Science studies

Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, and philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze the production, representation and reception of scientific knowledge and its epistemic and semiotic role.

Similar as in cultural studies, science studies are defined by the subject of their research and encompass a large range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. The interdisciplinary approach may include and borrow methods from the humanities, natural and formal sciences, from scientometrics to ethnomethodology or cognitive science. Science studies have a certain importance for evaluation and science policy. The field added technology in the last decade, and using science, technology and society, started to involve the interaction of expert and lay knowledge in the public realm.

The field started with a tendency toward navel-gazing: it was extremely self-conscious in its genesis and applications. Beyond a mere study of scientific discourse, it soon started to deal with all of its participants, relation of science expertise to politics and lay people. Practical examples include bioethics, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), pollution, global warming,biomedical sciences, physical sciences, natural hazard predictions, the (alleged) impact of the Chernobyl disaster in the UK, generation and review of science policy and risk governance and its historical and geographic contexts. While staying a discipline with multiple metanarratives, the fundamental concern is about the role of the perceived ̳expert‘ in providing governments and local authorities with information from which they can make decisions. The approach poses various important questions about what makes an expert and how experts and their authority is to be distinguished from the lay population and interacts with the values and policy making process in liberal democratic societies.

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