How do science and technology shape human lives? And how do society and culture, in turn, shape the development of science and technology?
Science and Technology Studies (STS) challenges some of our most treasured concepts and entrenched assumptions about the benefits of science and technology, as well as the ways in which these beliefs are introduced into everyday life.
Our researchers scrutinise how practitioners and policymakers use claims about scientific authority to advance their own social, commercial and policy agendas. By looking carefully at real-life examples - for example in companies promoting the sale of futures, or in multinational companies developing the latest technological fix - STS asks us to rethink our assumptions about new technological solutions. It demystifies grandiose ideas of governance, for example by showing the myriad ways in which our lives are increasingly regulated by ordinary objects and commonplace technologies: recycling systems, traffic lights, speed cameras and airport security systems.
Selected Projects
Mundane Technical Solutions to Public Problems drew on recycling and rubbish management; traffic control and speed cameras; and airport passenger movement and security to study the ways in which ordinary objects and technologies are increasingly the basis for regulation and social control of individual behaviour.
Researching Inequality through Science and Technology is an EU-funded project with partners in 11 countries examining the relationships between science and technology and social, economic and gender inequality.
Neuromarketing will examine practices and claims made by some neuroscientists and market researchers to be able to target products and services to consumers based on detection of brain activity.
Student Research Projects include internet governance, futuring practices in consulting organisations, evidence and policy relations in synthetic biology, the practices of explicitly ethical organisations, a comparative study of tissue engineering in UK and Japan, and STS perspectives on innovation processes.
People
Faculty
Stephen Woolgar, Director
Javier Lezaun, James Martin Lecturer in Science and Technology Governance
Research fellows
Peter Healey,Research Fellow and ResIST coordinator
Noortje Marres
Linsey McGoey
Tanja Schneider
Timothy Webmoor
Associate fellows
Daniel NeylandJerry Ravetz Doctoral students
Lucy BartlettTarek ChenitiKoichi MikamiChris SugdenMalte Ziewitz
Past events
Scalography - Scale has long confounded social scientists. This workshop, held 8 July 2009, aimed to turn the ‘problem of scale’ into an object of productive inquiry.
A Turn to Ontology - The STS group organised a one-day workshop in June 2008 to take stock of recent developments and assess the ontological turn in STS.
Related links
Science and Technology Studies at Saïd Business School