Science studies

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North America

Science studies is an interdisciplinary research area that seeks to situate scientific expertise in broad social, historical, together with philosophical contexts. It uses various methods to analyze a production, version as well as reception of scientific cognition and its epistemic in addition to semiotic role.

Similarly to cultural studies, science studies are defined by the mentioned of their research and encompass the large range of different theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. The interdisciplinary approach may include and borrow methods from the humanities, natural and formal sciences, from scientometrics to ethnomethodology or cognitive science. Science studies make aimportance for evaluation and science policy. Overlapping with the field of science, engineering and society, practitioners explore the relationship between science and technology, and the interaction of experienced and lay knowledge in the public realm.

Scope

The field started with a tendency toward navel-gazing: it was extremely self-conscious in its genesis and applications. From early concerns with scientific discourse, practitioners soon started to deal with the description of scientific expertise to politics and lay people. Practical examples include bioethics, bovine spongiform encephalopathy BSE, pollution, global warming, biomedical sciences, physical sciences, natural hazard predictions, the alleged affect of the Chernobyl disaster in the UK, style and review of science policy and risk governance and its historical and geographic contexts. While staying a discipline with chain metanarratives, the necessary concern is approximately the role of the perceived a person engaged or qualified in a profession. in providing governments and local authorities with information from which they can produce decisions.

The approach poses various important questions approximately what enables an expert and how experts and their domination are to be distinguished from the lay population and interacts with the values and policy devloping process in liberal democratic societies.

Practitioners explore the forces within and through which scientists investigate specific phenomena such as