Lehre
| Introduction to Science & Technology Policy | This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the key questions and issues facing societies in the increasingly important intersection between science, technology, and public policy. Students will explore how science and technology (S&T) enter the policy-process, how public policy and political interests shape S&T, how changes in S&T pose questions that require political and public attention, and how S&T are being governed through institutions. Among the range of topics covered are: • What is the “right” relationship between science, technology, and politics? What models exist? How does (scientific) “truth” interact with (political) “power?” • How do different sources of public authority and legitimacy – politics, expertise, the law, and the market – relate to one another in the context of S&T? What conflicts exist among them? • How is political decision-making possible in light of scientific controversies and irreducible risks? • How do organizations at the interface between science and politics work? • What is the role of “the public” in S&T policy? • Why do societies fund science? How do they govern it? • Do technologies have inherent political or ethical properties? • How do we envision the world through S&T? How do these visions relate to national political cultures? • How do societies cope with unavoidable technological risk, failures, and disasters? • How much should we rely on models? What is the role of models in the policy-process? Over the course of the semester, students will acquire a range of concepts and analytic lenses from the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Public Policy that will help them to deal with complex questions surrounding the politics of science and technology, identify fundamental patterns and recurring tensions in S&T policy, and speak about them with confidence in the context of their own research. In particular, students will be encouraged to take and defend normative positions on the questions and cases they encounter during the class. Case studies will draw upon a range of S&T areas and may include, among other things climate change, environmental regulation, nuclear power, biotechnology, public health, military technology, geoengineering, and space. One of the central themes of the class and the starting point for our discussion is the notion of a “rational” policy process – i.e. one tries to find “optimal” solutions for well-defined problems based on unambiguous scientific evidence, and implements these solutions with the precision of a “social engineer.” We will contrast this notion with ideals of an open, deliberative political process that accommodates a plurality of values, opinions, and life choices. The course will trace this fundamental tension of technocratic vs. deliberative politics throughout a wide range of S&T policy problems and sites. For the final sessions of the course, we might invite 1-2 guest lecturers working in different S&T policy-domains for a first-hand exposure to ongoing debates. The class will vote on the domains from which guest speakers will be invited – options are energy policy, environmental policy, IT/internet policy, innovation policy, space policy, health policy, resource policy, among others. |
| Innovation, Society, and Public Policy | This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the key questions and issues facing policy-makers and societies at large when trying to understand, govern, and live with innovation. Students will explore how innovation enters the policy-process (and vice versa); how emerging technologies and scientific progress pose questions that require political and public attention; and how innovation is (or isn’t) being governed through political institutions. Among the range of topics covered are:
Over the course of the semester, students will acquire a range of concepts and analytic lenses from the fields of Science and Technology Studies (MCTS) and Public Policy that will help them to deal with complex questions surrounding the policy and politics of innovation. In particular, students will be encouraged to take and defend a normative position on the questions and cases they encounter during the class. For example, should the state ‘pick winners’? Should life forms be patentable? How should we asses the benefits, costs and risks of innovation? What counts as innovative activity? One of the central themes of the class is the role of politics and policy-making in and for innovation: Innovation is frequently depicted as an apolitical, evolutionary process that plays out in a quasi-deterministic fashion between (apolitical) technologies and (apolitical) markets, with little room for intervention or governance. At the same time, innovation is frequently presumed to follow some universal mechanics that can be captured in the form of abstract models and apply similarly everywhere. In this course, we will repeatedly question both premises. Please note that this is not an instrumental “how-to” class that will provide you with toolkits for how to do innovation policy and management more efficiently. While we will talk a fair bit about policy models, strategies, processes, and indicators, the principal focus of the class is putting these instrumental ways of thinking about innovation into broader socio-political perspective and take a reflexive (and at times critical) look at the innovation economy, its premises and promises, as well as its implications Master in Management and Technology |
| Innovation in the Periphery? Industrial Legacies, Economic Transitions, and the Politics of "Lost Places" | The relation between spatial dimensions and sociotechnical configurations is a key aspect in the analysis of contemporary society. We start from a simple diagnosis: Innovation as a public discourse is more prominent than ever for regions at different scales. Yet, the geography of science and technology is thoroughly unequal. Repeated failures to spur economic and technological progress in so-called developing or underperforming regions have revealed the limits of thinking about innovation in terms of quasi-universal models (e.g. innovation systems) or best practice transfer (e.g. Silicon Valley). This course introduces the students to current issues and conceptual questions around science and technology in their spatial settings from a critical social science perspective. It explores how regions bring innovation imperatives in alignment with their unique social, cultural, and political contexts. We will analyze and explain the ways in which regions imagine the purpose, meaning, and limits of innovation differently – incl. high-tech, low-tech, and social innovation. The course covers a broad range of current and controversial topics from smart cities and living labs to global economic interdependencies. Inequality and inequity will be central themes in the curriculum – on both the local and global scale. A small number of countries, regions, cities, and localities are powerful gatekeepers, which arguably generate the bulk of creative activity, while the rest is largely excluded. In the “Global South,” (post-)colonialism, extractivism, and double-edged trade regimes have given rise to contestations around notions such as “economic development.” In other parts of the world, many places have suffered from heavy industrial decline and face even more challenges in light of urgent ecological transformations. This course critically engages with notions from innovation geography that has traditionally looked at agglomerations of firms and high-tech clusters to find mechanisms through which such clusters can be stimulated. However, our aim is to unpack the very ideas of “innovation,” “success,” and “spatial distribution,” which economists and policy makers often take for granted. We will reassess these notions as ways of knowing about the world and governing it based on the tacit assumptions and value judgements that lie at the core of regional innovation models, economic data sets, visual representations (maps), and other abstractions. Those devices not only describe the world as is “out there” but – as a tool in political and economic decision-making – they shape the reality firms, policy makers, and citizens are inhabiting. |
| Responsible Research & Innovation | While RRI as term and concept became well-known with the European Framework Program Horizon 2020, the research about RRI has increased accordingly. One of the main driving forces of RRI initiatives has been to systematically integrate - in various ways - social concerns and/or stakeholders in innovation processes. In the meantime, the EU shifted its focus from RRI to the open innovation and science vision, which also lowered the attention towards RRI. However, RRI has become more than a temporary fashion. Various tools, policies and practices have been developed in recent years in order to put RRI into practice. During the seminar “RRI in the making”, we want to discuss conceptual basics of RRI and identify relevant actors and levels of action. In addition, crucial RRI tools and policies are introduced in order to discuss and analyse RRI relevant cases with regard to different stakeholder perspectives. |
| Science in a Post-Truth World: STS and the Politics of Knowledge | In recent years, it has been widely claimed that we have entered a "post-truth" era. Such claims hold that there has been a widespread, identifiable shift amongst the public away from shared commitments to markers of truth: facts, objectivity, rationality. Such arguments vary in details and sophistication, but virtually all define the issue as one of great public consequence. Without a shared commitment to truth, they claim, we will be unable to effectively function as a society by solving common problems and properly assessing collective risks, which will produce negative effects: avoidable harm, missed opportunities, delayed or foregone progress. While these concerns encompass a range of milieus - from journalism, to history, to politics - scientific truth takes on a special status amongst these discourses, whether science is held up as an exemplar or scientific knowledge is singled out as uniquely important for guiding public rationality. No shortage of pressing sociotechnical issues have been framed in terms of "post-truth": climate change, vaccine controversies, urban planning, and various other environmental, public health challenges - as well as less consequential concerns like flat-eartherism and astrology. If we want to critically consider the ways that technoscience can responsibly tackle these issues, it is crucial to attend to conceptions of truth. This course examines the notion of "post-truth" from a set of STS and related perspectives, which is to say, we will explore the role truth (is supposed to) plays in technoscience. Much STS examines the way that science is politicized - how and why it comes to matter for various social, cultural, political, economic, etc. projects. Here we will relate this to recent politicizations of truth. What different conceptions, rhetorics, mobilizations, institutionalizations of truth are at play? What are the consequences? Here we will consider competing philosophical and historically changing conceptions of (scientific) truth, and of course, the novel (but by no means uniform) conceptions on truth offered by STS. |
| What Future of Mobility? Engaging Technologies, Politics, Economic Scenarios, and Practices | This course introduces the participants to key questions and issues facing policy-makers, engineers, and societies writ-large when trying to understand, anticipate, and organize the future of mobility. In order to comprehend current developments and visions around mobility, students engage with the history of transportation as well as past and present predictions about the future. Changes in infrastructural arrangements and mobility practices have often influenced economic and cultural development. Since the industrial revolution, we cannot imagine modern social relations and everyday life without a highly sophisticated system of roads, highways, railways, sea-lanes, and air traffic. Over the course of the semester, students tackle a host of mobility-related phenomena not as isolated cases but as a constitutive part of modern technologized societies and their visions of the future. |
| Basic Theories and Methods of Science & Technology Studies | This course is designed as preliminary introduction to the field of Science and Technology Studies for RESET and STS Master's students. It is specifically oriented towards students who have limited background in the humanities and social sciences. In the course we will attend to some of the formative ideas, concepts, theories, methods, and debates underlying STS. Both conceptually and chronologically, this course will be a sort of an intellectual pre-history/early-history of STS, rather than an up-to-date overview of the current state of the field. One key objective here is to understand how STS relates to and emerges from distinct intellectual lineages and theoretical frameworks. STS was - and is - in many ways a response to certain longstanding ways of thinking about science and technology. These include historical, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical traditions (among others). In this regard, we will think about how STS stands in relation to other social science and humanities approaches, and in turn, students will also receive a broad introduction to these fields. Here we will examine some basic problems in social theory and historical analysis, as well as longstanding philosophical concerns in epistemology and even metaphysics (among others). What kinds of questions, assumptions, and explanations motivate or define different ways of knowing? And what happens when these are used to think about science and technology? |
| Immersion Project | The immersion project aims to immediately give students hands-on experience with academic research, decision-making, and communication in emerging socio-technical fields such as sustainable energy solutions, industrial biotechnology, biomedical health care, the internet of things, big data, and urban infrastructure. Students work on specific projects at the intersection of responsible research and innovation in small teams and are continually given the opportunity to apply the theoretical knowledge they acquire in the module „Technology and Society“ to their projects i.e. reflect on how different ethical, political, economic, legal and media-related dimensions of responsibility relate to their immersion projects. Master in Responsibility in Science, Engineering and Technology (RESET) |
| Master’s Blog & Science School | The popular media is the central site where public debate about pressing technoscientific issues takes place. As such, experts are increasingly called upon to enter the “media arena” and inform these disputes. Scholars of STS and related fields find themselves in a novel position here: our disciplinary perspectives arguably make us particularly well-suited to participate in these debates, as we are meant to understand the complex interactions between science, politics, and publics defining these issues. Master in Responsibility in Science, Engineering and Technology (RESET) |
| Science School | The science school will be a place for the students to present and discus individual experiences and aggregated results from their chosen field of practice to a broader audience of experts. In order to organise the science school the students will mutually introduce their field of practice (e.g. the internship) and identify overlapping topics. Those students who find overlap in their topics will form small teams of 3-4 students in order to compare and contrast their cases. During the science school they will present shortly their individual experiences (5 min for each student) and their group results (10 min). After each group presentation there will about 15 min time for discussion. The individual experiences and group results should be presented in formats which are usually practiced at scientific conferences such as poster sessions, round table discussions or normal power point-presentations. |
| STS 1: Practices and Politics of Science and Technology | This module provides a one-semester graduate-level introduction to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Students are exposed to key STS concepts, questions, and empirical examples to explore how science and technology shape, and are being shaped by social and political processes, particularly with a view towards current debates (e.g. concerning the development and risks of new technologies) and societal transformations (e.g. the transformation from knowledge societies to techno-societies). Master in Science and Technology Studies (STS) |
| Technology & Society (Economics, Politics, Ethics, Law, & Media) | Science and technology are arguably among the most powerful forces of change in contemporary societies. Yet, their creation and governance has traditionally been left to a small group of experts - scientists in the lab, engineers deciding on a product design, or regulators in remote government agencies - with little role for those who have to live with their consequences. In most cases, the broader public has remained at the receiving end of scientific of technological change. Master in Responsibility in Science, Engineering and Technology (RESET) |
| The Sustained (Un)Sustainability of Mobility: Challenges, Perspectives, and Transformation Pathways | This course familiarises students with critical perspectives on (un)sustainable mobility patterns and paradigms on mobility transitions. The course analyses mobility as an essential part of society and the economy, and discusses the challenges and opportunities that derive from this both with regard to environmental and social issues. Students learn about different perspectives on future and sustainable mobilities, and how to critically analyse them. The course discusses different approaches to mobility transitions, as well as the opportunities and challenges that they present with regard to different social, ecological and economic issues. |