Goals and Expectations. First, I dislike putting students into boxes with rigid limits on what you can and cannot do or what is and is not relevant to the class. I provide a small number of defined goals developed by the department and myself.  However, these are only a beginning of a dialogue. You should be part of determining what you might like to get out of this experience. I encourage--some would say demand—each of you to suggest course corrections throughout the semester if you encounter something you would like to bring up in class. Not every suggestion will fit, but many will. My goal is to re-introduce some core concepts and tools in the field of Science and Technology Studies as a means of preparing you to more deeply investigate sociotechnical problems academically and in your future careers. You will learn how to critically evaluate technological artifacts, how systems are created and maintained, the role of expertise, and complex relationships of science, technology, people, institutional arrangements, and ideas.

What you and I bring to the class. STS is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary field with people coming from every conceivable background, including many engineers. As scholars, we consider historical, social, cultural, ethical, and philosophical contexts shaping technoscience and how science and technology have reciprocal effects on our understanding of and interaction with the world around us. Topics could include:

• sustainable agriculture futures for food and fuel
• social-political-economic contexts influencing nuclear power plant designs or deployment of renewable energy in existing grids
• democratic governance and civic science in toxicology
• Self and cyborgs at the juncture of embedded computers, bioengineering, and post-modern discourses of what it is to be human
• NASA, planetary science, and evolution of climate change debates
• Innovation and challenges in transportation
• Any number of possible topics YOU suggest that fit within the goals of the course

Each of you has a unique set of experiences, values, interests, and talents that I hope you share with the rest of us. This is not a flippant comment, the syllabus you see here is made up of all the things I have learned from your predecessors. Too often they have only opened up after a full semester or a full year. I hope you feel free to be an active participant in your own education.

Basic Structure. We begin with basic concepts in STS and a variety of tools you should use to seek out more information. This will scaffold how to explore your own research interests and consider alternative ways to think about techno-social interaction. We will need to learn how to evaluate academic and popular media you are likely unfamiliar with and refine the representation of these ideas in ways that you might not be entirely comfortable. Classes are oriented to give you techniques to investigate the assumptions, unintended consequences, inequalities, design flaws, institutional arrangements, and sociopolitical context surrounding the interaction of people, society, cultures, environments, and technoscience.