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Dr Carrie Friese STC S213

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement, with priority given to students on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. As demand is typically high, this may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

This course aims to give students a detailed understanding of sociologically informed approaches to social studies of science, technology and medicine (STMS). It will consider how and why STMS shifted and critiqued macro-level theories of technology in post-industrial society to explore the constitutive role of objects and artefacts in social relations. In other words, we will start the course by reflecting upon sociology’s traditional neglect of the social life of things or materiality. We will then explore varying conceptual developments within the fields through varying substantive case studies. These may include: power relations and social inequalities embedded in and reproduced by digital technologies; technology as a culture that shapes gendered and racialised discourses and economies, such as in robotics; infrastructures that reproduce the status quo but also become sites of resistance and social changes, such as in energy; the ways in which politics become embodied, as with genetics. In the process we will explore the ways in which technologies instantiate power relations and hegemonic cultures, as seen with visualizing technologies and colonisation for example, all the while also being sites where politics can be reworked, resisted and changed.

This course is delivered through seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours in the LT.

Reading Weeks: Students on this course will have a reading week in LT Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay plan in the LT.

Prainsack. B. (2017) Personalized Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? New York University Press.

Elias, A. (2019) Coral Empire: Underwater Oceans, Colonial Tropics, Visual Modernity. Duke University Press.

Felt, U et al (20016) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 4th Edition. MIT Press.

Kempner, J. (2014) Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health. Chicago University Press.

Kimura, A. (2016) Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination. Duke.

Saraiva, T. (2016) Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism. MIT Press.

Schüll, ND, Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012),

Vora, K and Atanasoski, N. (2019) Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Watts, L. (2019) Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga. (MIT Press)

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.