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Areas of Research Practitioners of S&TS at Cornell work primarily on problems that cross the
traditional boundaries of sociology, philosophy, politics, and history
(whether political, social, institutional, cultural, or intellectual). With faculty
expertise ranging from the Scientific Revolution of 16th and 17th century
Europe to contemporary science and technology both in the U.S. and
abroad, the group is able to explore the integration of science and society in
the broadest senses. Research and teaching examine scientific and technological
practice and use, with special concern for the roles played by legal
and political institutions, gender, religion, and the social dynamics of scientific
communities. Questions about how scientific and technological
knowledge and expertise interact with politics and government have led to
an interest on the part of some faculty members in topics of broad theoretical
interest both within and outside S&TS, such as scientific advice, citizen
participation, science communication, and the dynamics of public policy.
Several areas of empirical research especially stand out in work by Cornell
S&TS scholars: environment, biotechnology and medicine, and military
and civilian technology. In historical as well as contemporary work on the entire range of the sciences
and technology, emphasis is placed on the production (or
“construction”) of knowledge through instruments, practices and texts, and
the fortunes of that knowledge in a variety of social arenas. This work is
based on textual and archival analysis, oral history and interviews, participant-
observation working alongside scientists themselves, visual documentation,
and electronic resources. Faculty and students draw heavily on the
university’s superb library resources which also offer an excellent set of
electronic connections to resources beyond Cornell. (For a full listing of
faculty research interests, see individual entries on the following page.) All
of this research activity is reflected in the S&TS teaching program, as evidenced
in the wide array of courses available to graduate and undergraduate
students. The Department’s undergraduate curriculum offers graduate
students excellent opportunities for honing their teaching skills, thus developing
an increasingly important professional competence. Alongside a vital concern with issues of methodology, epistemology, and
social theory, the Cornell approach to S&TS nonetheless possesses a strong
empirical focus. This means that a typical piece of doctoral work takes as
its core an episode, comparative study, or state of affairs about which one
can ask a coherent, theoretically challenging question deriving from the
analytical approaches of S&TS. The empirical material guides what can
and cannot be said, while leaving considerable space for theoretical advances. |
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