Welcome to Momentum, the undergraduate research journal of the Science, Technology and Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Momentum website is currently undergoing renovation. In the meantime, you can read our editorial statement below or peruse the pages of our most recent issue at Penn’s Scholarly Commons site.

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Founded in 2012, Momentum seeks to showcase the wide variety of work created by students in the Science, Technology & Society (STSC) major and minor and by other students throughout the University whose work is related to our program.

Our journal takes its name from the concept of technological momentum, developed by the late Thomas P. Hughes, who taught for many years in our home department of History and Sociology of Science. Technological momentum is a model for the development of technology that explains why technologies sometimes seem to be inevitable or unchangeable. When technologies are young, society shapes their development, but over time, technologies become infrastructures, institutions, and investments and are harder to change or redirect. In honor of this now-classic theory in the history of technology and of Professor Hughes, we’ve titled our journal Momentum.

STSC  invites students from diverse backgrounds, opinions and interests to consider broad and fundamental questions about our society. 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 want to encourage that diversity within our publication, and our range of submissions reflects that goal. We include a range of work from senior honors theses to research papers from courses in our major and others, media reviews to archival work and more.  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.