In March 2005, the first Spring School of Science Studies was held in the Czech Republic. The four-day event attracted people from various fields and enabled them both to deepen their knowledge and to encounter concepts and ideas that may inspire their own work. In the year 2006 we published a book titled Science Studies Opens the Black Box where we introduce papers and lectures presented at the spring school.
During the event, speeches were given by lecturers from the Centre of Science Studies at Lancaster University (Maureen McNeil, John Law and Vicky Singleton) and Zdeněk Konopásek (Centre for Theoretical Study and Faculty of Social Sciences, Masaryk University) and presentations by postgraduate students or postdoctoral fellows from the Centre of Science Studies (Lancaster University) and PhD candidates conducting their research in various institutions in the Czech Republic. The Centre for Science Studies in Lancaster is one of the best centres in the UK (in 2001, the Centre was part of the Research Assessment Exercise and received a 6* rating, which is the highest available category) focusing on interdisciplinary research within and across the boundaries of science, technology, and public policy.
The idea of the spring school was to open through the lenses of Science and technology studies (STS) several issues from the “black box” of science and to discuss them interdisciplinary. We focused on problematising the construction of scientific knowledge, feminist science studies, actor-network theory (and after), the cultural analysis of science, postcolonial technoscience studies, and the analysis of human-machine interactions.
The book, which is available at National Contact centre – women and science, is structured around the specific sections at the spring school and can be obtained at the address: prodej@soc.cas.cz.
Contents:
- Introduction
Alice Červinková and Kateřina Šaldová
Technologies of the Future and its Present Perception
- Telling tales of reproduction and technoscience
Maureen McNeil
- Designing the future: fables from the mobile telecoms industry
Laura Watts
- Software and cosmopolitics: code as the language of the new Constitution
Denisa Kera
Global, Local
- Disaster in agriculture: or foot and mouth mobilities
John Law
- Coexistence between GM and non-GM crops: contested political geographies of Europe
Tereza Stöckelová
Politics in Everyday Life: Normativity and Agency
- Resuscitating citizens: defibrillators, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation and caring
Vicky Singleton
- Is there a dent in identities? Exploring risk perceptions of female-to-female transmission of sexually transmitted infections
Anne Rudolph
Performing Bodies
- Following ‘morbid obesity‘ beyond the operation room: mundane practices and the ontological politics of care
Jordi Sanz Porras
- Refashioning bodies, reshaping agency
Dawn Goodwin
- Notes on social life of corpses
Majda Rajčatová
Locating Expertise
- Personal, political, academic: The politics of fieldwork and my brush with Czech media stardom
Karen Kapusta-Pofahl
|