ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Science (and Technology Studies): Histories of STS and Its Forerunners, Interlocutors, Competitors, Targets, and Patrons

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

HSS/ESHS 2026 takes place in Edinburgh, home to the “strong program” and one of the early influential sites of the field of STS (whether Science, Technology & Society or Science & Technology Studies). The conference also takes place when—not for the first time—STSish critiques of science are both being wielded by anti-establishment activists and weaponized by authoritarian regimes; i.e., STS now has a usable past. Yet, with Edinburgh’s and other early STS programs near or past their half-century mark and some of the field’s (disputed) canonical works well into their forties, historical distance from STS’s origins is also now clearly possible. Our panel builds on the small but growing historical literature on STS, for example by Elena Aronova and Pierre-Benoît Joly, to explore how critical studies of science took root in various political regimes and with the support of a range of corporate, state, philanthropic, and civil society patrons and participants both before and after the institutionalization of the field now called STS. Cyrus Mody traces the contributions of oil companies—especially ARCO and Exxon—to early STS(ish) scholarship at Cornell, Penn, Harvard, and the Aspen Institute in the 1970s. Marianne Noël follows a cohort of young South Korean democracy activists (many also science and engineering students) in the 1980s as their anti-establishment critiques of science and technology evolved into post-democratization institutionalized STS programs in the ‘90s. Friedrich Cain traces genealogies of “application” and “creativity” in socialist science studies, especially in the GDR, where STS had been developed on ideological grounds and with financial help from the government. Finally, Paola Altomonte presents the story of two women biologists associated (contentiously) with North American universities, Ruth Hubbard and Anne Innis Dagg, whose activism, as both citizens and scientists, led them to interact with, and participate in, the early STS community.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Evangelia (Lina) Chordaki

Individual Presentations

• The Foundations of STS: Oil, Energy, and Philanthropy in the Early Institutionalization of US Science Studies - Cyrus C. M. Mody, Maastricht University

• From Politics to Academics: Political Activism and the Emergence of STS in South Korea - Marianne Noel, LISIS (CNRS, INRAE, Université Gustave Eiffel)

• STS in the GDR: Application, Creativity and the Reunification - Friedrich Cain, University of Vienna

• A wave into the field: questioning science from within as women in the 1960s and 1970s - Paola Altomonte, Maastricht University

Session Organizer

• Cyrus C. M. Mody, Maastricht University