SOCI 325: Sociology of Science

Welcome

Introduction &
course structure

  1. Introductions
  2. Course structure
  3. Course tools
  4. Assessment
  5. Sociology of science
  6. Course themes

Land acknowledgement

McGill University is located on land which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange amongst Indigenous peoples, including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg nations. McGill honours, recognizes and respects these nations as the traditional stewards of the lands and waters on which we meet today.

see also:

Chelsea Vowel. “Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments.” Âpihtawikosisân (blog), September 23, 2016. https://apihtawikosisan.com/2016/09/beyond-territorial-acknowledgments/.

Introductions

If you haven't already, please take a moment to fill out the (brief!) introductory questionnaire, available on Teams or at https://forms.office.com/r/PGuPKGVRqM

Course structure

Photo of Legault putting on a Habs mask but seeming to have difficulty as the mask is covering his eyes.

Attending in person

  • Wearing of masks is not required, but is greatly appreciated while in the classroom
  • If you have any symptoms of COVID-19 or have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 you please stay home (this will not affect your grade in this course)
  • It is up to us to make a safe and welcoming learning environment for everyone!

Course structure

Class period: hybrid lecture–seminar

  • Readings and small-group discussions are the foundation of the course
  • Most classes will begin with ~20 minutes of lecture (streamed and recorded), followed by ~60 minutes of structured, small-group discussion

Small-group discussions

  • Groups of 4-5 students, membership fixed starting Sept. 19
  • Discussions will focus on drafting responses to 5 or 6 discussion questions
  • Each of 9 discussion worksheets will span 1–3 class periods
    (see syllabus for details)
  • Instructor and TA will rotate through groups during class
  • Groups may work outside of class (e.g. online), but you are not expected to spend more than ~1 hour per class period covered

Course structure

Forming a group

  • Groups will have fixed membership starting September 19
  • Before then, use the “Group sign-up” tab on teams to sign up for one team
    (maximum 5 members per team)
  • Use these first couple of weeks to find group members who have similar preferences to your own (online/offline, language, …)
    E.g. “Peter McMahan (strongly prefer online meetings)”

Screenshot of Microsoft Teams, showing the embedded "Group sign-up" tab

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Course structure

Peer assessment

  • Peer assessment will be used:
    (a) to adjust group discussion grades and
    (b) for final project assessment
  • With peer assessment, multiple other students assess your work.
  • Provides more feedback on your work than would otherwise be possible.
Screenshot of judges from Dancing with the Stars all holding up signs awarding 10 points

Course tools

Course tools: Microsoft Teams

Photo of a middle-manager in an office setting looking judgemental (Screenshot of Bill Lumbergh from the film Office Space)

Microsoft Teams: hub of class activity

  • Why Teams?
    Teams provides integrated recording and accessibility features, class discussion, and much better collaboration features than Zoom/MyCourses
  • Remote participation
    (lectures and discussions)
  • Groups have private channels
  • Class-wide discussions/questions
  • Students can use existing McGill accounts
  • BUT, Teams has a clunky interface, and learning how to use it can be awkward

Course tools: Online syllabus

Screenshot of the course syllabus

Syllabus is online

  • Available at https://soci325.netlify.app
    (or through the "Syllabus" tab in the "General" channel on Teams)
  • Contains schedule, assignments, assessment, and other important information
  • Updated with links to slides and any schedule changes regularly

Course tools: Perusall

a pile of open books

Perusall for online reading

  • Collaborative reading environment
  • Annotate the course readings in groups of ~20
  • Ask questions, respond, discuss
  • To register for this class's Perusall, find the pinned announcement on Teams

Assessment

Assessment

  1. Reading
  2. Group discussions
  3. Discussion questions
  4. Final project
  • Reading accounts for 10% of final grade
  • All readings are done through Perusall
  • All scores are either 0 or 1
    (Perusall will tell you the maximum score is 3, but that is not the
    case for this class)
  • Lowest four reading scores dropped at the end
    of the semester
  • Details on scoring linked from syllabus:
    https://soci325.netlify.com/pages/perusall.html
  • If you did the reading on time, but did not get
    credit, message me to fix the score (really!)

    (I may respond to messages slowly, but I will respond)

Assessment

  1. Reading
  2. Group discussions
  3. Discussion questions
  4. Final project
  • Discussion worksheets, completed in groups, account for 32.5% of final grade (30% for worksheet scores, 2.5% for completing peer assessment)
  • Turned in through Teams by midnight of the day indicated on the schedule
    E.g. discussion worksheet 5, covering material from Oct 24 and Oct 26, is due by midnight Oct 27
  • Responses are marked on a 10-point scale, applied to each group-member’s grade
    (see syllabus for rubric)
  • Midway though the semester, there will be a round of peer assessment on group participation that will not affect final score
  • At the end of the semester, there will be another round of peer assessment on group participation that will be used to adjust final score by up to 10%

Assessment

  1. Reading
  2. Group discussions
  3. Discussion questions
  4. Final project
  • Each student is responsible for submitting three discussion questions over the course of the semester, contributing 20% to the final grade.
  • Topics will be assigned randomly at the end of the second week.
  • Each is marked on a 10-point scale based on the engagement and originality of the question.
  • For each discussion, the instructor may pick some discussion questions to use in class. Submissions that are used in class receive an automatic 10/10.

Assessment

  1. Reading
  2. Group discussions
  3. Discussion questions
  4. Final project
  • Each student will create a poster to be
    presented at the end of the semester,
    contributing a total of 37.5% to the final grade.
  • Topics must be submitted by Oct 3, for 5% of
    final grade.
  • Each poster will be assessed by 4 other
    students, contributing 30% to the final grade.
  • Each student will be responsible for assessing 4
    posters, worth 2.5% of the final grade.
  • Details of the poster project (themes, topics, etc)
    will be discussed in class.

Assessment

an IBM selectric typewriter

A note on "generative AI"

  • Large language models (ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc.) can generate convincingly fluid text.
  • Turning in text written by an LLM as your own work is a violation of McGill's policy on plagiarism.
  • LLMs can be a useful tool for generating ideas and structuring arguments only if the output is regarded with a sharply critical eye. Generally, I do not recommend them for academic work.
    Never rely on an LLM to provide factually correct information!
  • Keep in mind: LLMs are inherently exploitative in terms of data acquisition, resource consumption, and labour practices.

Sociology of science

Sociology of science

A sepia photo of an old-style operating theater, in which a large group of formallly dressed men watch a medical team perform surgery

"STS"

  • Science and Technology Studies”
     or
    Science, Technology, and Society”
  • Science and technology as the object of study
  • Spans many academic disciplines:
    anthropology, history, sociology, philosophy, …

Sociology of science

There is a sociology of everything. You can turn on your sociological eye no matter where you are or what you are doing. Stuck in a boring committee meeting … you can check the pattern of who is sitting next to whom, who gets the floor, who makes eye contact, and what is the rhythm of laughter (forced or spontaneous) or of pompous speechmaking. Walking down the street, or out for a run, you can scan the class and ethnic pattern of the neighborhood, look for lines of age segregation, or for little pockets of solidarity. Waiting for a medical appointment, you can read the professions and the bureaucracy instead of old copies of National Geographic. Caught in a traffic jam, you can study the correlation of car models with bumper stickers or with the types of music blaring from radios. There is literally nothing you can't see in a fresh way if you turn your sociological eye to it. Being a sociologist means never having to be bored.

Collins, Randall. 1998. “The Sociological Eye and Its Blinders.”
Contemporary Sociology 27(1):2–7

Sociology of science

Sociological approach to STS

  • C. Wright Mills (1959):
    The Sociological Imagination
    1. Understand individuality in its social context
    2. See the general in the particular
    3. See the strange in the familiar
  • For sociology of science, this means
    1. Individual scientists, theories, observations, inventions should not be studied in isolation, but in their social and historical contexts.
    2. The practices, beliefs, norms, and expectations of the scientific community should be seen as examples of general social processes.
    3. Things that are seen as normal in the production of science should be questioned.
  • E.g. women in science (see Hird 2011)

Sociology of science

Detail of Raphael's _The School of Athens_, focusing on Plato and Aristotle

Plato and Aristotle in the marketplace of ideas

Critical focus of the sociology of science

  • Skepticism toward the image of science as the ideal, pure, modern, rational search for knowledge
  • Recognition that science, like any institution, is messy
  • Bound to structures of economic, social, cultural power
  • Does not deny the reality of scientific knowledge

Course themes

Course themes

Theme 1: Scientific outcomes are social

  • The discoveries, inventions, publications, and ideas produced by scientists are not outside of
    society.
  • Scientific discoveries are guided by social processes.
  • Scientific discoveries have social implications.
  • The meaning and implications of scientific ideas depends on social context.
Black and white photo of a mushroom cloud resulting from atomic bomb explosion

Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki resulting from atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. in 1945

Course themes

Theme 2: Scientific practice is social

  • Science is done by scientists in social settings.
  • Scientists live in diverse social contexts that influence their behavior, expectations, beliefs, ideals, …
  • Laboratories and other research institutions are themselves social settings.
  • Doing science involves interacting with other scientists, funding agencies, political entities, and non-scientists.
Four people in a scientific lab. One is looking through a microscope. The other three are smiling while looking at a paper document together.

Course themes

Theme 3: Science aligns with power

  • Science is not neutral.
  • Scientific questions, practices, and findings tend to align with prevailing power structures.
  • The veneer of objectivity in science can reinforce oppressive dynamics along racial, gender,
    economic, disability, and geographic lines.
A map of the world, with countries allegedly colored by 'IQ'. North Ameria and Europe are indicated with high IQ, while Africa, Central/South America, and the Middle East are idicated with low IQ. This is an example of racist science.

Map of "IQ estimates" from Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2006). (note that this representation has been thoroughly debunked)

Course themes

Theme 4: The history of science is a social history

  • The meaning of ‘science’ has changed over time, and those changes trace historical patterns.
  • The history of Western science is inextricable from the European enlightenment and European colonialism.
  • Contemporary science reflects our current historical moment.
Woodcut print of an apothocary in Renaissance garb examining a vial

Next class

Theme: Scientific outcomes are social

Required:

  • Hird (2011)
    Science, Technology, and the Sociological Imagination
  • Benjamin (2019)
    Engineered Inequity: Are Robots Racist?

Image credit

Photo of Legault putting on a Habs mask but seeming to have difficulty as the mask is covering his eyes

Photo by Ryan Remiorz/ The Canadian Press via AP

Screenshot of judges from Dancing with the Stars all holding up signs awarding 10 points

Screenshot from “Dancing with the Stars (ABC), via the Baltimore Sun

Photo of a middle-manager in an office setting looking judgemental (Screenshot of Bill Lumbergh from the film Office Space)

Screenshot from Office Space (1999)

an IBM selectric typewriter

Photo by Wikimedia user Etan J. Tal

A sepia photo of an old-style operating theater, in which a large group of formallly dressed men watch a medical team perform surgery

Image from News Dog Media, via Daily Mail

Detail of Raphael's _The School of Athens_, focusing on Plato and Aristotle

Detail of Raphael's The School of Athens, via Wikimedia

Black and white photo of a mushroom cloud resulting from atomic bomb explosion

Photo via Wikimedia

A map of the world, with countries allegedly colored by 'IQ'. North Ameria and Europe are indicated with high IQ, while Africa, Central/South America, and the Middle East are idicated with low IQ. This is an example of racist science.

Image via Wikimedia

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Live demonstration of Teams interface

Live tour of syllabus

Live tour of Perusall