When Trevor Pinch, professor of science and technology studies, watches students on campus plugged into their iPods, he thinks about how technology shapes the way we experience sound in general and music in particular.

Pinch said that when people walking by the basement workshop of Robert Moog, Ph.D. '64, heard an early Moog synthesizer, some would say, "'What is this weird stuff?' In 1964-65, no one had been exposed to electronic sound at all," says Pinch, who wrote a book about Moog in 2002. "Now we are totally saturated by it. There really has been dramatic change, and we don't know too much about it."

"It's the 21st century, but most universities don't have an academic unit dedicated to studying the social and historical aspects of science and technology," says Stephen Hilgartner, chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS). "That's a bit odd. Understanding science and technology and how they fit into social relations has become really important."

To encourage scholars to pursue just this kind of understanding, STS was established in 1991. Formed by merging longstanding Cornell programs on the history, philosophy and impact of science and technology, the department has become a model for similar programs around the country. "Cornell is the first Ivy League university to have an STS department that I know of," says Pinch, who has been with STS since its inception and served as its chair for eight years. "We did it as an experiment, and it's been a successful experiment. Cornell is leading the world in this."

As a scholarly domain, STS researchers "want to understand how science and technology as forms of knowledge are produced; how their credibility is tested; how they change over time," explains Hilgartner. "We also seek to understand how science and technology move through the world, and how people incorporate them into their lives or build new kinds of lives using them."

Assistant professor Sara Pritchard, for example, studies the history of river management technologies to explore how societies think about nonhuman nature and human interactions with it. Professor Michael Lynch has examined the history of DNA forensic testing in the criminal justice system.

Hilgartner now is exploring how "anticipatory knowledge" -- efforts to imagine and understand the future -- is developed and used by governments.

"There are a lot of interesting, complicated questions about how you do that," says Hilgartner. "How do you make a model that's persuasive to people who may not want to believe it? How do parties who have different kinds of knowledge about the societies and systems you're trying to analyze negotiate about the shape of a model?"

Assistant professor Kathleen Vogel is writing a book on how the United States assesses biological weapons threats. She argues that the current approach used by policymakers and government analysts is too narrowly focused on technical issues, using her study of the intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war as a case in point.

"I try to show how it's very important to take into account the social context in assessing the development of biological weapons, in order to more accurately analyze and respond to emerging bioweapons threats," says Vogel.

STS students, who can major in either STS or biology and society, pursue the same careers as other liberal arts majors, like medicine, law or business, but with an important difference: "Instead of thinking of themselves as narrowly trained specialists, we hope they will be well prepared to think about science and technology in a far-reaching, societal way," says Hilgartner. "That's useful for many careers, and it's useful to society in general."

Claudia Wheatley is a writer with the Office of Publications and Marketing.