233021 VO Techno-Science and Society: Communicating and Interacting (2023S)

The aim of this lecture course is to give students an understanding of interactions and engagement processes between technoscience and society, and of challenges relating to these interactions. We will address the multiplicity of settings in which science and society interact, investigating the actors involved and the processes these interactions entail.

We start by mapping the central issues at stake and the actors typically involved in technoscience-society interactions. We will then engage with questions of different forms of societal participation in governing technoscientific developments as well as in knowledge-making. Next, we will scrutinize the role of values, affect and responsibility when technosciences and society engage with each other. This leads us to reflect on the politics of scientific communication and engagement, with a specific focus on governance and future making. It also means looking into issues of who holds expertise and thus power in the public arena when it comes to political decision-making, investigating the role science and technologies play in making (national) identities, and studying what responsibilities are involved in science communication and diverse forms of engagement with society. We will also explore what happens when science and law come to interact and when (big) data comes to ‘speak for’ society. Finally, we will look at risk and disaster situations and trace how communication and interaction work out there. Throughout the lecture, students will be introduced to important approaches and concepts that have been developed to address those questions. The lecture course is accompanied by a discussion class (KO 233022).