12. Better by Degrees? Exploring the Technoscience of Living Together in University Education
Martin Oliver, UCL Institute of Education
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
While STS scholars have spent decades investigating the generation of knowledge in laboratories or the politicised use of science in society, relatively little attention has been given to one way in which millions of people each year engage with scientific knowledge: as part of higher education.
This panel explores the conference themes in relation to the technoscience of educational practices in universities, treated as a site for the production, use, circulation and evaluation of technoscientific knowledge. It asks how we might live together better in educational communities that have, historically, been shaped by differences and hierarchies – between disciplines; university and society; teachers and learners; home and international students; on-campus and distance learners; with forms of participation, progress and outcomes that are gendered, racialised and classed. It highlights questions of care and responsibility within educational practices, and draws on a growing body of research that examines the whole university, not just focal sites such as research labs, as the context for our own scientific work (e.g. Sørensen & Traweek, 2022).
We invite contributions that engage with questions such as:
How are sociotechnical imaginaries reconfiguring educational practice?
Do the technopolitics of care embedded in educational algorithms and platforms reunite or divide teachers and their students?
Are surveillance and governance technologies enacting power relations in universities as racist as those being used in other selection and prediction processes?
How can we recuperate from the unexpected reconfigurations of technology, educational practice and embodied ways of knowing that we experienced during the pandemic?
