2. STS: What is it?


Any sociology that comes from Marxist and Weberian roots places technology and its ownership at the
core of society. Science, Technology, and Society (STS) draws on a wide range of disciplines
(anthropology, education, geography, history and history of science, organizational analysis,
philosophy of science, and sociology). STS reflects elites' interest in understanding and
controlling science and science-based technologies with public attitudes toward these technologies.
In the 1970s, there was talk of the operation of hidden social interests. In this view, science was
seen as a culture, but this made it difficult to critique. Knowledge was not seen as distorted or
ideological. Another conception was science as practice. This conception comes from Kuhn, and
science in his conception includes self-application that extends existing rules to new carefully
constructed experimental situations. It is demanding work, extremely creative, embodied and
consistently material. Thus, science apprentices learn to do science in the laboratory, where they
carefully examine the world as they did before they took up science. Kuhn also works with case
studies, and we learn about his approach to the history of science through examples. Likewise, STS
was, or is, contemporary historical case studies. The authors of STS began to deal with technology.
A relational logic is important to STS, just as Edison conceived of the world systemically
(science, technology, economics, law, politics had to be in harmony). STS is based on actor theory
(ANT theory). STS abandoned social constructivism and the "social" disappeared as a basic
analytical category. The notion of "construction" also poses a problem because it evokes a
construction site where something is built and that, if built, is built and does not allow much
notion of change.

The question of land rights revolves in part around ownership. Did the natives own the land or not?
If the Aborigines do not cultivate and develop the land, does that mean it is not theirs? Does that
mean it is land that is empty and wild? Why didn't they work it? In the indigenous concept, land is
neither a volume nor a surface with features, nor a space that can be occupied by people. It is a
process of creation and re-creation. Europeans perceived the world out there and reality was
separate from practice, for the natives this separation did not exist, was unthinkable, was
impossible. Is it a question of faith? Does faith reach where two parties not only see one truth,
but see a completely different world? Where one side sees land, the other side sees systems of life
and gods? What is reality and what is considered to be reality floats in practice. Thus different
realities are enacted in different practices. We are thus not in a one-world metaphysics, and this
optic does not only apply to the clash of cultures of the global North and the global South. This
practice can also diverge in, for example, scientific and medical practice, where one part of the
body can be conceived of in different ways and scales, and this can have implications and
solutions. In the doctrine of a unified world, then, the relevance of different perspectives must
be argued. Most of the time, however, there is no need to do so, as the worlds are usually separate
and each does not interfere with the other. But we can then ask, what knowledge fills the space
between them?

Law, J. (2008). On sociology and STS, The Sociological review, 56(4). 623-649.

Law, John 2015. "What's wrong with a one-world world?" Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16
(1):126-139. doi: DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2015.1020066.