Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a vast multidiscipline, comprising contributions, both from and to at least the following: sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, legal studies, communications and media studies. It draws on and contributes to cross cutting intellectual themes in constructivism, post essentialism, gender studies, cultural studies.
The main analytic inflections of Oxford STS include post essentialist currents, ethnographic perspectives, scepticism and provocation. The work is much aligned with STS sensibilities which stress working through difficult conceptual issues in relation to specific empirical cases, deflating grandiose theoretical concepts and claims (and even some ordinary ones) and emphasising the local, specific and contingent in relation to the genesis and use of science and technology. We are cautious about the unreflexive adoption and deployment of standard social science lexicons (eg power, culture, meaning, value). Analytically, much of our current work is focussed on issues in governance and accountability, especially on ways of rethinking conventional approaches to these topics, respecifying an analytically more sophisticated approach to “governance”, and unravelling the quagmire of different ways of talking about “accountability”.
It is characteristic of this approach to take revered and standardised ideas and concepts and convert them into objects of study: science, technology, the law, legal studies. This can be done either by recasting ideas and concepts so as to stress the processual, situated and contingent bases for the terms: eg ethics becomes ethicising; futures becomes futuring; governance becomes governancing; evidence becomes evidencing. Or by construing purportedly robust/recalcitrant concepts as objects of ethnographic study eg technology gives rise to technography, ontology yields ontography.
The STS sensibilities which interest us include reflexive attention to the (frequently unexplicated) notions of audience, value, impact, utility. Consistent with the premise that users are performed, enacted, configured (etc), for a whole range of cultural artefacts, we maintain an active interest in the transposition of social science research across sometimes challenging social organisational boundaries. This we construe as a radical intellectual challenge, not merely a political preference or a practical obligation. The crucial combination of research/intellectual approach and practical outreach is not easy (and this surely needs more research). But it is much easier to build effective outreach on the basis of research excellence, than to build research excellence on the basis of effective outreach.