This book introduces the term of TechnoScienceSociety to focus on the ongoing technological reconfigurations of science and society. It aspires to use the breadth of Science and Technology Studies to perform a critical diagnosis of our contemporary culture. Instead of constructing technology as society’s “other”, the book sets out to highlight the both complex and ambivalent entanglements of technologies, sciences and socialities. It provides some tentative steps towards a diagnosis of a society in which individuals and organizations address themselves, their pasts, presents, futures, hopes and problems in technoscientific modes. Technosciences redesign matter, life, self and society. However, they do not operate independently: Technoscientific practices are deeply socially and culturally constituted. The diverse contributions highlight the ongoing technological reconfigurations of rationalities, infrastructures, modes of governance, and publics. The book aims to inspire scholars and students to think and analyze contemporary conditions in new ways drawing on, and expanding, the toolkits of Science and Technology Studies.

​The exploration of ways to conceptualize the shaping of the present by socio‐technical futures is the aim of this volume. Therefore it brings together contributions from Science and Technology Studies and Technology Assessment, which focus all on the question how socio-technical images of the future shape present processes of innovation and transformation starting from empirical case studies and generalizing specific findings or by tackling conceptual questions from the outset. A white paper of 23 authors, which aims to sensitize researchers and practitioners completes the volume.

This open access book examines the role of pilot and demonstration projects as crucial devices for conducting innovation in the context of the energy transition. Bridging literature from sustainability transitions and Science and Technology Studies (STS), it argues that such projects play a crucial role, not only in shaping future energy and mobility systems, but in transforming societies more broadly. Pilot projects constitute socio-technical configurations where imagined future realities are materialized. With this as a backdrop, the book explores pilot projects as political entities, focusing on questions of how they gain their legitimacy, which resources are mobilized in their production, and how they can serve as sites of public participation and the production of energy citizenship. The book argues that such projects too often have a narrow technology focus, and that this is a missed opportunity. The book concludes by critically discussing the potential roles of research and innovation policy in transforming how such projects are configured and conducted.

This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised. Scholarly responses to post-truth have not fully addressed these entanglements, treating them either as something to be morally condemned or as accusations against which scholars have to defend themselves (for having somehow contributed to it). Aiming for wider problematisations, the authors of this book use post-truth to open scholarly and societal assumptions to critical scrutiny. Contributions are both conceptual and empirical, dealing with topics such as: the role of truth in public; deep penetrations of ICTs into main societal institutions; the politics of time in neoliberalism; shifting boundaries between fact – value, politics – science, nature – culture; and the importance of critique for public truth-telling. Case studies range from the politics of nuclear power and election meddling in the UK, over smart technologies and techno-regulation in Europe, to renewables in Australia. The book ends where the Corona story begins: as intensifications of Modernity’s complex dynamics, requiring new starting points for critique.

This book analyzes scientific problems within the history of physics, engineering, chemistry, astronomy and medicine, correlated with technological applications in the social context. When and how is tension between disciplines explicitly practised? What is the conceptual bridge between science researches and the organization of technological researches in the development of industrial applications? The authors explain various ways in which the sciences allowed advanced modelling on the one hand, and the development of new technological ideas on the other hand. An emphasis on the role played by mechanisms, production methods and instruments bestows a benefit on historical and scientific discourse: theories, institutions, universities, schools for engineers, social implications as well. Scholars from different traditions discuss the emergency style of thinking in methodology and, in theoretical perspective, aim to gather and re-evaluate the current thinking on this subject. It brings together contributions from leading experts in the field, and gives much-needed insight into the subject from a historical point of view. The volume composition makes for absorbing reading for historians, philosophers and scientists.

This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.

Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

This interdisciplinary book investigates the problematization of global challenges in world politics by analyzing what they are and how they come to be. Offering a conceptual framework, including four modes of construction—universalizing, bundling, upscaling, and creating urgency—this book provides a heuristic method for understanding how the process of rendering an issue a “global challenge” unfolds. It examines the role of the global challenges discourse, which may either reinforce or challenge the dominant orders of world politics, such as the capitalist market-based system and the liberal international order. As a consequence, the global challenges discourse facilitates the emergence of new actors and policy fields. The book will be of interest to students, academics, and practitioners of global governance, international organizations, and, more broadly, international political economy and international relations.

Over the last decade or so, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has become an intellectually dynamic interdisciplinary arena. Concepts, methods, and theoretical perspectives are being drawn both from long-established and relatively young disciplines. From its origins in philosophical and political debates about the creation and use of scientific knowledge, STS has become a wide and deep space for the consideration of the place of science and technology in the world, past and present. The Routledge Handbook of Science, Technology and Society seeks to capture the dynamism and breadth of the field by presenting work that pushes the reader to think about science and technology and their intersections with social life in new ways. The interdisciplinary contributions by international experts in this handbook are organized around six topic areas: embodiment consuming technoscience digitization environments science as work rules and standards This volume highlights a range of theoretical and empirical approaches to some of the persistent – and new – questions in the field. It will be useful for students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities, including in science and technology studies, history, geography, critical race studies, sociology, communications, women’s and gender studies, anthropology, and political science.

In this volume, fifteen scholars from the United States, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Colombia discuss the social implications of new technologies. Their essays address the cultural worlds that crystallize around technologies, the challenges to democracy that they pose, and the responsibility of modern technology for forcing a public response to new social and moral issues. Three themes define the three sections into which the volume is divided: "New Worlds," "New Technologies," and "New Issues." The essays in the section "New Worlds" range from optimism that new technologies will produce a better world than that of 1992, through a nonjudgmental discussion of the transformation of our "lifeworld" that new technologies are effecting, to deep concern for the viability of the world that modern technology has already created. In "New Technologies," the focus is on political responses to modern technologies. The authors in this section see the challenge to understanding and controlling our technological world in reshaping existing relations of social power and authority, and in creating new institutions more adequate to the sociopolitical realities of the process of technological innovation. While the contributors in the first two sections of the volume argue that broad changes in values and institutions are preconditions of a more beneficent relationship among people, nature, and technology, those in the section "New Issues" adopt narrower, more specific, viewpoints. Their essays address the political values underlying the Deep Ecology movement, the ethics of military technologies, the capacity of democratic institutions for a public role in setting technology policies, and science and technology literacy mechanisms. Collectively, these essays reflect the growing international concern with the role played by technological innovation in a rapidly changing world, and they point toward the formulation of concrete political platforms for informed social responses to the innovation process.