An
Interdisciplinary
Approach to
Studies of Science,
Technology, Society, and Culture
Clare C. Jen
an Annotated Bibliography
Metropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang, Director
Guilty indulgences galore... what kind of course would this be without the
requisite foreign sci-fi silent film from the 1920s? This film will
hopefully raise questions about the roles science and technology play in
the imaginings of futures. Will the future be bleak? Are we nearing an
apocalypse? And is technology the culprit? How are technology and
humanity related? What does it mean to be human?
From Germany, sci-fi film Metropolis paints a futuristic dystopia
where
science, technology, time, and mechanization have eroded humanity. In
Lang's Metropolis, characters represent mind, body and heart in
both
gendered and spatial ways. Urban landscapes, way up high of towering
skyscrapers and luxury, are the obvious seeds of Blade Runner. And
the
nightmarish underworld where workers toil and bodies contort to the hands
of time-keeping machines are equally, if not more so, evocative of the
hell-on-Earth in Blade Runner and the perpetual twilight world of
The City
of Lost Children.
Other recommended films:
Blade Runner, Matrix, The City of Lost Children, Dark City,
Frankenstein,
Delicatessen
World Health Organization. Understanding the BSE
Threat. October 2002
Understanding the BSE Threat is a World Health Organization
(WHO) publication that aims to inform the public about bovine spongiform
encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease." BSEs related human form is
variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). WHO intends to provide
consumers with questions to ask of their public health authorities,
information on the origins and dynamics of the BSE epidemic, insight into
preventive measures and surveillance, and details on the risks within
countries. Consumers around the world are to be alerted in that the
disease has a long incubation period and that contaminated feed is
internationally traded.
A reading of this text that critically asks What and How scientific
information is communicated to the public informs explorations into the
role Science plays in public life. What is this public? And, whom is
most affected? How do business interests intersect with those of science
in the formation of policy? What areas of the world have the greatest
financial interests involved?
The World Health Organizations (WHO) Department of Communicable Disease
Surveillance and Response (CSR) works towards global health security
through effective and efficient epidemic alert and response. CSR has a
site specifically devoted to avian influenza. WHO provides situation
updates, reports of confirmed human cases, FAQs, factsheets, and
guidelines and recommendations.
Students of this class are to consider this website as a form of
communication between Science and the public. From a geopolitical
perspective, how is the situation of avian influenza different from mad
cow disease? What communities are affected? How are women involved? Who
bears the economic losses of outbreak containment? How do these global
health interventions differ from that involving mad cow disease?
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
"The story here is mainly about dogs," commences Haraway in this follow up
to "The Cyborg Manifesto" (3). Companion Species, though, is not
entirely
about dogs. It is more about the inter-relationality between living beings
and the worlds that ensconce them. Haraway looks at dogs as companion
species, as a four part composition, in which "co-constitution, finitiude,
impurity, historicity, and complexity are what is (16)."
This text serves as a rich resource in the realm of technoscience. It
offers a new perspective on naturecultures, and it considers all
carbon-based matter as intermingled, messy, and interrelated. In
particular, in exploring global public health interventions into local
agricultural handlings, this text may offer an interesting perspective on
cows and chickens as companion species. What role do companion species
play in discourses of global health security, national defense, public
safely?
Sinclair, Uptown. The
Jungle. (1906).
Sinclair portrays wage-slavery in Chicago at the turn-of-the-century. He
argues against the use of workers in industrial capitalism. This
political novel, though, is best known for its depiction of horrible
unsanitary conditions in meat-packing plants. This novel is credited as a
major impetus in the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration
(FDA) as part of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
This text is useful in the larger discussion of what historical roles
public policy and industry have played in the interpretation of science in
the United States. Who are the major players in this case? What is at
stake for each? Whom is most hurt and how?
Latour, Bruno. War of the Worlds: What About
Peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.
A war is raging. Bruno Latour, in War of the Worlds, speaks of several
worlds at war, citing symbols of 9-11, globalization and fragmentation,
and
the divide between nature and culture. He also writes about the so-called
Science Wars. Latour describes the two sides as: in the time of
modernity, the world was conceived of as filled with matters of fact, and
now, the world is full of the state of affairs.
This text provides useful tools for interventions into heated and hostile
binaries. In that binaries function as epistemological weapons, Latour
puts forth diplomacy as a mediating instrument of war and peace.
Koertge, Noretta (ed.). 1998. A House Built on
Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Following on the heels of the Sokal hoak, A House Built on Sand is
an
aggressive attack against those engaged in postmodernist analyses of
science. Noretta Koertge, professor of the history and philosophy of
science at Indiana University, edits this collection of essays by
scientists and philosophers of science. Its primary objective is to
debunk the debunkers.
This text provides a great introduction to what critics of science studies
and STS have to say about the usefulness, lack there of, of postmodernist
analyses of science. These quite contentious essays spur conversations of
disciplinary and theoretical battles, of academic integrity versus
political ideology. In a meta-meta analysis, students in this course will
be asked to critique this collection of essays from a science study
perspective.
Chuh, Kandice. imagine otherwise on Asian
Americanist Critique. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.
Kandice Chuh argues for a re-envisioning of Asian American Studies as a
subjectless critique that allows for an interrogation of power and
knowledge. Asian American Studies should cease scholarly focus on a
homogenous static subject if its ultimate aim is to challenge social
inequality. Chuh explores concepts of difference and distance, and an
embrace of unification as opposed to identity.
I envision Chuh's text as useful in conversations about identity,
subjectivity, differences and representations. How do science and
technology represent peoples? What does this subjectivity mean? Of what
use is this newly imagined Asian American Studies to feminist studies of
science?
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without
Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke
UP,
2003.
My concerns and interests guide me to consider Feminism Without
Borders
and imagine otherwise as companion texts. As Chuh critiques static
subjectivity, Mohanty delineates how Western feminists have represented
Third World women in acts of self-presentation. Mohanty utilizes concepts
of sexual difference and Third World difference in the production of such
representations.
This text is useful in exploring questions of how and what science and
technology represent with respect to peoples and places, with particular
emphasis of "Third World women."
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The
Birth
of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
Foucault's text is intended as a "genealogy of the present
scientifico-legal
complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications
and rules." He looks at discipline and punishment as forms of social
regulation, at technologies of power and knowledge, at supervisory
architecture and disciplinary space. For this course, pay specific
attention to quarantines, surveillance, and panopticism.
This text serves as a rich resource in studies of how bodies are
constituted and made to matter, by what technological means, and for whose
benefit and loss.
The Science Studies Reader. Mario Biagioli
(Ed). New York: Routledge, 1999.
This Reader serves as a fine anthology or sampler of writings and
hot
topics--the Who's Who and What's What--of science studies. The editor's
introduction is a good entrez to the tenets and concerns of science
studies and explicitly labels itself as not a canonical
declaration. Contributors include: H.M. Collins, Ian Hacking, Donna
J. Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Bruno Latour, Emily Martin, Andrew
Pickering, Simon Schaffer, Steven Shapin, Susan Leigh Star and James
R. Griesemer, Sharon Traweek.
For this course, I envision juxtaposing selections from both House
Built
on Sand and this anthology, so that students can determine what really
is
at war for themselves.