The Culture of Science

The casebook offers five reading units organized thematically around significant questions at issue. Reading Unit 1 grounds students in contemporary questions of science and its boundaries, offering a blend of dense and approachable readings intended to spark class conversations on the topic of scientific culture. Units 2 and 3 extend discourses on scientific culture into areas of critical analysis such as gender, race and ethnicity, religion, ethics, and colonialism, as well as examining issues of language and perception. Unit 4 focuses on basic questions of fact, definition, and interpretation by exploring the discourse surrounding anomalies, pseudoscience, and skepticism, making it particularly useful for reviewing and extending students’ understanding of skills learned in Writing 121. Finally, Unit 5 offers a case study on Frankenstein as a techno-moral lesson on overreaching ambition and how it applies to scientific culture today. While the Table of Contents is organized thematically, many readings have cross-unit (and cross-disciplinary) connections and relevance. We encourage instructors to make use of the Alternative Table of Contents and to feel welcome to assign the entire casebook in your courses and/or to use individual readings or units as launching points for individual and team research projects. Supplementary teaching resources can be found in the casebook bibliography.

This casebook opens up modes of inquiry into Western knowledge foundations, asking students to embrace epistemological uncertainty as a productive means of developing critical thinking skills.