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Making Room for a Postcolonial Critique in the Introductory STS Curriculum

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Teaching Economic Inequality and Capitalism in Contemporary America

Abstract

Over the past few decades, research in ‘postcolonial technoscience’ has grown steadily within the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). Breaking away from the Euro/West-centric models of analysis, this scholarship has developed new conceptual frameworks and tools to address political economies of science and knowledge. However, in our teaching of STS, particularly at the introductory level, there seems to be limited engagement with these aspects of STS, and a continuation of Euro/West-centrism of the predominant discourse. In this chapter, I suggest that enriching the introductory STS curriculum with recent literature in postcolonial technoscience can provide students with an opportunity to examine how local and global inequities may affect science, and how science may be used to sustain such inequities. Instructors of introductory STS courses can better serve students by encouraging explorations of the regulatory ideals of Western science in relation to local and global standpoints and postcolonial criticisms.

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Correspondence to Dilshani Sarathchandra .

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Sarathchandra, D. (2018). Making Room for a Postcolonial Critique in the Introductory STS Curriculum. In: Haltinner, K., Hormel, L. (eds) Teaching Economic Inequality and Capitalism in Contemporary America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71141-6_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71141-6_20

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