Dynamics of research agendas at ESOCITE Conferences, 1996-2018

Abstract

The academic field known as Science, Technology and Society (STS) in Latin America has been analyzed by some authors who established periods and cycles of interest that relate academic productions with dynamics of institutionalization, disciplinary configurations and political periods. Most of these works have been qualitative in nature, interpreting the knowledge produced in the field from a profuse reading of the existing bibliography and the authors' experience within the field. In terms of approaches, they were inscribed both in the traditions of document analysis and anthropological approaches, which are very typical of the STS field. In this work we build new and quantitative data, based on the information obtained from the periodic conferences of the Latin American Association of Social Studies of Science and Technology (ESOCITE Meetings), understanding it as a space where the agendas, interests and productions of the members of the field are most dynamically expressed. We place these results in dialogue with previous works with a view to contributing to studies on the STS field.

Keywords
research agendas; ESOCITE; Social studies of science and technology; research dynamics