Fall 2020 - ANTH 430/SOC431 - Dr. Götz Hoeppe 

Course Description 

“How do science and technology shape the world? Or medicine and engineering? How does the world in turn shape them? And how, if at all, might we intervene in these processes?” As John Law (2018) argues, these are the core questions of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It is an “interdisciplinary discipline” to which anthropologists and sociologists contribute, along with historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists and others.  

Focusing on STS’s anthropological and sociological side and its historical development, this course probes into science as a social enterprise that is influenced by the wider culture – and influences it in return. We examine key questions and concepts through readings, exercises, videos and online materials. These concepts include perception, observation, counting, categorization, paradigms, experiment, interests, trust, technologies of witnessing, credibility, laboratory studies, inscription devices, the social construction of facts, translations, actor-networks, immutable mobiles, scientific and political representation, experts and expertise, publics and participation. 

I hope that by the end of the course you have experienced that the social study of science can be thought-provoking and fun, and is useful for developing critical awareness as citizens and participants in a technological society – not the least in these times of the Corona virus and climate crises. 

Course Goals and Learning Outcomes 

• To describe key developments in the anthropology and sociology of science. 

• To identify how knowledge and social order are entangled, and how trust and its limits shape the public understanding of science. 

• To explain how “social facts” and “facts about nature” come about – and how they differ from each other.  

• To distinguish how different media – like writing, numbers and images – shape scientific knowledge and its communication. 

• To identify ways of how publics form and can participate in scientific and technological developments, and what the challenges of this participation are. 

• To use the free-flowing seminar give-and-take as a way to generate ideas for a term paper, apply course concepts to a current issue of science in society or a theoretical problem, work towards its completion under the supervision of the instructor, and present one's own findings in a seminar talk.