SGTR -- Studying Emerging Technologies: Empirical Research in a Speculative Space

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This Small Grant for Training and Research (SGTR) supports development of a program to train graduate students in study of emerging technologies. Given the rapid pace of technological change in such areas as biotechnology and the new genetics, information technology and computing, and nanotechnology and materials, demand is increasing for a cadre of social scientists and humanists specializing in the study of the social dimensions of emerging technology. The SGTR will create a focus area on emerging technologies in Cornell's existing Ph.D. program in Science & Technology Studies (S&TS). This award will provide support for two students for three years. Students in the new focus area will participate in a new graduate seminar on "Studying Emerging Technologies," take an advanced methods seminar, and take courses, participate in laboratory rotations, or engage in other activities to acquire appropriate technical knowledge. Each will conduct an empirical research project on an emerging technology that requires active engagement with the technical knowledge and help to organize and present an annual campus-wide panel discussion on social dimensions of emerging technologies. The program will also involve organizing an annual research workshop on studying emerging technologies. Unlike studies of any particular new technology, study of "emerging technologies" requires understanding a cluster of related issues: the complex deployment of "revolutionary" discourse; the intertwining of changing practices in laboratories, patent offices, and investment houses; the new "practical cosmologies" developed by technical workers as they embrace and extend technological revolutions; and the ethical complexities of conducting research about emerging technologies while often, because of ethnographic methodology, simultaneously participating in technological development. This project seeks to create a coherent training and research program integrating these issues into a coherent theoretical frame. The direct impact will be to train a particular cohort of two students per year in studying emerging technologies. Its broader impacts will include producing new courses on "studying emerging technologies," "archiving contemporary science," and other topics; sponsoring empirical research projects that, through presentation and publication, will contribute to wider scholarly discourse about emerging technologies; supporting campus-wide discussions between the scientific and technical communities and the science and technology studies community about the social dimensions of emerging technologies; and engaging individual faculty and students in the sciences and engineering in exploration of emerging technologies. Taken together, these activities will create broader awareness of issues associated with emerging technologies and will lead to wider integration of issues from science and technology studies into the work of scientists and engineers.