Curating Science and Technology Studies Teaching

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When I arrived at UCT I was handed two PG courses to teach. In shaping the content of those, I kept coming back to the ways that every course we teach could be a STS course. Development is shaped by the stories of science and society, identity is made and remade through science-society knots. 

This is why a space dedicated to teaching this field is such a treat and also an exercise in restraint and curatorship. Our first iterations of the course outline tried to think about the ways we could take you all on a guided overview of the field of STS. Our first motivation to faculty is captured in an image below. I have also included a screenshot so you can see one of the very early drafts of our course outline.

We only have six weeks where we can be physically co-present in a seminar though, and Amrita and I have taken the leap to, with you, to move away from the usual weekly thematic course design. We have asked each of you to choose a book from our selection and to be our guide through your journey with it. As this blog progresses, we hope that the conversations will keep going beyond these six weeks and beyond this first small group. This seminar is an experiment, as is this blog, and it recalls a poem we discuss this week, some lines of which are: 

'Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what  

looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade." - Alice Fulton, "Cascade Experiment"


Playing with digital and old school design



Faculty motivation excerpt

An example of a section of one of the early iterations of the course

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