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Institute for Technoscience & Society

Credit: Zoran Svilar

UPCOMING! ITS SEMINAR SERIES

Welcome to the Institute for Technoscience & Society!

Our goal is to create a global hub of critical and interdisciplinary research and information about the relationship between technoscience and society. We want to support excellent research on this relationship, especially on the configuration of social, political, and economic power underpinning scientific claims, medical practices, emerging technologies, sites of innovation, and much more.

We are an Associated Research Unit of the new Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society initiative. Connected Minds is a $105.6 million, seven-year interdisciplinary research initiative led by York University and funded by the federal government through the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) program.

We have four thematic research clusters at the Institute:

  • Technoscientific Injustices: what are the implications of emerging technoscience? What are the impacts of algorithmic systems, biotechnologies, low-carbon technologies, or environmental services? Do they impact different social groups differently? How can our work support more just and inclusive science and technologies?
  • Technoscientific Economies: how are science and technology entangled with our economies? How do economic logics and drivers shape the development of technologies in certain ways? What technologies are sidelines at the expense of others (e.g. autonomous vehicles over public transit)? How can our work support more responsible innovation?
  • Technoscientific Pasts & Futures: how is the future of science and technology bound up with our pasts? What we learn from the history of science, technology, and innovation to help us develop more inclusive science and more responsible technologies? How can the past help us to develop hopeful visions of the future?
  • Technoscientific Bodies & Minds: how are health and illness defined by science and technology? What are the implications of prevailing understandings of health risks, diseases, and healthcare delivery? Do these prevailing understandings reinforce social injustices, inequities, and divisions? How can our work on our bodies and minds help us analyse how biomedical knowledge and materialities are socially produced?

If you want to get involved in the Institute, then please get in touch.

Contact: techsoc@yorku.ca

@STS_YorkU