Science Studies: Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge

✍ Scribed by Sabine Maasen (editor); Matthias Winterhager (editor)

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 303
• Edition: 1. Aufl.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How can we understand the intensifying interactions of science and society? It is the interdisciplinary field called science studies that provides us with a rich inventory of analytical approaches. They help us explore science as a practice, a subsystem, a culture, and an institution. Their joint observation: Science today is part and parcel of what has come to be known as 'knowledge society'. More than ever, knowledge production and consumption are in need of incessant monitoring and sophisticated reflection.
Nine exemplary studies that inquire into, or are themselves examples of the dynamics of scientific knowledge, are included here: They cover issues as diverse as eugenics, climate research, and the role of historiography, and make use of different tools such as evolutionary reasoning, metaphor, and bibliometrics. Finally, they ponder the need for science to go public (PUS) as well as for society to regulate knowledge and to restructure universities as building blocks of our science system. Their joint message: Science studies can and should assume an active role in observing, reflecting, and communicating the intricate encounters of science and society today.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction
Science Studies. Probing the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge
Eugenics – Looking at the Role of Science Anew
A Statistical Viewpoint on the Testing of Historical Hypotheses: The Case of Eugenics
Humanities – Inquiry Into the Growing Demand for Histories
Making Sense
Bibliometrics – Monitoring Emerging Fields
A Bibliometric Methodology for Exploring Interdisciplinary, ‘Unorthodox’ Fields of Science. A Case Study of Environmental Medicine
Science Policy – Making Universities Cope with Science Today
German Universities on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century
Evolutionary Theory and the Social Sciences – Increasingly a Mutual Exchange
Culture is Part of Human Biology. Why the Superorganic Concept Serves the Human Sciences Badly
Climatology – Innovative Research Strategies in a Dynamic Field
Making Ice Talk: Notes from a Participant Observer on Climate Research in Antarctica
Metaphors – Moving Targets in the (Social) Sciences
Why Metaphor? Toward a Metaphorics of Scientific Practice
Science and the Public – Pushing PUS with Science Studies
What Kind of ‘Public Understanding of Science’ Programs Best Serve a Democracy?
Knowledge Politics – The Paradox of Regulating Knowledge Dynamics
Policing Knowledge
Indices
Subjects
Authors