Courses in Science and Technology Studies at Williams College
Courses offered 2018/2019:
SCST 101 (S) Science, Technology, and Human Values
Crosslistings: HSCI101 / SOC201 / SCST101
This course offers an introduction to science and technology studies, or STS. A radically interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the roots of STS stretch through the philosophy, history, and sociology/anthropology of science and technology. Students will become acquainted with major STS schools, methodological strategies and research trajectories through intensive reading and analysis of classical and contemporary works in the field. Considerable attention will be devoted to exploring the nature of science and technology, their relationships to and interactions with one another, society and the natural world, and the influences these interactions exert in shaping what humans value. A fundamental goal of the course is to cultivate awareness and understanding of the social organization of technology and scientific knowledge production, and the technoscientific structuring of modern social life broadly. The course as such is aimed at attracting from all divisions those students who are intellectually adventurous and inclined to think critically about the place and prominence of science and technology in the modern world.
Spring 2019
SEM Section: 01 MWF 8:30 am – 9:45 am Grant Shoffstall
SCST 153 (S) Androids, Cyborgs, Selves (WI)
Crosslistings: ENGL153 / SCST153
In this expository writing course, we will analyze and argue about how near-human or partly human bodies and intelligences are imagined in fiction and film. When do these bodies, these intelligences, improve the worlds in which they appear, and when do they threaten them? How are they gendered, how are they raced, and why? And what do they want? As we will see, authors in different cultural and technological contexts have imagined not-quite-human selves for different ends and in radically different ways. This course focuses on articulating these differences and developing significant claims about them in clear, argumentative prose. We will spend half or more of our class time discussing and practicing writing skills. Texts may include R.U.R., “The Bicentennial Man,” Blade Runner, Metropolis (Suite 1: The Chase), and Her.
Spring 2019
SEM Section: 01 TR 8:30 am – 9:45 am Ezra D. Feldman
SCST 236 (F) Automatic Culture: From the Mechanical Turk to A.I.
Crosslistings: HSCI236 / SCST236
Using literary writing and visual representation as our primary points of entry, we will study the history of automation, exploring its effects as idea and as material implementation upon public and private spheres, craftsmen and courts, wage-laborers, artists, and inventors. Readings from such authors as E.T.A. Hoffman, Kurt Vonnegut, Roald Dahl, and Sydney Padua will be supplemented with studies in the history and historiography of technology. The objects we examine will be as different from one another as the dulcimer-playing android presented as a gift to Marie Antoinette, IBM’s Deep Blue, and contemporary devices like Amazon’s Echo.
Fall 2018
SEM Section: 01 TR 8:30 am – 9:45 am Ezra D. Feldman
SCST 250 (S) Environmental Justice (DPE)
Crosslistings: ENVI250 / SCST250
How are local and global environmental problems distributed unevenly according to race, gender, and class? What are the historical, social and economic structures that create unequal exposures to environmental risks and benefits? And how does inequity shape the construction and distribution of environmental knowledge? These are some of the questions we will take up in this course, which will be reading and discussion intensive. Through readings, discussions, and case studies, we will explore EJ in both senses. Potential topics include: toxics exposure, food justice, urban planning, e-waste, unnatural hazards, nuclearism in the U.S. West, natural resources and war, and climate refugees. Occasionally, community leaders, organizers, academics, and government officials will join the class to discuss current issues.
Spring 2019
SEM Section: 01 W 1:10 pm – 3:50 pm Laura J. Martin
SCST 301 (F) Social Construction (DPE)
Crosslistings: WGSS302 / REL301 / COMP315 / SOC301 / SCST301
“Social construction” can often seem like the great collegial insight. By now, you’ve all heard that categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are in some sense not part of nature, but instead are created and maintained socially or culturally. The idea of social construction has been vital to critical race theory and queer theory, and, in this course, we will push ourselves into philosophy of science to see whether or not these same insights apply to everything. If we know that “Whiteness,” “heterosexuality,” and “masculinity,” for instance, are all socially constructed, we will ask if the same is true of “electrons,” “money,” “the solar system,” and “climate change.” Can it be that all of our reality is socially constructed? Or does social construction have limits? If so, what are they? We will also ask more fundamental questions, such as: What does it mean to say something is socially constructed? How does social construction relate to claims that an aspect of the world is “real” or “not real?” Is social construction a theory about language, power, culture, societies, human perceptions, or the limits of science? What kind of political, ethical, ontological, or epistemological work do theories of social construction do? We will begin with different accounts of the social construction of race, gender, and sexuality. In the second part of the course, we will dig deeper into philosophical debates about social construction as such. Then we will explore constructionism about natural science. In the last part of the course, we will change gears and explore look at cutting-edge work in the theory of social science aimed at explaining the construction and ontology of social worlds. The class will culminate in a project in which students will put their social construction theories into practice.
Fall 2018
SEM Section: 01 W 1:10 pm – 3:50 pm Jason Josephson Storm
SCST 401 (F) Cold War Technocultures
Crosslistings: SOC363 / SCST401
In this seminar students will pursue sociohistorical analyses of Cold War American culture(s) by attending to key points of intersection between politics, aesthetics, and major technoscientific developments during this period. Part I will focus principally on the emergence of the computer and its role in shaping American infrastructure and styles of thought aimed at Soviet “containment.” We will trace the historical threads connecting MIT’s “Whirlwind” computer project and the SAGE continental air defense system; nuclear wargaming at the RAND Corporation and the aesthetics of “thinking the unthinkable”; the science of cybernetics and the prospect of automation; and ultimately the role of computation, intermedia, and systems logic in perpetrating the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Part II will take up the Cold War space race–from Luna 2, Sputnik I, and Yuri Gagarin to Projects Mercury, Gemini, and the Apollo moon landing. Within this context we will also consider the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report; plans backed by NASA for the industrialization and colonization of outer space; and the place of science-fiction as a Cold War aesthetic (print, televisual, cinematic). Part III, finally, will explore key moments of conflict, resistance, appropriation, and unintended consequences of Cold War technoscientific developments, among them antipsychiatry and environmentalism; Project Cybersyn, an infrastructural casualty of the U.S./CIA-backed Chilean coup of 1973; the New Left, the American counterculture, new social movements, and the countercultural roots of new media and neoliberalism.
Fall 2018
SEM Section: 01 W 1:10 pm – 3:50 pm Grant Shoffstall