SCIENCE STUDIES CORE SEMINAR

 

WINTER 2002

 

COGR 224B / HIGR 239 / PHIL 209B /SOCG 255B

 

 

“Formal and Informal Knowledge”

 

 

Tuesdays, 9:35 am – 12:30 pm in HSS 3009

 

 

 

 

Prof. Steven Epstein, Department of Sociology, UCSD

Office phone: 858-534-0489; Email: sepstein@ucsd.edu

Home page: http://sociology.ucsd.edu/~sepstein/

Office hours: Tue 4:00-5:00 pm and Wed 2:00-3:00 pm in SSB 476

 

Prof. Chandra Mukerji, Department of Communications, UCSD

Office phone: 858-534-3596; Email: cmukerji@ucsd.edu

Office hours: TBA

 

 

Readings:

 

There are four required books, available for purchase at Groundwork Bookstore in the old Student Center:

 

            Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

 

            Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

 

            Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (various editions available) .

 

            Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

 

All additional course readings can be borrowed from Sheri in the Science Studies Program office (858-534-0491; ssadmin@ucsd.edu).

 

 

Requirements:

 

We expect each student to write a 15-page paper, due one week after the last class meeting, on Tuesday, March 19. Please submit two copies of your paper: one to Prof. Epstein, and one to Prof. Mukerji.

 

We will also ask each student to prepare discussion questions for two class meetings during the quarter. These questions must be emailed to all participants in the seminar by 4:00 pm on the day before class. Each of you will need to sign up for your weeks at the first meeting of the course.

 

 

Schedule:

 

Week 1 (Jan 8): Introduction

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 78-85.

Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 73-77.

Helen Watson-Verran and David Turnbull, “Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems,” in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff, Gerald E. Markle, James C. Petersen, and Trevor Pinch (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 115-139

Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2-5.

 

PART ONE: PROBLEMS AND POLITICS OF REASON

 

Week 2 ( Jan 15): Varieties of Mathematical Reasoning

            David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1976] 1991), chapter 5.

            Lave, Cognition in Practice, chapters 1-4.

 

Week 3 (Jan 22): Politics and Technologies of Formal Knowledge

            Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms (entire).

 

Week 4 (Jan 29): The Scientific Revolution and the Formalization of Knowledge

            Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Chapters 5-6.

 

PART TWO: FORMALIZING KNOWLEDGE

Week 5 (Feb 5): Technologies and Techniques of Formalization and Representation

            Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990):  115-179.

            Denis Cosgrove, “Global Illumination and Enlightenment in Geographics of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher,” Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W.J. Withers (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 33-66.

            Sheila Jasanoff, “The Eye of Everyman: Witnessing DNA in the Simpson Trial,” Social Studies of Science 28 (October-December 1998): 713-40.

 

Week 6 (Feb 12): Standards and Classifications

            Bowker & Star, Sorting Things Out, Introduction and Chapters 1, 6-7, 9-10.

 

PART THREE: PROBLEMS & POLITICS OF POWER/KNOWLEDGE

Week 7 (Feb 19): Expertise and Risk

            Sheila Jasanoff, “The Political Science of Risk Perception,” Reliability Engineering and System Safety 59 (1998): 91-99.

            Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture—From the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 45-112.

            Jeffrey Escoffier, “The Invention of Safer Sex: Vernacular Knowledge, Gay Politics, and HIV Prevention,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 43 (1999): 1-30.

           

Week 8 (Feb 26): Public Understanding of Science

            Stephen Hilgartner, “The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses,” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519-39.

            Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, The Golem: What Everyone Should Know About Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 141-151.

            Brian Wynne, “Misunderstood Misunderstandings: Social Identities and Public Uptake of Science,” Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992): 281-304.

 

Week 9 (Mar 5): Lay Activism in Relation to Science and Technology

            Epstein, Impure Science, Introduction, Book Two, Conclusion.

            Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107-156.

 

Week 10 (Mar 12): Exploitation of Local Knowledge in Research

            Lucy Suchman, “Representing Practice in Cognitive Science,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1990), 301-321.        

Londa Schiebinger, Secrets, Fraud, and Theft:  Eighteenth-Century Naturalists in the West Indies (Draft).