Science and Technology Studies (STS) for ELSI Research
Creators: name: Gordon, Julia
name: Shim, Janet
Publisher: name: Center for ELSI Resources and Analysis
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Genetics
subject: FOS: Biological sciences
subject: Ethics
subject: Science
subject: ELSI
subject: science and technology studies
subject: biocapital
subject: technoscience
subject: subjectivity

description: The interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) broadly attends to how scientific and technological knowledge systems, objects, practices, and discourses shape and are shaped by historical, social, cultural, political, and economic values, norms, relations, and institutional structures. Prevailing questions and lines of inquiry that characterize this field include, for example, understanding how state apparatuses and private corporations leverage scientific knowledge to control, regulate, and stratify bodies and populations; how scientific methods, resource allocation structures, and institutional arrangements intersect with configurations of power and inequality; and how boundaries between ‘expert’ and ‘lay’ shape conceptions of health, risk, ability, and personhood. These questions are particularly pertinent to interrogating the ethical and social implications of genomic knowledge and science, which has emerged as a dominant epistemological framework, research focus, business model, and colloquial conversation topic across the globe. STS emerged in the interwar period, as historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and scientists began questioning the relationships among scientific knowledge systems, technological innovations, and social forces. The field underwent significant transformations in the late 1970s, influenced by global civil rights and women's liberation movements, and coinciding with major shifts in the global economy including the privatization/commercialization of scientific research and dissemination. Currently, STS encompasses a wide breadth of epistemological and methodological orientations, including the philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology of science, and critical race, gender, queer, disability, media, and post-colonial studies, among others. This collection introduces STS concepts useful for ELSI research, maps major conversations in STS relevant for genomics, and offers empirical examples of applying STS frameworks to pressing questions at the intersection of genomics, governance, and bioethics. The first section includes foundational works that cover some key STS arguments: that science and society are co-produced, technoscientific objects have politics encoded within them, all knowledges are situated, and classificatory practices and infrastructures are socially constructed and consequential. The second section covers STS frameworks that examine biocapital, financialization, and governance, exploring how scientific knowledge production and technoscientific innovations leverage and stretch democratic governance models, corporate bodies, and the state. These works illustrate how genomics and adjacent fields define and profit from bodies, and how STS scholars make sense of policymaking and regulatory regimes. The third section examines the boundary work around ‘expertise,’ social movements, and public uptake of genomic and other knowledges. Our final section features selections that engage with biological citizenship, one theoretical tool for understanding how genomics serves as a conduit for power across macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of interaction. Other works in that section also explore how genomic discourses can reify social hierarchies and disproportionately harm marginalized racial, disabled, and queer communities. Through this collection, we invite ELSI researchers to join STS scholars in challenging prevailing views on the boundaries and divides between science, technology, and society, and between expertise and lived experience. In the spirit of STS, we invite interdisciplinary collaboration and coalition-building to bridge the gap between theory and praxis, academia and activism, in the pursuit of ethical, equitable, and inclusionary genomics and other technosciences.