Conceptualizing Global STS

• In Event: Global STS in Deglobalization of the World

Abstract

While STS has succeeded in elucidating much of the minute sociological structure of technoscience, it has paid less attention to how science and technology is constituted across and between multiple centers and multiple locales. We argue that combining transnational approaches with STS presents new opportunities for generating new frameworks that address some of these challenges and limitations. We call this a “global” STS because this better captures the range of scales at which these new frameworks will function. The “global” label recognizes and emphasizes the truly worldwide connectedness of the flows of technoscience. We suggest four ways in which a Global STS may contribute to new formulations and frameworks for thinking about science and technology. First, a Global STS will place renewed emphasis on the flows and movements that constitute modern technoscience. Second, Global STS focuses critical attention on the relationship between the global and the local. Global STS aims to develop new modes of talking and analyzing across scales, capturing both the globality and the locality of processes. Third, Global STS seeks to account for the multi-polarity of contemporary technoscience. Global STS promises new metaphors with which to describe the multiplicity of relations between people, places, and things. Finally, Global STS will draw attention to new institutional and technological frameworks that are likely to dominate the constitution of technoscience in the twenty-first century.

Author

• Sulfikar Amir, Nanyang Technological University