Imaginaries, Actants and Co-production: the Governance of Socio-technical Developments - Einzelansicht

Achtung: Kursbeginn am 11.04.2023!

Global AI, the smartphone in everyday life, green energy production or real-time digital voting and opinion polling - the intertwining of technology, society and science is ubiquitous. Chances as well as risks for technological developement propose a challenge for the governance of technological innvoations.

This reading course will use key texts to elaborate the development and evolution of STS in the context of philosophy of science (feminist and post-colonial approaches, actor-network theory, technology assessment). The goal is to elaborate the questions that STS can address to society. Based on this, the focus will be on the transfer of STS to societal problems (e.g. body technologies, biotechnology, geoengineering, automobility, combat drones). The ways in which science and technology prove co-productive in shaping the social will be discussed.

Studrnts acquire theoretical and methodological knowledge to reflect on questions of regulation of science and technology. They learn to understand interactions between scientific and technological developments and social change, and to consider these insights for decision-making processes in different areas of democratic contemporary societies.

There will be a number of seminar-related assignments (e.g., abstracts, protocols, documentation of open questions, discussion input) that will be specified at the beginning of the seminar. For the term paper students may choose an empircal case and draw on the questions we elaborated during course.