2021 Readings

The following reading list is provisional and is a recommended list of readings only to use as a resource in your current and future studies. You are not required to have read each or every article to participate in the Summer School. For legal reasons the STS Summer School cannot provide copies of these readings to all participants, however many of the readings can be readily accessed online and are freely available through your local university library.

General Readings

*Jasanoff, Sheila. “The Vanishing Square: Civic Learning in the Internet Age.” The Hastings Center Report 51, S1 (2021):S5-S9.

*Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Whale and the Reactor, pp. 19-39, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Strongly Recommended

Jasanoff, Sheila. “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science.” Minerva 41, no. 3 (2003): 223–244.

Jasanoff, Sheila and Hilton Simmet. “No Funeral Bells: Public Reason in a ‘Post-Truth’ Age.” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 5 (2017): 751-770.

Monday, August 2

STS in the World

Hurlbut and Saha

Browse Global Observatory webpage.

Jasanoff, Sheila and J. Benjamin Hurlbut. “A global observatory for gene editing.” Nature 555, 7697 (2018):435-437.

Saha, Krishanu, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Sheila Jasanoff et al. “Building Capacity for a Genome Editing Observatory: Institutional Design.” Trends in Biotechnology 36, no. 8 (2018):741-743.

Hurlbut, J. Benjamin. “Imperatives of Governance: Human Genome Editing and the Problem of Progress.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 63, no. 1 (2020):177–94.

Hilgartner and Jasanoff

(Skim) Jasanoff, Sheila, Stephen Hilgartner, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Onur Özgöde, Margarita Rayzberg. “Comparative Covid Response: Crisis, Knowledge, Politics.” Interim Report.

Jasanoff, Sheila and Stephen Hilgartner. “A Stress Test for Politics: Insights from the Comparative Covid Response Project (CompCoRe) 2020.” Verfblog, 11 May 2021.

Scientific Controversies

Felt, Irwin and Pinch

*Jasanoff, Sheila. “Controversy Studies.” In Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. London: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Hilgartner, Stephen, J. Benjamin Hurlbut and Sheila Jasanoff. “Was ‘science’ on the ballot?” Science 371, iss. 6532 (2021):893-894.

Tuesday, August 3

STS and Public Trust

Felt, Hilgartner and Joly

*Jasanoff, Sheila. “Back from the Brink: Truth and Trust in the Public Sphere.” Issues in Science and Technology XXXIII, no. 4 (2017).

Hilgartner, Stephen. “Capturing the imaginary: Vanguards, visions and the synthetic biology revolution.” In S. Hilgartner et al. (Eds.), Science and Democracy: Making Knowledge and Making Power in the Biosciences and Beyond. Taylor & Francis eBook, 2015.

Hilgartner, Stephen. “Introduction.” In Reordering Life: Knowledge and Control in the Genomics Revolution, pp. 1-24, (notes) 249-254. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2017.

Case Studies

Laurent and Stilgoe

Metz, Cade. “The Costly Pursuit of Self-Driving Cars Continues On. And On. And On.” New York Times, 24 May 2021.

Elish, Madeleine Clare. “Moral crumple zones: Cautionary tales in human-robot interaction.” Engaging Science, Technology and Society 5 (2019): 40-60.

Stilgoe, Jack. Who’s Driving Innovation? New Technologies and the Collaborative State. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Science and Activism I: Publics and their Problems

Parthasarathy with Darnovsky, Latham and Saldanha

Parthasarathy, Shobita. “Innovation Policy, Structural Inequality, and COVID-19.” Democratic Theory 7, no. 2 (2020): 104-109.

Parthasarathy, Shobita. “Breaking the Expertise Barrier: Understanding Activist Challenges to Science and Technology Policy Domains.” Science & Public Policy 37, no. 5 (2010): 355-367.

Science and Activism II: Risks and Responsibilities

Jasanoff with Esvelt, Collins and Joly

Specter, Michel. “Rewriting the Code of Life.” New Yorker, 25 December 2016.

J. Kuzma, F. Gould, Z. Brown, J. Collins, J. Delborne, E. Frow, K. Esvelt, D.
Guston, C. Leitschuh, K. Oye & S. Stauffer. “A roadmap for gene drives: using institutional analysis and development to frame research needs and governance in a systems context.” Journal of Responsible Innovation 5, sup. 1 (2017):S13-S39

Evans, Sam Weiss, & Palmer, M. J. “Anomaly handling and the politics of gene drives.” Journal of Responsible Innovation 5, sup. 1 (2018):223–242.

Wednesday, August 4

Law, Expertise and Social Justice

Ahmed, Kennedy, Sunder Rajan and Winickoff

Ahmed, Aziza. “The future of facts: The politics of public health and medicine in abortion law.” University of Colorado Law Review 92, iss. 4 (2021).

Ahmed, Aziza. “Adjudicating Risk: AIDS, Crime, and Culpability.” Wisconsin Law Review 2016, no. 3 (2016): 627-653.

Kennedy, David. “Afterword.” In A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy, pp. 281-314. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Kennedy, David. “Law and the Global Dynamics of Distribution.” In A World of Struggle: How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy, pp. 171-217. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Heywood, Mark. “Shaping, Making and Breaking the Law in the Campaign for a National HIV/AIDS Treatment Plan.” In P. Jones and K. Stokke (eds.), Democratizing Development: The Politics of Socio-Economic Rights in South Africa, pp. 181-212, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.

Winickoff, David. “The problem of epistemic jurisdiction in global governance: The case of sustainability standards for biofuels.” Social Studies of Science 47, no. 1 (2017): 7-32.

Case studies

Miller and Pfotenhauer

Merrill, Dave. “The U.S. will need a lot of land for a zero-carbon economy.” Bloomberg Green, 29 April 2021.

Erlanger, Steven and Somini Sengupta. “Europe unveils plan to shift from fossil fuels, setting up potential trade spats.” New York Times, 14 July 2021.

“Lab leak” case study

Hurlbut with Lakoff, Baker and Regalado

Hurlbut, J. Benjamin. “A science that knows no country: Pandemic preparedness, global risk, sovereign science.” Big Data and Society 4, no. 2 (2017):1-14.

Bloom, Jesse D. et al. “Investigate the origins of COVID-19.” Science 372, 6543 (2021):694.

Lakoff, Andrew. “The Routes of Viral Traffic.” Noēma, 10 June 2021.

Lakoff, Andrew. “On the Search for the Origins of COVID-19: A Forum.” Somatosphere.net, 3 March 2021.

Baker, Nicholson. “The Lab Leak Hypothesis.” New York, 4 January 2021.

Regalado, Antonio. “They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab.” MIT Tech Review, 25 June 2021.