The Group

Scientific knowledge and technological systems and innovations are an indispensable component of individual and collective life in societies around the world today. Making sense of foundational questions about what constitutes a good, just, and sustainable way of living and how to build worlds that support flourishing of diverse forms of life requires grappling with the histories, imaginations, infrastructures, institutions, and broader human contexts of science and technology.

Researchers in the Ethics, Technology and Society group, within the Department of Humanities and Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zürich, study the mutual interplay of science, technology and society using frameworks and methods from Science, Technology & Society (STS), history, philosophy, anthropology, critical theory, and the arts. We privilege interpretive, qualitative methods that combine situated ethnographic detail with deep knowledge of cultural contexts and histories, ideally in a cross-national comparative perspective.

Teaching and public engagement

The humanities and interpretive social sciences offer crucial insights and methods for grappling with the role of science and technology in contemporary societies. They are also indispensable to understand what "ethical" and "socially-responsible" scientific and technical practice means and how to pursue it.

To share the benefits of insight from the humanities and interpretive social sciences with ETH colleagues in the sciences and engineering and our Swiss public neighbors more broadly, researchers in the Ethics, Technology and Society group are committed to teaching and public engagement. We aspire to translate research and theoretical and methodological innovations from STS into resources that can support scientific and lay communities in grappling with the ethical and human contexts of life in advanced technological societies.

To this end, we collaborate with students and faculty in the Bioethics Research Group, the ETH AI Center, the ETH-EPFL external pageSwiss Data Science Labcall_made, and other ETH centers and programs to create together educational opportunities, trainings, public convenings and cross-disciplinary research initiatives that can generate learning and dialogue about ethics, technology and society on pressing issues.

Beyond the academy, we seek to engage with and learn from Zürich and Swiss publics and civil society organizations who have a history of working on issues at the intersection of technology and society.

More about Science, Technology & Society

To learn more about the field of Science, Technology & Society (STS), you may enjoy to content from our group's collaborators:

• Read the external pagebrief overview of the field from the Harvard STS Programcall_made.
• Read a perspective on the value of the field of STS from pioneering scholar of Science, Technology & Society external pageSheila Jasanoff, in her Acceptance Speech for the 2022 Holberg Prizecall_made