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Science and Technology Studies (STS, also: “Science, Technology and Society”) examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. STS is the international counterpart of German “Wissenschafts- und Techniksoziologie”. Unlike these disciplinary specialties of German sociology, STS nowadays is huge with respect to researchers involved and academic programs, and it is explicitly interdisciplinary – including approaches not only from sociology, but also from anthropology, history, political science and other disciplines. And also, unlike the German sociological specialization, STS is nowadays often meant to be a normative endeavor that contributes to the creation of a “better” society, or at least to a broader and more “inclusive” or a more power sensitive narration of historical or actual socio-technical developments.
As STS programs and conferences have evolved to a puzzling multitude of approaches and research topics, the seminars’ goal is twofold:
First, the seminar deals with the historical origins of the STS-perspective – the confluence of diverse research approaches from the sociology of science, especially laboratory studies, ethnomethodology, the rise of actor-network theory, anthropological studies of the social fabrication of scientific facts in the mid-eighties and the turn to technology which resulted in the program of reconstructing the social construction of technology in detail.
Second, the seminar covers some current research areas of STS that are of special interest for a sociological perspective.
