The STS Summer School @ Harvard is a three-year pilot program to develop a curriculum for students from a broad range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds. The aim of this initiative is to train future policy professionals, reporters, and academic analysts in the basics of how to understand public technical controversies, the production of doubt and ignorance, the ethics of new and emerging technologies, and public engagement in science and technology policy.
The program introduces students to key concepts from controversy studies, illustrative case studies, and background readings. Students are equipped to understand the social and institutional conditions that underwrite the credibility of expertise and to grasp why these sources of trust are currently under strain. They learn to better assess and evaluate expert claims and deal with public controversies relevant to scholarly and professional objectives.
We invite applications from doctoral students and postdocs in STS and related fields, as well as from young professionals in the tech industry, public policy, and the media. Applicants should demonstrate a strong commitment to investigating the interconnections between science, technology and society — though we encourage applicants from all disciplinary, professional and personal backgrounds to apply.
An STS Summer School Parable
The parable of the six blind men and the elephant has come to stand for the partiality of human understanding and of expert vision in particular. A well-known 19th century poem by the American poet and satirist John Godfrey Saxe popularized the fable in the West. Saxe called attention to themes familiar to contemporary STS scholars (e.g., the incompleteness of expert knowledge, the sources of epistemic conflict, and the constraining effects of prior knowledge and experience):
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!
MORAL
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
The parable continues to resonate with today’s crises of knowledge and expertise. In the Prologue to their interim report on policy responses to Covid-19, for example, CompCoRe project leaders Jasanoff, Hilgartner, et al. draw attention to similar disputation about the causes of the pandemic.
Funding
The STS Summer School is jointly hosted by the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School and the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard Kennedy School, with the generous support of the Hewlett Foundation.
Contact
STS Summer School @ Harvard
Program on Science, Technology and Society
79 John F. Kennedy Street
Cambridge MA, 02138
sts.harvardsummer@gmail.com
1-617-496-0807
