Santa Clara University

Resources for Students

A Santa Clara education ought to prepare every student to function as a well-informed and responsible citizen in their community and the world as a whole. This involves the capacity to make thoughtful and competent decisions about matters impacting their own lives as well as the wider human community and environment. In the 21st century the diffusion of scientific and technological culture into virtually every aspect of life requires that such citizens have a basic understanding of the scientific and technological dimensions of society and its institutions, as well as the complex relations between them.

Such ‘technological citizenship’, as it has been called, also demands refined skills in critical evaluation and problem solving, as well as the capacity to reflect from multiple perspectives on the many scientific and technological dilemmas confronting society. In order to become full ‘technological citizens’ of the world, then, Santa Clara students will need more than just scientific and technological knowledge, they will also need the ‘habits of mind and heart’ needed to apply that knowledge intelligently and responsibly.

The traditional model of liberal education in the U.S. and elsewhere has historically underserved students in these respects, by means of promoting (either implicitly or explicitly) some or all of these faulty or inadequate assumptions:

• The assumption that science, technology and society can and should be treated within the various academic disciplines as separate domains of study.
• The assumption that science is best understood as an autonomous discipline immune from the influence of other social and cultural norms, values, and interests, with the countless counterexamples ignored or presented as ‘aberrations’ from ‘real’ science.
• The assumption that technology is simply ‘applied science’, rather than a social force that also shapes scientific theory and research in myriad ways.
• The assumption that technologies are ‘value-neutral’, and that social problems or opportunities created by their integration into society can simply be regarded as the result of user choices.
• The assumption that particular scientific and technological advancements are either unequivocally good or bad for society, rather than a more complex perspective that investigates how such developments affect individuals, groups and institutions differentially and along multiple dimensions of value, understanding that ‘progress’ almost always involves complex trade-offs.

The STS component of the Core is a powerful opportunity to encourage our students to question and reevaluate the assumptions above, and by facilitating their critical, reflective and active engagement with these questions, we can help them to become full citizens of a scientific and technological culture.

A field of inquiry in its own right, Science, Technology, and Society Studies (hereafter “STS”) has been built over time as an interdisciplinary project that draws on methods and theories across the humanities and social sciences, all of which in their particular ways focus on the relationships between science, technology, and society. [Some students may find the STS Wikipedia entry useful.] Thus, much like other disciplines and inter-disciplines, the field of STS is characterized by an every-developing series of central texts.  These texts are important, either because they have synthesized the problems and methods of the field in particularly fruitful ways, or they have disrupted prevailing assumptions of the field and thus have set it on innovative paths. Though by no means exhaustive, the following bibliography is a representative view of texts that played an important role in shaping the field over the course of the 20th century the field.

STS Bilbiography

Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935)

Robert K. Merton, Science and the social order (1938)

Robert K. Merton, The normative structure of science  (1942)

Edgar Zilsel, The sociological roots of science (1942)

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

Karl Popper, Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge (1963)

Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of natural science (1966)

David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (1974)

David MacKenzie and Judith Wajcman, Social Shaping of Technology (1985)

John Law (ed.), Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (1986)

Wiebe Bijker, et al., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987)

Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (1987)

Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France (1988)

Steve Shapin & Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985)

Helen Longino, Science and Social Knowledge (1990)

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991)

Nancy Cartwright, The dappled world: A study of the boundaries of science (1999)