Editing Science and technology studies (section)

==History==
Like most [[interdisciplinary]] fields of study, STS emerged from the confluence of a variety of disciplines and disciplinary subfields, all of which had developed an interest—typically, during the 1960s or 1970s—in viewing science and technology as socially embedded enterprises.<ref>Bijker, W. E., Hughes, T. P., Pinch, T. and Douglas, D. G., ''The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology'', [[MIT Press]], Cambridge, 2012.</ref>  The key disciplinary components of STS took shape independently, beginning in the 1960s, and developed in isolation from each other well into the 1980s, although [[Ludwik Fleck]]'s (1935) monograph ''Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact'' anticipated many of STS's key themes. In the 1970s [[Elting E. Morison]] founded the STS program at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT), which served as a model. By 2011, 111 STS research centers and academic programs were counted worldwide.<ref>[http://stswiki.org/index.php?title=Worldwide_directory_of_STS_programs The STS Wiki].</ref>

<blockquote>"The mid-70s was a sort of formation period, and the early 1990s as a peak of consolidation, and then  the  2000s  as  a  period  of  global  diffusion" ([[Sheila Jasanoff]])<ref>https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/226/142</ref>.</blockquote>
=== Important key points ===

{{more citations needed|section|date=January 2024}}
*[[History of technology]], that examines technology in its social and historical context. Starting in the 1960s, some historians questioned [[technological determinism]], a doctrine that can induce public passivity to technologic and scientific "natural" development. At the same time, some historians began to develop similarly contextual approaches to the [[history of medicine]].
* [[History and philosophy of science]] (1960s). After the publication of [[Thomas Kuhn]]'s well-known ''[[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions]]'' (1962), which attributed changes in scientific theories to changes in underlying intellectual [[paradigm]]s, programs were founded at the [[University of California, Berkeley]] and elsewhere that brought [[historians of science]] and philosophers together in unified programs.
*[[Technology and society|Science, technology, and society]]. In the mid-to-late-1960s, student and faculty social movements in the U.S., UK, and European universities helped to launch a range of new interdisciplinary fields (such as [[women's studies]]) that were seen to address relevant topics that the traditional curriculum ignored. One such development was the rise of "science, technology, and society" programs, which are also—confusingly—known by the STS acronym. Drawn from a variety of disciplines, including [[anthropology]], [[history]], [[political science]], and [[sociology]], scholars in these programs created undergraduate curricula devoted to exploring the issues raised by [[science]] and [[technology]]. Feminist scholars in this and other emerging STS areas addressed themselves to the exclusion of [[Women in science|women]] from science and engineering, focusing instead on critiquing gendered power dynamics in prior STS research.<ref name=":3b">{{cite journal |last1=Wajcman |first1=Judy |title=Feminist Theories of Technology |journal=Handbook of Science and Technology Studies |publisher=SAGE Publications Inc |date=1995 |pages=189–204 |doi=10.4135/9781412990127.n9|isbn=9780761924982 }}</ref>
*Science, engineering, and public [[policy studies]] emerged in the 1970s from the same concerns that motivated the founders of the science, technology, and society movement: A sense that science and technology were developing in ways that were increasingly at odds with the public's best interests.{{According to whom|date=November 2013}} The science, technology, and society movement tried to humanize those who would make tomorrow's science and technology, but this discipline took a different approach: It would train students with the professional skills needed to become players in science and technology policy. Some programs came to emphasize quantitative methodologies, and most of these were eventually absorbed into [[systems engineering]]. Others emphasized sociological and qualitative approaches, and found that their closest kin could be found among scholars in science, technology, and society departments.{{Citation needed|date=September 2010}}

During the 1970s and 1980s, universities in the US, UK, and Europe began drawing these various components together in new, interdisciplinary programs. For example, in the 1970s, [[Cornell University]] developed a new program that united [[science studies]] and policy-oriented scholars with historians and philosophers of science and technology. Each of these programs developed unique identities due to variations in the components that were drawn together, as well as their location within the various universities. For example, the University of Virginia's STS program united scholars drawn from a variety of fields (with particular strength in the history of technology); however, the program's teaching responsibilities—it is located within an engineering school and teaches ethics to undergraduate engineering students—means that all of its faculty share a strong interest in [[engineering ethics]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Gorman|first1=Michael|last2=Hertz|first2=Michael|last3=Louis|first3=Garrick|last4=Magpili|first4=Luna|last5=Mauss|first5=Mark|last6=Mehalik|first6=Matthew|last7=Tuttle|first7=J.B.|date=October 2000|title=Integrating Ethics & Engineering: A Graduate Option in Systems Engineering, Ethics, and Technology Studies|url=http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2000.tb00552.x|journal=Journal of Engineering Education|language=en|volume=89|issue=4|pages=461–469|doi=10.1002/j.2168-9830.2000.tb00552.x|s2cid=109724698 |url-access=subscription}}</ref>

===The "turn to technology" (and beyond)===
{{see also|Social construction of technology}}

A decisive moment in the development of STS was the mid-1980s addition of technology studies to the range of interests reflected in science. During that decade, two works appeared ''en seriatim'' that signaled what [[Steve Woolgar]] was to call the "turn to technology".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Woolgar |first=Steve |date=January 1991 |title=The turn to technology in social studies of science |journal=[[Science, Technology, & Human Values]] |volume=16 |issue=1 |pages=20–50 |doi=10.1177/016224399101600102 |jstor=690038|s2cid=145470661 }}</ref> In a seminal 1984 article, [[Trevor Pinch]] and [[Wiebe Bijker]] showed how the sociology of technology could proceed along the theoretical and methodological lines established by the sociology of scientific knowledge.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Pinch |first1=Trevor J. |last2=Bijker |first2=Wiebe E. |date=August 1984 |title=The social construction of facts and artefacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other |journal=[[Social Studies of Science]] |volume=14 |issue=3 |pages=399–441 |doi=10.1177/030631284014003004 |jstor=285355|s2cid=19157599 |url=https://research.utwente.nl/en/publications/the-social-construction-of-facts-and-artefacts-or-how-the-sociology-of-science-and-the-sociology-of-technology-might-benefit-each-other(9370d395-f64e-418e-922e-bfbc59fb9250).html }} See also: {{cite book |editor1-last=Bijker |editor1-first=Wiebe E. |editor2-last=Hughes |editor2-first=Thomas Parke |editor3-last=Pinch |editor3-first=Trevor J. |date=2012 |orig-year=1987 |title=The social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology |edition=Anniversary |location=Cambridge, MA |publisher=[[MIT Press]] |isbn=9780262517607 |oclc=759491749}}</ref> This was the intellectual foundation of the field they called the social construction of technology. Donald MacKenzie and [[Judy Wajcman]] primed the pump by publishing a collection of articles attesting to the influence of society on technological design (''Social Shaping of Technology'', 1985).<ref>{{cite book |editor1-last=MacKenzie |editor1-first=Donald A. |editor2-last=Wajcman |editor2-first=Judy |date=1999 |orig-year=1985 |title=The social shaping of technology |edition=2nd |location=Buckingham |publisher=[[Open University Press]] |isbn=0335199143 |oclc=39713267 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/socialshapingoft0000unse }}</ref> Social science research continued to interrogate STS research from this point onward as researchers moved from post-modern to post-structural frameworks of thought, Bijker and Pinch contributing to SCOT knowledge and Wajcman providing boundary work through a feminist lens.<ref name=":1b">{{Cite journal |last=Law |first=John |date=November 2008 |title=On Sociology and STS |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2008.00808.x |journal=The Sociological Review |volume=56 |issue=4 |pages=623–649 |doi=10.1111/j.1467-954x.2008.00808.x |s2cid=149088374 |issn=0038-0261|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

The "turn to technology" helped to cement an already growing awareness of underlying unity among the various emerging STS programs. More recently, there has been an associated turn to ecology, nature, and materiality in general, whereby the socio-technical and natural/material co-produce each other. This is especially evident in work in STS analyses of biomedicine (such as [[Carl May]] and [[Annemarie Mol]]) and ecological interventions (such as [[Bruno Latour]], [[Sheila Jasanoff]], [[Matthias Gross]], [[Sara B. Pritchard]], and [[S. Lochlann Jain]]).