module
Undergraduate Module Descriptor
ANT3044: Imagined Futures: Environment, Industry, Health and Society
This module descriptor refers to the 2023/4 academic year.
Module Aims
This module supports you in understanding how differently positioned actors, across cultural contexts, engage with technoscience to respond to perceived crises. Focusing on interconnected case studies of environment, industry and health, we examine what kinds of problems people look to technoscience to resolve.
By attending to whose values are implicated in specific spaces, places, and at specific times we consider what alternative versions of the world are (and are not) being imagined, and how this has reshaped life across local and global scales. We consider the unanticipated consequences and limits of these socio-technical imaginaries, asking what happens when solutions fail, and how social science might address the gap between technological optimism and pessimism.
| On successfully completing the programme you will be able to: | |
|---|---|
| Module-Specific Skills | 1. Demonstrate knowledge of the social study of technoscientific innovation 2. Critically examine social, political, and economic issues in the development of science and technology 3. Show understanding of the range of social relations and values at work in technoscientific policy and practice |
| Discipline-Specific Skills | 4. Demonstrate understanding of how cross-cultural research on science and technology can be used to study social values across time, space and place. 5. Evaluate a range of social science arguments around science and technology |
| Personal and Key Skills | 6. Work collaboratively and individually to develop and apply understanding 7. Communicate effectively in written and oral formats |