2023-2024 Course Catalog
Welcome to Virginia Tech! We are excited that you are here planning your time as a Hokie.
Welcome to Virginia Tech! We are excited that you are here planning your time as a Hokie.
Examination of the interrelationship among science, technology, and society. Study of how science, technology, and medicine are defined and analyzed by the humanities and social sciences. Examination of topics, theories, and methods of the field of Science and Technology Studies. Depiction of the dynamics of scientific and technological controversies including the roles knowledge, expertise, risk, rhetoric and public understanding play in policy making.
Examination of the relationship between technology and race. Technology such as information and communication technologies, medical and biometric technologies, transportation, and space travel in contexts of colonialism, indigenous knowledge, and globalization. Role of technology in resistance and emancipation. Assessment of inequity in the design and maintenance of sociotechnical systems including bias in design, surveillance, biopolitics, and the digital divide.
Development of engineering and its cultural values in historical and transnational perspectives. Explores the varying knowledge, identities, and commitments of engineers and engineering across different countries. Examines values in emergent infrastructures of engineering education and work, and the participation of engineers and engineering in evolving forms of capitalism. Helps students learn to reflect critically on their knowledge, identities, and commitments in varying curricula and a globalizing world.
Basic Science, Technology, and Society (STS) perspectives on the life sciences and the ethical issues they raise. Humanistic approaches to analyze how our values and perceptions are informed by the ways that we understand bodies, biology, and life itself. How our hopes, desires, and fears shape the practices and technologies of the life sciences.
Critical examination of diverse definitions and examples of innovation. Discussion of innovation as a process of social change; as technology diffusion; as an economic engine; as an ecosystem; as an ideology; and more. Introduction to methods and ideas from the field of Science and Technology Studies including the analysis of innovation from historical, cultural, and economic perspectives, as well as the study of innovations consequences and its alternatives. Collaborative projects focused on creatively describing and critiquing local cases of innovative work.
Examines the value-laden issues surrounding the professional dimensions of research in the physical sciences and technology, and provides humanistic perspectives on the role and function of science in society.
Introduction to issues and themes in global science and technology policy, from the perspective of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Comparison of national and international policy agents, institutions, structures, and processes. Integration of key ideas from STS into policy analysis, including regulatory cultures, cultural notions of risk and expertise, large socio-technical systems, and social shaping of technology. Emphasis on international controversies, diverse cultural perspectives, and inclusion in policy processes. Cases may include international controversies over genetically modified foods, transmissible illnesses, nuclear energy, and information security.
Examines the nature and causes of global environmental challenges. Focuses on the role of science and technology in the causation of environmental problems and provision of solutions. Investigates uneven impacts among different groups and nations. Explores multicultural dimensions and ethical debates in the relationship between humanity and natural world. Considers visions of alternative futures.
Exploration of the relationships between religion and science in the western tradition. Basic frameworks for relationships between religion and science in historical and cultural context, types of human knowledge and truth, similarities and differences between science and religion, evolution, the origins of the creationist movement, and contemporary moral and ethical issues.
Examines the use of data to identify, reveal, explain, and interpret patterns of human behavior, identity, ethics, diversity, and interactions. Explores the historical trajectories of data to ask how societies have increasingly identified numerical measures as meaningful categories of knowledge, as well as the persistent challenges to assumptions about the universality of categories reducible to numerical measures.
Critical, interdisciplinary exploration of ethical considerations regarding human engagements with technology, including technological development, use, success and failure. History and fundamental concepts of normative ethics and their application to specific technologies and technological systems. Emphasis on conceptualizations and representations of technology with respect to various social, cultural, and historical perspectives on nature, human nature, and technological artifacts.
Development of technology and engineering in their social and cultural contexts. Examines the interaction of people, cultures, technologies, and institutions such as governments, religious bodies, corporations, and citizens groups. 2715: Examines the creation and modification of technologies to establish the basic structures of civilization, from prehistory to the Industrial Revolution (about 1800). 2716: Examines the nature of technological change and consequences in society, from about 1800 to present.
Development of technology and engineering in their social and cultural contexts. Examines the interaction of people, cultures, technologies, and institutions such as governments, religious bodies, corporations, and citizens groups. 2715: Examines the creation and modification of technologies to establish the basic structures of civilization, from prehistory to the Industrial Revolution (about 1800). 2716: Examines the nature of technological change and consequences in society, from about 1800 to present.
Examines key concepts, ideas, and technologies in global population displacement, including categorization, distribution and governance of displaced groups. Introduces displacement drivers such as natural disaster, climate change, civil unrest, infectious disease, and forced relocation. Identifies digital infrastructures used for, by, and against displaced populations. Describes experiences of displaced people.
Examination of science and technology as social and cultural activities in the modern world. The relationship of science and technology to their social and cultural contexts. Institutions and values in science and technology. The changing relationship of technology to science. Discuss how the domain and objects of scientific investigation have been shaped by changing concepts of nature and the natural.
Study of human health within and across a variety of geographic contexts in North America. Describe the health consequences of inequity and injustice within and across American contexts. Consider the roles of collectives, social movements, mutual aid, interdisciplinary thinking, power and social justice in addressing pathologies of power and working towards human well-being. Advocate a biosocial lens that considers the dynamic relationships between biology and environmental, social, geographic, and historical contexts.
Technologies and the experience of disability. The ways institutions, laws, and biases influence how disability is interpreted within engineering and design culture. How disability communities resist, negotiate, adopt, make, and change technologies. Development of work on this topic through making, doing, and writing. Conversations about ableism, media portrayals, historical narratives, ideology, and rhetoric surrounding technology and disability. Includes field trips to learn about the law and assistive technology.
Provides a humanist perspective on dilemmas of medical ethics. Focus on the varieties of human experience of medical dilemmas. Topics include contemporary controversies, such as assisted reproduction, genetic testing and treatment, clinical trials, end-of-life interventions, and the allocation of health-care resources.
Examines the interconnections between energy use and social life. Considers the ways that modern social institutions, such as states, cities, and households are shaped by energy systems, particularly the pervasive use of fossil fuels. Explores the influence of energy extraction and commerce on economic development and global politics. Surveys major contemporary problems related to energy, including climate change and natural resource depletion. Develops an interdisciplinary framework, drawing insights from history, sociology, and economics, for evaluating policies to transition to a sustainable energy system.
Reinforces concepts and perspectives in Science, Technology, and Society through collaborative research projects. Provides experience with major research techniques used in STS, such as interviewing, ethnography, and documentary research. Covers a range of presentation formats for academic communication and public outreach. Research topics involving contemporary problems related to science and technology.
Conceptual and institutional development of physical and biological sciences viewed within a cultural and societal context. 3705: Early Science; 3706: Modern Science
Conceptual and institutional development of physical and biological sciences viewed within a cultural and societal context. 3705: Early Science; 3706: Modern Science
Exploration of the history of biology during the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries, including developments in evolutionary biology, genetics and molecular biology, biology and race, and conservation biology. Emphasis on biology’s reciprocal relationship with society, how it has helped shape ideas of race and ethnicity, and the ethical dilemmas it has generated.
Advanced introduction to social scientific concepts and methods in the study of contemporary science and technology. Examines the political, social, and cultural dimensions of a contemporary development or controversy in science and technology. Studies the relationship of science and technology to social structure, power relations, and inequality. Focuses on the institutions and organizations in which emergent science and technology are produced. Discusses policy options informed by social scientific analysis. May be repeated once with different content for a maximum of 6 credits. Pre: Junior standing.
Introduction to the field of narrative medicine, with attention to narrative competencies, the use of narrative medical education, and the function of narratives in the experience of healing. Includes narrative approaches to biomedical ethics.
Introduction to the field of narrative medicine, with attention to narrative competence, the use of narrative in medical education, and the function of narratives in the experience of healing. Includes narrative approaches to biomedical ethics.
Builds the analytical tools of STS and humanistic deconstruction. Challenges students to read, write, and interrogate academic literatures and real-life, immediate problems and artifacts in ethical, sociocultural, historical, and context informed ways. Builds this competence while examining materials related to current topics in health, such as but not limited to: population, development, reproductive technologies, pollution, climate change, environmental health beyond humans, and, colonialism. Employs multiple humanistic lenses including: biopolitics & biopower, intersectionality, structural and institutional analysis, syndemics, anticolonialism, violence, and disability to examine these materials.
Discusses sex and medicine in contemporary U.S. society. Explores how notions of sexual behavior and normality are defined and structured by medical discourse. Examines cultural institutions that play significant roles in formulating ideas about and definitions of deviance, perversity, and tolerated marginality. Critiques medical responses to sexual variations. Examines experiences of people who have sought out, or been the unwilling victims of, sexual medicine. Junior standing required.
Investigates the gender dimensions of science in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Discusses feminist studies of science, exploring strengths and limitations. Assess implications of cultural assumptions about gender for practicing scientists. A 3000 level course in science or engineering may satisfy the prerequisite.
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