Group Coordinator: Gonçalo D. Santos (CIAS / Sci-Tech Asia)
The main focus of the Technoscience, Society, and Environment research group is to promote critical analysis and public debate on contemporary issues lying at the intersection between technoscience, society, and environment.
Group activities cover important topics that bring together multiple fields across the sciences and the humanities:
- Social-Cultural Anthropology
- Medical Anthropology / Environmental Anthropology
- Science and Technology Studies (STS)
- Critical Humanities
- Anthropocene Studies
We live in age of increasing social and environmental uncertainties that are often mediated by developments in technoscience. The term “technoscience” refers to the increasing interwovenness of science and technology in the fabric of the contemporary world. There are today few aspects of everyday life and social space-time that are not shaped by technoscientific developments in artificial intelligence, computer science, genetic medicine, biotechnology, environmental engineering, architectural design, urban planning, among others. At the same time, there are increasing anxieties about the impact of many of these technoscientific developments in society. Starting from the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of science, technology, and society (STS) studies has challenged deeply entrenched ideas about the autonomy of science and technology. This focus on the interplay between technoscience, on the one hand, and society and politics, on the other hand, is crucial to make sense of some of the tensions shaping contemporary societies, and it can be productively combined with new trends in environmental studies to initiate a wider discussion on the impact of global technoscientific modernity on local and planetary ecosystems. This group seeks to promote critical analysis and public debate focusing on the larger forces and inequalities shaping contemporary experiences of environmental degradation and struggles of resilience, adaptation, and environmental justice.
The group brings together scholars from the multidisciplinary field of anthropology and more generally the human sciences, encouraging the cross-fertilization of research perspectives from different areas in the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. The group includes researchers and students who are developing fieldwork-based projects in different parts of the world and who are working with diverse human and non-human populations on issues lying at the intersection between technoscience, society, and environment. Research topics include some of the most pressing issues of our time: How is the current global system of economic production and consumption leading to environmental degradation and shrinking levels of biodiversity? How are various human populations around the world affected by increasing anthropogenic environmental uncertainties and forces of climate change? How are globally circulating scientific models of pandemic management keeping societies safe and at what costs? How are algorithms changing the way welfare systems operate and under what kinds of regimes of inequality? How is virtual space, including social media, changing social connections and political deliberation, including the way we communicate and bond with one another? How are processes of automation changing the way labor is organized and knowledge is produced? How should recent developments in genome editing be governed to safeguard human dignity and integrity? What kinds of ethical considerations should be in place in biomedical research involving human remains or human tissue samples? How do the arts, and the built environments created by artists and designers, help us to destabilize common sense and collectively reflect on the way forward? How can we open up dialogues on these topics within an ethical framework of social responsibility?
Putting forward a critique of modernist assumptions that place humanity at the center of the world, the group approaches the unfolding of human sociality and technoscientific modernity in the context of larger shared ecologies and multispecies entanglements. This multispecies approach can be applied at multiple scales, both spatially and temporally. Focusing on multiple spatial scales is a good way to move beyond the limitations of place-specific perspectives and to show how local histories are connected and interwoven in larger fields of interdependence and larger communities of risk and fate. Focusing on multiple temporal scales is a good way to avoid the trap of presentism and to show how present-day developments are linked to larger historical and evolutionary processes. The group has a strong transnational component that brings together researchers and students working on different parts of the world, North and South, East and West. Adopting a transnational perspective on contemporary issues places us in a better position to question prevailing assumptions, to explore new conceptualizations, and to imagine how the world might be otherwise. We want to develop a better understanding of contemporary intersections between technoscience, society, and environment, and we want to foster public discussions that will prove helpful in research as well as in applied developments within academia and civil society in Europe and globally. This amounts to creating a new collaborative approach to the links between technoscience, society, and environment, and in this new collaborative paradigm of knowledge creation, there is plenty of scope for more horizontal and inclusive debates with multiple stakeholders including lay citizens and non-human actors like forests, on the major social and environmental challenges facing contemporary collectives.
Coordinator
Researchers
Researchers (PhD Students)
Collaborators
Available soon.
Available soon.