Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies

The Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies is an interdisciplinary research unit dedicated to salient issues at the intersection of the history, theory, and methodology of science. Among the fields that contribute to the formation of the Centre’s research agenda are philosophy, sociology, ethics, media studies, and linguistics. Through integrated initiatives, the Centre has developed a special focus on both national and international contexts of the processes of knowledge production, evaluation, and application. From various disciplinary standpoints, the researchers at the Centre seek to understand how science operates by analysing both intellectual developments and institutional settings in a broad context of particular knowledge regimes.

Among the research projects currently conducted by the members of the Centre are studies on the transformation of higher education systems, academic temporality, literary technologies of science, the foundations of mathematics, the social impact of research infrastructures, digital humanities, or type theories and their applications to natural language.

The Centre was founded in 1968 as the Centre for the Theory and Methodology of Science. Under the leadership of Prof. Ladislav Tondl, the Centre took up a significant role in shaping the area of science and technology, especially through its activities within the International Council for Science Policy Studies. Due to political reasons, the Centre was discontinued in 1970. It has been fully renewed in 1993 under its current name. In the 1990s, the Centre analysed transformation processes at the national level (with the outcome published as Transformation of Science and Research in the Czech Republic, Filosofia, Prague 1998. Since 2000, the Centre has participated in many international projects such as Recognizing Central and Eastern European Centres of RTD: Perspectives for the European Research Area, Strategic Evaluation on Innovation and the Knowledge Based Economy in Relation to the Structural and Cohesion Funds. Members of the Centre also took part in a number of projects funded by the EU: ProAct, MASIS, PLACES, NANOPINION, ResAGorA, ResInfra@DR.

Since 1969 the Centre has also published a peer-reviewed academic journal Theory of Science dedicated to the inquiry into the philosophical and methodological principles of scientific knowledge.