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Constitutionalist STS – Broadening the field’s research agenda

Thu, August 21, 8:30 to 10:30am, Intercontinental Hotel, Monserrat II

Abstract

Within Science and Technology Studies (STS), there is a tendency to foreground questions about how knowledge, science, and technology are shaped by their immediate social, cultural and organizational surroundings, while considerably less emphasis has been placed on taking scientific and technological practices as windows onto wider society and its ordering macro-structures of politics, law, and economics. In this paper, we propose that it is time for STS to address the great questions of social macro-order that lie at the centre of the social sciences in a more head-on manner. We contend that it is impossible to make sense of major societal, political, and economic issues today without taking into account the thoroughly science- and technology-mediated character of the world. In order to remain relevant for today’s pressing socio-political concerns and complement the interpretative authority of more established social science disciplines, STS as a field therefore needs to consider how its resources can be brought to the task of understanding and re-envisioning the broad and divisive categories commonly employed to interpret fundamental individual and collective rights – liberty, equity, justice, security, democracy, citizenship, among others. We call this approach ‘Constitutionalist STS.’ In this paper, we argue that instead of asking only about the social construction of science and technology, we must equally ask the symmetrical question about the technoscientific construction of social, political, and legal order. We support this argument by presenting a few brief reflections on current events as thought experiments for what Constitutionalist STS can achieve.

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