Of course, I have many ideas about what I want to include (too much in fact, as I am sure my students can attest). I have also checked out the syllabus archive at the Science and Democracy Network and the syllabus archive at 4S, both wonderful resources. A core text will be Sismondo 2010 -- An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (2nd edition).
With this post I am inviting readers to recommend what they think should be on such a syllabus. I welcome input from STS specialists as well as amateurs. What readings -- books, articles, essays, whatever -- are core to the social science of science?
Thanks!
10 comments:
My number one recommendation is "Reef Madness- Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz and the Meaning of Coral" by David Dobbs. The book chronicles the 19th century Academic battles between Academic supporters of Louis Agassiz and Darwin and the tactics employed to crush dissenting scientific views (a mirror of today's climate wars- though the book does not go there).
The book when discussing Alexander Agassiz (Louis's son) noted he“viewed skeptically the more strident expressions of Darwinism and creationism because he had seen the madness made when scientists took theory as dogma.”
Something by Kurzweil?
"The Ultimate Resource" by Julian Simon. He has been proved right time after time, but gets little credit. Don't know if it is appropriate for your course, but a good introduction to his work can be found in Wired Magazine in an article entitled "Doomslayer."
JD Ohio
Roger, I taught a similar course about ten years ago and used an earlier edition of Rosenberg's PHILOSOPHY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE and had very good results with it--students liked it and understood it (upper division undergrads and grads). There is always Ziman's classic but perhaps too dated for your use.
Philosophy of Social Science
Gogogadget hyperlink!
Doomslayer: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
I think Collins & Evans work (_Rethinking Expertise_, and the original 2002 article in _SSS_) is useful, and unlikely to receive fair treatment in orthodox STS accounts.
Also worthwhile and at the STS margins is Leah Ceccarelli (2011), Manufactured scientific controversy: Science, rhetoric, and public debate. _Rhetoric & Public Affairs,_ 14(2), 195-228.
Putting the hippies on the payroll
Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance, by James Heartfield
"The rise of green capitalism is not just expressed in demands for restraining mass consumption, but also in changed attitudes towards production. A system that prioritises profit over people has little difficulty retooling its performance to engage in unproductive activities, as long as it can make money.
Just as the corporate raiders of the 1980s saw that it was possible to make money by breaking industry up rather than building it up, so today’s green capitalists realise that it is possible to make big bucks without doing very much at all – by ‘manufacturing scarcity’.
Here, Heartfield identifies carbon trading, ‘clean energy’, environmental land retirement and green belt housebuilding restrictions as the key examples where output is squandered in favour of (green) profits: ‘restricting output and so driving up prices is one short-term way to secure profits’ (p34).
http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2008-03/heartfield.htm
http://www.amazon.com/GREEN-CAPITALISM-Manufacturing-scarcity-abundance/dp/1906496102/ref=la_B004OB12EO_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1343855559&sr=1-2
A Step Further Out by Jerry Pournelle?
I second the Evans/Collins recommendation.
Thomas Gieryn, “Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non‐Science,” American Sociological Review 48: 781‐95. 1983.
Steven Epstein, “Drugs into Bodies,” Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: UC Press), 1996.
Steven Shapin, “Knowing About People and Knowing About Things: A Moral History of Scientific Credibility,” A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth‐Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1994.
Theodore Porter, “US Army Engineers and the Rise of Cost‐Benefit Analysis,” Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1995.
Thomas Nickles, “Justification and Experiment,” in David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, The Uses of Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1989.
Geof Bowker and Leigh Star, “The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification Under Apartheid," Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press), 2000.
These are all from Clark Miller's Human and Social Dimensions of Science & Technology core seminar, first semester syllabus... you should get a copy of the whole thing, there's lots more really good stuff on it--e.g., Heilbroner, Hughes, Charles Perrow, Sheila Jasanoff...
Even if it was the hardest thing I had to read during my maters course:
Bruno Latour Science in Action
For a really good class discussion:
Collins & Evans "The Third Wave of Science Studies Studies of Expertise and Experience"
& the 3 responses from Jasanoff, Wynne, and Arie Rip in SSS (June 2003)
and...
Brian Wynne, May the Sheep Graze Safely? ....
'Expert' & 'Lay' knowledge
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