Welcome to the Institute for Science and Society
Our research is transforming how we engage with science and technology. We are expanding public participation and community involvement in knowledge and innovation. We are developing novel ways to contribute to the making of scientific research and technological change.
The Institute for Science and Society (ISS) is one of the leading centres in Science and Technology Studies (STS) within the UK, Europe and internationally. We are not only concerned with investigating the social, political and ecological aspects of science and technology but also with conducting transdisciplinary research that brings together the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences. Since ISS was established in 1998 we have attracted over £20 million in research funding in collaboration with partners across many different disciplines.
ISS has a distinctive research and working ethos: we are strongly committed to producing ground-breaking, transformational, engaged and collaborative research and to supporting new generations of STS scholars, postgraduate research students and early career researchers.
These are some of the topics that stand out in the research of ISS scholars:
- Sustainable social infrastructures: energy, climate change, green chemical technologies and low carbon transitions
- Health and the psychosocial: biomedicine, bioscience and the psychological and social constitution of our lives
- Alternative technoscience: from minority engagement, participatory practices and activist research to citizen science and community technoscience
- Animals, medicine and society: Laboratory research and veterinary ethics
- Expanding bioeconomies: circular economies, responsible innovation and the valorisation of waste, renewables and biomass
- Involved STS: feminist, decolonial, cultural and more-than-human approaches to science, technology and society
- Language and science: metaphors, representations and the framing of scientific and technological issues in public discourse and the media
- Digital lives: from sensing technologies to big data screening and data culling to digital objects and the fusion of code and matter
- Science governance: science policy, public deliberation, scientific decision making and participatory governance
- Transdisciplinary engagements: synergies between the social sciences, physical sciences, biosciences and engineering
ISS is part of six of the University's Research Priority Areas: