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Description
The topic for 2024/25 is 'the politics of feeling in science-society relationships'.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, technological hype, climate anxiety, mistrust of scientific institutions, and legacies of harm and injustice trouble the relationships between science and society. This course aims to understand and respond to these challenges by exploring the powerful emotional dynamics which underpin them. Through interdisciplinary perspectives on affect, the module explores how feelings like anxiety, resentment, desire, grief, love, awe, and optimism drive hype around new technologies, mobilise climate change activists, create conspiracy communities, and provide relevance and meaning an unstable and uncertain world. It will examine the unconscious and embodied aspects of science-society relationships, asking how affective practices, habits, and routines, unconscious fantasies, denials, and other defence mechanisms, and the limitations and affordances of brains and bodies play their parts in public engagement, responsible innovation, and technoscientific governance. In focusing on the dynamic relational processes of affect and emotion, the course will provide students with the conceptual and practical tools required for understanding, analysing, and responding to the deep psychosocial tensions and conflicts underpinning many of the contemporary challenges in science-society relationships.
Module deliveries for 2024/25 academic year
Last updated
This module description was last updated on 8th April 2024.
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