The Certificate in Science, Technology, and Society is designed for degree-seeking graduate students at Georgia Tech. This certificate is for students who would like to demonstrate additional competence in some aspect of STS or special competence in STS in their home discipline. The certificate is open to students in good standing in any graduate program at Georgia Tech.
The 12-credit certificate program helps students to:
- Understand the social, cultural, and epistemic dynamics of science and technology
- Explore these dynamics across world societies and cultures
- Develop sensitivity to issues of gender, race, and justice across areas of knowledge, including engineering, medicine, environment, cognition, security, innovation, design
- Employ STS approaches as scholars or practitioners (e.g. engineers, scientists, or policymakers)
Program of Study (Four Courses Total):
- Core Course: One Required
- HTS 6743 / PUBP 6743 / LMC 6743: STS Core Seminar
- HTS 6118: Science, Technology and the Economy
- HTS 6121 / INTA 8803: Science, Technology and Security
- HTS 6123 / LMC 8803: Social and Cultural Studies of Biomedicine
- HTS 6124: Science and Technology Beyond Borders
- PUBP 6748 / LMC 6748: Social Justice, Critical Theory and Philosophy of Design
- LMC 6749 / PUBP 6749: Feminist Theory and STS
- Up to One Other Elective, Subject to Student Interest and STS Coordinator Approval
- Many appropriate courses are offered across the Ivan Allen College and the Institute, for example, CS 8893: Cognition and Culture
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STS Courses for Spring 2026
LMC 6650 Project Studio: Affective Data Visualization
Yanni Loukissas, School of Literature, Media & Communication
Tuesdays, 12:30 p.m.
What can data visualization do to us, not just for us? Can data visualization enhance our senses, foster curiosity and wonder, induce anxiety and fear, or make us more resilient? In this Spring 2026 Project Studio, we will explore the affect of data visualization.
In recent years, the fields of data science (computing), data visualization (design) and data studies (humanities and social sciences) have explored how data function instrumentally, as alleged evidence. By this definition, data are rhetorical instruments. They exist to support the rational claims made by scientific, scholarly, commercial, and civic organizations. This perspective on data is important. However, it can overlook questions about how data work experientially, as perceptual and aesthetic artifacts. Indeed, data have an emotional impact, with social implications for what counts as data, where can data work, and who can make use of data. How data make us feel is at least as important to their effectiveness as the logical arguments they support.
In this course, we will explore the affective potential of data visualization through a series of design investigations culminating in public data visualization prototypes for the Georgia Tech Library Interactive Media Zone.
In the process, we will learn about how data visualization can shape the way people feel about our campus and the surrounding communities. Prior experience in data visualization is welcome, but not required.
Email Yanni Louissas to learn more or for a permit to register.
PUBP 8813: Gender, Science, Technology, & Policy
Mary Frank Fox, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy
Wednesdays, 6:30 p.m.
Participation and performance are key to the creativity, productivity, and innovation of science and technology.
In this class, we will learn about experiences and conditions of women and men in scientific fields—and ways these are shaped by:
- educational patterns and practices (from pre-school through graduate education);
- organization and cultures of workplaces;
- evaluation, recognition, and rewards;
- work and family;
- meanings of science;
- patterns of retention in fields;
- and more.
Throughout, we examine policies to enhance contributions to science and technology. The class provides opportunities for students to develop understandings important for present and future success.
HTS 6116: Global Environmental History
Germán Vergara, School of History and Sociology
Wednesdays, 5 p.m.
This course offers a survey of environmental historiographies from around the world, encompassing works on Asia, Europe, Africa, the US, and Latin America, as well as global environmental history. The works have been selected to introduce students to the diversity of approaches, themes, debates, and problems that characterize the environmental historiographies of various regions worldwide. We will focus on topics such as natural abundance, industrialization, and the Cold War when reading US environmental history; states and their environmental basis when examining Asian environmental history; empire, resource extraction, and conservation when analyzing African literature; commodities, empire, and disease in the case of Latin America; the climate and rivers in European environmental historiography, among others. We will also read works that take a global approach. The overall purpose of the course is to introduce students to the field of environmental history through the regional literature that constitutes its building blocks and the global scholarship that tries to determine how regional pieces of the puzzle fit from a planetary perspective, a view for which environmental history might be particularly suitable.
LMC 8001: Proseminar in Digital Media
Richmond Wong, School of Literature, Media & Communication
Mondays, 2 p.m.
This course explores advanced work in the production and critique of new media forms, and provides students with a background in concepts from across STS, human-computer interaction, and design research. Our investigations will consider intellectual history posed around the question: How is research constructed and evaluated in these fields? For the STS inclined, we usually have weeks on "what is science?," the social construction of technology, Lucy Suchman's situated actions, feminist epistemologies with Haraway and Harding, post-human and assemblage theories, and critical data/algorithm/AI studies.
HTS 6111: Technology & Modern Culture
Eric Schatzberg, School of History & Sociology
Thursdays, 5 p.m.
Introduces the complex interplay between technological systems and diffuse systems of consumption, social organization, and culture beyond the act of production.