S&TS Connections: Making Digital Stuff…
Phoebe Sengers just presented an interesting critique of S&TS, arguing that as we’ve been discussing it this weekend, there are several aspects which in fact obstruct S&TS from engaging with engineers and designers in HCI and other cultures. In essence, her argument is that in emphasizing itself as an academic discipline, S&TS has erected boundaries around itself, which have the effect of closing out interesting connections with other research.
This is an interesting angle, especially for the crowd gathered in this room. Cornell has been one of the pioneers of a certain flavor of Science & Technology Studies (yesterday, Sheila Jasanoff discussed the ways in which even the placement of the ampersand in S&TS as opposed to ST&S is a political move that reflects the Cornell project of building S&TS as a discipline), and most of the people here are pretty much within the core set of S&TS practice. The “Making Digital Stuff“ panel, and Phoebe more particularly, seem very interested in connecting S&TS with other kinds of research, which would have positives and negatives. On the plus side, expanding the boundary of S&TS (or rendering it a little more diffuse) would bring more researchers under the big tent, researchers who according to Phoebe and others are already reading S&TS literature and see themselves as doing resonant work. On the other hand, between the Science Wars and countless institutional battles, the erection of S&TS as a discipline itself rather than an interdisciplinary collective has been essential to the accumulation of the institutional resources and power which are essential to the practice of scholarship, both on the departmental and individual level.
Sometimes, I wonder which course S&TS will follow – will it become a real and tangible field like English or Political Science, or will it eventually become a sort of virtual discipline like Marxism, offering a way to view the world and a set of theoretical tools with which to do so, but without any of the trappings of a more explicit discipline (departments, PhD programs, endowed chairs, etc.)…