STSS 591: SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY STUDIES IN ACTION

Autumn 2015
Friday, 1:30-3:20 p.m.
CMU 242

Professor: Leah Ceccarelli

Office: CMU 145
Email: cecc@uw.edu
Office Hours: MWF 12:30-1:30p and by appointment.

COURSE OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES

This course introduces graduate students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to Science,
Technology, and Society Studies (STSS) as an interdisciplinary area of research. It also orients
those enrolled or soon to be enrolled in the STSS graduate certificate program to the expectations
of the program, especially the design of their STSS portfolio. Each week, a different member of
the STSS core faculty will introduce a theme or area of active research interest.

By the end of this quarter, students should be able to:

Evaluate different disciplinary research methodologies that are applied to questions
in the contextual study of science and technology;
Integrate STSS concepts and methods with the core ideas of students home
discipline;
Navigate the ethics, policy and equity issues that arise at the interface of science,
technology and society.
Critically appraise and deploy robust content knowledge of relevant science,
technology and society studies research beyond their home discipline;

In addition:
Social science and humanities students will demonstrate the ability to situate
disciplinary interests in science and technology in an interdisciplinary context;
STEM program and Professional program students will demonstrate an
understanding of the history, social context, and philosophy of the research
traditions in which they work.

ASSIGNMENTS

This class is graded on a CR/NC basis, meaning that it is not graded on the 4-point scale. All
assignments will be graded as CR or NC; you must receive a CR grade in all of the assignment
categories below to pass the class. All written assignments should be double-spaced, and should
be uploaded as PDFs or Word documents to the course website.

Reading Responses: to encourage thoughtful reflection as you complete the course readings, you
will be required to post reading responses as PDFs or Word documents 24 hours before class
each day. You should provide some context for the question or insight that you share in your
write-up, but what you turn in each day should be no longer than three paragraphs. I will
evaluate your corpus of reading responses by the following criteria:
Completeness: the number of reading responses turned in by deadline
 Relevance: the degree to which reading responses adequately involve the subject of
discussion for that day
Engagement: the degree to which reading responses are used by the student to spark
class discussion
Insight: the degree to which the students reading responses offer intriguing remarks
about the subject for the day, or make particularly unique and edifying points about
his or her own experiences regarding that subject, or extend the ideas in the reading
assignment in important ways

Seminar Participation: to stimulate discussion in class, you will be expected to raise a question
or make a point from your reading response during class each day, as well as respond to the
comments of other students. On the last day of class, you will present your final synthetic essay
to your classmates.

Synthetic Essay: you are expected to choose a theme that anticipates and provides scaffolding
for the development of an STSS portfolio that will be put together over the course of your
graduate program. By the end of this quarter, you will write a 3-4 page synthetic essay
addressing that theme as it runs through the readings and lectures of this class.

Note on Attendance
Students are expected to attend all class meetings. If you must miss a class session for medical
reasons or to attend an academic convention, please contact the professor in advance.
 SCHEDULE

All the required readings will be available on the course website at

https://catalyst.uw.edu/workspace/cecc/51689/. You should complete the assigned readings
before the class begins. Each day will introduce one member of the core faculty for the STSS
graduate certificate program.

10/2 Orientation

10/9 David Ribes: Historical Epistemology & Ontology

Historical epistemology and historical ontology are empirical approaches to the study of how
we know and what we know. STSS scholars in these traditions track the objects, methods,
instruments and sociotechnical organizations of scientists situated in history and across it. This
lecture will elaborate recent developments in these lines of research, and exemplify them using
cases from sexuality science, mad travelers disease, and my own investigations of long-term
infrastructures supporting Ecological and HIV/AIDS science.

Readings:
Ian Hacking, Style for Historians and Philosophers, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 23.1 (1992): 1-20.
Lorraine Daston, Introduction to Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by Lorraine
Daston (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1-14.
David Ribes and Jessica-Beth Polk, Organizing for Ontological Change: The Kernel of a
Research Infrastructure, Social Studies of Science 45.2 (2015): 214-41.

10/16 Leah Ceccarelli: Rhetoric of Science and Technology

Alan Gross, one of the first scholars to write about the rhetoric of science and technology, argues
that the rhetoricians tools for starring the text establishes the place of rhetoric in science
studies. What might the ancient art of rhetoric tell us about the arguments used by scientists and
various publics as they communicate about science and technology, and how might that
contribute to the broader interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society studies?

Readings:
Leah Ceccarelli, Rhetoric of Science and Technology, in Ethics, Science, Technology,
and Engineering, 2nd edition (Cengage Learning, 2015), 621-25.
Celeste M. Condit, John Lynch, and Emily Winderman, Recent Rhetorical Studies in
Public Understanding of Science: Multiple Purposes and Strengths, Public
Understanding of Science 21. 4 (2012): 386-400.

10/23 Andrea Woody: Science as Practice: Explanation in Modern Western Science

Contemporary philosophy of science is grappling with how to generate normative analysis while
shifting attention from abstract conceptions of scientific reasoning and content to more concrete
and detailed descriptions of specific scientific practices. To illustrate this shift we will consider
the changing shape of analysis regarding scientific explanation, trying to tease apart ontological,
epistemological, and methodological dimensions of the discourse and grappling with how we
should make sense of this central category of science. What does it mean to explain something
in modern science? Is explanation a central goal in science? Do explanations across disciplines
have much in common? Should they?

Readings :
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Explanation (chapter 13) in Theory and Reality: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2003): 190-201.*
Bas van Fraassen, The Pragmatics of Explanation.
Andrea Woody, Re-orienting Discussions of Scientific Explanation: A Functional
Perspective, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 52 (2015): 79-87.

10/30 Malia Fullerton & Kelly Edwards: The Hidden Curriculum in Research Culture

What constitutes the responsible conduct of research and how are these norms routinized and
enforced within the biomedical research community? What perspectives may be overlooked or
marginalized in this approach to promoting research integrity?

Readings TBA*

11/6 Gina Neff: Affordance, Constraints, and Practices in the Quantified Self

The Quantified Self refers to how people record, analyze, and reflect on data that they gather
about facets of their lives, along with the tools that they use and the communities they consult to
make sense of it. It is also the result of two powerful forces, the datification and
biomedicalization of society. For this session well look at The Quantified Self as an example of
how technologies are shaped by social forces, user practices, powerful stakeholders, and cultural
imaginaries. What happens when technologies meet medicine? When bodies become quantified
and digitized?

Readings:
Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus, Chapters 1-2 in The Quantified Self (MIT Press, 2016).
Peter Nagy and Gina Neff, Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for
Communication Theory, Social Media & Society 1.2 (2015): 1-9.

11/13 Celia Lowe: Animal Studies [awaiting more precise topic and paragraph description]

Readings TBA*

11/20 Phillip Thurtle: Science, Technology, and the Materiality of Media

Scientific knowledge is mediated knowledge. In a period where the use of media technologies
dominate everyday life, this section will ask how does the study of the use of media inform a
knowledge of how scientific knowledge is crafted, what it shares with other forms of media
based experiences, and how it fits into specific political economies?

Readings:
Lisa Cartwright, Science and the Cinema, in The Visual Culture Reader, edited by
Nicholas Mirzoeff (Routledge, 1998), 199-213.
Robert Mitchell, Introduction and Chapter 5, in Bioart and the Vitality of Media
(University of Washington Press, 2010).
 Alexander Galloway, Introduction, in The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012).

11/27 NO CLASSTHANKSGIVING HOLIDAY

12/4 Sareeta Amrute: Computing the Postcolony

How can we take power and place into account in our histories of computing? How do
computing technologies emerge from and get tinkered with in postcolonial contexts?

Readings:
Kavita Philip, Lilly Irani, and Paul Dourish, Postcolonial Computing: A Tactical
Survey, Science, Technology, & Human Values 37.1 (2012): 3-29.
Sareeta Amrute, Encoding Race, Encoding Class (Duke University Press, 2016),
excerpt.*

12/11 Presentations of Final Synthetic Essays

* = pdf not yet available on website