The editors of Science, Technology, & Human Values and guest editors John Aggrey, Liora Goldensher, Marie Stettler Kleine, Christine Labuski, Jane Lehr, Cora Olson, Desen Ozkan, and Kari Zacharias are calling for short essays (up to 4,000 words max) for an upcoming Thematic Collection on Critical STS Pedagogy. Interested scholars should send proposals for full papers (200-250 word abstract, plus 100-150 word biographical note per author) to sthvjournal@gmail.com before December 5, 2023. We encourage submissions from scholars from a range of career stages and disciplinary backgrounds, and are particularly interested in contributors located outside Global North institutions and locations, and/or who are based at predominantly undergraduate institutions, institutions designed as ‘minority-serving’ by the US NSF/Department of Education, or whose positions are primarily teaching-focused. Applicants will be informed of the outcome in January/February 2024 with full manuscripts expected in June 2024 (unless otherwise negotiated).
We invite contributions that respond to two questions: 1) what makes for critical STS pedagogy? And, 2) what does critical pedagogy mean for STS?
Building on the longstanding contention that critical STS pedagogy can make for different science and different technology,[i] we are particularly interested in contributions that focus on praxis, by which we mean both what students and instructors do in a course or classroom and what students and instructors can do beyond that course or classroom. What makes STS learning spaces ones where all participants can develop not only changed consciousness, but the relationships and skills necessary to act against violence, subjugation, and dispossession and in service of redress and redistribution?[ii] What is happening in classrooms where solidarities are built and strategies conceived? What kinds of collaboration are practiced in STS classrooms? What tensions—epistemic, institutional, relational, disciplinary, etc.—arise in the practice of critical STS pedagogies?
Our turn to critical STS pedagogy acknowledges the decolonial pedagogues who initiated critical pedagogy as well as the critiques of critical pedagogy that followed.[iii],[iv] We acknowledge the liberatory desires of the decolonial pedagogues and the ways that efforts to liberate perpetuate relations of dominance.[v] In this spirit, we seek to challenge the often dominant notion that our pedagogical praxis constitutes a side project or service for the university in addition to our true research. Our goal with this thematic collection is to build and extend what Emily York and Shannon Conley call STS as Critical Pedagogy.[vi] In doing so, this special edition would mark the ways that STS is remade and reassembled with our students, in student organizations, and in other less visible academic terrain. To that end, we welcome articles coauthored by students (graduate and undergraduate) and faculty, groups of students, and teaching teams.
[i] Knopes, Julia. 2019 . “Science, Technology, and Human Health: The Value of STS in Medical and Health Humanities Pedagogy,” Journal of Medical Humanities, 40: 461-471.
[ii] Another way to think about this question is how can STS provide space for making “Theory as Liberatory Practice”? hooks, bell. (1994). “Chapter 5. Theory as Liberatory Practice.” In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (59-75). New York: Routledge. Many of these questions mirror questions that hooks asked in her works.
[iii] Friere, Paulo. 2005. Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum).
[iv] Lather, Patty. 1992. “Post-Critical Pedagogies: A Feminist Reading.” In Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy. Edited by Carmen Luke and. Jennifer Gore. New York, Routledge.
[v] Lather, 1992, 122.
[vi] York, Emily, and Shannon Conley. 2019. "STS As Critical Pedagogy." In “The STS Futures Lab at the Intersection of Research and Pedagogy.” In Innovating STS Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. STS as Critical Pedagogy
Published: 10/11/2023