Dr Carrie Friese STC S213

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement, with priority given to students on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Political Sociology and MSc in Sociology. As demand is typically high, this may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

This course aims to give students a detailed understanding of sociologically informed approaches to social studies of science, technology and medicine (STMS). It will consider how and why STMS shifted and critiqued macro-level theories of technology in post-industrial society to explore the constitutive role of objects and artefacts in social relations. In other words, we will start the course by reflecting upon sociology’s traditional neglect of the social life of things or materiality. We will then explore varying conceptual developments within the fields through varying substantive case studies. These may include: power relations and social inequalities embedded in and reproduced by digital technologies; technology as a culture that shapes gendered and racialised discourses and economies, such as in robotics; practices that reproduce the status quo but also become sites of resistance and social changes, such as in medicine; the ways in which politics become embodied, as with surveillance technologies. In the process we will explore the ways in which technologies instantiate power relations and hegemonic cultures, as seen with visualizing technologies and colonisation for example, all the while also being sites where politics can be reworked, resisted and changed.

This course is delivered through seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours in the AT.

Reading Weeks: Students on this course will have a reading week in AT Week 6, in line with departmental policy.

7 minute presentation given during seminar in the AT.

Benjamin, Ruha. (2019) Race After Technology. London: Polity Press

Wajcman, Judy (2004) Technofeminism. London: Polity.

Turkle, Sherry. ([2011]2017) Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from one another.

Haraway DJ (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

Crawford, Kate. (2022) Atlas of AI. Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press. Introduction and Chapter 3.

Franklin, Sarah. (2013) Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lupton, Debora. (2019) Data Selves. London: Wiley.

Vora, Kalindi. (2015) Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourcing Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kelty, Chris. (2019) The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Radin, Joanna & Emma Kowal. (2017) (Eds.) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or The Love of Technology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vora, K and Atanasoski, N. (2019) Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Essay (60%, 4000 words) in January.
Portfolio (40%) in the AT.

Attendance at all classes and submission of all set coursework is required.