SO471      Half Unit
Technology, Power and Culture

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course aims to give students a detailed understanding of sociologically informed approaches to social studies of science, technology and medicine (STMS). It will consider how and why STMS shifted and critiqued macro-level theories of technology in post-industrial society to explore the constitutive role of objects and artefacts in social relations. In other words, we will start the course by reflecting upon sociology’s traditional neglect of the social life of things or materiality. We will then explore varying conceptual developments within the field through varying substantive case studies. These may include: power relations and social inequalities embedded in and reproduced by digital technologies; technology as a culture that shapes gendered and racialised discourses and economies, such as in robotics; technical practices that reproduce the status quo but also become sites of resistance and social changes, such as in medicine; the ways in which politics become embodied, as with surveillance technologies; and the toxicities of technologies and environmental justice. In the process we will explore the ways in which technologies instantiate power relations and hegemonic cultures, as seen with visualizing technologies and colonisation for example, all the while also being sites where politics can be reworked, resisted and changed.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is usually delivered through seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in WT.

Blog post

Students will be expected to produce an assignment of no more than 1000 words in preparation of the learning portfolio, due in WT Week 5.

Benjamin, Ruha. (2019) Race After Technology. London: Polity Press
Sara Shostak (2013). Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health
Wajcman, J. (2004) Technofeminism.
Turkle, Sherry. ([2011]2017) Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from one another.
Haraway DJ (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Crawford, Kate. (2022) Atlas of AI. Power, Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press. Introduction and Chapter 3.
Franklin, Sarah. (2013) Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lupton, Debora. (2019) Data Selves. London: Wiley.
Vora, Kalindi. (2015) Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourcing Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kelty, Chris. (2019) The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Radin, Joanna & Emma Kowal. (2017) (Eds.) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vora, K and Atanasoski, N. (2019) Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures.

Portfolio (100%, 5000 words) in May

Learning Portfolio (100%) of no more than 5000 words in total, with words limits for each component.

Attendance at all classes and submission of all set coursework is required.