TORONTO, August 19, 2009 -- Students in a new graduate program at York University will study the role that science and technology has played in our lives, past and present, using the tools of the social sciences, philosophy and history.
"You can't escape the impact of science on contemporary life – we are so used to seeing it everywhere that it becomes almost invisible to us and we don't even notice it," says York humanities Professor Bernard Lightman, the program's founder and director. “Science and technology play a role in almost everything we do, or use, from the smart phone that delivers our email to the stain-resistant fabrics in our shirts."
The Science & Technology Studies Graduate Program is devoted to understanding this role, how and why science and technology came to play a role in so much of daily life, and the consequences we live with as a result, both good and bad, says Lightman.
The first of its kind in Canada, York’s new Science and Technology Studies Graduate Program will go beyond studying the history and philosophy of science, employing a broader interdisciplinary perspective to examine four areas of science and technology: biosciences and biotechnologies; human-machine interactions; public science; and physical systems. Thirty-five professors at York will contribute to the program, including faculty who have graduated from top science and technology programs at MIT, Cornell and Harvard.
In the biosciences and biotechnologies field, students will explore subjects such as the geopolitical significance of epidemics. Within the field of human-machine interactions, they will examine wearable technologies, cyborgs and mind-controlled devices to explore the future of humanity’s relationship with machines. In the area of public science, they will study how scientific innovations are communicated to the public, and the impact of these innovations, as well as the legal and ethical dimensions of scientific and technological issues. Finally, they will examine the interconnectedness of physical sciences, within disciplines such as astronomy, physics, and chemistry, to discover how matter, energy, ideas, communicative strategies and technological processes have converged to create physical systems and the disciplines that probe them.
York is home to two prominent journals in the field of science and technology studies – ISIS and the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. The University is also one of six regional nodes in the Strategic Knowledge Cluster in Science & Technology Studies, funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Enrolment in the new program will start at about sixteen students this year, and is expected to grow in the future, says Lightman, due to increasing recognition of the enormous role that science and technology play. Graduates may be expected to meet the growing need for experts who are able to translate scientific terminology into plain English, he says, and to play important roles in academia, government policy making, elementary and secondary school education, science journalism and the media.
York University is the leading interdisciplinary research and teaching university in Canada. York offers a modern, academic experience at the undergraduate and graduate level in Toronto, Canada’s most international city. The third largest university in the country, York is host to a dynamic academic community of 50,000 students and 7,000 faculty and staff, as well as more than 200,000 alumni worldwide. York’s 10 faculties and 26 research centres conduct ambitious, groundbreaking research that is interdisciplinary, cutting across traditional academic boundaries. This distinctive and collaborative approach is preparing students for the future and bringing fresh insights and solutions to real-world challenges. York University is an autonomous, not-for-profit corporation.
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For further information, please contact:
Janice Walls, Media Relations, York University, 416-736-2100 x22101 / wallsj@yorku.ca
