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Imagined Futures: Environment, Industry, Health and Society

Module description

Module aims - intentions of the module

This module supports you in understanding how differently positioned actors, across cultural contexts, engage with technoscience to respond to perceived crises. Focusing on interconnected case studies of environment, industry and health, we examine what kinds of problems people look to technoscience to resolve.

By attending to whose values are implicated in specific spaces, places, and at specific times we consider what alternative versions of the world are (and are not) being imagined, and how this has reshaped life across local and global scales. We consider the unanticipated consequences and limits of these socio-technical imaginaries, asking what happens when solutions fail, and how social science might address the gap between technological optimism and pessimism.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate knowledge of the social study of technoscientific innovation
• 2. Critically examine social, political, and economic issues in the development of science and technology
• 3. Show understanding of the range of social relations and values at work in technoscientific policy and practice

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Demonstrate understanding of how cross-cultural research on science and technology can be used to study social values across time, space and place.
• 5. Evaluate a range of social science arguments around science and technology

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 6. Work collaboratively and individually to develop and apply understanding
• 7. Communicate effectively in written and oral formats

Syllabus plan

Whilst the module’s precise content may vary from year to year, it is envisaged that the syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics:

• Environmental crises & technoscientific solutions
• Promises, imaginaries & hype-cycles
• (Un)Sustainable industries
• Reimagining the human
• Technoscience, development and global inequalities
• Responsible futures
• “Futurelessness”
• Hopeful futures

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to redo the assessment(s) as defined above. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Brown, N., & Rappert, B. (2017). Contested futures: A sociology of prospective techno-science. Routledge.
• de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). U of Minnesota Press.
• Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (2015). Dreamscapes of modernity: Sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power. University of Chicago Press.
• Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2008). Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. John Wiley & Sons.
• Rajan, K. S. (Ed.). (2012). Lively capital: Biotechnologies, ethics, and governance in global markets. Duke University Press.
• Shove, E., & Spurling, N. (2013). Sustainable practices: Social theory and climate change. In Sustainable Practices (pp. 1-13). Routledge.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – College to provide hyperlink to appropriate pages

Key words search

Technoscience; Imaginaries; Promises; Hope; Anticipation; Hype