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
Neuromarketing: Over a period of three years, Tanja Schneider and Steve Woolgar will participate in a European wide project on the “Neuro-turn in European Social Sciences and the Humanities: Impacts of neurosciences on economics, marketing and philosophy” (NESSHI) with a total value of 1,250,000€ funded by an ESRC “Open Research Area” grant. The objective of this research will be to provide the first empirical assessment of the uptake of decision neurosciences by social sciences and the humanities (SSH), and its subsequent consequences. The UK contribution to the project undertakes an empirical investigation of the new practices of "neuro-SSH" by studying in depth the developments in neuromarketing through ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and documentary analysis with the objective to offer an assessment of the social implications of these for marketing and business practices.
The Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) project is an ESRC-funded study of the impacts of computer-based and networked systems on academic research. In addition to the ethical, legal, and institutional implications of these innovations upon digital social research, or so-called 'e-research', the project investigates how visualisation transforms notions of evidence and knowledge.
How's my feedback? is an ESRC-funded project that brings together designers, managers, policy-makers, users and researchers to rethink and evaluate web-based rating and ranking schemes.
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.
Recent past 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 (ResIST) is an EU-funded project with partners in 11 countries examining the relationships between science and technology and social, economic and gender inequality.
People
Faculty
Stephen Woolgar, Director
Research fellows
Tanja Schneider
Timothy Webmoor
Associate fellows
Peter Healey
Daniel Neyland
Jerry Ravetz
Doctoral students
Lucy Bartlett
Chris Sugden
Malte Ziewitz
Past events
How's my feedback? - This conference explored the idea of a website that allows users to publicly assess their experience with review and rating schemes – a feedback website for feedback websites.How are we to judge the effectiveness of these schemes? What is it to evaluate the evaluators – and will this business ever end?
Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation - The theme of the conference was the permeation of science and research with computational seeing. How does computer mediated vision as a mode of engagement with information as well as with one another effect what we see (or think we see), and what we take ourselves to know?
Neurosociety: what is it with the brain these days? - The theme of this conference was the rise of the brain and the emergence of the brain industry or ‘neuro markets’. The aim was to explore how, why and in what ways the figure of the brain has come to permeate so many different areas of thinking and practice in academic and commercial life. What are the consequences for academia, business, commerce and policy?
After Markets: Researching Hybrid Arrangements - This workshop explored ways ahead in the social study of heterogeneous arrangements in the current context, in which the 'free market' has become a more openly contested category.
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.
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