ABSTRACT
In the last decade or so, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has become an intellectually dynamic interdisciplinary arena. Concepts, methods, and theoretical perspectives are being drawn from long-established disciplines, such as history, geography, sociology, communications, anthropology, and political science, and from relatively young fields such as critical race studies and women’s and gender studies. From its origins in philosophical and political debates about the creation and use of scientific knowledge, STS has become a wide and deep space for consideration of the place of science and technology in the world, past and present. STS is a field characterized by lively debates centered on foundational ideas and by work shaped by engagement with contemporary and past techno-scientific issues. If scholars energetically pursued questions of what it means to talk about the construction of knowledge and science in the early days of the field, today STS covers a wider range of topics, from the experiences of nuclear power workers to the hydrological construction of nation-state borders and the politics of scientific dieting among India’s economic elites. Beyond those who identify primarily as STS scholars are researchers whose work speaks forcefully and compellingly to the technoscience-society/culture nexus. Thus, for example, there are scholars who associate primarily with the field of communications, but do engaging work on new social media, and law professors who write provocatively on the politics of the knowledge commons. We take a big tent approach to STS, and in this handbook we seek to capture the dynamism
and breadth of the field by presenting work that pushes us to think about science and technology and their intersections with social life in new ways.The book is not comprehensive in the sense of covering every corner of the field, but rather, highlights a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to some of the persistent – and new – questions in the field. Rather than soliciting traditional handbook review essays concluding with research questions pointing the field forward, we asked prospective authors, including senior and early career scholars doing some of the most vital work in the broad science, technology and society arena, to contribute pieces that are explanatory and weave clear and cogent arguments through important empirical cases. The chapters are organized around six topic areas: embodiment, consuming technoscience,
digitization, environments, science as work, and rules and standards. Over the past half-decade, these areas have yielded especially important empirical insights and/or generated new
theoretical ferment. New developments, such as digitization, the role of markets and corporations in the sociotechnical shaping of human bodies (especially gendered, sexualized, ethno-racialized, and classed bodies), and increasing citizen participation in local, national and international science and technology governance, have been important impetuses for extending and challenging STS theory, including by using insights from other disciplines.Other topics, such as science as work, embodiment, and environments, are of long-standing concern in STS, but are the location where some of the fields’ freshest ideas are emerging. We also aimed to create a collection that, despite the diversity of the chapters, has an element
of unity across essays. To generate thematic coherence throughout the book, authors, some more explicitly than others, address one or more of three key processes: how and why ideas, artifacts, and practices come to be institutionalized or disrupted; what explains the scale at which technoscience comes to have meaning, is struggled over and travels; and by what means materiality and cultural value(s) shape science and technology. These themes are not exhaustive but they represent some of the enduring and newer questions that STS addresses. Contributors approach questions of institutionalization and disruption by attending to canonical explananda, and to newer (for STS) foci, such as advertising and market mechanisms, and that most distinctive technology, the internet, that have been ever more important over the past decade. Some of our writers, consistent with recent developments in STS, bring renewed awareness to contests over the meanings of “global” and “local,” exploring how at least some aspects of technoscience-infused social life are especially compressed in time and space, and others vastly expanded. Finally, materiality and culture have long been at the heart of STS. Authors in this book attend closely to how the material is realized, and when and how social meanings and symbols matter in questions of technoscience.Materiality, once dismissed by the field, is now a topic of central concern, as is culture, in shaping individual and group identities, careers, nation-states, and scientific objects and networks.These themes are not exhaustive of the strands of work currently being done in STS; they do, however, offer ways of capturing how contemporary STS scholars are grappling with new questions and topics. Our big tent approach to STS thus seeks to capture concerns that are at the center of the field, and some that are at its (current) edges, but which address the crucial issues surrounding the relationship among science, technology, and society. Situating the work within the book in the context of social studies of science and technol-
ogy over the past three decades illuminates some of the specific and enduring insights from the field, on which some of our contributors build, some challenge, and others use only indirectly. The canon in STS as a disciplinary arena (as opposed to a wider network of scholarship) was built on a specific set of debates that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; yet some of the insights and concerns from this early period, such as the relationship between ethnoracialization and science, sexuality, and inequality were never built into the canon. Excellent overviews of the field of STS exist (Hess 1995, Biagioli 1999, Bauschpies et al. 2006, Sismondo 2004, Lynch 2012); our goal in this introduction is more limited: to provide context for the chapters that follow, by tracing out some of the key developments in STS, and some of the current directions of the more expansive contemporary field.Rather than rehearse a canonical story,we also include some debates and contributions that were dormant but have now come to fore, and some of the new areas in which we see considerable dynamism in the field.
