10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17348
This contribution reconstructs the history of Science and Technology Studies in Switzerland. With a focus on the institutional aspects of the field’s emergence, it traces early initiatives to foster social research on science and technology, then considers, in more detail, the network building that led to the foundation of the Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology, and Society (STS-CH). It also identifies important sites of STS research in the Swiss academic landscape. This reconstruction reveals characteristics of the field as it emerges such as the late uptake of STS research in Switzerland compared to other European countries, the importance of young researchers and bottom-up initiatives for the building of a relevant academic network, and processes of fragile institutionalization and of de-institutionalization. To conclude, the contribution reflects on the field’s (inter)national and (inter)disciplinary configuration.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17348
1
en
Martina Merz
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Switzerland
A Fragile Field. The Development and Transformation of Science and Technology Studies in Switzerland
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Crossing Boundaries
2017-07-20
2023-06-22
2017-07-20
2023-08-21
129-145
TS
Martina Merz
2017/07/20
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17348
129
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt
2038-3460
1
Switzerland
en
145
A Fragile Field. The Development and Transformation of Science and Technology Studies in Switzerland
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17348/16197
8
                                                                  Crossing Boundaries

A Fragile Field
The Development and Transformation of Science
and Technology Studies in Switzerland

       Regula Valérie Burri                                 Martina Merz
  HafenCity University Hamburg (DE)               Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (AT)



    Abstract: This contribution reconstructs the history of Science and Tech-
    nology Studies in Switzerland. With a focus on the institutional aspects of
    the field’s emergence, it traces early initiatives to foster social research on
    science and technology, then considers, in more detail, the network building
    that led to the foundation of the Swiss Association for the Studies of Sci-
    ence, Technology, and Society (STS-CH). It also identifies important sites of
    STS research in the Swiss academic landscape. This reconstruction reveals
    characteristics of the field as it emerges such as the late uptake of STS re-
    search in Switzerland compared to other European countries, the im-
    portance of young researchers and bottom-up initiatives for the building of a
    relevant academic network, and processes of fragile institutionalization and
    of de-institutionalization. To conclude, the contribution reflects on the field’s
    (inter)national and (inter)disciplinary configuration.

    Keywords: STS; Institutionalization; History; Academic association; Inter-
    disciplinarity; Switzerland.

    Corresponding author: Regula Valérie Burri, Science and Technology
    Studies, HafenCity University Hamburg, Überseeallee 16, D-20457 Hamburg,
    Germany – Email: regula.burri@hcu-hamburg.de.




    Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars are interested in the
ways local settings, cultural contexts, and transnational configurations
shape the production and use of science and technology and, at the same
time, ask how these contexts and configurations are themselves co-
produced and reconfigured by scientific knowledge and technological
applications. In perspective of STS, it may thus seem inadequate to focus
on the history of an academic field within a national context. Neverthe-
less, national funding institutions and local (actor) networks did play an

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
8 (1) pp. 130-145 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2017
130                                                              Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

important role for the emergence of STS, be it in Switzerland or else-
where. In this contribution, we reconstruct the developments of STS
within the Swiss context. In doing so, we follow the suggestion “to tell
parallel stories of the emergence of STS from other national and regional
vantage points” (Jasanoff 2010, 192).
    Such an enterprise could inquire into the epistemic culture (Knorr
Cetina 1999) or the conceptual approaches of STS researchers, or provide
an overview on the topics and debates in STS scholarship – laboratory
studies, investigations of the control and environmental or social impact
of science, and studies that explore the manifold challenges of biomedi-
cine or nanotechnologies, to name just a few. It could then examine how
these topics have been investigated and discussed in the Swiss context. In
other words, it could explore the epistemic dimension of the emerging
field. While Swiss STS researchers indeed address a heterogeneous set of
research topics, our contribution, however, does not trace the thematic
orientations but rather focuses on the institutional and inter-disciplinary
framings and network developments which have been shaping the field in
Switzerland. Building on the claim that STS should inquire into the “local
configuration” of new research fields, which would allow “to recover the
situated practices and distinctive policies in terms of which new research
fields happen to be constituted” (Merz and Sormani 2016, 2), our interest
in this contribution is to reconstruct some of these local practices and
policies that have been shaping the formation of STS in Switzerland.
    The contribution is organized around specific characteristics identi-
fied when reconstructing the history of STS as it emerged. We first trace
early initiatives from the late 1980s and 1990s before considering, in more
detail, how a Swiss-wide network of STS scholars formed and a dedicated
STS association came into being. The contribution then proceeds with a
sketch of the institutional development and situation of STS at a number
of Swiss universities. Finally, we conclude the contribution by reflecting
on the field’s (inter)national and (inter)disciplinary configuration. Having
been actively involved in the long process of building STS in this country
(while pursuing our careers outside Switzerland today), this article allows
us also to revisit the sites and initiatives of science policy ‘from below’1.




   1
     Both authors have been active in the Swiss STS community. Regula Valérie
Burri was the co-president of the Swiss Association for the Studies of Science,
Technology, and Society (STS-CH) from 2003 to 2011, and the co-president of
the STS research committee of the Swiss Sociological Society from 2001 to 2013.
Martina Merz was the co-president of the Swiss Association for the Studies of Sci-
ence, Technology, and Society (STS-CH) from 2001 to 2012.
Burri & Merz                                                                131
1. A Late Beginning

    Science and Technology Studies (STS) has been established in several
Western countries since the 1970s. In many European countries, academ-
ic departments devoted to the study of the social implications of science
were founded with the expectation that they provide knowledge and ad-
vice to policy makers. However, in Switzerland STS was almost unknown
at the time. Two decades later, the engagement with science and technol-
ogy as a subject of scrutiny in the social sciences and humanities remained
scarce. In the mid-1990s, a report on the academic situation of Science
Studies commissioned by the Swiss Science Council called the status of
the sociology of science in Switzerland “precarious”. With the exception
of a few researchers at the universities of Lausanne and Bern, the study
found no institutional anchoring of research, and concluded that the so-
ciology of science in Switzerland was equipped “extraordinarily poorly”
compared to other countries (Heintz and Kiener 1995, 37).
    In 1995, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) es-
tablished a chair in philosophy of science and science studies. It consti-
tuted the first chair in an STS-related area of scholarship in Switzerland2.
In Lausanne, Bern and Geneva a small number of researchers engaged in
research associated with this field, predominantly relying on external
funding. Considering these rare institutional initiatives, it does not come
as a surprise that the social studies of science and technology did not ad-
vance significantly in the years that followed. Helga Nowotny, one of the
prominent actors in the development of the field both internationally and
nationally, recalls that STS had been adopted only hesitantly in Switzer-
land (Nowotny 1998).


2. Disciplinary Roots: The Role of Swiss Sociology in the
   Development of Swiss STS

    The slow uptake of STS in the Swiss context was related to the local
situation of the sociology of science and the history of science. Both of
these important traditions within STS were institutionally weak in Swit-
zerland until the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, within the Swiss Sociological
Society, a few researchers took the initiative to create institutional frame-
works for conducting studies on the social implications of science and
technology. In 1987, a “research committee” (a section of the society) on
work and technology was founded in Neuchâtel with the aim to foster re-
search on the role of technology in the structuring of work (“Comité de
recherche sur le travail et les techniques”, SVPW/SGS 1987, 4). This re-

   2
      Available at http://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/materialien/professoren/resultat
.php (retrieved February 14, 2017).
132                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

search committee survived just a few years.
     In the early 1990s, the Bulletin of the sociological association pub-
lished a call for the foundation of a research committee on information
technology and society. The author, Blaise Galland, who was at the time a
researcher at EPF Lausanne, pointed to the social importance of infor-
mation technologies. Comparable to a “macro-social super structure”
(“superstructure macro-sociale”), emerging information technologies
would create new worlds and shape society: its history, politics, and social
interactions (SVPW/SGS 1992, 44). Such impacts, he concluded, should
be explored and analysed in sociological research.
     Soon after this call, the mentioned research committee was estab-
lished. In 1993, it organized a European conference on Computer Sci-
ence, Communication and Society: A Technical and Cultural Challenge in
Neuchâtel in cooperation with the “Swiss Informaticians Society”. This
seems to have been one of the first international events on this issue in
Switzerland (SVPW/SGS 1993). Nevertheless, the committee was dis-
solved a few years later.
     In April 1995, a third attempt was made to create an institutional set-
ting for research on the social implications of science and technology.
Two postgraduate researchers from the universities of Lausanne and
Bern, Francesco Panese und Bettina Heintz, initiated a research commit-
tee on science, technology, and knowledge (“Sciences, techniques et con-
naissances – Wissenschafts- und Techniksoziologie”). The two research-
ers emphasized the central role of science and technology in modern soci-
eties and called for the development of analytical tools to understand and
handle the societal transformations resultant from science and technolo-
gy. Such research, they wrote, should inquire into the complex and diver-
sified processes of the production and deployment of science and technol-
ogy and should examine the involved actors and places (SVPW/SGS 1995).
     This committee, finally, turned out to be a booster for the further de-
velopment of STS in Switzerland. It initiated a variety of activities and
cooperated with the science and technology sections of the German and
Austrian Sociological Associations at a common congress of the three as-
sociations (SVPW/SGS 1999). Members of the committee also published
an interdisciplinary collection of articles on STS issues in Switzerland, in-
cluding policy concerns (Heintz and Nievergelt 1998).
     At the same time, researchers of the committee were involved in the
large social science research program “Switzerland: Towards the Future”.
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the program included
a module on “Knowledge Production and Value Change” and provided
grants to young researchers (SVPW/SGS 1994; 2000). With funds from
this program, two committee members, Bettina Heintz and Bernhard
Nievergelt, organized a Spring School with the title Science and Technol-
ogy Studies in Switzerland in 1999. The spring school marked a milestone
in the history of the development of Swiss STS.
Burri & Merz                                                              133
3. Bottom-Up Initiatives and Young Scholars: The Spring
   School and its Aftermath

    The Spring School took place in Zurich from March 1 to 5, 1999. It
brought together a broad range of younger scholars with internationally
renowned STS researchers like Susan Leigh Star, Karin Knorr Cetina,
Helga Nowotny, Brian Wynne, and Timothy Lenoir. Paul Hoyningen-
Huene and Werner Rammert acted as moderators. David Gugerli and
Jakob Tanner complemented the Swiss speakers. The Spring School was
fundamental for Swiss STS: it assembled the scattered researchers inter-
ested in social and historical studies of science and technology into an in-
terdisciplinary community, and inspired many researchers to focus on sci-
ence and technology issues for the first time.
    Young scholars played an important role in this event. Most of the 80
participants were working on either PhD projects or early phase postdoc
projects. Shortly prior to the Spring School, Helga Nowotny had re-
marked that, despite of the lacking institutionalization of STS in Switzer-
land, there existed young scholars acquainted with the international de-
velopments in STS who had shown to be “willing and capable” of partic-
ipating in these developments “in consideration of the Swiss circumstanc-
es” (Nowotny 1998, 10-11, translation by the authors).
    Two discussion events dedicated to the further development of STS in
Switzerland took place during the Spring School. It had been the explicit
objective of the organizers to develop a research agenda for Swiss STS
and to create a network of Swiss STS researchers (SPP Zukunft Schweiz
1998). The participants of the discussion events agreed that a network
fostering exchange among STS researchers was missing in Switzerland.
An informal group formed spontaneously with the aim to explore the op-
tion of establishing a Swiss STS association and organize further meetings
(see STS-CH Annual Report 2001-2002 and SVPW/SGS 2000). To foster
communication among interested researchers Christoph Müller, a mem-
ber of the organizing sociological research committee, set up a mailing list.
    Convened by the aforementioned informal group a first meeting on
New Projects for the Establishment of STS in Switzerland took place in
Bern on January 19, 2000. Young scholars had organized this meeting,
and most of the approximately two dozens of attendees were early career
researchers in history, sociology, or geography. Only one of the partici-
pants was a professor (Lengwiler 2000). During the meeting it was decid-
ed to pursue the project of a Swiss STS association, to establish a website
and to plan another spring or summer school. For each of these three
tasks, a working group was set up3.


    3
     The working groups’ members were as follows: Swiss STS association: Regu-
la Valérie Burri, Christoph Müller, Andrea Scheller, Beate Wilhelm; Website:
Bruno Strasser; next Spring/Summer School: Marc Audétat, Alain Kaufmann.
134                                                              Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

    The dynamics and enthusiasm that had characterized the Spring
School carried over into 2000, giving rise to further activities. Two work-
shops organized in Lausanne and Geneva served as a platform for addi-
tional networking as well as the discussion of ongoing research. These
events were accompanied by a visit to a museum and to the European la-
boratory for particle physics CERN4.
    Structural issues were an important and ongoing topic of discussion in
these meetings. Participants agreed that the sociological research commit-
tee, which had organized the Spring School and provided the organiza-
tional structure for the later meetings, should serve only as temporary or-
ganizational platform for the Swiss STS community. This agreement was
based on the variety of disciplinary backgrounds, besides sociology, of the
emerging community. An additional reason for reorganization was noted
in a review of the Spring School, in which the sociological research com-
mittee claimed that the organizational frame of the research committee
had been overburdened and that “a discussion on the structure was ur-
gently needed” (SVPW/SGS 2000, 54, translation by the authors). The
review suggested that, if the committee would further serve as an organi-
zational structure for the Swiss STS community, it should change its
name. When the working group “Swiss STS association” presented a first
outline of bylaws during the workshops in Lausanne and Geneva, the at-
tendees agreed that the newly established association should have its own
organizational structure.
    At the same time, the members of the sociological research committee
were “carefully positive” with regards to the further existence of the
committee: despite their engagement in the foundation of the new STS
association, the committee members advocated the continuation of its ac-
tivities (SVPW/SGS 2001). The committee received regular funding by
the Swiss Sociological Association, which allowed the flexible and easy
organization of small-scale events. In 2001, when the long-term president
Bettina Heintz resigned, the committee decided to reconstitute itself, and
Alain Kaufmann, Bernhard Nievergelt and Regula Valérie Burri were
elected as new co-presidents. During the following twelve years, the
committee organized a variety of events and activities. These included
two visits to the exhibitions iconoclash and Making Things Public at
ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2002 and 2005 as well as two international work-


   4
      The workshop in Lausanne took place at EPF Lausanne on April 27, 2000.
It was organized by Marc Audétat, Alain Kaufmann and Bernhard Nievergelt and
included a presentation of several local initiatives: the recently founded Observa-
toire Science, Politique et Société, the study program European Studies of Socie-
ty, Science, and Technology, the Laboratoire d´études sociales des sciences, and
IMédia, a local initiative at the University of Lausanne dedicated to the communi-
cation between science and society. The workshop at the University of Geneva on
October 19-20, 2000 was organized by Martina Merz and Bruno Strasser (see also
SVPW/SGS 2001).
Burri & Merz                                                                 135
shops at the congress of the Swiss Sociological Association in 2003, which
discussed the relationships between science, technology, and neoliberal-
ism. Members of the committee also co-organized conferences with the
Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences on topics like “tech-
nology research” (2003) and “biomedicine” (2004), and they cooperated
selectively with TA-Swiss (Centre for Technology Assessment). Further
activities were mostly organized in cooperation with the then founded
STS association – many times by identical staff. In 2013, the members of
the sociological research committee agreed that it would not make sense
to keep up the committee and decided to dissolve it.
    The Spring School and the activities following it had all been bottom-
up initiatives. They were not initiated by departments or larger institu-
tions but instead were organized by younger academics with little institu-
tional power. The engagement of these researchers finally led to the
foundation of the Swiss STS association.


4. Interregionality, Interdisciplinarity, and Internationality:
   The Foundation and Development of STS-CH

    In fall 2000 and early 2001, the preparations for the foundation of the
Swiss STS Association advanced. At the mentioned workshop in Geneva,
the participants voted on the name of the new association, and opted for
“Swiss Association for the Studies of Science, Technology, and Society
(STS-CH)”. After a further preparatory meeting in Bern in early 2001, the
inaugural meeting of the association was convoked. On April 20, 2001,
seventeen researchers from Zurich, Lausanne, Bern, Geneva, and St. Gall
met in Bern to celebrate the foundation of STS-CH. The bylaws adopted
at this meeting listed two main objectives of the association: “information
exchange and the building of networks” and “the external representation
of interests” by fostering STS activities and research5.
    During this event, the executive council and the presidency were
elected. The first council of STS-CH (Marc Audétat, Monika Dommann,
Martin Lengwiler, Martina Merz, Christoph Müller, Bruno Strasser, Be-
ate E. Wilhelm) consisted of three postdocs and four doctoral students.
The constitution of the council conformed to the members’ quest to have
all regions and disciplines represented. They considered it very important
to have a balance of representatives from the French speaking part (EPF
Lausanne, University of Geneva) and the German speaking part (the uni-
versities of Bern and Zurich, and ETH Zurich), as well as having both the


    5
      See http://www.sagw.ch/de/sts-ch/Association/mainColumnParagraphs/0/
text_de_files/file0/STS-CH-stat-2001-d.pdf (retrieved February 14, 2017, sections
translated by the authors). The following sections rely on the annual reports of
STS-CH and on documents in the private archives of the authors.
136                                                               Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

social science branch and the history branch of STS represented in the
council. To guarantee a fair balance, the meeting’s attendees also decided
to establish a co-presidency, constituted by the historian Martin
Lengwiler and the sociologist Martina Merz. The care for such a regional-
ly and disciplinarily distributed council would be characteristic for STS-
CH in its later years and remained one important criteria for the organi-
zation of activities and the self-understanding of the association until to-
day.
    Disciplinary heterogeneity was not only an issue in terms of the organ-
izational structure of STS-CH. More importantly for the members of the
association was the genuinely interdisciplinary character of the field of
science and technology studies. The association’s bylaws thus explicitly
mentioned that “STS is not disciplinarily restricted”6. Interdisciplinarity
was also an issue in the welcoming addresses that had been prepared for
the occasion of the inaugural meeting by prominent international STS re-
searchers (such as Geoffrey C. Bowker, Steve Epstein, Bernward Joerges,
Karin Knorr Cetina, Ted Porter, Susan Leigh Star, and Steven Shapin).
Karin Knorr Cetina, a former president and founding member of the So-
ciety for Social Studies of Science (4S), advocated fostering discussion be-
tween the disciplines:

            “May the new association stimulate as many intellectual con-
       troversies and bloodsheds among its philosophical, historical, soci-
       ological and other factions as 4S has done in the past! (...) and may
       it always insist that its members are simultaneously inside and out-
       side the science, technology and society they study”.
       (Welcoming address by Karin Knorr Cetina, April 19, 2001)

    This quote underlines that interdisciplinarity was no guarantee for
successful communication and cooperation between disciplines. Rather,
the STS community would have to continuously struggle for a mutual
understanding. In the context of an academic world that was (and still is)
predominantly organized in disciplinary structures, as is the case for Swiss
universities, it was more difficult to integrate and institutionalize enter-
prises of that kind.
    Another important issue, internationality – i.e. the ways a national STS
association should relate to the international community – was addressed
by Jakob Tanner, a Zurich based and internationally renowned historian:

           “My advice? STS-CH should write STS in capitals and CH in
       lower case. Academic research heads toward an open future with-
       out any national number plates. Instead, academic curiosity, the
       ability to amaze, and irritability are needed. Big, sedated explana-

   6
      See http://www.sagw.ch/de/sts-ch/Association/mainColumnParagraphs/0/
text_de_files/file0/STS-CH-stat-2001-d.pdf (retrieved February 14, 2017, sections
translated by the authors).
Burri & Merz                                                              137
        tory models should for now be parked. This is how experimental
        expeditions to new scientific territories come about, and thus
        emerges the space for the needed search movements and unex-
        pected encounters”.
        (Welcoming address by Jakob Tanner, April 19, 2001, translation
        by the authors)

    The founding members of STS-CH shared this view. The association’s
“national number plate” was never meant to foster specifically Swiss re-
search topics but rather pointed to the context in which most activities of
STS-CH would take place. From the very beginnings, researchers advo-
cated an international orientation of the association that was in accord-
ance with the international character of science in general, and STS in
particular. This orientation was supported by the communication practic-
es of the academics involved in the foundation of the association. Starting
with the Spring School in 1999, academics had communicated in English
rather than German and French, as it had been mostly the case before.
The use of English was meant to prevent researchers from the distinct
linguistic regions in Switzerland from teaming-up and excluding persons
from the respective other region. Equally important, the establishment of
English as the association’s official and unofficial communication lan-
guage allowed researchers from abroad to participate in the activities of
STS-CH without language barriers.
    In the academic landscape of the Swiss humanities and social sciences
the language policy that was adopted had an innovative element. While,
for example, the sociological research committees engaged in research on
science and technology had been using English mainly in their workshops
and conferences, STS-CH was one of the first academic associations that
would use English in their official communication as well as in the daily
exchanges of members from different language regions.
    Since the foundation of STS-CH, its council and its members have ini-
tiated and carried out a large number of national and international activi-
ties and events. Often these were conceived and organized in cooperation
with local teams with the aim of pooling organizational resources, as well
as furthering contact across locations. Besides more confined workshops,
there were also discussion sessions on topics of both scientific and socie-
tal importance and STS-informed guided tours through exhibitions. STS-
CH has co-organized four larger international meetings to this day. These
so-called Swiss STS Meetings covered a range of topics and took place at
the then central locations of STS in Switzerland: Knowledge in Plural
Context (Lausanne, 2001); Sites of Knowledge Production (Basel, 2004);
Science Futures (Zurich, 2008); Collecting, Organizing, Trading Big Data
(Lausanne, 2014).
    That STS-CH had acquired a good reputation abroad was apparent
with the invitation issued by the European Association for the Study of
Science and Technology (EASST) to jointly organize one of their biennial
 138                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

meetings in 2006. The EASST-Meeting 2006 took place in Lausanne, in
August, under the title Reviewing Humanness: Bodies, Technologies and
Spaces. This event marked the moment from which on, without doubt,
the Swiss STS community – not only individual researchers or teams –
had arrived on the field’s international map. In the same year, STS-CH
gained further respectability also nationally when the association was ac-
cepted as a member of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sci-
ences. The approval procedure required the association’s co-presidents
(at the time, Regula Valérie Burri and Martina Merz) to argue convincing-
ly that (a) STS-CH could not be represented by one of the existing, disci-
pline-oriented member societies and that (b) the field, and its association,
had a future lying ahead.
    In the next section we will move back in time to take a closer look at
the debates about and the processes of institutionalizing STS in Switzer-
land, especially as organizations of higher education are concerned.


5. Institutionalization (and De-institutionalization): STS
   Centers and Chairs

     How STS could be institutionalized has been an important topic of
discussion since the beginning of the field’s broader introduction in Swit-
zerland in the late 1990s. The question of potential forms of institutional-
ization would be difficult to answer, according to Helga Nowotny (1998),
due to the extant profound structural crisis of universities that seemed to
offer little opportunity for experimentation. Nowotny suggested that such
instances of crisis lend themselves to transdisciplinary approaches and
models “that consciously build on a ‘light’ and networked form of organi-
zation affording the exploitation of all extant personnel and institutional
resources” (Nowotny 1998, 10-11, translation by the authors ). Such net-
works should cross the existing disciplinary and institutional boundaries
and, in addition, they should not be constrained by boundaries between
the academic and extra-academic realms (idem). In these early years, an-
other visionary account proposed the construction of an interdisciplinary
centre for Science and Technology Studies in Switzerland (Nievergelt
1998).
     Interestingly, science policy actors actively initiated and furthered this
debate. To provide an example: the Parliament had commissioned the
Swiss Science Council (SSC) to address science studies within its funding
period 1992-1995. In this context, the SSC held a closed meeting with the
title Science Studies – Problems and Perspectives in 1994 and launched a
comprehensive review of the field (SWR 1995; Heintz and Kiener 1995).
The conclusions note “a consensus that Science Studies is worthy of sup-
port, concerning the level of fundamental research as well as teaching”
(SWR 1995, 61, translation by the authors). At that time, the office for
Burri & Merz                                                                  139
technology assessment (“Stelle für Technikfolgenabschätzung”, the later
TA-SWISS) was in a trial phase under the umbrella of the SSC. Foreign
experts, in their evaluation of the TA office, also asserted that Switzerland
lacked researchers qualified in conducting social studies of science and
technology (Heintz and Nievergelt 1998). Such statements may well have
contributed to the positive attitude that science policy actors in Switzer-
land held towards STS.
    The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) also showed a general
openness for and interest in science studies, e.g. in the context of the
aforementioned Priority Program “Switzerland: Towards the Future”.
The SNSF supported the field through project funding and by awarding
research professorships (SNSF professorships) to scholars with projects
in or closely associated with STS (Marcel Weber, Basel; Martina Merz,
Lucerne; Valérie November, Lausanne; Monika Dommann, Basel; Mari-
anne Sommer, Zurich and Lucerne). While the SNSF’s continuing sup-
port played an important role to initiate and sustain research efforts in
STS, it nonetheless could not contribute directly to institutionalizing the
field at the university level. A first reason was the limited duration of each
of the funding initiatives, a second that universities were wary of the
SNSF’s potential intervention in their strategic decisions, in particular
where interventions would impact upon disciplinary configuration (Merz
2009).
    At the same time, a number of Swiss universities pursued initiatives
with the view to implement STS more strongly, albeit without coordinat-
ing their respective projects. As we will show below, the initiatives were
adopted at different organizational levels of the universities, combining
bottom-up approaches with the top-down implementation of new chairs.
Two locations, Zurich and Lausanne, stood out with their long-term en-
gagement in STS and associated areas of scholarship. Each location will
be examined in more detail, followed by brief sections on other selected
locations’ involvement in STS.

    5.1 Zurich

   At ETH Zurich, philosophers of science Ferdinand Gonseth (chair in
mathematics 1929-1960, also dedicated to philosophy of science since
1947) and Paul Feyerabend (chair in philosophy of science 1979-1991)
had been active many years before a combined chair for “Philosophy of
Science and Science Studies” was established in 1995. First held jointly by
Yehuda Elkana (until 1999) and Helga Nowotny (until 2002), this chair,
now a chair for Science Studies, has since become an attractive and lively
center of considerable standing, of importance especially for the German-
language academic community7. Together with other chairs at ETH Zur-

   7
     Available at http://www.ethistory.ethz.ch/materialien/professoren/ (retrieved
March 1, 2017).
140                                                         Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

ich, the chair for Science Studies offers an interdisciplinary Masters pro-
gram in the history and philosophy of science.
    In 1997, ETH Zurich established the Collegium Helveticum. Inspired
by the interdisciplinary Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, this new unit pur-
sued the objective of fostering discussion and cooperation between the
natural and technical sciences, on the one hand, and the social sciences
and humanities, on the other. Besides ETH professors Adolf Muschg and
Iso Camartin, the aforementioned Yehuda Elkana and Helga Nowotny
established the Collegium Helveticum as a centre that offered an interdis-
ciplinary fellowship program for doctoral students of different discipli-
nary origin and a guest program for artists, writers, and scientists. Nu-
merous symposia, workshops, literary readings, and exhibitions brought
together scholars from abroad with the local team and engaged the sci-
ences in dialogue with the public8. Right from the beginning, central ap-
proaches and themes of STS constituted important topics of debate and
enriched inter- and transdisciplinary exchange. In the years following
1998 – the year Helga Nowotny took over as head –, the Collegium Hel-
veticum developed into the central location for STS in Switzerland. It
continues to be a centre for reflection and debate about science and its
relation with society also under its new bi-institutional roof of both ETH
Zurich and University of Zurich since 2004.
    In 2005, the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich founded the Cen-
ter History of Knowledge as a joint centre of competence with the objec-
tive of fostering and coordinating research and teaching in historical,
philosophical and cultural studies perspective on modern knowledge sys-
tems and knowledge societies. The centre has become the largest institu-
tion in Switzerland that addresses topics associated with Science and
Technology Studies within perspectives of the humanities, such as, in par-
ticular, history. It also hosts a doctoral program on the history of
knowledge, which is supported by the Swiss University Conference9.
    In 2014, the new Center for Higher Education and Science Studies
took up work at the University of Zurich with the objective of conducting
research and performing advisory functions.
    Next to these centres, the professorship of history of technology at
ETH Zurich, a chair in the history department of the University of Zur-
ich, and, more recently, the chair of popular culture at the University of
Zurich have become important locations in which STS research is being
carried out.




   8
    See also Nievergelt (1998).
   9
    Available at http://www.zgw.ethz.ch/de/doktoratsprogramm.html (retrieved
March 6, 2017).
Burri & Merz                                                                   141
    5.2 Lausanne

    Lausanne is the other Swiss location in which activities in STS go back
to the early 1990s. First initiatives in research and teaching were primarily
undertaken by younger scholars. For example, an organizational unit at
EPF Lausanne was involved in setting up the international Master’s pro-
gram European Studies of Society, Science, and Technology and partici-
pated in the program when the first cohort started in 199310. This interna-
tional study program connected (and still connects) students and teaching
staff at selected universities in a number of European countries. Through
the continuing engagement of scholars at EPF Lausanne and the Univer-
sity of Lausanne, first steps toward institutionalizing STS were undertak-
en. A success in this respect was the establishment of an assistant profes-
sorship in sociology of science and technology at the University of Lau-
sanne in the year 2000.
    The year 1999 saw the founding of the Observatoire Science, Poli-
tique et Société at EPF Lausanne which, in its activities, focused primarily
on higher education research and its boundary areas with STS. In 2005,
the Observatoire was transferred to the University of Lausanne where it
became integrated into its Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. In this
Faculty a chair for social studies of science and technology was estab-
lished in 2011. Since 2016, the Faculty’s STS scholars meet regularly in
the context of the newly created STSLab: a research unit that gathers al-
most a hundred regular members, doctoral students and associates11.
    With its two universities, Lausanne is today amongst the most dynam-
ic sites in Switzerland for STS research, especially in its social scientific
orientation. The local community of STS scholars is well connected inter-
nally and is also closely associated with other fields of research and activi-
ty. These connections have afforded new profiles for positions. For ex-
ample, the aforementioned assistant professorship established in the year
2000 was transformed, in 2008, into a full professorship held jointly by
the Faculty of Biology and Medicine and the Faculty of Social and Politi-
cal Sciences. In Lausanne, a social science and humanities perspective on
medical research is well established, encompassing the history of medi-
cine and public health. To mention another example, it was again those
scholars who had engaged in fostering STS early on who took the initia-
tive to found the Interface Sciences – Société. This is a platform promot-
ing and organizing dialogue between science and the public that offers an
institutional home for science mediators and researchers alike for more
than fifteen years.




    10
         https://prezi.com/xhdhvcb0rbx7/esst-timeline/ (retrieved March 6, 2017).
    11
         https://www.unil.ch/stslab/en/home.html (retrieved March 6, 2017).
142                                                          Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

   5.3 Further Locations

    A number of other locations developed activities in STS that were
more closely aligned with particular research fields. For more than a dec-
ade, for example, Basel had been an important location for STS, especial-
ly for the sociology of science and knowledge. A professorship for Science
Studies was established in 2001. However, after the professor left the uni-
versity to take up a position abroad in 2013, the Rectorate closed down
this unique centre for the social studies of science and technology at a
university in German-speaking Switzerland. Since then, research and
teaching associated with STS, in particular history of science, have been
located primarily at the university’s Department of History.
    At the University of Geneva, since the early 2000s, it was a small
number of scholars associated with the history of medicine that under-
took activities in the field of STS. While STS has not become strongly in-
stitutionalized at this university so far, considerable research activity ex-
ists with a focus on biology and medicine. Two professorships have been
of importance in this context: a chair of philosophy of science and a chair
of science education and history of science.
    At the University of Lucerne, founded as a modern higher education
institution in the year 2000, research and teaching associated with science
studies first took place in the Department of Sociology. A promising per-
spective for the future emerged only with the establishment of a chair for
Science Studies in 2010. A year later, the chair holder together with the
newly appointed professor for cultural studies (who happened to be a sci-
ence studies scholar) founded the Department of Cultural and Science
Studies. As of late, STS activities in Lucerne have taken up momentum;
similar to the situation in Zurich, however, social science scholarship that
addresses science and technology is still limited.
    In addition to these locations, the chair of social and cultural geogra-
phy at the University of Neuchâtel and some dispersed researchers at
other Swiss universities, including universities of applied sciences, have
engaged in STS research.
    In summary, the current situation of STS in Switzerland is one of am-
bivalence (see also below). While the Zurich and the Lausanne contexts
have succeeded in institutionalizing STS by way of dedicated professor-
ships and the bundling of activities in centres, the situation looks quite
different in other locations. In particular, the closing of the STS chair in
Basel points to a de-institutionalization of the field, which had taken up
considerable momentum locally to the benefit of STS in Switzerland more
generally.
Burri & Merz                                                              143
6. Conclusion

    Our reconstruction of the history of STS in Switzerland has revealed
several characteristics of the emergence of the field: a late uptake of STS
research in both academic and institutional terms; the importance of one
discipline, sociology, as a driver for the building of an STS network in its
early stage; the engagement of young academics in organizing events and
fostering the dialog bottom-up; the involvement of different language re-
gions and academic disciplines in such activities; the orientation towards
the international STS community; and, finally, processes of fragile institu-
tionalization (and de-institutionalization).
    In our concluding reflections, we will revisit two related themes. First,
from the literature on the development of new research fields or disci-
plines it is known that institutionalization involves different levels and
processes: in particular, the establishment of journals, associations, chairs,
and degree programs (e.g. Heilbron 2004). The fact that STS was no
longer a novel research field internationally when its development finally
took off in Switzerland left its mark on how it evolved in this country. Ini-
tiatives at the national level, such as STS-CH, were geared toward the in-
ternational state of the field and its international scientific community
right from the beginning. “CH” indeed remained written in lower case
(as a welcoming address had suggested, see above). No serious attempt
was undertaken to create a separate epistemic space for “Swiss” STS in
the form of, e.g., a journal. While also selected initiatives at Swiss univer-
sities closely cooperated or aligned with developments abroad (e.g. the
early participation of EPF Lausanne in constructing a European Master’s
program in STS), the establishment of dedicated university positions and
centres, however, depended more strongly on local particularities. Aca-
demic positions in STS have remained a scarce resource until today. In
many cases, STS activities are undertaken either ‘undercover’ (i.e. under
the denomination of another field) or in the context of positions that as-
sociate STS with other areas of scholarship. This scarcity of dedicated po-
sitions may be one of the reasons why the two Swiss locations in which
STS is best institutionalized today are those in which two universities (a
cantonal university and a Federal Institute of Technology) coexist: Zurich
and Lausanne. The richer institutional milieus of such co-habitation may
offer more opportunities for bottom-up initiatives to create chairs, cen-
tres, or degree programs and provide more options to reassemble local
networks and resources to the benefit of a still fragile field like STS.
    A second issue of interest pertains to the disciplinary configurations of
STS in Switzerland. We again observe two separate trends when compar-
ing the national level of the Swiss-wide association and the local, depart-
mental level. STS-CH was founded deliberately to engage with STS in its
broadest sense: involving scholarship from the full spectrum of disciplines
as well as transdisciplinary activity. In contrast, individual centres and
departments in many cases reproduce the organizational separation that
144                                                           Tecnoscienza – 8 (1)

has also gained traction internationally: that between STS in a narrow
sense (associated with the social sciences only) and its counterpart in the
humanities, in particular the history of science, technology, and
knowledge. When we take into consideration this distinction, the Swiss
landscape of Science and Technology Studies shows a more nuanced pic-
ture than presented in our brief summary above. In Zurich, the cultural
studies and humanist orientation of STS is particularly well established.
With the Center History of Knowledge, and its broad spectrum of schol-
arship in the humanities, Zurich has become the most visible and im-
portant location for the history and philosophy of science in Switzerland.
In contrast, as far as the social science orientation of STS is concerned,
only the Lausanne context has succeeded in institutionalizing the field by
way of professorships and the bundling of activities within the STSLab.
The situation of STS in other locations keeps evolving, in varying direc-
tions. The fragility of STS in Switzerland is thus not only a feature of lim-
ited resources (personnel and other) but also of the unpredictability and
contingent nature of its development.


Acknowledgement

    This contribution is based on Burri and Merz (2014) and is in large
parts a translation of this text. We thank Sophie Ritson for the English
editing of the manuscript.


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Burri & Merz                                                                 145
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