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What STS Can Do: Innovations and Alternatives for STS Practice – I

Wed, September 4, 1:00 to 2:30pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Oak Alley

Abstract

Biology has its doctors, physics its engineers, sociology its social workers. What about STS? In a time of ethical lapses, replication crises, and unintended consequences on the one hand and fake news, mistrust of expertise, and politically motivated attacks on science on the other, the need for public, practicing STS(s) has never been greater. STS programs historically carved their niche in the academy by occupying a liminal space as provider of service or breadth requirement courses to undergraduate STEM majors while adopting more critical modes in research and graduating teaching. STS training has been seen variously as: i) an off-ramp providing safe harbor for intellectual refugees from STEM disciplines; ii) an on-ramp to professional degrees in medicine, law, and policy; and iii) an all-purpose safety-valve for consideration of social impacts through the training of future ethicists, program managers, public educators, and the like.

STS is clearly much more than this. Still, as an interdisciplinary and often anti-disciplinary field that questions the very distinction of “pure” and “applied,” we have relatively few conversations about professional training in STS. This session invites theoretical and empirical analyses, case studies, and visionary proposals for applied and practicing STS as it already exists and as we imagine it might look in near and long-term futures. Taking a best practices approach, this session also welcomes analyses informed by the experiences of adjacent fields (e.g. applied, public, and practicing anthropology, sociology, communications, philosophy, education etc.) Papers may be invited to special journal issue on this topic.

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