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Science and Democracy Network Resources

In an effort to pool resources, members of the Science and Democracy Network (SDN) have begun to create an archive of course syllabi and a list of key readings for scholars working on SDN issues. These resources, especially the list of readings, are currently works in progress. Participation from SDN members in improving these resources is warmly encouraged. For more information, contact Lauren Schiff.

Course syllabi

These course syllabi, compiled by Shobita Parthasarathy, have been categorized by topic. It is hoped that they  will help experienced scholars to expand their teaching repertoires and newer scholars to craft their own courses.
Note: Unless otherwise indicated, the individual syllabi are copyrighted works of their creators and are used here with permission. They are for the personal use of SDN members. Distribution on other sites is not authorized.

Politics and Policy of Science and Technology

• Reflexivity in Science and Governance, Clark Miller
• Science and the State, Arthur Daemmrich
• The Politics of Scientific Knowledge, Kaushik Sunder Rajan
• Knowledge, Technology, and Property, Stephen Hilgartner
• Science & Courts, Javier Lezaun
• Science and Democracy, Clark Miller
• Introduction to Science & Technology Policy Analysis, Shobita Parthasarathy and Paul Erickson
• Political Environment of Policymaking [Comparative Science & Technology Policy], Shobita Parthasarathy
• Science, Power and Politics (I), Sheila Jasanoff
• Science, Technology, and the Politics of Nature, David Winickoff
• Risk Governance: Policymaking, Knowledge, and Uncertainty, Pierre Benoit Joly
• Risk Governance (2): Policymaking, Knowledge, and Uncertainty, Pierre Benoit Joly
• Risk Governance-Methodology: Policymaking, Knowledge, and Uncertainty, Pierre Benoit Joly
• In-Formation: Ethnographies of Emergent Structures, Kaushik Sunder Rajan
• Collaborative Governance: Planning for the Unthinkable, Bruce Goldstein

Expertise

• Policy, Publics, and Expertise, Brian Wynne and Bronislaw Szerszynski
• Community Involvement and Public Participation, Bruce Goldstein
• The Role of Experts in the Policy Process, David H. Guston
• Citizen Science: Environment, Technology & Democracy, Roopali Phadke

Genetics/Biotechnology/Biomedicine:  Politics and Policy

• Genetics and Biotechnology Policy, Shobita Parthasarathy
• The Politics of the New Genetics, Javier Lezaun
• Bioethics, Law and the Life Sciences, Sheila Jasanoff
• The New Life Sciences: Emerging Technologies, Emerging Politics, Stephen Hilgartner
• The Politics of International Health, from Smallpox to Stem Cells, Shobita Parthasarathy
• Bioethics and Society, David Winickoff
• Biomedicine: Ethics, Law, and Practice, Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Environmental Politics and Policy

• Environmental Politics, Sheila Jasanoff
• Environment and Culture, Bronislaw Szerszynski
• Global Environmental Governance, Paul Erickson
• Global Environmental Governance, Clark Miller
• Introduction to Environmental Planning and Policy, Bruce Goldstein
• Institutions, Environmental Change and Development, Tim Forsyth
• Institutions and Global Environmental Change, Tim Forsyth
• Environmental Analysis and Problem Solving, Roopali Phadke

List of readings

Below is a growing list of readings that participants in SDN consider to be of significance for scholars working on SDN issues. Annotations have been provided by various participating SDN members. This list is a work in progress.

• Arthur Daemmrich, Pharmacopolitics: Drug Regulation in the United States and Germany (UNC Press, 2004).
  Comparing drug regulation in the United States and Germany, Daemmrich finds different "therapeutic cultures" — the interrelationships among governments, patients, the medical profession, and the pharmaceutical industry — underlie national differences and explain variations in pharmaceutical markets and medical care. Finding the therapeutic cultures systemically present across regulatory laws, clinical trials, and adverse reaction reporting systems, he suggests that international harmonization efforts based on highly technical standard-setting processes will fail to achieve their goals.
• Arthur Daemmrich, "A Tale of Two Experts: Thalidomide and Political Engagement in the United States and West Germany," Social History of Medicine 15 (2002), 137-158.
  This article compares the experiences of the German physician Widukind Lenz and American regulator Frances Kelsey during and after the thalidomide tragedy based on a "double-bind" of expertise. The Lenz — Kelsey comparison demonstrates how institutional structures shape an expert's social and scientific roles. While the degree of exposure to politically motivated attacks differed for these two experts, they nevertheless faced similar threats to their professional credibility and personal integrity when they publicized links between thalidomide and birth defects.
• Steven Epstein, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
  Lucid, balanced and impressively well-documented, this book chronicles almost month-by-month two interlinked developments in the fight against AIDS: first, the search for the cause of the disease and, second, the effort to treat its victims. The diarist's approach to relating this history pays handsome dividends because it allows Epstein to show how every phase of scientific discovery was deeply influenced by people with AIDS, who came to constitute a new kind of social movement in the landscape of American biomedical politics. The book makes a significant contribution to science and democracy studies by linking STS to the sociology of social movements.
• Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
  This is a learned and seminal study of the intertwining of modern science and liberal democratic thought from their mutual beginnings in the English Enlightenment to the 20th century. Ezrahi argues that the practices that accounted for the success of the Scientific Revolution, in particular the act of "attestive witnessing" by observing publics, also accounted for the rise of liberal democracy. To satisfy such publics, liberal democratic states have been led to use technology instrumentally, creating demonstrations of their own legitimacy. The book powerfully demonstrates the theoretical value of linking STS to political theory, and of bringing both to bear on contemporary problems of governance.
• Steve Fuller, The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000).
  Based in social and political theory, this book by a philosopher of science explores changes in the political constitution of science in society and the notion of the university as a republic of science. Fuller argues that science should be under democratic control and he advocates a republican form of democracy for science as well as society.
• David Guston, Between Politics and Science: Assuring the Integrity and Productivity of Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  This book is an exemplary STS study of the (changing) relationship between science and politics. Drawing from a variety of analytical perspectives in political economy, sociology, and history, it examines the transformations of the "social contract for science" in the US since WWII. The book points to the creation of what it calls new "boundary organizations" which aim to improve the relationship between scientific and political actors and to re-establish trust between them.
• Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
  This book offers a new perspective on scientific advice to regulatory agencies by drawing on Erving Goffman's conception of life as a performance on stage. Expert advisers in this book are conceived as performers whose "impression management" (Goffman) serves to produce and establish authority and credibility in the political process. By using the symbolic-interactionist dramaturgical vocabulary for the analysis of expert advice in contemporary politics, the book enriches our vision as spectators of and participants in such "public dramas," thus also contributing to self-reflexivity in STS.
• Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1990).
  This exemplary book illuminates the status and impact of scientific expertise in political decision-making. By drawing on two case studies of US regulatory agencies — the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — this study examines the mechanisms by which scientific knowledge is evaluated in the political context. Empirically, the book provides insights in the workings of the two federal agencies; conceptually, it introduces the notion of "regulatory science" and, by analyzing the distinctive practices that go into its making, the book contributes to our understanding of the nature of expert knowledge in democracies.
• Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), Comparative Science and Technology Policy, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1997).
  This anthology of previously published articles presents an authoritative overview of comparative research on science and technology policy in order to illuminate the choices that confront decisionmakers in this field. Contributions from various disciplines, including economics, political science, law, and science and technology studies, reflect both traditional structuralist perspectives and those that challenge conventional assumptions. Articles address the relationship between science and the state, and compare how different governments have sought to support and regulate scientific research, technology, industrial innovation and global competitiveness. The collection also looks at how international influences can affect national policies.
• Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order (London: Routledge, 2004).
  This seminal collection of essays offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between scientific knowledge, political power, and culture. It develops the concept of "co-production," which is an analytical framework to describe and analyze the ways in which scientific knowledge is simultaneously constituted along with social institutions, discourses, representations, and identities. "Co-production" has become a widely used notion to understand how science and governance, and science and society more generally, are related and intertwined.
• Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
  This subtle comparative analysis reconstructs the ways in which policymakers in Europe and the United States responded, according to their political cultures, to developments in biotechnology in the last quarter of the 20th century. The book is an exemplary contribution to the analysis of regulatory cultures through the lens of STS. It offers, in addition to a reconsideration of central concepts in democratic theory such as representation, deliberation, and participation — excellent new analytic tools, such as the concept of "civic epistemology." It explains how cultural ways of making sense of novel scientific and technological entities can explain cross-national variations in the governance of emergent technologies.
• Dorothy Nelkin (ed.), Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions, 3rd edition (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage, 1992)
  This book is the third edition of a popular work that put controversy studies on the map of STS scholarship in the United States. It contains case studies of intensely contested issues related to science and technology that analyze the formative social and political contexts as well as the diverging sets of values and norms involved. Though lacking the sophistication of much European work in the sociology of scientific knowledge, the book remains significant for a perspective on scientific disagreement that avoids a simplistic sociology of error.
• Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
  In this path-breaking and eminently readable study of industrial and environmental accidents, Perrow develops the analytical concepts of tightly vs. loosely coupled and complex vs. simple systems to explain how runaway reactions can occur, even in settings with extensive mechanical and human supervision. He finds that additional control mechanisms — a common response to disasters — cannot ensure safety in tightly coupled, complex systems and instead advocates designing simpler systems with greater opportunities for intervention.
• Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
  Among the foundational texts for the study of science and the state, this book by Price, a political scientist and founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, describes a "spectrum from truth to power" that distinguishes scientific and political forms of evidence, argument, and decision making. His separation of the scientific domain from the political realm continues to resonate with much policy analysis and thinking, particularly in the United States, where new mechanisms are regularly proposed to transfer knowledge more efficiently from science to policy.
• D. Sarewitz, Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996)
  This book analyzes the myths underlying the science-society relationship since WWII. It points to the "myth of accountability" by which integrity within science is equaled to external responsibility in society, with the effect that outsiders are excluded from evaluating or judging science. By advocating for a science policy that takes into account the needs of society, the book engages in a normative account of the science-society relationship.
• Debra Spar, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).
  Spar argues that societies should come to grips with the commercial dimensions of reproduction today by establishing standards and regulations to govern transactions. Comparing a variety of forms of current and envisioned methods of reproduction and building families — including stem cell research, surrogacy, egg swapping, 'designer babies,' adoption, and human cloning — she explores underlying moral and legal challenges and suggests that the transactional elements would be best served by transparent government regulation.
• Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint (Graphics Press, 2003).
  In an entertaining deconstruction of PowerPoint, Tufte analyzes how bullet points have become the primary mode of presentation and describes consequences for arenas ranging from the Columbia shuttle disaster to the presentation of public health information. The author advocates handouts as high-bandwidth, high-resolution media for complex concepts and supports discussion of in-depth empirical findings over superficial presentations.

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