Brook, 13-43, 71-88.
    Listed reading
  • Fujimura, Joan. “Authorizing Knowledge in Science and Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 2 (1998): 347-360.
    Listed reading
  • Barad, Karen. “Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices.” In The Science Studies Reader. Edited by Mario Biagioli. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999, pp. 1-11. ISBN: 9780415918688.
    Listed reading
  • Shapin, Steven. 1988. “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” In The Science Studies Reader. Edited by Mario Biagioli. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999, pp. 479-504. ISBN: 9780415918688.
    Listed reading
  • Latour, Bruno. “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World.” In Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. Edited by Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Michael Mulkay. London, UK: Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983, pp. 141-170. ISBN: 080399783.
    Listed reading
  • Callon, Michel. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay.” In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Edited by John Law. London, UK: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 196-229. ISBN: 9780710208026.
    Listed reading
  • Mackenzie, Donald. “Nuclear Missile Testing and the Social Construction of Accuracy.” In The Science Studies Reader. Edited by Mario Biagioli. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999, pp. 342-357. ISBN: 9780415918688.
    Listed reading
  • Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 99, no. 3 (1993): 559-589.
    Listed reading
  • Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. “Excerpt from 1227: Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Translated from the French by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 395-415. ISBN: 9780816614028.
    Listed reading
  • Listed reading
  • Merton, Robert. 1942. “The Normative Structure of Science.” In The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973, pp. 265-278. ISBN: 9780226520919.
    Listed reading
  • Mukerji, Chandra. “War and State Funding in the Twentieth Century.” In A Fragile Power: Scientists and the State . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 39-61. ISBN: 9780691085388.
    Listed reading
  • Knorr-Cetina, Karin. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780674258945.
    Listed reading
  • Keller, Evelyn Fox. “Feminism and Science.” Signs 7, no. 3 (1982): 589-602.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “The Gender/Science System: Or Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science?” Hypatia 2, no. 3 (1987): 37-49.
    Listed reading
  • Traweek, Sharon. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics.” In Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 74-105. ISBN: 9780674063488.
    Listed reading
  • Harding, Sandra. “Thinking from the Perspective of Lesbian Lives.” In Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 249-267. ISBN: 9780801497469.
    Listed reading
  • Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature . New York, NY: Routledge, 1991, pp. 183-202. ISBN: 9780415903875.
    Listed reading
  • ———. “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.” In Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience . New York, NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 23-39. ISBN: 9780415912457.
    Listed reading
  • Martin, Emily. “The Woman in the Flexible Body.” In Revisioning Women, Health, and Healing: Feminist, Cultural, and Technoscience Perspectives . Edited by Adele Clarke and Virginia Olesen. New York, NY: Routledge, 1998, pp. 97-115. ISBN: 9780415918466.
    Listed reading
  • Wilson, Elizabeth. “Biologically Inspired Feminism.” Australian Feminist Studies 17, no. 39 (2002): 283-285.
    Listed reading
  • Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature . New York, NY: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-182. ISBN: 9780415903875.
    Listed reading
  • Sandoval, Chela. “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed.” In The Cyborg Handbook. Edited by Chris Hables Gray, with the assistance of Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor. New York, NY: Routledge, 1995, pp. 407-421. ISBN: 9780415908481.
    Listed reading
  • Haraway, Donna. “Apes in Eden, Apes in Space.” In Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science . New York, NY: Routledge, 1990, pp. 133-156. ISBN: 9780415902946.
    Listed reading
  • Gusterson, Hugh. “Bodies and Machines.” In Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 101-130. ISBN: 9780520081475.
    Listed reading
  • Helmreich, Stefan. “The Spiritual in Artificial Life: Recombining Science and Religion in a Computational Culture Medium.” Science as Culture 6, no. 3 (1997): 363-395.
    Listed reading
  • Dumit, Joseph. “A Digital Image of the Category of the Person: PET Scanning and Objective Self-Fashioning.” In Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences. Edited by Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1998, pp. 83-102. ISBN: 9780933452978.
    Listed reading
  • Schiebinger, Londa. “Who Should Do Science?” In Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science . Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995, pp. 184-200. ISBN: 9780807089019.
    Listed reading
  • Jacobson, Matthew Frye. “Whiteness and Science, from “Free White Persons” in the Republic, 1790-1840.” In Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 31-38. ISBN: 9780674063716.
    Listed reading
  • Haraway, Donna. “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture, Or It’s All in the Family: Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth-Century United States.” In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Edited by William Cronon. New York, NY: Norton, 1995, pp. 321-366. ISBN: 9780393038729.
    Listed reading
  • Listed reading
  • Stepan, Nancy Leys, and Sander L. Gilman. “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism.” In The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future. Edited by Sandra Harding. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 170-193. ISBN: 9780253208101.
    Listed reading
  • Eglash, Ron, and Julian Bleecker. “The Race for Cyberspace: Information Technology in the Black Diaspora.” Science as Culture 10, no. 3 (2001): 353-374.
    Listed reading
  • Listed reading
  • Heath, Deborah. “Bodies, Antibodies, and Modest Interventions.” In Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences. Edited by Gary Lee Downey, and Joseph Dumit. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1998, pp. 67-82. ISBN: 9780933452978.
    Listed reading
  • Taussig, Karen-Sue, Rayna Rapp, and Deborah Heath. “Flexible Eugenics: Technologies of the Self in the Age of Genetics.” In Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide. Edited by Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 58-76. ISBN: 9780520237933.
    Listed reading
  • Petryna, Adriana. “Illness as Work: Human Market Transition & Biological Citizenship.” In Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp. 82-148. ISBN: 9780691090191.
    Listed reading
  • Franklin, Sarah. “Kinship, Genes and Cloning: Life after Dolly.” In Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide. Edited by Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 95-110. ISBN: 9780520237933.
    Listed reading
  • Helmreich, Stefan. “Trees and Seas of Information: Alien Kinship and the Biopolitics of Gene Transfer in Marine Biology and Biotechnology.” American Ethnologist 30, no. 3 (2003): 341-359.
    Listed reading
  • Lock, Margaret. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780520228146.
    Listed reading
  • Kittler, Friedrich. 1986. “Gramophone.” In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter . Translated from the German by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 21-114. ISBN: 9780804732338.
    Listed reading
  • Ronell, Avital. “Delay Call Forwarding & Birth of a Telephone: Watson - Dead Cats.” In The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989, pp. 1-15, and 227-232. ISBN: 9780803238763.
    Listed reading
  • Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Materiality of Informatics.” In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 192-221. ISBN: 9780226321462.
    Listed reading
  • Weheliye, Alexander. ““Feenin”: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Special issue on Afrofuturism. Edited by Alondra Nelson. Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 21-47.
    Listed reading
  • Doyle, Richard. “Sympathy for the Alien: Informatic Ecologies and the Proliferation of Abduction.” In Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living . Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 193-216. ISBN: 9780816640096.
    Listed reading
  • Redfield, Peter. “The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space.” Social Studies of Science 32, no. 6 (2002): 791-825.
    Listed reading
  • Hayden, Cori. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN: 9780691095578.
    Listed reading
  • Nelson, Diane. “A Social Science Fiction of Fevers, Delirium, and Discovery: The Calcutta Chromosome, the Colonial Laboratory, and the Postcolonial New Human.” Science Fiction Studies 30 (2003): 246-266.
    Listed reading
Sources