In the last two decades, Social Studies of Science & Technology, Science and Technology Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society have been the fastest growing "disciplines" within the international community of social scientists (Latour 1991). Beginning in Britain at Edinburgh and Sussex, STS moved rapidly to Australia at Deakin University and University of Wollongong, and then during the late sixties to universities in the United States.
At present, about thirty US institutions have autonomous graduate programs in STS; these include significant programs at MIT, Cornell, Stanford, UCSD, Virginia Polytechnic, Minnesota, Iowa, RPI, and the Pennsylvania State University. Many more Public Policy programs have a substantial STS track, e.g., the Kennedy School or Syracuse.
STS has its own professional organizations --- The Society for the Social Studies of Science and The National Association for Science, Technology and Society --- as well as its own journals --- The Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society; Social Studies of Science; Science, Technology, and Human Values; and Issues in Science and Technology.
At the graduate level, STS emerged initially out of governmental and industrial initiatives to increase the effectiveness of investment in new scientific and technological knowledge. While this continues to be the focus of some programs, in many programs it has been overtaken by growing public concerns about suspected misuses of science and technology, calling for greater public control over scientific and technological systems and examining their implications for the quality of life. More recently STS has become the foundation for movements to reform science education; a new STS journal, Science & Education: Contributions from History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science and Mathematics, emerged to facilitate this discussion.
At the undergraduate level, STS has been exploding as a field of study as it becomes increasingly clear that a critical understanding of the nature, social context, history, and cultural implications of science and technology is important for effective citizenship and involvement in contemporary life. STS has also proven to be a favored and particularly appropriate major for pre-medical and pre-law students.
STS is a good fit for virtually all institutions of liberal education, but especially at the Claremont Colleges.
Many small institutions have at most two or three STS faculty whose major academic commitments may be elsewhere. In Claremont, over 110 faculty are on the list for the electronic newsletter, STS Gazette. Core STS faculty are among the leaders in the field nationally and internationally. Rudi Volti's Society and Technological Change, for example, is used as a central text for introductory STS courses at several institutions, including Lehigh, where the course is taught by the president of the National Association for Science, Technology, and Society; Andy Zanella is co-author of Discovery, Innovation, and Risk: Case Studies in Science and Technology, which has received rave reviews; Pamela Smith has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for Humanities fellowships, and her book The Business of Alchemy was recently voted "Best Book" by the History of Science Society.
Since the late 1970s, the field of STS has emerged as an academic discipline in colleges and universities throughout the United States, and since then, dozens of STS programs have been established in undergraduate and graduate institutions. The history of the STS Program at the Claremont Colleges epitomizes the way in which interdisciplinary programs came into existence at Pomona College. In 1982-83, a group of faculty from all the colleges began meeting with a view towards founding a program in the history of science. Following a survey of the entire faculties at the colleges, twenty-two faculty members responded positively; indeed the interest was so broad that the group revised its original plans for a program in history of science to work instead toward establishing a program on Critical Studies of Science and Technology. In 1984, an election for steering committee was held and most of the members elected at that time have gone on to lead the program since. The steering committee participated with the Academic Deans' Council in obtaining funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for three years of grants of between $20,000 and $30,000 to develop the program. The money was used for grants to faculty in order to develop courses that would count toward the major, to secure release time for faculty to attend and participate in core courses, with a view to attaining enough faculty capable of teaching the core to guarantee that the program would continue smoothly during sabbaticals and other periods when normal staffing was unavailable. Library holdings in basic works were also enhanced with $5000 in each year of the grant.
At the same time, the steering committee was actively engaged with the delicate problem of shaping a curriculum to propose to the five undergraduate colleges. The basic issue was trying to mesh the faculty's own conception of the field with the constraints that each of the colleges, for its own internal reasons, put upon this strange new creature: an intercollegiate program in a field not widely recognized, bearing on the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and engineering, with no college taking the obvious lead and few faculty with apparently relevant degrees. After some initial setbacks and subsequent negotiations, modifications, and discussion, in spring 1988 the program was approved as a major at Scripps, Pomona, and Pitzer, and as a possible special concentration at Harvey Mudd. The name of the program was changed to Science, Technology, and Society, and the program was available to students beginning in 1988-89. The first senior class of five students graduated with the STS major in 1992. Since then, the number of graduates has remained fairly steady at between two and ten per year. STS has since partnered with other interdisciplinary programs to offer students the option of majoring in STS/Public Policy Analysis or Women's Studies/STS. Currently, we are discussing the possibility of an STS/Environmental Analysis major with the newly founded Environmental Analysis Program (founded 2001). In 2000 a minor in STS began to be offered.
Thanks to sustained efforts by STS faculty at Harvey Mudd College (HMC), one of the most significant recent developments for the STS Program has been the founding of the Hixon Forum for Responsive Science and Engineering at HMC. The goal of this development initiative is to create a center for STS at HMC, centered on a senior professor in STS housed in a technical discipline who oversees an administrative staff, course development funds, high-profile conferences, and physical space. The aim of the forum to develop courses and carry out research that links scientific, technological, ethical, public policy, and other issues in new and innovative ways was envisaged as a way to carry forward the mission of HMC to produce leaders in engineering and science who have a strong understanding of human and social goals. In general terms, it was meant to reaffirm the integration of science and the humanities in the liberal arts setting of the Claremont Colleges. The forum is not yet a reality; progress made so far has been the creation of an annual visiting senior professorship in STS, the Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professorship, beginning in 1997-98.
None at this time.
Click here for Information on Previous Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professors:
Sal Restivo, Sociologist of Mathematics, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Author of The Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics (1985), The Sociological Worldview (1995), Mathematics in Society and History (1992), Science, Society, and Values: Toward a Sociology of Objectivity (1994), and other publications.
Darin Barney, Professor of Philosophy at University of Ottawa. Author of Prometheus Wired (Chicago, 2000).
Andrew Feenberg, Professor of Philosophy at San Diego State University. Author of Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Oxford University Press, 1986), Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford University Press, 1991), Alternative Modernity (University of California Press, 1995), and Questioning Technology (Routledge, 1999).
Langdon Winner, Professor of Political Science, Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, Department of Science and Technology Studies. Author of The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (University of Chicago Press, 1988), and Technology and the Human Experience (Forthcoming).
David Noble, Professor of History, York University. Author of Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (2002), The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (1999), Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (1986), and America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1979).