SGTR -- Studying Emerging Technologies: Empirical Research in a Speculative Space

这项培训和研究小额赠款（SGTR）支持开发一项计划，以培训研究新兴技术的研究生。鉴于生物技术和新遗传学、信息技术和计算机、纳米技术和材料等领域技术变革的快速步伐，对专门研究新兴技术的社会层面的社会科学家和人文主义者的需求正在增加。SGTR将在康奈尔大学现有的科学与技术研究（S&amp；TS）博士项目中创建一个新兴技术的重点领域。该奖项将为两名学生提供为期三年的支持。在新的重点领域的学生将参加一个新的研究生研讨会“研究新兴技术”，采取先进的方法研讨会，并参加课程，参加实验室轮转，或从事其他活动，以获得适当的技术知识。每个人都将开展一个新兴技术的实证研究项目，该项目需要积极参与技术知识，并帮助组织和展示一个关于新兴技术的社会维度的年度全校小组讨论。该计划还将包括组织一次研究新兴技术的年度研究研讨会。与对任何特定新技术的研究不同，对“新兴技术”的研究需要理解一系列相关问题：“革命”话语的复杂部署；实验室、专利局和投资公司不断变化的实践相互交织；技术工作者在拥抱和扩展技术革命时发展出的新的“实用宇宙论”；在进行新兴技术研究的同时，由于民族志方法论的原因，常常会涉及到技术发展的伦理复杂性。该项目旨在创建一个连贯的培训和研究计划，将这些问题整合到一个连贯的理论框架中。直接影响将是每年培养两名特定的学生学习新兴技术。其更广泛的影响将包括开设有关“研究新兴技术”、“存档当代科学”和其他主题的新课程；赞助实证研究项目，通过展示和出版，将有助于有关新兴技术的更广泛的学术论述；支持科技界和科技界就新兴技术的社会层面在校园范围内展开讨论；让科学和工程领域的个别教师和学生参与新兴技术的探索。总的来说，这些活动将使人们更广泛地认识到与新兴技术有关的问题，并将导致把科学和技术研究中的问题更广泛地纳入科学家和工程师的工作。

This Small Grant for Training and Research (SGTR) supports development of a program to train graduate students in study of emerging technologies. Given the rapid pace of technological change in such areas as biotechnology and the new genetics, information technology and computing, and nanotechnology and materials, demand is increasing for a cadre of social scientists and humanists specializing in the study of the social dimensions of emerging technology. The SGTR will create a focus area on emerging technologies in Cornell's existing Ph.D. program in Science & Technology Studies (S&TS). This award will provide support for two students for three years. Students in the new focus area will participate in a new graduate seminar on "Studying Emerging Technologies," take an advanced methods seminar, and take courses, participate in laboratory rotations, or engage in other activities to acquire appropriate technical knowledge. Each will conduct an empirical research project on an emerging technology that requires active engagement with the technical knowledge and help to organize and present an annual campus-wide panel discussion on social dimensions of emerging technologies. The program will also involve organizing an annual research workshop on studying emerging technologies. Unlike studies of any particular new technology, study of "emerging technologies" requires understanding a cluster of related issues: the complex deployment of "revolutionary" discourse; the intertwining of changing practices in laboratories, patent offices, and investment houses; the new "practical cosmologies" developed by technical workers as they embrace and extend technological revolutions; and the ethical complexities of conducting research about emerging technologies while often, because of ethnographic methodology, simultaneously participating in technological development. This project seeks to create a coherent training and research program integrating these issues into a coherent theoretical frame. The direct impact will be to train a particular cohort of two students per year in studying emerging technologies. Its broader impacts will include producing new courses on "studying emerging technologies," "archiving contemporary science," and other topics; sponsoring empirical research projects that, through presentation and publication, will contribute to wider scholarly discourse about emerging technologies; supporting campus-wide discussions between the scientific and technical communities and the science and technology studies community about the social dimensions of emerging technologies; and engaging individual faculty and students in the sciences and engineering in exploration of emerging technologies. Taken together, these activities will create broader awareness of issues associated with emerging technologies and will lead to wider integration of issues from science and technology studies into the work of scientists and engineers.