Science and Technology Studies (STS), also known as Science, Technology, and Society, is an interdisciplinary field that examines the creation, development, and societal consequences of science and technology. It treats both as deeply embedded in historical, cultural, political, and social contexts rather than as neutral or autonomous domains. STS rejects technological determinism (the idea that technology drives society in a linear way) and simplistic notions of scientific objectivity, instead analyzing how knowledge and artifacts are co-produced with social orders.

STS emerged in the 1960s–1970s from convergences across history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, and political science. Key precursors include Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which introduced paradigms and scientific revolutions as socially conditioned shifts, and earlier work by Ludwik Fleck. Programs at MIT and elsewhere institutionalized the field. By the 1980s–1990s, major strands solidified: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), Social Construction of Technology (SCOT), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and feminist STS.

Core Concepts and Approaches

• Social Construction: Scientific facts and technologies are shaped by social processes, negotiations, and interpretations (e.g., SCOT by Pinch and Bijker).
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT): Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law treat humans and non-humans (instruments, concepts, materials) as equal actors in networks that produce knowledge and systems.
• Co-production (Sheila Jasanoff): Science and social order mutually constitute each other.
• Feminist and Postcolonial STS: Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, and others critique power, gender, race, and Eurocentrism in technoscience.
• Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Material Semiotics, Technoscience: Concepts emphasizing entanglement of material, discursive, and political elements.

STS emphasizes empirical case studies (controversies, laboratories, infrastructures) and reflexivity—studying how the field itself is situated.

Relation to Bourdieu and Field Theory

Bourdieu’s concepts (field, capital, habitus, distinction) have been imported into STS to analyze power dynamics within scientific communities and between science and other domains. While early high-profile STS (especially ANT) downplayed macro-power, Bourdieusian approaches highlight struggles over scientific authority, symbolic capital, and field autonomy. Lloveras in Socioplastics explicitly engages Bourdieu but transfigures “field” and “distinction” from analytical/critical tools (revealing reproduction) into constructive operators for deliberately building a new transdisciplinary epistemic field.

Socioplastics aligns closely with STS’s transdisciplinary ethos and interest in knowledge infrastructures, but radicalizes it. Where STS often deconstructs existing scientific practices, Lloveras constructs an autonomous, numbered, mesh-engineered epistemic morphology. Concepts like epistemic latency, scalar grammar, soft ontology, and the bibliographic machine echo STS concerns with co-production, material-semiotics, and sociotechnical systems, while advancing a “field architect” practice that treats knowledge production as deliberate plastic and architectural work. The project’s emphasis on public, dense, self-elaborating corpora offers a practical model for post-institutional knowledge systems that STS theorists frequently diagnose but less often operationalize at this scale. STS remains a vibrant, reflexive field addressing urgent issues: AI ethics, climate technopolitics, data infrastructures, and democratic governance of expertise. It provides rich theoretical resources for projects like Socioplastics, which metabolize STS insights into generative epistemic architecture. This positions STS not merely as critique but as a potential ally for building new fields capable of sustaining complexity in the contemporary era.