This course module introduces students to the Science Technology and Society (STS) interdisciplinary field. First, students are introduced to select concepts such as the Social Construction of Technology, Technopolitics, and Sociotechnical Imaginaries. Then these concepts are applied to selected case studies that pertain to concrete aspects of the relation between society and technological and scientific change. Such aspects include: (a) Production technologies. (b) Environmental technologies. (c) Transport technologies. (d) Energy technologies. (e) Information Computation and Telecommunication Technologies. (f) Biotechnologies.

The lectures are also based on 19th and 20th century Greek and international history. Students are introduced to select narratives and debates from labour history, economic history, social history and diplomatic history.

All lectures are designed to produce debates on current problems and challenges. This includes the discussion of topics such as (a) Geopolitics and International relations (b) Class, Racial and Gender discrimination (c) State policy (d) Emigration. Such topics come to the fore in every lecture via selected abstracts taken from the daily press, and are discussed in conjunction with their often obscured technical aspects.

The contents of the module are outlined as follows:

1. Introduction
2. Introductory Concepts I

• Is “technology” a “hazardous concept”?
• Technological determinism
• Large technological systems

2. Introductory concepts II

• The Social Construction of Technology
• Technology in use
• Actor network theory
• Technopolitics
• Socio-technical imaginaries

1. First industrial revolution
2. Machinery, workers and worldviews in an age of cotton

• The steam engine, the spinning mule, the watch
• The historicity of the concept of “time”
• Disassociating “labour” from “nature”
• On “moral economy” and “technological revolutions”

1. Second Industrial Revolution
2. Taylorism

• Management, engineering, and the organization of work – a history
• Computation and the workplace
• Taylorism today – software platforms and “smart” technologies

5. Fordism

• Origins of the assembly line
• Spaces of production and spaces of reproduction of labour power
• The emergence of a “fordist” world
• Immigration during a technological revolution: from the early 20^th to the early 21^st

6. Transport

• The early twentieth century transport revolution
• The emergence of “geopolitics”
• Technological accidents
• Social ramifications of the “self-driving” car
• Geopolitics and transport technologies today: the Chinese “belt and road” initiative.

7. Energy I – The oil century

• The transition from coal to oil – Energy and geopolitics
• The rise of petroleum geology – A deeply political discipline
• Oil in the World Wars of the 20^th century
• Hydrocarbon exploration, energy transition and war in the 21^st century – The Greek case

1. Third Industrial Revolution
2. Energy II – Nuclear

• Material configurations and state policies
• International relations in the Cold War
• Experts and expertise – technopolitics
• Contemporary notions of “nuclear” – Ramifications of the AUKUS treaty

9. Information I – Calculation and computation

• Computation and labour
• Computing in the Cold War
• The historicity of “computing”
• Social gender and technology

10. Environmental challenges

• The emergence of the “environment” – another “hazardous concept”?
• Energy technologies and the environment
• Energy transitions – geopolitics and environmental concerns in the Ukranian war and beyond

1. Towards a fourth industrial revolution
2. Information II – Artificial intelligence and big data

• Artificial intelligence and the “end of work”
• Historical and philosophical dimensions of the Turing machine
• Video games –between work and the reproduction of labour power
• A world of “big data”

12. Biomedical technologies

• “Genealogy”, “power”, “knowledge” and “technology” according to Michel Foucault
• “Performativity”, as seen in the case of anti-epidemic masks
• The Intensive Care Unit: History of a peculiar “black box”
• Technology and expertise in the recent pandemic

13. Wasn’t the future wonderful? History, technology and futurism in times of crises

• Course overview

Past and future of the relation between society and technology

Upon successful completion of the course, students are expected to:

(1)     Understand and use select concepts from the STS interdisciplinary field, with special emphasis on Gabrielle Hecht’s “technopolitics”, Thomas Hughes’ “large technological systems” and David Edgerton’s “technology in use”.

(2)     Realize the historicity of the relation between technology and society.

(3)     Use this understanding to approach a wide range of contemporary challenges, including (a) “Artificial intelligence” and “technological unemployment”, (b) Immigration, (c) Environmental degradation, (d) “Resource wars” and state conflict, (e) Energy transitions, (f) The “biomedical revolution”.

(4)     Demonstrate awareness of possible social implications of their research.

(5)     Discern new and/or open social issues or challenges when they arise in their professional conduct.

None

Before each lecture, students are required to read a chosen article and answer specific questions that have been posed by the instructor beforehand. Each student thus prepares and delivers a 2-page essay before each lecture. The instructor reads the students’ essays before the lecture and uses them to organize a discussion. The final grade is the average of the grades given to these weekly short essays.

The sources listed below are divided by lecture. The first source cited in each section is required reading (for books, this means the reading of selected chapters). Students then answer specific questions, related to the “required reading” in a 2-page essay that is delivered to the Instructor before the lecture. The rest of the sources are used by the instructor to inform the lecture and are accessible to students who are interested in further reading suggestions.

1. Introduction
2. Introductory Concepts I

• Leo Marx, “‘Technology’: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept”, Social Research, 64, No. 3, 1997.
• Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes & Trevor Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, MIT Press, 1993, (¹1987).
• Merrit Roe Smith & Leo Marx (eds.), Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, MIT Press, 1994.

2. Introductory Concepts II

• Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen, “Authority, Political Machines, and Technology’s History”, in Gabrielle Hecht and Michael Thad Allen (eds.), Technologies of Power: Essays in Honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes, MIT Press, 2001.
• Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, 1987.
• Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim, “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea”, Minerva, 47, 2009.
• David Edgerton, ‘From Innovation to Use: Ten Eclectic Theses on the Historiography of Technology’, History and technology: An International Journal, 16, No. 2, 1999.

1. First industrial revolution
2. Machinery, workers and worldviews in an age of cotton

• Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, MIT Press, 2007.
• Sven Beckert, Cotton: A Global History, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
• P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past & Present, No. 38, 1967.
• Edward Jones-Imhotep, “The Ghost Factories: Histories of Automata and Artificial Life”, History and Technology, 36, No.1, 2020.

1. Second Industrial Revolution
2. Taylorism

• Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, 1974.
• Merrit Roe Smith, “Industry, Technology and the ‘Labor Question’ in 19th-Century America: Seeking Synthesis”, Technology and Culture, 32, no. 3, 1991.
• Thomas J. Misa, “The Reform of Factories, 1895-1915”, in Thomas J. Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
• Christos Karampatsos, «‘Μαγικό Εργαλείο αυτός ο Υπολογιστικός Κανόνας!’: Η Τεχνοπολιτική Διάσταση και η Ιστοριογραφική Σημασία της κατά Φρέντερικ Τέιλορ ‘Επιστημονικής Οργάνωσης της Εργασίας» [A Magic Instrument that Slide Rule! On the Technopolitical Dimension and Historiographical Significance of Frederick W. Taylor’s ‘Scientific Management’], Nefsis, 27-28, 2021.
• Allessandro Delfanti and Bronwyn Frey, “Humanly Extended Automation or the Future of Work Seen through Amazon Patents”, Science, Technology and Human Values, 20, 2020.

5. Fordism

• David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, John Hopkins University Press, 1984.
• Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921, State University of New York, 1981.
• Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, Basic Books, 1983.
• David Nye, America’s Assembly Line, MIT Press, 2013.

6. Transport

• Christos Karampatsos, “Efrosini Crossing Syngrou Avenue: Automobile Accidents and the Introduction of the Automobile in Greece, 1900-1911”, History of Technology, 33, 2017.
• Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History”, The Geographical Journal, 23, No. 4, Apr, 1904.
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, University of California Press, 2014.
• Ulrich Beck, “From Industrial Society to the Risk Society: Questions of Survival, Social Structure and Ecological Enlightenment”, Theory, Culture and Society, 9, 1992.
• Graeme Gooday, Domesticating Electricity: Technology, Uncertainty and Danger, 1880-1914, Pickering and Ghatto, 2008.

7. Energy I – The oil century

• Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Money, Oil and Power, Simon and Schuster, 2008, (¹1991).
• Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Verso, 2011
• Philippe Le Billion, The Geopolitics of Resource Wars, Frank Cass, 2005.
• Christos Karampatsos, Spyros Tzokas and Giorgos Velegrakis, “The Endless Potentiality: A Century and a Half of Greek Oil Aspirations (and what often becomes of them)”, Journal of Energy History,

1. Third Industrial Revolution
2. Energy II – Nuclear

• Gabrielle Hecht, “Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy in Postwar France”, Technology and Culture, 35, No. 4, 1994.
• Stathis Arapostathis, Aspasia Kandaraki, Yannis Garyfallos and Aristotle Tympas, «‘Tobacco for Atoms’: Nuclear Politics, Ambivalences and Resistances about a Reactor that was Never Built», History of Technology, 33, 2017.
• Maria Rentetzi, “Gender, Science and Politics: Queen Frederika and Nuclear Research in Post-war Greece”, Centaurus, 51, 2009

9. Information I – Calculation and computation

• Jennifer Light, “When Computers Were Women”, Technology and Culture, 40, No. 3, 1999.
• Aristotle Tympas, Calculation and Computation in the Pre-electronic Era: The Mechanical and Electrical Ages, Springer, 2017.
• Andrew Warwick, “The Laboratory of Theory, or What’s Exact About the Exact Sciences?”, in M. Norton Wise (ed.), The Values of Precision, Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Lorraine Daston, “Calculation and the Division of Labour, 1750-1950”, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 62, 2017.

10. Environmental challenges

• Joel Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, The University of Akron Press, 1996.
• George Kennan, “To Prevent a World Wasteland: A Proposal”, Foreign Affairs, 48, No. 3, Apr. 1970.
• Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement, Island Press, 2005.
• Frank Uekoetter, “The Strange Career of the Ringelmann Smoke Chart”, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 106, 2005

1. Towards a fourth industrial revolution
2. Information II – Artificial intelligence and big data

• Colin Garvey, “Broken Promises and Empty Threats: The Evolution of AI in the USA, 1956-1996”, Technologystories.org, https://doi.org/10.15763/jou.ts.2018.03.16.02, 2018.
• Christine von Oertzen, “Machineries of Data Power: Manual versus Mechanical Census Compilation in Nineteenth-Century Europe”, Osiris, 32, 2017.
• Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, MIT Press, 1992.
• Bruno Strasser and Paul Edwards, “Big Data Is the Answer… But What is the Question?”, Osiris, 32, 2017.
• Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Public Affairs, 2019.
• Simon Schaffer, ‘OK Computer’, in Michael Hagner (ed.), Ecce Cortex: Beitraege zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns, Wallstein Verlag, 1999.
• George Caffentzis, “Why Machines Cannot Create Value, or Marx’s Theory of Machines”, στο Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl & Michael Stark (επιμ.), Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, Verso, 1997.

12. Biomedical technologies

• Nancy Kentish – Barnes, “’Death Organized by the Doctor’: End of Life Decisions in Intensive Care Units”, Revue Française de Sociologie, 50, 2009.
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage Books, 1995 (¹1975).
• Christos Lynteris, “Plague Masks: The Visual Emergence of Anti-Epidemic Personal Protection Equipment”, Medical Anthropology, 37, No. 6, 2018.
• John Luce & Douglas White, “A History of Ethics and Law in the Intensive Care Unit”, Critical Care Clinic, 25, 2009.
• Samuel Cohn Jr., Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS, Oxford University Press, 2018.

13. Wasn’t the future wonderful? History, technology and futurism in times of crises

• Paul Ceruzzi, “An Unforeseen Revolution: Computers and Expectations, 1935-1985”, in Joseph Corn, Imagining Tomorrow: History Technology and the American Future, MIT Press, 1986.
• Claudia Castaneda & Lucy Suchman, “Robot Visions”, Social Studies of Science, 44, No. 3, 2014.

TOOLS: Each lecture is supported by a specially prepared Power Point presentation. Presentations change over time according to students’ feedback. Short video streams are also occasionally used.

WEBSITES: A wide array of contemporary newspaper articles accompanies each lecture’s bibliography. Students read these articles during the course of each lecture and comment on them using the concepts and approaches suggested in the bibliography. The expected result is to emphasize the interplay between the past and the present of the society-technology relationship. The list of newspaper articles is kept up-to-date and changes over time.

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Instructor(s) : Christos KARAMPATSOS

MRES.B.01 – Science, Technology, Society: From History to Policy