3.0

Average Course Rating

Everything is involved with science, knowledge, and technology these days: from education to punishment, from communication to healthcare, from voting to investment, from policymaking to activism, and from developmental initiatives to nation building. Nobody escapes science, knowledge, and technology, but we know so little about how to deal with them, and our relationships with them are nothing but complicated. And what are science, knowledge, and technology after all? How do they—not only the “hard sciences” like physics and biology but also “social technology” or “social knowledge”—permeate every corner of our lives? This course 1) introduces how sociology studies broadly defined science, knowledge, and technology; 2) bridges the sociological literature on science, knowledge, and technology with related social scientific domains such as organization theory, economic sociology, political sociology, and inequality and intersectionality; and 3) attempts to break the “selection bias” in the literature by covering a wider range of societies (especially the institutionally “significant others” such as China and Russia) and their interactions. By doing so, this course teaches students to radically rethink science, knowledge, and technology in various sociological traditions, and provides them with tools for further investigation and engagement. This course satisfies the "reading seminar" requirement for the Moral and Political Economy major.