Introducing computer scientists to Science, Technology, and Society studies.
Introducing a 2018 summer reading group with the purpose of introducing CMU Computer Science students to works from Science, Technology, and Society studies.
Since we've encountered some confusion: While STS deals with the interaction of science, technology, and the social, this is not an applied ethics group. The readings are closer to philosophy, history, and cultural studies than the type of professional ethics literature we usually encounter in CS. That said, please reach out if you'd like to start a group for ethics; we are willing to support you.
If you're committed to reading 5-25pgs per week, willing to participate in discussion, and are in Pittsburgh this summer, we're looking for you!
Our reading schedule:
Date
Reading
Comments
June 5, 2018
Agre, Philip E. "Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI." Bridging the Great Divide: Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work. 1997. [pdf]
June 12
Law, John, “STS as Method” in Hackett, E. J., Amsterdamska, O., Lynch, M., & Wajcman, J. (2008). The handbook of science and technology studies (No. 3rd). The MIT Press. [pdf]
June 19
"Preface" from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,Objectivity, Zone Books, 2007 and "Introduction" and "Cognitive Interests" sections from Donald MacKenzie, "Statistical Theory and Social Interests: A Case-Study",Social Studies of Science, SAGE, 1978.
June 26
Marx, Leo. "‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept." Social Research (1997): 965-988.
July 3
Aronova, Elena. "The politics and contexts of Soviet science studies (Naukovedenie): Soviet philosophy of science at the crossroads." Studies in East European Thought 63.3 (2011): 175. [pdf]
July 10
Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-1939,” in Biagioli, The Science Studies Reader.
Professor Jay Aronson from the History dept. will be visiting to help us work through this one!
July 17
Arthur L. Stinchcombe. 2001. When Formality Works. University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1-3
Read the section headings for all 3 chapters & choose the one you're most interested in.
July 24
Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme. "ASCII Imperialism." In Standards and their Stories: How quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life, ed. Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. 2009. and Lily Irani et al. "Postcolonial Computing: A Lens on Design and Development." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10), 2010.
July 31
Winner, Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1, 1980, pp. 121–136. www.jstor.org/stable/20024652.
Aug 7
Robert Frodeman and Jonathan Parker. 2009. Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact: The National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Criterion and the Question of Peer Review. Social Epistemology 23, 3-4 (July 2009), 337–345.
Future of Computing Academy. 2018. It’s Time to Do Something: Mitigating the Negative Impacts of Computing Through a Change to the Peer Review Process. ACM.Link.
Deborah G. Johnson and Jameson M. Wetmore, “STS and Ethics: Implications for Engineering Ethics,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (MIT, 2008). [pdf]
Aug 14
Joan Donovan, danah boyd. "Stop the Presses! Moving from Strategic Silence to Strategic Amplification in a Networked Media Ecosystem." Work in Progress.
