Week 1: Introduction: General Questions Raised by the Social Study of Science

Week 2: From Philosophy of Science to History of Science: The idea of ‘Progress’

Readings:

· Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959 [1934]

· Thomas Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 1962

· Gerald Horton, ‘Science and Progress revisited’, in Leo Marx and Bruce Mazlish (eds.), Progress: Fact or Illusion?, 1996, pp. 9-26

Week 3: Science as a text I: The Rhetoric Approach

Readings:

· Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Anchor Books, 1966.

· Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, 1979.

Week 4: Science as a text II: The Narrative Approach

Readings:

· Joseph Gusfield, The Culture of Public Problems, The University of Chicago Press, 1984, chapter 4 “Comedy and Pathos in Drinking-Driver Research” pp. 83-108.

· Hayden White “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative, 1980, pp. 5-27.

Week 5: The methodological Principle of “Symmetry” in the Study of Controversies

Readings:

· David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, Routledge, 1976, chapter 1 “The Strong Program in the Sociology of Knowledge” pp.1-19.

· Michel Callon, “Some element of a Sociology of Translation: domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” pp.196-233 in The Social Process of Scientific Investigation, Karin D. Knorr (ed.), Reidel Publishing, 1980.

· Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, Harvard University Press, 1988, chapter 1 “Strong Microbes and Weak Hygienists” pp.19-58.

Week 6: On the way scientists and non-scientists define “Nature”

Readings:

· Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean. Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009, chapter 4 “Alien Species, Native Politics. Mixing Up Nature and Culture in Ocean O’ahu” pp. 145-170.

· Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, University of Chicago Press, 2013.

· Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think, University of California Press, 2013.

· Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life on Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015.

Week 7: The Science Wars: Concreteness and ‘out-thereness’ of Reality

Readings:

· David Bloor, ‘Anti-Latour’, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30:1, 1999, pp. 81-112

· Bruno Latour, ‘For Bloor and Beyond – A Reply to David Bloor’s Anti-Latour’, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 30:1, 1999, pp. 113-129

· Ian Hacking, The social construction of what?, Harvard University Press, 1999. Chapter “Madness: Biological or Constructed?”

Week 8: Knowledge or Beliefs? The Question of Rationality for Social Scientists

Readings:

· Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, Prentice-Hall, 1967.

· Jeanne Favret-Saada, Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage, Cambridge University Press, 1980. pp.3-28

Week 9: Reconsidering the Divide Between ‘Science’ and ‘Literature’

Readings:

· Frederic Aït-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 2011.

· Vincent Debaene, Far Afield: French Anthropology Between Science and Literature, 2014

Week 10: Science as a Field

Readings:

· Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, 1984

· Pierre Bourdieu, Science de la science et réflexivité, 2001 [excerpts will be translated in English by the TA]

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Week 11: The Scientist as a ‘public intellectual’

Readings:

· Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Corporatism of the Universal: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World.” Telos 1989, 81 (1989): 99–110.

· Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens, “The Sociology of Intellectuals”, Annual Review of Sociology, 2002, 28. 63-90.

· Gil Eyal and Larissa Buchholz, “From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions,” Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 117–137. · Corey Robin, “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2016

Week 12: Conclusion