Does Science and Technology Studies (STS) provide innovative methodology and analytics for Social Science Research

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Amit Prasad

Does Science and Technology Studies (STS) provide innovative methodology and analytics for Social Science Research?

Science and Technology Studies, STS, which emerged in the late 1970s made several important contributions to our understanding of science and technology. In the first instance, through investigations of technoscientific practices in the laboratory, STS showed that scientific knowledge was context dependent. They also highlighted that scientific knowledge production, instead of occurring via an abstract and universal method, relied on bricolage. As such STS undercut the very idea of a universal and objective science and redefined the role of technology, some even emphasizing non-human agency. Can then STS approaches and findings provide innovative methodology and analytics for social science research? As we know, science and scientific objectivity have undergirded social science methodologies; as a result, it may seem STS approaches can lead to the abandonment of objectivity and truth. This concern becomes all the more pertinent in the context of what has been called the post-truth era and in light of widespread proliferation of "anti-science" misinformation and conspiracies, for example during the COVID pandemic. In this talk, I will show how in fact we can better understand even recent proliferation of scientific misinformation if we draw on STS methodology and analytics.

Bio Note:

Amit Prasad teaches in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he is also an affiliate faculty of the Atlanta Global Studies Center and the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. His research is aimed at excavating the history of the present in relation to post/de-colonial, transnational, and global aspects of science, technology, and medicine. In particular, he investigates how genealogies of colonialism continue to animate present day values, norms, ideologies, and practices, including in our own field. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, American Institute of Indian Studies, among others and he has published in a number of journals, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology & Human Values, Theory, Culture, and Society, Cultural Geographies, Technology & Culture. He is the author of Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT) and Science Studies Meets Colonialism (Polity). Presently, he is writing a book on his decade long study of a stem cell therapy clinic in India that is tentatively titled Miracle or Science. He is also the Treasurer of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and an editor of the journal Science, Technology & Society (Sage).