Sub themes

Fifty years ago Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions opened avenues for social studies of science and knowledge. 

The idea that science is made in communities, sharing paradigms and at times undergoing turbulent changes or revolutions, prompted a raft of studies on how science is made in practice.

After Kuhn, four challenges might be identified:

Life

After two world wars and at the start of the cold war it was perhaps unsurprisingly the physics of the atom that took centre stage in Kuhn’s analysis. Arguably, today, life and the molecular have become the key objects of attention and concern. How is life understood, enacted and negated in a post-genomic world? Just as importantly, how disparate lives are drawn together in manners that are acceptable is becoming a key challenge for society more generally.

Ethnographically and philosophically informed work draws together philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geographers and others interested in biological innovation. Researchers in the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for Genomics in Society EGENIS have been addressing the ways in which postgenomic life is studied, ordered and understood. A Biological interest group with a series of talks and seminars forms a unique link between humanities, social science and bioscience researchers at Exeter.

The challenges currently facing global life, the innovative knowledges and materials required for its survival and flourishing, are being addressed through an inter-disciplinary grouping under the acronym of FEASTS (Food, Environment, Agriculture and Science and Technology Studies). Particular concerns include the lives of animals, the transformation of plant lives through biotechnologies and the new co-dependenices of human, animal and plant lives through shared immunologies and diseases (see for example Biosecurity Borderlands).

Redistributing Expertise

If Kuhn was mostly concerned with universities, laboratories and institutions, it is clear that today science and technology are practised in a whole suite of places with often intricate connections with various publics, arts and commercial organisations. The shift from public understanding to public engagement with science and technology, and the interest in new forms of accountability and legitimacy, are testament to this.

The Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies Hub (REACT) is one of four knowledge exchange hubs awarded nationally as part of a £16million investment by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (ARHC) for knowledge exchange projects between research academics, creative industry partners and businesses

Researchers at the Centre for Science, Maths and Technology Education explore the role of ICT technologies in the development of scientific and technical expertise.

Digital Worlds

The re-organisation of living tissues, images, data and knowledges into digital form, its transferability and ownership, its distribution and the simultaneous rise of ubiquitous computing provide huge challenges for the humanities and social sciences.

The Centre for Intermedia promotes advanced transdisciplinary research in performance and the arts through collaborations between artists, academics and scientists from a range of disciplines.

Contagion is a newly funded pilot project across the sciences and social science/ humanities which aims to develop appropriate tools and methods to study rapid social, technical and biological change which result from new kinds of rapid connections made possible through digital media and through new forms of cross species traffic.

Tying together changing media to innovative life forms involves legal challenges to Intellectual Property law, human rights, bioethics, and information law, matters that are explored through the Science, culture and law (SCULE) grouping in Exeter.

Ideas to Things

Far from being solely concerned with ideas or theories, the sciences are more often characterised through their practices, their focus on objects or epistemic things. If this is true of laboratory science, it’s even more the case when science goes public. This ontological turn in science studies focuses on how matters are made in and through practices, the political struggles to make things cohere enough and the ensuing debates on what makes good knowledge and practice.

One of the most innovative and exciting developments within the field of science, technology and culture involves a shift to the making of things in practices, to ontology and to creative engagements with those practices and creative energies.

This ontological turn in social sciences is explored through theoretically informed work on a variety of themes which include architecture, music, psychiatry, education, management and robotics. One emergent theme at Exeter will include the creative challenges faced within environmental politics and practice.