WTMC PhD Winter School ‘A New Political Sociology of Science’
From Sunday 10 to Thursday 14 January 2021 WTMC organized a PhD Winter School (online) with anchor teacher Pierre-Benoît Joly. Why is it necessary to (re)politicize STS? What does it mean? What are the implications from a methodological and epistemological standpoint? This WTMC Winter School was dedicated to such questions and invited participants to travel through a reflexive journey. This journey first took stock of the Science and Technology Studies (STS) legacy and the way our community deals with politics. Joly’s main argument is that STS misses major issues.
In addition to anchor teacher Pierre-Benoît Joly, four key figures in research and policy contributed to this Winter School:
- Melanie Peters, Director of the Rathenau Institute
- Ismael Rafols, Senior Researcher at CWTS and associate faculty at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex, United Kingdom
- Johan Schot, Professor of Global History and Sustainability Transitions at the Utrecht University Centre for Global Challenges and Director of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC), The Netherlands
- Soraya Boudia, Professor of Sociology and History of Science, Université de Paris, France
In his lecture, “Transforming our world – A proposition”, Johan Schot proposes socio-technical system change as a way to address the great challenges of our time. Related to this, he provides an introduction to Deep Transitions Dynamics, and the work of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium (TIPC) which explores the question how STI policy can facilitate transformation. He explains some of the key concepts of Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) and introduces the so-called Transformative Outcomes.