Here is a list of STS oriented courses on offer for the Spring semester at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

STS 100 / History 182C / ISF 100G
Science, Technology, and Society

Mazzotti and staff

102 Moffitt
Tue-Thu 9:30-11:00

Be it bugs, buildings, or bits, what humans imagine and construct is tightly interconnected with the societies they live in. This course provides an overview of the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) as a way to study how our knowledge and technology shape and are shaped by social, political, historical, economic, and other factors. We will learn key concepts of the field (e.g. how technologies are understood and used differently in different communities) and apply them to a wide range of topics including geography, history, environmental and information science, and others. Questions this course will address include: how are scientific facts constructed? How are values embedded in technical systems? Can non-humans have agency? Is it possible to dissociate science and politics? What is scientific evidence and how do we use it?

History 275S: History of Science (graduate seminar)
Tuesday 4:00-6:00
470 Stephens Hall

This seminar will provide an advanced introduction to the study of science and technology as objects of historical and sociological inquiry. What does it mean to think historically about notions such as the scientific method, objectivity, truth, and technological efficiency? We shall discuss exemplary research in the history of science and science studies, from the Scientific Revolution to contemporary technoscience, and critically engage with key themes and methodologies in these fields. We shall pay particular attention to the ways in which locally produced knowledge and artifacts can travel and achieve universal credibility. By the end of the seminar students will be familiar with the main approaches used by historians and sociologists to reconstruct the complex interaction of science, technology, and society in the making of the modern world.

ANTH 189: Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Data

Professor Cori Hayden
Department of Anthropology

MW 4-5:30pm

Whether we are contemplating the promises and perils of pharmaceutical consumption, the militarization of everyday life in the U.S., or the question of whether it matters that Google may be tracking our every move as its search functions fundamentally shape what and how we know, science and technology (including information technology) are fundamental parts of the political and social worlds we inhabit, and of our intimate senses of ourselves. This course addresses these questions in three clusters. First, it provides an advanced introduction to key conceptual work in the anthropology of science including work by Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Emily Martin, Michel Foucault, and others. The goal is to lay a foundation for stepping back and asking, what critical tools are available to us for thinking about how truth-effects are produced in the world today? How do we know what we know? And who is the “we?” Second, course readings will ask, how might the consumer and technological objects (pharmaceuticals, smartphones) that saturate many lives in the U.S. and globally fundamentally shape not just personal experiences of the world but the very foundations of what counts as, for example, “health” in the first place? (As with Joseph Dumit’s book Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health). Third, have new information technology, media platforms, and data-rich practices (data mining, self-tracking) now fundamentally changed the questions we must pose vis-à-vis knowledge and truth? Here we will look at crowd-sourcing knowledge production (and labor), the rapidly growing self-tracking movement (especially vis-à-vis health) and the tracking of racialized police violence, and recent work on the infrastructures of “the cloud” to examine the forces that are giving shape to the circuitry of knowledge, experience, health, and work today. Readings may include (but are not limited to) Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” Dumit’s Drugs for Life, Latour’s Science in Action, selections from the work of Foucault, Deleuze, and Marx, Orit Halpern’s Beautiful Data, Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, and more.