A NEW AND EXCITING
CULTURES OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH GROUP
You are invited to become part of a new initiative at UNC to foster collaborative interdisciplinary research and pedagogy on the cultures of science and technology. This initiative seeks to enable scholars from the humanities, the social and the “hard” sciences, and the professional schools to engage with each other and with critical debates about the historical and contemporary character of science and technology. The group seeks to encourage scholars from multiple disciplines to work together to construct better models for understanding the epistemological, social, cultural, and political dimensions of science and technology. This initiative is sponsored by the University Program in Cultural Studies, with financial support from the Offices of the Provost and the Dean of the
Cultural studies assumes that every aspect of human reality is the product of a complex set of material and social relations, and hence, it is in part shaped by the cultural and discursive practices that surround and permeate it. Cultural studies advocates interdisciplinary knowledge production in which scholars learn to talk across disciplinary boundaries and across literatures in multiple disciplines. The Research Group is open to all faculty and graduate students with interests in the relations, practices and institutions of science and technology.
The Cultures of Science and Technology Research Group will be financially supported (e.g., for research assistants, guest speakers, workshops, conferences, release time, study in a second discipline, and more) for as long as four years, as it moves toward the preparation of larger funding proposals for research and/or institutional development. The group will also build connections with similar projects around the country and the world.
In additional to regular meetings organized around readings and presentations, the Research Group may organize lectures and seminars with invited guests, workshops, conferences, mentoring opportunities, exhibits, and so forth. It will also provide whatever assistance is necessary in the efforts of its members to seek external funding in support of the continued activities of the group.
Scope/Focus
Our point of departure is the belief that one of the primary roles of the public university is to help to articulate a critical consciousness about the social –indeed, socio-natural--orders in which we happen to live, and that in today’s world these orders are indelibly shaped by science and technology. To this extent, the cultural analysis of science and technology has a particularly crucial role to play vis à vis the nature of the university itself. With this overall principle in mind, we propose the following considerations as a point of departure.
1. As many theorists argue, modern societies are characterized by the central role of expert forms of knowledge (in the physical, natural, social, and human sciences) in creating the worlds in which we live. There is an intricate relation between knowledge production and the production of reality. What is certain is that knowledge is not an innocent reflection of reality, but the very means through which reality is produced. (A similar idea is contemplated in the UNC document, “General History of the Science Complex,” which begins, “During the past 200 years, science has transformed human civilization.”)
2. The situation has become even more complex in recent decades. With the development of new digital and biological technologies (e.g., computer, communications and information technologies, new genetics, etc.) expert knowledge has taken on an even greater role in the making of natural and social orders. From our bodies to our agricultural systems, from economic practices to the mass media, techno-science is having an increasing role in the production of our social, cultural, and natural worlds. Given their connection to economic globalization, technosciences are having an even more dramatic planetary effect. While the resulting orders are increasingly accepted as inevitable, the need for constructive, yet critical, analyses of these orders is as pressing as ever, if not more.
3. The gap between techno-scientific and critical humanistic knowledge is growing; moreover, the critical consciousness necessary to address where this process is leading us seems to be increasingly under attack.
4. The question is then: what are the most viable options to create a novel critical reflection on the knowledge-society relation in the public universities of the twenty-first century? There are a number of possibilities currently being tried. Interdisciplinary programs that bring together the natural, social, and human sciences around particular issues (as in some environmental, women, queer, and ethnic studies programs) are a case in point. Over the past two decades, programs in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) –under various rubrics- have appeared at a number of universities, as a way to reflect on the co-construction of techno-science and society.
5. Today, “science studies” involve an entire panoply of actors and fields, including disciplines like anthropology, geography, communications, history, and literature; theories such as feminist, queer, critical race, and actor-network; political economy and theories of globalization; fields such as cultural studies and environmental studies; and methods such as ethnography in laboratories, hospitals, cyberspace, and so forth. Some scientists are also involved with these studies, especially around questions of new paradigms and orientations (e.g, complexity theory in mathematics, physical and biological sciences; notions of networks, self-organization and emergence; some new trends in cognitive science and philosophy of biology; debates on the relation between science and religion, the organic and the artificial; bio-ethics; new evolutionary perspectives; and so forth). All of these tendencies constitute potential allies for a Cultures of Science and Technology research program at
The research group will seek to develop common languages and agendas for potential collaborative research, and common frameworks within which different disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches can work together in a variety of ways. It will engage with both dominant paradigms as well as a variety of heterodox and alternative paradigms available for conceptualizing science and technology in non-hegemonic ways. An important part of the group will be to conceptualize and develop proposals for funding for research and institutional development.
The first semester of the group’s formal activities (Spring 2005) might be spent discussing a diversity of approaches for studying science and technology from cultural perspectives. The readings and research directions of the group will be determined by the interests of those participating. If you are interested in participating in this group, or who would like further information, please contact the coordinators:
Arturo Escobar aescobar@email.unc.edu and Tyler Curtain tyler@unc.edu
