Areas Of Research
The expertise of the department faculty ranges from the Scientific Revolution of 16th and 17th century Europe to contemporary science and technology both in the U.S. and abroad. Research and teaching examine scientific and technological practice and use, with special concern for the roles played by legal and political institutions, gender, religion, and the social dynamics of scientific communities. Questions about how scientific and technological knowledge and expertise interact with politics and government have led to an interest on the part of some faculty members in topics of broad theoretical interest both within and outside S&TS, such as scientific advice, citizen participation, science communication, and the dynamics of public policy. Several areas of empirical research especially stand out in work by Cornell S&TS scholars: environment, biotechnology and medicine, military technology, audio and sound technologies, scientific controversy, and the history of 20th century American technology. For more detail on faculty research interests, see individual entries here: Department Faculty.
In historical as well as contemporary work on the entire range of the sciences and technology, emphasis is placed on the production of knowledge through instruments, practices and texts, and the fortunes of that knowledge in a variety of social arenas. This work is based on textual and archival analysis, oral history and interviews, participant-observation working alongside scientists themselves, visual documentation, and electronic resources. Faculty and students draw on the university’s superb library resources, which also offer an excellent set of electronic connections to resources beyond Cornell. All of this research activity is reflected in the S&TS teaching program, as evidenced in the wide array of courses available to graduate and undergraduate students. The Department’s undergraduate curriculum offers graduate students excellent opportunities for honing their teaching skills, thus developing an increasingly important professional competence.
Alongside a vital concern with issues of methodology, epistemology, and social theory, the Cornell approach to S&TS nonetheless possesses a strong empirical focus. This means that a typical piece of doctoral work takes as its core an episode, comparative study, or state of affairs about which one can ask a coherent, theoretically challenging question deriving from the analytical approaches of S&TS. The empirical material guides what can and cannot be said, while leaving considerable space for theoretical advances.