III. Revealing and Studying
Sociotechnical Systems 

Chapter 6 - Questioning Technoscience: Seeing Complex Networks and Material Agency

Chapter 6 offers a menu of concepts and pedagogical tools that facilitate the discovery of hidden complex social interconnections among science, technology, environment, and society, and that challenge technological determinism. Taking a sociotechnical systems approach, this chapter introduces mapping skills that reveal the tangled active relationships among artifacts, relevant social groups, and activities associated with science and technology. The chapter will offer a variety of activities using STS conceptual tools such as Actor Network Theory (ANT), social construction of technology (SCOT), diffraction/implosion, socio-materiality of S&T, and boundary metaphors. 

Chapter 7 - Revealing Power: Asking Critical/Ethical Questions About Sociotechnical Worlds

This chapter aims to develop student capacity to ask questions about the ways in which values, politics, and power dynamics shape science and technology, for whose benefit, and with what unintended consequences. Building on the idea that artifacts have politics, recipes may include learning activities such as stakeholder mapping, technology assessment, applications of environmental justice frameworks, and comparative risk and policy analysis. Recipes may also enact STS approaches to applying ethical reasoning, analyzing and contextualizing drivers of sociotechnical change, and questioning narratives of technology as progress.