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Theoretical frameworks associated with science and technology studies (STS) are becoming increasingly prominent in social science energy research, but what do they offer? This review provides a brief history of relevant STS concepts and frameworks and a structured analysis of how STS perspectives are appearing in energy social science research and how energy-related research is appearing in social science STS. Drawing from an initial body of 262 journal articles and books with a stratified sample of 68 published from 2009 to mid-2019, the review identifies four major groups of perspectives: (1) STS-related cultural analysis, especially the study of sociotechnical imaginaries; (2) STS-related policy analysis, such as research on the social construction of risks and standards and on the performativity of economic models; (3) STS perspectives on public participation processes, expert-public relations, and mobilized publics; and (4) the study of sociotechnical systems, including large technological systems, the politics of design, and users and actor-networks. Connections among the perspectives and the value for energy social science research are also critically discussed.

In den 1980er- und 1990er-Jahren vernetzten sich Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen der Natur- und Technikwissenschaften in autonomen Arbeitskreisen, um sich gegenseitig zu unterstützen und um ihre Fächer aus einer feministischen Perspektive kritisch zu reflektieren und zu verändern. Im Kontext der Frauenbewegung entwickelten sie kollektive Arbeitsformen. Die Bedingungen und Möglichkeiten der Gender Studies haben sich inzwischen verändert und viele feministische Naturwissenschafts- und Technikforscher*innen arbeiten heute nicht mehr in derartigen Arbeitskreisen, engagieren sich aber weiterhin für diesen Bereich. Anhand von ausgewählten frühen und jüngeren Arbeitskreisen erinnert dieser Beitrag an die Arbeitskreise, skizziert deren Arbeitsformen und argumentiert, dass sich die aktuellen feministischen Naturwissenschafts- und Technikforscher*innen stärker innerhalb der Hochschulstrukturen verorten und einen weniger revolutionären, zunehmend akademischen Subjektstatus annehmen, ohne die Wissenschaftstransformation aufzugeben.

AbstractFeminist science and technology studies calls the researcher to reconsider subjectivity in three ways. First, who or what has subjectivity? Second, is subjectivity a property of an individual being with sentience, or is it a more diffuse process? Third, who or what acts in meaningful ways to impact social relations (and are thus worthy of sociological study)? According to feminist STS, the conferral of subjectivity has been nationalized, racialized, and sexualized, and the influence of non‐human life and non‐living matter has been underemphasized. We suggest that sociological research could benefit from a more expansive understanding of subjectivity and a more interactive (or "entangled") notion of social–material relations. Human relations and action need not just be considered in the context of the human and social but can also be considered in relation to the non‐human and material. To make the implications of feminist STS more concrete, we offer specific applications of feminist STS methodologies across a range of sociological methods and topics.

The interdiscipline of science and technology studies ('STS') has been characterized by its descriptive analyses of the presumptions and practices of scientific communities, and by numerous theoretical internal debates over the proper framework of analysis of science. While STS has not been characterized by a powerful effect on law and government, both of which are consumers of scientific expertise, an opportunity arises for engagement in public policy disputes due to the willful ignorance regarding science in the Trump administration, and the negative effects of political agendas and conflicts of interest therein. The urgent need for reliable expertise in such political contexts is addressed in the so-called third wave of STS that is based on Harry Collins and Rob Evans's innovative 'architecture of expertise.' Two recent book chapters, namely Darrin Durant's essay on ignoring experts and Martin Weinel's essay on counterfeit scientific controversies, serve as practical examples of third-wave theory. Bruno Latour, who was engaged in a debate with Collins (and others in STS) concerning their respective approaches during the 1990s, also recently addressed the need for expertise (particularly climate expertise) in government contexts. Nowadays, Collins and Latour both promote consensus expertise and identify its reliance (for its authority) on science as a trusted institution. This article compares the similarities (and acknowledges the differences) between Collins and Latour with respect to their pragmatic strategies, and concludes that notwithstanding internal debates, STS scholars should join Collins (with Evans) and Latour to look outward toward critique and correction of governments that ignore scientific expertise.

This article analyzes the varied niches of an emerging academic field, Science and Technology Studies (STS), as a means of understanding intellectual and professional development. As a new, upstart entity in the established and inertial field of academia, STS has carved out a successful and expanding niche in the ecology of higher education via a variety of unique intellectual and institutional strategies. By adapting and reconfiguring organizational and professional structures of traditional liberal arts, the case of STS exposes three main themes in the organization of knowledge and higher education: reinvention, accounting, and professionalism. STS scholars endeavor to reorganize the distribution and organization of knowledge turfs, which often involve idiosyncratic, symbiotic, or competitive relationships with sciences, social sciences, and/or humanities. This often creates dilemmas regarding how to account for scholarly work using new, divergent, or incommensurable merit criteria or professional values. The article concludes with empirical analyses of the emergence and content of STS departments throughout the world and of Social Studies of Science, the flagship journal of the field. Data and evidence were gleaned from a variety of semistructured interviews with STS scholars, archival sources, and detailed citation records. As STS continues to grow and develop with its diffuse and eclectic foci, this raises questions of whether and how the field should or will be coordinated intellectually or professionally. These multivalent professional logics and values are sources of both vitality and tension in STS and illuminate larger issues of professional and intellectual organizational strategy in developing fields and realms of knowledge.

Recent scholarship provides the opportunity for an assessment of the underexplored but promising marriage between science and technology studies (STS) and Internet governance (IG) research. This article seeks to provide such an assessment by reviewing and discussing, in particular, three volumes: Laura DeNardis's The Global War for Internet Governance (2014, Yale University Press), The Power of Networks: Organizing the Global Politics of the Internet by Mikkel Flyverbom (2011, Edward Elgar Publishing), and Governance, Regulations and Powers on the Internet edited by Eric Brousseau, Meryem Marzouki, and Cécile Méadel (2012, Cambridge University Press). Approaching IG through an STS lens, these authors bring to the fore a number of related issues that political and legal sciences have addressed only incompletely so far, but are crucial to understand today's governance of the Internet as a complex sociotechnical system of systems. In their research, STS scholars of IG highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute IG; the plurality and "networkedness" of hybrid devices and arrangements that populate, shape, and define IG processes; the performative function of these arrangements vis-à-vis the virtual, yet very material, worlds they seek to regulate; the invisibility, pervasiveness, and agency of infrastructure.

In introducing the contributions to this special section, we explore the links between social and juridical concepts of normativity and science and technology. We follow the Legal Pluralism challenge to the notion of state law as the sole source of normative order and point to how technological transformation creates a pluralistic legal universe that takes on new shapes under conditions of globalization. We promote a science and technology studies (STS)-inspired reworking of Legal Pluralism and suggest expanding the portfolio of legally effective regimes of ordering to include the normativity generated by materiality and technology. This normativity is amply demonstrated in the case studies included in the papers which make up this special section. We conclude that the inclusion of approaches developed in STS research helps analytically to overcome what we view as an incomplete law project, one unable to deal with the technicized lifeworlds of a global modernity. The contributions to this special section illustrate that technomaterial change cannot be understood without recognition of the role of normative impacts, and conversely, the legal pluriverse cannot be understood without recognition of the normative role of techno-material arrangements.