Science and technology studies (STS) or science, technology, and society is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, and social contexts.
"A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the Socialist Review (US). In it, the concept of the cyborg represents a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine." Haraway writes: "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."
Michael Scott Kimmel is an American retired sociologist specializing in gender studies. He was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University in New York and is the founder and editor of the academic journal Men and Masculinities. Kimmel is a spokesman of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) and a longtime feminist. In 2013, he founded the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University, where he is Executive Director. In 2018 he was publicly accused of sexual harassment. He filed for retirement while Title IX charges were pending; no charges were subsequently filed.
Trevor J. Pinch was a British sociologist, part-time musician and chair of the science and technology studies department at Cornell University. In 2018, he won the J.D. Bernal Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science for "distinguished contributions to Science and Technology Studies over the course of [a] career."
Michael Alan Messner is an American sociologist. His main areas of research are gender and the sociology of sports. He is the author of several books, he gives public speeches and teaches on issues of gender-based violence, the lives of men and boys, and gender and sports.
Nancy Folbre is an American feminist economist who focuses on economics and the family, non-market work and the economics of care. She is professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Sociology, Director of the Violence and Society Centre at the City University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.
Michael E. Lynch, is an emeritus professor at the department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His works are particularly concerned with ethnomethodological approaches in science studies. Much of his research has addressed the role of visual representation in scientific practice.
Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was an American sociologist. She specialized in the study of information in modern society; information worlds; information infrastructure; classification and standardization; sociology of science; sociology of work; and the history of science, medicine, technology, and communication/information systems. She commonly used the qualitative methods methodology and feminist theory approach. She was also known for developing the concept of boundary objects and for contributions to computer-supported cooperative work.
James Mahmud Rice is an Australian sociologist in the Demography and Ageing Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. He works at the intersection of sociology, economics, and political science, focusing in particular on inequalities in the distribution of economic resources such as income and time and how private and public conventions and institutions shape these inequalities.
Joan Elise Robinson Acker was an American sociologist, researcher, writer and educator. She joined the University of Oregon faculty in 1967. Acker is considered one of the leading analysts regarding gender and class within the second wave of feminism.
Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.
Paula S. England, is an American sociologist and Dean of Social Science at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research has focused on gender inequality in the labor market, the family, and sexuality. She has also studied class differences in contraception and nonmarital births.
Mutual shaping suggests that society and technology are not mutually exclusive to one another and, instead, influence and shape each other. This process is a combination of social determinism and technological determinism. The term mutual shaping was developed through science and technology studies (STS) in an attempt to explain the detailed process of technological design. Mutual shaping is argued to have a more comprehensive understanding of the development of new media because it considers technological and social change as directly affecting the other.
Susan "Sue" Speer C.Psychol, FHEA is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
William "Bill" Craig Martin was an Australian sociologist. He was Professor of Sociology at Flinders University and the University of Queensland and was an editor of the Journal of Sociology. His main research interests were in the sociology of work and employment.
Technofeminism explores the role gender plays in technology. It is often examined in conjunction with intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw which analyzes the relationships among various identities, such as race, socioeconomic status, sexuality, gender, and more. However, many scholars, such as Lori Beth De Hertogh, Liz Lane, and Jessica Oulette, as well as Angela Haas, have spoken out about the lack of technofeminist scholarship, especially in the context of overarching technological research.
Jane Pilcher SFHEA is a sociologist specialising in names and naming, gender, and ageing. She is an associate lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, having previously held posts at Cardiff University and the University of Leicester.
Feminist science and technology studies is a theoretical subfield of science and technology studies (STS), which explores how gender interacts with science and technology. The field emerged in the early 1980s alongside other relativist theories of STS which rejected the dominance of technological determinism, proposing that reality is multiple rather than fixed and prioritizing situated knowledges over scientific objectivity. Feminist STS's material-semiotic theory evolved to display a complex understanding of gender and technology relationships by the 2000s, notable scholars producing feminist critiques of scientific knowledge and the design and use of technologies. The co-constructive relationship between gender and technology contributed to feminist STS's rejection of binary gender roles by the twenty-first century, the field's framework expanding to incorporate principles of feminist technoscience and queer theory amidst widespread adoption of the internet.
