In Fall 2020 I took the introductory course STS C200 at UC Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. The course made use of three learning techniques: reading, journaling, and discussing.
With some hesitation, I’m sharing my reading journal. Some excuses/disclaimers: we were reading fairly quickly (each entry marks one week), and entries were limited to 2-3 pages. I may have missed some key points and messed up the ones I haven’t, but I know I’ve learned a whole lot in the process.
Warm thanks to my fellow students who were wonderful partners in discussion, and to Massimo Mazzotti for patiently guiding us through it all. It was a great experience.
Politics and Historiography.
- The German Ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1845-46).
- The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia, Boris Hessen (1931).
- From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, Alexandre Koyré (1957).
Early Sociology of Science.
- The Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber (1935).
- The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Robert Merton (1973).
- The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason, Pierre Bourdieu (1975).
Early Sociology of Science (cont.).
- Conservative Thought, Karl Mannheim (1925).
- Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Ludwig Fleck (1935).
Revolutions and Negotiations.
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (1962).
- Proofs and Refutations, Imre Lakatos (1976).
The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK).
- What is a Social Fact?, Emile Durkheim (1895).
- Wittgenstein and Mannheim on the Sociology of Mathematics, David Bloor (1973).
- Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge, Barry Barnes and David Bloor (1982).
- Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, David Bloor (2004).
History of Science and Social Constructivism.
- Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Scientific Life, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985).
- Galileo the Emblem Maker, Mario Biagioli (1990).
The Social Construction of Technology.
- Do Artifacts have Politics?, Langdon Winner (1980).
- The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, Trevor Pinch (1987).
- An Equation and Its Worlds: Bricolage, Exemplars, Disunity and Performativity in Financial Economics, Donald MacKenzie (2003).
Laboratory Studies.
- Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979).
- The House of Experiment in Seventeenth Century England, Steven Shapin (1988).
Actor-Network Theory.
- Science in Action, Bruno Latour (1987).
- Institutional ecology, ‘Translations’, and Boundary Objects, Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer (1989).
Decentering STS.
- Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway (1988).
- The Zimbabwe Bush Pump, Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol (2000).
- Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin (2019).
Algorithmic Life.
- Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci (2017).
- Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya U. Noble (2018).
STS, Expertise, Public Discourse.
- Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge, Steven Epstein (1996).
- Merchants of Doubt: How A Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (2010).