This course considered the social nature of science and scientific knowledge, as well as the relationship between science and wider society. This class systematically explored important elements of scientific practice – for instance, training, observation, experimentation, and theories – and examined their fundamentally social character. Topics here included: Science and Gender; Scientific Expertise in Society; Science and the Environment; Science and Medicine. We studied science internally and externally using a variety of readings, including historical and sociological case studies from physics, biology and environmental science, earth science, and chemistry.
I have linked my final research paper where I showed science is fundamentally a social endeavor because scientific knowledge is created for and within the public domain; it is communal.