Science and Technology Studies. Socio-epistemologia storica delle negoziazioni disciplinari

The aim of this work is to (re)construct the emergence process of the “Science and Technology Studies” (STS) field, as a result of broad disciplinary negotiations (especially between history of science, sociology of science and philosophy of science). In order to achieve this, I proposed an integrated methodology that I labelled “Socio-Historical Epistemology”. From the historical point of view, my Ph.D thesis provides a detailed survey of the academic emergence of the “STS” interdisciplinary field, from the 60s to the mid 80s (made also through archive research and oral history). First of all, I traced some intellectual, academical and socio-political trajectories, in order to explain the conditions of the emergence of this field (from the 30s to the 60s). In the following chapter I proposed a cartography of the major research units and pedagogical programs in U.K., U.S., France, German Democratic Republic, Federal Republic of Germany, Austria and Netherlands. Finally, another chapter is dedicated to the professional and international societies in STS. The results of this historical inquiry have been interpreted and organised through the framework of the “sociology of scientific fields” and the “sociology of knowledge”. Furthermore, the philosophical approach has made possible an epistemological analysis of both the historical and the sociological genesis and development of the interdisciplinary context of research of the “STS”. In this sense I argued that disciplinary boundaries in social sciences are, at the same time, diachronically constructed and reconstructed, through a collective process of controversies and negotiations and due to epistemological claims.