Momentum is the undergraduate research journal of the Science, Technology and Society (STSC) program at the University of Pennsylvania. Initiated in the Spring 2012 semester, the journal seeks to showcase the wide variety of work created by students in the STSC major and minor and by other students throughout the University whose work is related to our program.
There are as many individual STSC programs as there are students in the program, for science and technology studies invites students from diverse backgrounds, opinions and interests to consider broad and fundamental questions about our society. Furthermore, as we have seen from our first issue, people all over the Penn campus think critically about science and technology;Momentum is a way of bringing all of these perspectives together to stimulate fruitful new ideas among both our contributors and readers. We have, from the beginning, wanted to encourage that diversity within our publication, and our range of submissions reflects that goal. In our first issue, we have included a range of work from senior theses to research papers from classic courses in our major, media reviews to archival work and more, and we are always looking for creative new ways that Penn students are using the unique perspective on society that comes from science and technology studies.
Our journal takes its name from the concept of technological momentum, developed by Thomas P. Hughes, Professor Emeritus in our home department of History and Sociology of Science. Technological momentum is a model for the development of technology that reconciles the two viewpoints of social determinism and technological determinism. When technologies are young, society can control their development, but over time, technologies become built into society and begin to exert an increasing amount of control. In honor of this now-classic theory in the history of technology and of Professor Hughes, we’ve titled our journal Momentum.
The editors of Momentum can be contacted at stsc.momentum.journal@gmail.com