Studying Science and Technology Studies at Frankfurt – STS@GU

• STS at Frankfurt provides you with a broad multi-disciplinary engagement with STS, building on intellectual conversations, particularly, with cultural anthropology, sociology and human geography.
• The host of the programme, the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, has a track record of research interest into real-world problems, mobilising a range of ethnographic formats for their study. 
• Goethe University Frankfurt is an institution rich of resources of critical theorising and analysis, which we consider as complementary to our interest in empirical analyses of the material, social and discursive character of science and technology.

• are curious about science and technology as these are practised within actual, observable situations; 
• have a feel for a specific problem out there in the real world that involves science or technology, a problem they can learn more about by looking at, e.g.,media reports or research papers, a problem they endeavour to examine further by way of ethnographic fieldwork; 
• are keen to engage with a whole range of actors (such as scientists, activists, bureaucrats, technology developers, citizens and non-citizens) as their research partners; . . . want to deepen or discover ethnographic research as a unique bundle of methods and an epistemic perspective; 
• enjoy reading - reading STS research in its various genres and in its con- versations with these genres, including science fiction, utopian novels, poetry - reading policy papers, scientific research, export reports and legal regulation texts; 
• want to develop their academic writing to pay attention to differences between dominant voices and those that are often muted, to care for nuances in representing arguments; 
• can listen both to fellow students, teaching staff as well as research partners and informants in the field, who are willing to engage in critical and constructive discourse, exploring routinely how arguments are grounded and substantiated, how arguments can be developed, problematised, given up or defended. 
• who may have a background in STS, . . . 
• and we welcome students who have an undergraduate/Bachelor degree in disciplines other than STS, who may come from universities inside or outside of Germany.

• do you fancy it short and fluffy, maybe with a fairy? Then have a read of John Law's The Manager and His Powers.
• do you like a textbook, its authority and broad range? Then consider Sergio Sismondo's An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies.
• do you prefer a substantive monograph to dive into STS? Then, well, here are three recommendations, based on our core interests: If you are interested in the digital, information, infrastructure, data, engineering, consider Lucy Suchman's Human-Machine Reconfigurations; interested in actor-network theorising, medicine, disease, organisation, consider Annemarie Mol's The Body Multiple; interested in the anthropocene and environmental issues, consider Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World, Hannah Knox's Thinking Like a Climate, or Andrea Ballestero's A Future History of Water.

We consider Emerson et al's Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes a useful introduction for students. It tells you how to turn observations into empirical material, and therewith guides you to what to observe, which ethnographic sensibilities you need to develop.

In our MA program, we subscribe to a broad concept of ethnography. Ethnographic fieldwork does not need to entail a long-term stay on a specific location, but also be mobile and short-term. Depending on the human and non-human actors who populate your area of interest, you may be conducting mostly in-depth interview with experts or spend much time with members of the research community while they are performing mundane tasks. You will also be mining texts written and published on or by the actors of the fieldsite for ethnographically productive information. A policy brief or a legal text can also give you hints on the practices and materialities that frame your field of interest. For us, ethnography is more than a method – ethnography employs a bundle of methods needed for the phenomena at hand. Most importantly we consider it an epistemic practice and perspective, which reflects on practices and their conditions, asks how some issues are made relevant and durable while others are rendered invisible. The way we do ethnography is often collaborative, experimental and generates knowledge relevant also beyond academia. Read more.

• ethnographic research 
• developing critique through empirical detail 
• interest in real-world problems and contemporary discourses, including the anthropocene, datacenters, algorithmic politics, citizen science, biomedicine, urban infrastructures

Students of the Institute are expected to politically self-organise. Traditionally, students have organised as a collective student body, aka Fachschaft, which is supported by the Institute with a dedicated room for students and with opportunities for spokespeople to participate in the Institute's decision-making.

The Fachschaft is composed of students of our English language MA programme in STS and our German language BA programme in Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology.

Science and Technology Studies is an interdisciplinary and highly internationally networked field, that is interested in the mutual shaping of science, technology and society. With that, STS has develop a firm ground to scrutinise both the effects of science and technology on cultures and societies as well as the myriad of practices, rituals, routines, organisations and institutions that shape the form and the content of science and technology. For this dual focus, STS has developed a rich repertoire of analytics that has been found apt to critically understand modern problems, tensions, troubles and contradictions in the real world as well as their mundane practices, such as patenting life, closed science, wars, climate change, the sixth extinction, music, mathematical problem-solving, nursery work, legal routines, energy transitions, mobility and much more.

Science and Technology Studies is an evolving field with a commitment to study the mutual shaping of science, technology and society. Yet, there is no single, unified definition of STS. However, since the 1980s, the term STS has been increasingly used to refer to Science and Technology Studies, designating largely (social-)constructivist and post-constructivist research on science and technology. Science and technology as objects of inquiry in STS are commonly conceptualised as situated, entangled, heterogeneous, evolving assemblages, associations, or networks. STS attends to practices and practitioners, preferring empirical case studies, often of ethnographic or historiographic form. STS scholars have often been working closely with practitioners in science and technology. Scholars have listened carefully to practitioners' accounts of science and technology in practice (vs. in textbooks). They have been enlisted by practitioners as collaborators, thereby gaining privileged insights and understandings of knowledge production or technology development and technology as situated practice. Or scholars and practitioners have engaged together in partial, activist and interventionist engagement.

Science studies started out examining questions of practices in producing scientific knowledge claims. Scholars began to study scientists at work in laboratories, using the method of participant observation on-site, resulting in analyses of scientific research as “messy", non-linear and non-deterministic socio-material processes. STS research on technologies called into question dominant views of technology development as a powerful factor affecting societies “from the outside". Instead, STS approaches were able to show that science, technology, and society are constantly influencing each other, and can be productively analysed as co-evolving sociotechnical ensembles.

Classical STS has addressed science and technology across a range of domains, ranging from natural science domains to engineering and via the problematisation of biomedicine to health. STS has also been concerned with publics and their understanding of science, controversies, decision-making, intellectual property, the military, international relations and the global south. In the midst of these, STS has cultivated diverse capacities, e.g. analytics and methods to problematise rhetorics and the language of plans and promises in science and engineering, or to empirically scrutinise infrastructures, their maintenance work, hidden labour and silenced voices, and, of course, contribute to theoretical innovation across the social sciences and humanities.

Actor-network theory (ANT) became an important conceptual foundation for STS research and is key to our take on STS. ANT enquires into complex and dynamic relations between distributed, heterogeneous (human/non-human or social/material) agencies. ANT scholars extended their studies beyond natural science and technologies into various new areas, notably to the study of organisations, gender, economics, markets, finance, animals, nature, environment and sustainability. Meanwhile, ANT has significantly evolved and developed productive conversations especially with feminist technoscience studies, resulting in conversations about “post-ANT" and a wider family of material semiotic analyses.

Overall, the last twenty years have seen exciting and critical conversations and intersections between STS and neighbouring fields, e.g., feminist, gender, disability and postcolonial studies, and many others. STS can now be considered a well established interdisciplinary field, with regular conferences nationally and internationally, with hundreds to thousands of participants each year.

Internationally, the close relationship between anthropological inquiries into knowledge, material culture and technologies and the emerging interdisciplinary project of STS started in the 1980s, when STS researchers took up ethnography as an approach for laboratory studies and other research. Around the same time, anthropologists began to conduct empirical research on practices of scientific knowledge production, particularly in the field of reproductive and medical technologies, molecular biology and biotechnologies as well as in physics, nuclear energy, and chemistry. Their studies depict science and scientific institutions as particular social and cultural forms. They also explore topics in gender and science, science and technologies and ethics and values, and others. Increasingly, the interests of anthropologists in STS also include critical studies of computer technologies, computer algorithms, software code, data analysis, and other high-tech areas. They also pay attention to questions of science and technology in the context of those parts of the world that are not highly industrialised, and their encounters with the industrialised and high-tech parts of the world.

Since then, anthropology and STS increasingly forged close intellectual ties. The cultural perspective of anthropology serves to criticise de-contextualising and essentialising stances of deterministic views of technology. Vice versa, the engagement with STS approaches has helped anthropology to progressively questioning hegemonic dichotomies of, e.g., nature/culture or technical/society. Today, “anthropological STS", aka AnthroSTS, continues to be characterised by the commitment to intense and extensive empirical fieldwork, supposed to generate a form of STS that is “more holistic and culturally embedded" than ANT, the sociology of knowledge (SSK) and the social construction of technology (SCOT). That said, at Frankfurt, we are keen to conduct and supervise holistic and culturally embedded STS research that thrives of the analytical capacities of post-actor-network-theorising in conversation with feminist technoscience studies and critical data studies.

In sum, for Frankfurt STS ethnography is central. We teach ethnographic methods and we expect students to conduct ethnographically grounded research projects within the study programme's research curriculum. We consider ethnography as epistemic bearing and conduct. Ethnographic research in STS can take several forms, each of which are shaped in specific STS and AnthroSTS conversations: we are interested in collaborative, experimental and interventive forms of ethnography, we are practicing praxeological STS, our students engage in infrastructural inversion as practised in infrastructure studies, we perform discourse ethnographies, we conduct digital ethnographic projects in conversation with critical data studies, we cherish more-than-human ethnographic approaches to studies of the anthropocene.

The research curriculum is the decisive component in substance and work of our MA in STS programme. It provides you with a structure, a scaffolding, in which you are guided to work towards your master thesis, to be completed at the end of your second year of fulltime study.

Our students join the programme already with a research problem that they are keen to explore. We are aware that interests might change once you study with us. However, as we offer a research intensive programme we want to ensure applicants bring own research ideas and interests that match with the programme. During the first semester students engage with STS ethnographic research methods and their results. In parallel students typically start revising their research problem based on their emerging understanding of STS. In the second semester students develop their research problem into a problem of and for STS based on in-depth reading of methodology as well as research literature on their problem space, complemented by intensive empirical research into their problem; this work culminates in a well informed thesis prospectus, which students inform through their reading of relevant literatures and their empirical research. With this research prospectus students can celebrate the midst of their study progress. The second year consists of three modules in which students intensify their empirical research, conduct data analysis, develop, revise and revise again and again their argument; students relate their emerging argument to the relevant classical and recent research conversations and debates in STS. The second year ends with writing up the master thesis, as part of which each student carefully renders their argument well readable for fellow students, teaching staff and examiners.

To enable this process, the research curriculum is structured into five modules, which together constitute 65% of the MA Programme's expected study workload. In the early semesters, we structure most of the workload for our students, for the later semesters, we expect students to increasingly and effectively self-organise much of their workload.

Semester	#	Module Title	Credits and nominal average workload/week
1	M5	Introduction to Research Methods	14 ECTS: 18h/week
2	M6	Research Design	17 ECTS: 22h/week
3	M7	Fieldwork	17 ECTS: 22h/week
4	M8	Analysis and Writing	5 ECTS: 6-7h/week
4	M9	Master Thesis	5 ECTS: 33h/week

The Master program's focal areas