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Area of Concentration: Technologies

Learning Objectives

Students will

  • develop the ability to understand and explain technologies in their historical and social context;
  • be able to understand that technologies are not created in a vacuum but build upon social forces and previous developments;
  • develop the capacity to critically reflect on the relationship between technologies and societies;
  • be able to articulate the fact that technologies are never neutral and, moving beyond techno-optimistic narratives, learn to assess how technologies can also cause harm;
  • build connections between technologies and larger social questions about problems facing the globe in the 21st century, such as the climate crisis, racial inequality, income inequality, other forms of global instability, and ethical questions surrounding surveillance and digital security;
  • be encouraged to reflect on the role that technologies can play in addressing these issues or, alternatively, exacerbating them using both primary and secondary sources;
  • provide students with the theoretical tools and hands-on skills to assess technologies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. How something works is just as important as understanding why it was designed that way or how it has been adopted across different contexts.

By promoting interdisciplinary thinking, this area of concentration aims to reflect the necessity of viewing these issues in a nuanced and complex way.

In this area of concentration, we seek to fuse the material and the social to encourage students to interrogate technologies in context. In combining the past and the present, this area of concentration fosters critical insight into how technologies shape and reshape society. Our definition of technology is much wider than merely “digital technology;” we offer   courses that see technology as a socio-material object. A technology can be tangible objects like the elevator, a nuclear reactor, genetically engineered corn, or a bridge, or intangible things like an algorithm, privacy regulations, or a number. What is key is that students understand that technology is never objective or neutral. It only exists or is used in a certain societal context, and as such, it cannot be seen as separate from social structures. In particular, within the larger remit of Contextual Studies, the Technologies area of concentration is therefore offering courses that investigate how (emerging) technologies, often presented by tech industry hype as a fix to existing societal problems from global warming to racism, can themselves reinforce or deepen social inequalities. What about the carbon footprint of streaming media, or the material pollution of technological waste, for example?

Bachelor: Students will be introduced to key concepts and methods within STS (Science and Technology Studies), and in particular its connections to crucial social issues confronting our society. They will be able to understand technology in its broadest sense, from infrastructure to object.

Master: Students gain a more theoretical background of technologies, having a more nuanced understanding of the approaches in STS (Science and Technology Studies), or other relevant fields such as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, environmental studies, media studies, or human geography.

Key Topics:

  • Social Impacts of Technology
  • Past and Future of Technologies
  • Technology as Culture
  • Technologies and the Environment
  • Ethics of Technologies

Coordination

Paula Bialski

Prof. Ph.D.

Associate Prof. Sociology of Digitisation

SHSS-HSG
Büro 52-7106
Müller-Friedberg-Strasse 8
9000 St. Gallen

Suzanne Enzerink

Prof. Ph.D.

Assistant Professor for American Studies

SHSS-HSG
Büro 51-6015
Unterer Graben 21
9000 St Gallen
north