Science and Technology Studies (STS) for ELSI Research
Collection Editor(s):
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Introduction
The interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) broadly attends to how scientific and technological knowledge systems, objects, practices, and discourses shape and are shaped by historical, social, cultural, political, and economic values, norms, relations, and institutional structures. Prevailing questions and lines of inquiry that characterize this field include, for example, understanding how state apparatuses and private corporations leverage scientific knowledge to control, regulate, and stratify bodies and populations; how scientific methods, resource allocation structures, and institutional arrangements intersect with configurations of power and inequality; and how boundaries between ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ shape conceptions of health, risk, ability, and personhood. These questions are particularly pertinent to interrogating the ethical and social implications of genomic knowledge and science, which has emerged as a dominant epistemological framework, research focus, business model, and colloquial conversation topic across the globe.
STS emerged in the interwar period, as historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scientists began questioning…
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- Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 351–394). Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.
- Parthasarathy, S. (2024). The politics of expertise in genomics policy and law. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 20.
- Hilgartner, S., Prainsack, B., & Hurlbut, J. B. (2017). Ethics as governance in genomics and beyond. In U. Felt, R. Fouché, C. A. Miller, & L. Smith-Doerr (Eds.), The handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 823–851). The MIT Press.
- Parthasarathy, S. (2017). Patent politics: Life forms, markets, and the public interest in the United States and Europe. University of Chicago Press.
- Rajan, K. S. (2012). Pharmaceutical crises and questions of value: Terrains and logics of global therapeutic politics. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(2), 321–346.
- Hurlbut, J. B. (2017). Experiments in democracy: Human embryo research and the politics of bioethics. Columbia University Press.
- Eyal, G., & Medvetz, T. (Eds). (2023). The Oxford handbook of expertise and democratic politics. Oxford University Press.
- Wynne, B. (1992). Misunderstood misunderstanding: Social identities and public uptake of science. Public Understanding of Science, 1(3), 281–304.
- Irwin, A., & Wynne, B. (Eds.). (1996). Misunderstanding science? The public reconstruction of science and technology. Cambridge University Press.
- Epstein, S. (1998). Impure science: AIDS, activism, and the politics of knowledge. University of California Press.
- Brown, P., Zavestoski S., McCormick S., Mayer B., Morello-Frosch R., & Gasior Altman, R. (2004). Embodied health movements: New approaches to social movements in health. Sociology of Health & Illness, 26(1), 50–80.
- Novas, C., & Rose, N. (2000). Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual. Economy and Society, 29(4), 485–513.
- Epstein, S. (2007). Inclusion: The politics of difference in medical research. University of Chicago Press.
- Timmermans, S. (2015). Trust in standards: Transitioning clinical exome sequencing from bench to bedside. Social Studies of Science, 45(1), 77–99.
(See also other ELSIhub Collection: Who Are We Now? Genetics, Genomics, and the Question of the Human)
- Braun, L. (2014). Breathing race into the machine: The surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics. University of Minnesota Press.
- Reardon, J. (2017). The post-genomic condition. The University of Chicago Press
- Hamraie, A., & Fritsch, K. (2019). Crip technoscience manifesto. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 5(1), 1–34.
- Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology. Polity Press.
- TallBear, K. (2013). Genomic articulations of indigeneity. Social Studies of Science, 43(4), 509–533.
(See also other ELSIhub Collections: Biocolonialism and Other “Western”-Centered Bioethical Failures Onto Indigenous Peoples, The Evolution of Race and Population Identifiers in Scientific Thought and Practice)
Suggested Citation
Gordon, J. T., & Shim, J. K. (2025). Science and technology studies (STS) for ELSI research. In ELSIhub Collections. Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis (CERA). https://doi.org/10.25936/968X-E836
About ELSIhub Collections
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ELSIhub Collections are essential reading lists on fundamental or emerging topics in ELSI, curated and explained by expert Collection Editors, often paired with ELSI trainees. This series assembles materials from cross-disciplinary literatures to enable quick access to key information.