Short Abstract:

This roundtable gathers the editors and contributing authors of a thematic collection in Science, Technology and Human Values. The thematic collection invited contributions that respond to two questions: 1) what makes for critical STS pedagogy? And, 2) what does critical pedagogy mean for STS?

Long Abstract:

This roundtable consists of authors and editors for a thematic collection in STHV on Critical STS Pedagogy. Our provocation for the collection read: Building on the longstanding contention that critical STS pedagogy can make for different science and different technology, we are particularly interested in contributions that focus on praxis, by which we mean both what students and instructors do in a course or classroom and what students and instructors can do beyond that course or classroom. What makes STS learning spaces ones where all participants can develop not only changed consciousness, but the relationships and skills necessary to act against violence, subjugation, and dispossession and in service of redress and redistribution? What is happening in classrooms where solidarities are built and strategies conceived? What kinds of collaboration are practiced in STS classrooms? What tensions—epistemic, institutional, relational, disciplinary, etc.—arise in the practice of critical STS pedagogies?

Our turn to critical STS pedagogy acknowledges the decolonial pedagogues who initiated critical pedagogy as well as the critiques of critical pedagogy that followed., We acknowledge the liberatory desires of the decolonial pedagogues and the ways that efforts to liberate perpetuate relations of dominance. In this spirit, we seek to challenge the often dominant notion that our pedagogical praxis constitutes a side project or service for the university in addition to our true research. Our goal with this thematic collection is to build and extend what Emily York and Shannon Conley call STS as Critical Pedagogy. In doing so, this special edition would mark the ways that STS is remade and reassembled with our students, in student organizations, and in other less visible academic terrain. To that end, we welcome articles co-authored by students (graduate and undergraduate) and faculty, groups of students, and teaching teams.