Science and technology studies, usually shortened to STS, is an interdisciplinary field that treats science and technology not as neutral discoveries dropped into society from above but as activities deeply shaped by the social, political, and cultural contexts in which they happen. The field draws on sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and political science to ask questions that working scientists rarely pause to consider: why does one research program attract funding while another withers? Whose values get built into a new technology? How do “facts” travel from a laboratory bench into textbooks, courtrooms, and public policy? STS emerged in the mid-twentieth century and has grown steadily since, informing debates on everything from climate policy to artificial intelligence.
What STS Actually Studies
The simplest way to understand STS is through its founding provocation: the products of scientific research are not purely objective reflections of nature but are shaped, at every stage, by social forces. Early work in the field analyzed the social history of controversies, the rhetoric scientists use in their papers, and the informal aspects of laboratory work to show that what counts as an established scientific fact is tangled up with social contingency.1Social Studies of Science. Technical Work and Critical Inquiry: Investigations in a Scientific Laboratory That does not mean STS scholars think gravity is a social construct or that vaccines do not work. It means they are interested in how scientific knowledge gets produced, certified, and circulated, and why that process matters for the rest of us.
STS researchers study laboratories, but also hospitals, courtrooms, regulatory agencies, patent offices, and activist organizations. They study how engineers choose among competing designs, how risk assessors decide what counts as “safe enough,” and how patient groups push back against medical authority. The unifying thread is attention to the mutual shaping of science, technology, and society: each one changes the others, and none can be understood in isolation.
Core Theoretical Frameworks
Several big conceptual toolkits have come out of STS over the decades. Three of the most influential deserve a brief sketch because you will encounter them constantly in STS writing.
The Social Construction of Technology, known by its acronym SCOT, argues that the success or failure of a technology cannot be explained by its technical superiority alone. Different social groups interpret a technology differently, and those competing interpretations drive its development. The classic example is the bicycle: in the late nineteenth century, some groups wanted speed, others wanted safety, and the machine’s design stabilized only once a dominant interpretation won out. SCOT has been both celebrated for democratizing how we think about technology and criticized for underplaying how structural forces like class and gender constrain which groups actually get a say.2Science, Technology, & Human Values. The Social Construction of Technology: Structural Considerations
Actor-Network Theory, or ANT, goes a step further. Developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law, ANT insists that both human and non-human entities actively shape social reality through interconnected networks.3TEME. THE ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND THE QUESTION OF POWER: RETHINKING AGENCY AND STRUCTURE A laboratory mouse, a piece of software, a legal contract, and a research scientist are all “actors” in the network, and the interesting question is how they become linked together in ways that hold steady or fall apart. ANT can feel strange on first encounter because it refuses to privilege human intentions over the behavior of objects and instruments. But it turns out to be a powerful way to trace how, say, a new medical device travels from a prototype in a university lab to widespread clinical use: at every step, both people and things have to be enrolled in the network for it to hold.
Co-production is a third framework, associated with the political scientist Sheila Jasanoff. The idea is that the way a society understands the natural world and the way it organizes itself politically are produced together, not sequentially. Scientific knowledge does not just inform governance; governance shapes what counts as authoritative knowledge. Research in this vein explores how the making of citizens, procedures, and outcomes is intertwined with normative views about what people are allowed to claim to know, what counts as a legitimate process, and what values hide inside seemingly objective measurements.4PubMed. Making citizens, procedures, and outcomes: Theorizing politics in a co-productionist idiom
The Deficit Model and Why “Just Educate People” Falls Short
One of STS’s most consequential contributions to public life has been its critique of how scientists and policymakers think about public attitudes toward science. For decades, the default assumption was what scholars call the “deficit model”: if ordinary people are skeptical of a new technology or a scientific consensus, it must be because they lack the relevant knowledge. Fill the deficit with facts, and their attitudes will line up with the experts’.
Quantitative research has shown the picture is far more tangled. Knowledge does matter as a determinant of attitudes toward science, but the relationship between knowledge and attitudes is complex and interacting rather than straightforward.5Public Understanding of Science. Science in Society: Re-Evaluating the Deficit Model of Public Attitudes People’s trust in institutions, their personal experiences, their cultural values, and the specific technology in question all mediate how more knowledge translates (or does not translate) into more favorable attitudes. Someone who deeply understands the science of nuclear power may still oppose it on grounds that have nothing to do with ignorance.
This critique spurred a shift in science communication theory from one-way “transmission” toward dialogue-based approaches that treat the public not as empty vessels but as participants with legitimate concerns and local knowledge.6Theoria, Beograd. Traditional approach to scientific communication: Critique of the “deficit model” and contemporary perspectives Whether that shift has actually changed practice in government agencies and research institutions is a separate, less encouraging story, but the intellectual groundwork is well established.
Who Counts as an Expert
If the deficit model oversimplifies how knowledge shapes attitudes, a related question looms: who gets to speak with authority on a technical issue? STS scholars Harry Collins and Robert Evans proposed a “third wave” of science studies focused specifically on the problem of expertise. Their framework distinguishes between different kinds of expertise. Contributory expertise means you can actually do the science yourself. Interactional expertise means you have absorbed enough of a specialist community’s language and tacit knowledge to hold a real conversation with its members, even if you cannot run the experiments.7Social Studies of Science. The Third Wave of Science Studies Both types rely heavily on immersion in a community of practice; you cannot pick them up from a textbook alone.8PubMed. Bringing tacit knowledge back to contributory and interactional expertise: A reply to Goddiksen
This matters practically because modern democracies constantly face decisions that require technical knowledge most citizens and most politicians do not have. One institutional response has been the consensus conference, sometimes called a citizens’ panel. Modeled on the Danish experience, a consensus conference gathers a small group of ordinary citizens, gives them access to experts and background materials, and asks them to deliberate on a policy question with high technical content. The aim is both to inform policymakers about public views and to improve citizens’ understanding of and participation in technical decision-making.9Science, Technology, & Human Values. Evaluating the First U.S. Consensus Conference: The Impact of the Citizens’ Panel on Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy Denmark institutionalized the format within its technology assessment apparatus, making it a recurring feature of parliamentary deliberation.10Science and Public Policy. Danish consensus conferences as a model of participatory technology assessment: An impact study of consensus conferences on Danish Parliament and Danish public debate
The expertise debate has only intensified in the age of social media, where someone with no immersion in a field can amass a large following by confidently narrating cherry-picked studies. STS does not resolve this tension neatly, but it offers a vocabulary for thinking about it that goes beyond the unhelpful binary of “trust the experts” versus “question everything.”
Feminist and Postcolonial Critiques
Some of the field’s most searching work has come from scholars who ask whose perspectives science systematically excludes. Feminist standpoint theorists like Sandra Harding argued that conventional conceptions of scientific objectivity amount to “weak objectivity” because shared biases within scientific communities produce only partial and distorted answers. Harding proposed “strong objectivity,” which demands that scientists reflect on their own social position and on how that position shapes their perspectives and the questions they think to ask.11ScienceDirect. Scientists’ situated knowledge: Strong objectivity in transdisciplinarity The point is not that science should be subjective, but that ignoring the social location of the knower makes science less rigorous, not more.
Postcolonial STS extends this logic across cultures. Western science has historically been treated as the benchmark against which other knowledge systems are measured, with indigenous knowledge dismissed as merely local, pragmatic, or value-laden. STS scholars have challenged that hierarchy, arguing that different cultures’ ways of understanding the natural world should be compared as knowledge systems on equal footing. Western technoscience, rather than being definitional of rationality, is itself a variety of knowledge system, shaped by particular circumstances of production.12SAGE Knowledge. Handbook of Science and Technology Studies: Science and Other Indigenous Knowledge Systems This argument has practical stakes for fields like agriculture, conservation, and public health, where indigenous knowledge often proves more locally effective than imported technical solutions.
Technologies Have Politics
One of the most cited ideas to come out of STS is the political theorist Langdon Winner’s argument that artifacts have politics. The argument is that technological designs can embody and enforce political arrangements, sometimes deliberately and sometimes as a side effect of who was and was not in the room when design choices were made. A highway overpass built too low for public buses to pass under is a piece of infrastructure that also functions as a tool of racial and economic segregation, whether or not anyone intended that.
This insight has proven remarkably durable. Recent work applies Winner’s framework alongside SCOT to generative artificial intelligence in libraries, arguing that AI’s architecture embeds political arrangements that threaten core library values like equitable access and intellectual freedom, while also recognizing that libraries retain agency at the implementation level to push back against those embedded politics.13portal: Libraries and the Academy. Do Artifacts Still Have Politics? Technological Determinism and Professional Agency in Academic Libraries’ AI Transformation The question “do artifacts have politics?” is now nearly four decades old, but it keeps finding fresh applications because every new technology raises the same issue in a new form.
A related concept gaining traction is “sociotechnical imaginaries,” which describes collectively held visions of desirable futures that are bound up with specific technological projects. The concept exploded in scholarly use: citations to work on sociotechnical imaginaries rose from about a hundred in 2016 to over five hundred by 2019.14Oxford Academic. Capturing the invisible. Sociotechnical imaginaries of energy. The critical overview Energy policy is a natural home for this idea. Whether a country imagines its future as nuclear-powered, solar-powered, or hydrogen-powered shapes not just its engineering investments but its geopolitics, its labor markets, and its sense of national identity.
STS Meets Artificial Intelligence
AI has become one of the most active frontiers for STS research, and for good reason: algorithms raise every classic STS question at once. Who decides what data to train on? Whose values are encoded in optimization targets? How do biases in society get laundered through supposedly objective computational systems?
Recent work integrating formal mathematical definitions of bias with sociotechnical perspectives examines how bias in AI systems originates, manifests, and produces real-world harms.15PubMed Central. Bias in AI systems: integrating formal and socio-technical approaches The STS contribution here is to insist that “fixing bias” is not purely a technical problem solvable with better math. If training data reflects a society with structural inequalities, a perfectly calibrated algorithm will reproduce those inequalities unless someone deliberately intervenes, and deciding how to intervene is a political and ethical choice, not an engineering one.
This concern feeds into a broader STS-inflected movement called responsible innovation, which proposes that research and development should be governed by four ongoing commitments: anticipation of potential impacts, reflexivity about one’s own assumptions and motives, inclusion of diverse voices in decision-making, and responsiveness to changing circumstances and new concerns.16Research Policy. Developing a framework for responsible innovation The framework has been adopted, at least on paper, by several European funding agencies and is increasingly invoked in debates over AI governance, gene editing, and geoengineering.
Patients, Activists, and Biomedical Research
STS has long been interested in how people outside the formal research establishment shape the science that affects their lives. Biomedicine is a rich site for this. Patient advocacy groups have evolved from fundraisers and awareness campaigners into active partners in the research process itself. Patient advocates bring lived experience that can reshape research priorities, improve study designs, and influence how results are communicated and applied.17PubMed Central. From patient advocacy to patient-driven research: Building active partnerships beginning at the bench to reach the bedside
STS research has analyzed the specific practices through which patient groups connect their bodily experience with the world of biomedical research to become active participants in shaping its direction.18Science, Technology, & Human Values. Moving Evidence: Patients’ Groups, Biomedical Research, and Affects AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s is the landmark case: activists did not just demand faster drug trials but taught themselves enough immunology and trial design to propose concrete methodological changes that researchers eventually adopted. More recent examples include rare-disease communities that fund their own research programs and insist on co-designing trials from the start.
Manufactured Ignorance
If STS studies how knowledge gets made, it has also turned a sharp eye on how ignorance gets manufactured. The subfield sometimes goes by the name agnotology, and its most consequential findings concern commercially driven ignorance. Tobacco companies, fossil-fuel firms, and chemical manufacturers have all funded research strategically designed to create doubt about established scientific findings. Agnotology examines the social and epistemic consequences of this deliberate production of uncertainty.19PubMed. Tensions in agnotology: Normativity in the studies of commercially driven ignorance
The practical lesson for anyone consuming scientific information is that not all uncertainty is innocent. When an industry-funded study concludes “more research is needed,” STS scholarship gives you reason to ask: more research needed by whom, and toward what end? The strategies documented by agnotology researchers, such as funding friendly experts, amplifying minority scientific opinions, and shifting the burden of proof onto regulators, now show up in debates over pesticides, sugar, and social-media harms. Recognizing the playbook does not make you cynical about science; it makes you a better judge of which uncertainties are genuine and which have been engineered.
Governing by Numbers
A quieter but deeply consequential strand of STS examines what happens when institutions try to measure and rank the very knowledge production they are supposed to support. Universities are a prime example. The current era is characterized by an increasingly pervasive process of governing by numbers, where metrics function as proxies for quality and excellence. One major Australian university, for instance, developed a composite index that distilled an individual academic’s worth into a single number combining research income, publication output weighted by journal ranking, and graduate supervision loads.20Higher Education Policy. Audit Culture and Academic Production: Re-shaping Australian Social Science Research Output 1993–2013
STS scholars worry about what these metrics do to the knowledge they measure. When researchers are rewarded for publishing many papers in high-ranking journals, they have incentives to pursue safe, incremental work over risky, transformative projects. When impact factors determine hiring and promotion, the metric stops being a measure and starts being a target, which, as the social scientist Charles Goodhart observed, means it ceases to be a good measure. The phenomenon extends well beyond universities: hospital performance dashboards, school league tables, and police crime statistics all reshape the behavior they claim merely to record. STS brings a distinctive lens to these dynamics by insisting that numbers are not neutral descriptions of reality but tools that actively reorganize the institutions they are embedded in.
Why STS Frustrates Some Scientists
It is worth acknowledging that STS has always had a tense relationship with parts of the scientific establishment. The “science wars” of the 1990s saw some prominent natural scientists accuse STS scholars of undermining science by treating it as “just another social activity.” The physicist Alan Sokal’s famous hoax paper, submitted to a cultural-studies journal, crystallized the accusation that social constructionist approaches were indifferent to whether scientific claims were actually true.
The charge was, at best, a caricature. Mainstream STS does not deny that the natural world constrains what scientists can credibly claim. What it does deny is that nature alone, without any social process, determines which claims survive. Peer review, funding decisions, career incentives, institutional prestige, and public controversy all play roles that a purely internalist account of science cannot capture. The Strong Programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge, one of STS’s founding intellectual commitments, insists that both true and false beliefs deserve the same kind of sociological explanation, not because truth does not exist but because explaining why a true belief was accepted requires more than saying “because it’s true.”21Social Studies of Science. Contrastive Explanation and the ‘Strong Programme’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
In practice, the tension has been productive. Many working scientists now accept that reflexivity about institutional incentives, power dynamics, and social context makes research better, even if they would not describe themselves as STS scholars. The replication crisis in psychology and biomedicine, the growing recognition that datasets encode social biases, and the push for open science all echo arguments STS scholars were making decades earlier, often to skeptical audiences.