After Disenchantment: Science, Education, and la Vita Activa
Channel: Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra
Date: 2021-11-02

In the 2021 Inaugural Lecture of CES Doctoral Programmes, Prof. Sheila Jasanoff questions how science and technology has largely been portrayed by philosophers and sociologists of technology through a lens of disenchantment, bemoaning the power of science and technology to empty our world of meaning, through devices such as rationalization, standardization, massification, and routine. In such narratives humans are seen as subjugated to machineries of production, and deprived of voice and agency, so that innovation suffers and democracy itself is in deficit. In this lecture, Sheila Jasanoff argues to the contrary, that the turn of the twentieth century brought enormous gains in our capacity to reflect on what it means to be citizens of scientific and technological societies. Drawing on concepts such as co-production, constitutionalism, and sociotechnical imaginaries, she shows how this rise in social reflexivity has equipped us to rethink the politics of science and technology, and illustrates this with work in science and technology studies (STS) on environment, biotechnology, and AI to show how advances in theories of science and technology in society open up new vistas for social creativity and political action.