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- Convenors:
-
Bernhard Isopp
(Technical University of Munich)
Joakim Juhl (TU Munich)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores different inter- and cross-disciplinary settings in which STS scholars teach. Considering STS as a teaching program promises to reveal insights about how STS scholars envision, value, articulate, translate, and negotiate the central lessons of the field.
Long Abstract:
STS programs and courses are often institutionally housed within or closely adjacent to natural science or engineering programs or departments. At the university level, in institutions with a primarily technical orientation, STS (or STS-informed) courses can form a major part of the social science component of larger science and engineering curricula.
In these settings, STS can be valued as a source of social scientific understanding about how science, engineering, and technology actually work in their own right, as well as a means for understanding the complex relationships that constitute technoscience. However, it is often also called upon to provide understandings of the contexts and mechanisms that would enable science or technology to be put into practice in some concrete social, economic, or policy setting. Thus, STS teaching can become instrumental.
By reflecting on these dynamics, this panel hopes to explore the following questions by looking at a range of cases in a variety of academic and institutional contexts (including but not limited to the technical university):
Who are the envisioned learners of STS knowledge? What are the central lessons that STS is meant to teach? How are these translated into other epistemic traditions and made relevant and valuable from their point of view? For example, how might we approach STS pedagogy in a way that accounts for the perspectives of engineers or natural scientists whom have no prior training in social science or the humanities? How do and can STS scholars navigate or negotiate the different institutional spaces in which we are expected to teach? How do we both protect our own conceptual heritage while also making ourselves useful and valuable in non-STS environments? How does this relate to different visions of engaged STS? How have notions of STS as a pedagogical program shaped its identity, institutional or otherwise?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Bernhard Wieser (Graz University of Technology)
Short abstract:
Addressing STS teaching practice raises questions regarding objective, content and didactics of such educational engagement with science and engineering students. In addition, teaching STS challenges us to reflect upon our underlying assumptions about teaching, learning and its desired effects.
Long abstract:
What is the purpose of teaching STS to scientists and engineers? What would STS scholars want scientists and engineers to know about STS and why is it so important? In addition to the question of the objective of such educational efforts, it is also critical to answer the didactical question of how to teach STS. Which teaching style and methods are best suited to reach STEM-audiences (i.e. science and engineering students)?
Being an STS scholar employed at an engineering school, I draw on profound experiences with teaching STS to STEM audiences. Teaching STS is not only a question of purpose and method, but it also raises the ontological question of how STSers constitute themselves as academics at a University of Technology. Furthermore, teaching STS raises fundamental questions regarding the very nature of education. Do we conceive of teaching as an act of knowledge transfer? Or does teaching STS go beyond the goal of implanting STS ideas into the minds of scientists and engineers? Would it be possible to frame teaching STS as a form of intervention into society – perhaps even as the pursuit of normative goals such as making science and technology responding to the SDGs, the ideals of social justice, participation and democracy? Having experiences with a broad scope of courses, I will reflect on my experiences ranging from conventional lecture style teaching of STS core concepts to science fiction seminars and hands on ethnographic field work.
Darrin Durant (University of Melbourne)
Short abstract:
I use the different responses of Nietzsche and Weber to the nihilistic condition to work, by analogy, to how STS frames the options students have for responding to the contestation over fact and value we see in techno-scientific controversies.
Long abstract:
What is STS? If pushed for a soundbite, our replies typically include methodological sophistication and pointers to political relevancy: ‘STS demonstrates the contingency of knowledge creation and the socio-historical grounding of authority relations’. Students often ask – after being introduced to the contingent knowledge infrastructures underlying what has come to be called fact or implicated in controversy over what we should call fact - “how can I decide in the face of controversy”? “Remain the detached analyst” is rarely satisfactory. One annoying way that students often frame their query is whether STS is philosophy or sociology. I recently decided to move past dissing philosophy and take their question seriously. This led me to nihilism. The philosopher Nietzsche and the sociologist Weber each thought the nihilistic condition – there are no foundations other than those we invent; meaning and value are constructed – demanded a response. Each agreed science is instrumentally valuable but engenders disenchantment, including irresolvable struggle over values, but charted different paths in response. Are we saying to our STS students to follow Nietzsche, to create values and revel in the blurring of authority, only we democratize the philosopher in a way Nietzsche would oppose while retaining his image of scientists as reducers of value? Or are we saying to our STS students to follow Weber, using (idealized) methodological distinctions to analyse competing value-spheres (politics/science, actor/analyst), only our modest scholar-activism breaks Weber’s academia/politics boundary while keeping his mobilizing of science to clarify means-ends and thus inform normativity?
Alvise Mattozzi (Politecnico di Torino)
Short abstract:
The paper intends to explore how STS can teach engineering students to think their profession beyond the problem/solution perspective.
Long abstract:
Based on an more than 6 years experience teaching BA engineering students, this paper intends to reflect on the ways, in which the knowledge of Actor-Network Theory inspired Social Studies of Science and Technology can become plausible and at the same time somewhat irritating for engineering students.
Indeed, through numerous examples, I try to show engineering students the implausability of many categories through which we tend to think technology related practices, starting with the dichotomy technology/society.
Whereas students, not versed in social sciences and in their debates, seemed to not have issues with the adoption of most, if not all, STS tenets, they tend to have more difficulties in accepting the consequential overcoming of the problem/solution dichotomy, around which a relevant part of their identity is built.
Nevertheless, only overcoming the idea that engineering - or any other kind of profession - solves problems, fully positions engineering within a collective perspective, where engineering can still have a role in providing stabilizations of collective articulations, though without being depoliticized and without engineers being deresponsibilized.
While introducing such perspective, what is relevant is to listen to students and their refusal to accept it. Such dialogue can indeed shed light on the image of engineering, as well as help a shared work of reconsidering students' future profession, without frustrate their expectations.
Pilar Avendaño Antunez (University of Edinburgh) Bruno Alejandro Orsatti Sanchez (University of Strathclyde)
Short abstract:
The proposal aims to define a complementary method for Latin American Engineering and Science curricula through humanities and social sciences to comprehend science, technology, and medicine, facing the challenges of the highly technically narrow programmes.
Long abstract:
This paper suggests that the curricula of Latin American engineering and science university departments must be enhanced to reinforce interdisciplinary knowledge analytically, esthetically, and ethically to meet current pressuring and dynamic changes. Analyzed curricula are shown to be focused on highly technical and narrow technological perspectives and lack enabling disparate perspectives that come into dialogue for exploring diverse social and ethical implications.
An integrative technical research project is proposed to conduct investigations on state-of-the-art technology, instruct prominent scientists and engineers, and enable those who influence the course of technology to contemplate the societal consequences of their endeavours.
The proposals presented need to be adjusted and supplemented to discover the most effective strategies, ensuring that the education of Latin American engineers can consistently adapt to the ever-changing global landscape, with responsible decision-making in the student's real world, where science and technology are both fundamental components.
Martin Fonck (Technical University of Munich)
Short abstract:
In this presentation, I am interested in addressing and reflecting on the panel questions by focusing on the experience with a particular teaching method: "the site visit." Explore the interactions between science, technology, and society by visiting places where professional visions are trained.
Long abstract:
In this presentation, I am interested in addressing and reflecting on the panel questions by focusing on the experience with a particular teaching method: "the site visit." Explore the interactions between science, technology, and society by visiting places where professional visions are trained, inspired by current invitations to experiment with participant observation. What can we learn by paying attention to the places where knowledge-making and training occur? The advantage of this method is that it allows to cultivate reflexivity, offers a dynamic way of interacting with STS questions “in the field”, and uses training spaces located in urban or institutional contexts in which STS institutions are based. In addition, historical, obsolete sites or new projects offer an opportunity to explore institutional traces and reconfiguration in methodological commitments. The difficulty? How do we evaluate this pedagogical activity, and how do we transform it into something methodical? Or is it also important to acknowledge the intrinsic value of the pedagogical experience itself rather than reproducing an instrumental view towards this type of activities and STS interventions? How does evaluating site visits become a tool and opportunity for redesigning teaching methods?