Author Archives: aimurray

Critical Nutrition Symposium

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March 8, 2013

9:00AM-5:30PM

261 Social Sciences I

Advice about what to eat for health and well being is pervasive in the modern world, and such advice is delivered as if it were uncontroversial, universally applicable, welcome, and effective. When it appears not to work, rather than reflection on the scientific, cultural, and sociological underpinnings of the endeavor, the response has been for more informative food labels and more emphasis on food education. What’s wrong or missing in conventional nutritional practice? What are its effects in terms of human health and social justice? What other approaches might work better? This symposium will bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and perspectives to comment on the content and delivery of nutritional science. Invited guests include Charlotte Biltekoff (American Studies and Food Science, UC Davis), Jessica Hayes-Conroy (Women’s Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges), Adele Hite (Public Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Aya H. Kimura (Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i-Manoa), Hannah Landecker (Sociology and Center for Society and Genetics, UCLA), and Jessica Mudry (Center for Engineering in Society, Concordia University). UCSC food scholars Julie Guthman, Melissa Caldwell, Nancy Chen, and Jake Metcalf will provide commentary.

This event is sponsored by the Multi-campus Research Program on Food and the Body and the “Knowing Food” Research Cluster of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies. Additional support has been provided by the Community Studies Program, the Science & Justice Research Center, the Department of Environmental Studies, and the Department of Sociology.

Please RSVP to Lisa Nishioka (global@ucsc.edu) if you plan to attend.

For questions regarding the program contact Julie Guthman (jguthman@ucsc.edu)

Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires: Problems of communicating uncertainty about landscape change

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Karen Holl (UCSC, Environmental Studies)

Maggi Kelly (Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Policy & Management, UC Berkeley)

Tim Forsyth (Department of International Development, London School of Economics)

 

Over the last few years the contribution of deforestation and forest fires to climate change has come to be of increasing interest, even as new technologies of remote sensing and modeling have made it possible to measure and predict landcover change with unprecedented accuracy. These technologies have made it possible to imagine environmental policies which compensate landowners for averted deforestation (known as REDD, Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation), or to support thinning forests in order to prevent forest fires. However, increased precision also introduces new problems of communicating uncertainty to policymakers and of gaining the trust of the general public. Professor Holl will talk about the challenges of including tropical forest restoration in proposed markets in carbon offsets, Professor Kelly will talk about her work with remote sensing technologies such as LIDAR in order to measure California forests and to inform the general public about forest conditions. Tim Forsyth is a specialist in political approaches to environmental change and international development, and will moderate a conversation about the challenges of communicating uncertain knowledge about forests to policymakers and other audiences.

Rap Report > Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires: Problems of communicating uncertainty about landscape change

February 26, 2013 | 4:00-6:00PM | Engineering 2, Room 599

Seeding Sustainability: Hunger, BioTech, and the Future of Food Systems

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Saturday February 23, 2013

7:00-10:00PM

UCSC Media Theater

Confirmed Speakers:

Miguel Altieri (UC Berkeley)

Eric Holt-Gimenez (Food First)

Kent Bradford (UC Davis)

Moderator: Jacob Metcalf (UCSC Science & Justice Research Center)

Registration (free) is kindly requested.

In collaboration with the UCSC Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the Science & Justice Research Center will host a panel discussion on the role of genetically modified crops within sustainable food systems in the global South. Food and agroecology activist and scholar Dr. Vandana Shiva will headline a panel with diverse perspectives from crop science, philanthropy. This panel will cap the CASFS weekend-long gathering and seed exchange event Strengthening the Roots: Seeds and Justice Convergence.

Two decades of experience with GMO crops, including mixed assessments of environmental impact and increased yield, indicate that controversies about biotech agriculture is not just (or even primarily) about the modified plants themselves. Rather, a complex social system travels with the plants. This system includes intellectual property, legal and political regimes, chemical inputs, industrialized and centralized food processing, farmer debt and much more. As the debate over GMO crops has evolved, particularly in the global South, the controversies have shifted from genetic modification techniques to the appropriateness of that social system for providing environmentally beneficial and economically secure food systems. Thus, this panel seeks to investigate the question of under what conditions ag-biotech is capable of providing sustainable—in all its ecological, cultural, and economic connotations—food systems in the global South? And are achieving those conditions both plausible and worth whatever trade-offs may be made in pursuit of extending and improving upon more traditional modes of growing food?

Mast Fruiting and Ectomycorrhizal Associates: How Looking Below Ground Reshapes Above Ground Ecologies and Politics

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February 19, 2013

4:00-6:00PM

Engineering 2, Room 599

Lisa Curran (Woods Institute for the Environment/Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)

Respondents: Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC) and Andrew Mathews (Science & Justice Research Center and Anthropology, UCSC)

Lisa Curran is an anthropologist and tropical ecologist who, over the last twenty five years, has carried out extensive research on forest ecology and plant/mycorrhizal relations in Indonesian forests. Through her engagement in policy research and advocacy she has participated in key forest policy conversations, including through her criticism of oil palm plantations in Latin America and South East Asia. Lisa’s current interdisciplinary research programs examine the effects of land use change, climate, drought and fire on carbon dynamics and biodiversity; and impacts of governmental policies and industrial practices on ecosystems and rural livelihoods in Asian and Latin American tropical forests. Today she will talk to us about her research on the relationship between below ground ectomycorrhyzal associates and above ground mast fruiting by important dipterocarp tree species. In a public conversation with Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC) and Andrew Mathews (Science & Justice Research Center and Anthropology, UCSC) she will talk about how this research has informed her engagement with and criticism of oil palm plantations, and about how it broadens competition models that have historically been dominant in ecology.

Informational meeting for new cohort of Science & Justice Graduate Training Program

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INFORMATIONAL MEETING: Wednesday March 6 2013, 12:30-2:00PM, at the Baytree Conference Center. Lunch will be provided.

SPRING 2013 COURSE: Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration (SOCY/BME/FMST 268A and ANTH 267), Prof. Andrew Mathews, Thursdays 9-12:00

We are pleased to announce new opportunities for graduate students to join our NSF-funded Science & Justice Training Program. The SJTP brings together students and faculty from across all departments and divisions on campus to develop innovative research at the intersections of science and society. Students will receive training and mentorship in interdisciplinary research methods and develop collaborative research projects. The spring course, Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration, will be the first step in a (pending) Graduate Certificate Program that will provide students with a number of opportunities for research funding, planning and hosting colloquia related to their research, training in writing for interdisciplinary academic and non-academic audiences and participating in other NSF-sponsored projects.

Enrollment in the course is required for participating in the Training Program. Attending the informational meeting is strongly encouraged, but not required.

Past collaborative research projects have included:

  • Physicists working with small scale farmers to develop solar greenhouses scaled to local farming needs
  • Colloquia about the social and political consequences of scientific uncertainty in climate change research
  • Examining how art can empower food system justice movements
  • Working with local publics to improve African fishery science

Prior SJTP Fellows have come from the following departments: Philosophy, Physics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, History of Consciousness, Digital Arts and New Media, Sociology, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Anthropology, and Politics.

Click there to download a flyer for this event.

 

Recent special issues edited by Science & Justice members, past and present

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A number of past and present Science & Justice members have recently edited special editions of scholarly journals focussed on themes commonly explored in Science & Justice colloquia and courses. These collections highlight the ways in which S&J facilitates thinking across boundaries and gathering around interesting objects.

Assistant Director of the S&J Research Center  Jacob Metcalf and longtime friend of S&J, Thom van Dooren (University of New South Wales), co-edited an edition of Environmental Philosophy (9:1) titled Temporal Environments: Rethinking Time and Ecology. The collection of essays addresses the role that temporality, or lived time, should have in environmental philosophy, and especially ethics. The role of time in environmental ethics has largely been restricted to an empty container for human agency to do good or ill. By understanding time as material, produced, constructed, maintained, lived, multiple, and a more-than-human concern, the authors in this collection are able to ask which times are liveable for humans and non-humans alike. This topic grew out of Science & Justice discussions, especially the Slow Science event in Fall 2011.

Astrid Schrader (York), a founding member of the Science & Justice Working Group, co-edited with Sophia Roosth (Harvard) a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (23:3) titled Feminist Theory Out of Science. The issue features articles by a number of Science & Justice members and friends, including Karen Barad, co-Director of the Science & Justice Training Program. Attending to the rich entanglements of scientific and critical theory, contributors to this issue scrutinize phenomena in nature to explore new territory in feminist science studies. With a special focus on relating theory to method, these scholars generate new feminist approaches to scientific practice. What emerges from these diverse essays is an approach to critical thinking that inhabits, elaborates, and feeds upon scientific theory, holding feminist theory accountable to science and vice versa.

Lindsay Kelley (Public Library of Science), an early member of the Science & Justice Working Group, and Lynn Turner (Goldsmiths) co-edited an issue of parallax (19:1) titled bon appétit. This issue includes a contribution from S&J Assistant Director, Jacob Metcalf, on the ethics of cultured meat and the stories we tell about technoscientific advances. bon appétit explores the limits of eating, confronting the boundaries between self and other, filth and food.  At the time of writing escalating food costs – especially as linked to climate change – provoke daily crises, demonstrating the urgency of a wholesale rethinking of the matter of what, how and who we eat. The essays engage different strategies and target different aspects of this erstwhile basic need.

Forthcoming shortly as a special issue in Science Technology & Human Values, S&J advisory board member Laura Mamo (SFSU) and Jennifer Fishman (McGill) have collected articles on the Entanglements of Science, Ethics and Justice. This issue grew out of a conference about topics in science and justice at SFSU, including an article on genomics and justice by Jenny Reardon, co-Director of the S&J Research Center.

Karen Barad provides keynote address to “MATTERING: Feminism, Science and Materialism” conference

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Karen Barad, co-Director for the Science & Justice Training Program, will provide the keynote address at the upcoming feminist science studies conference at CUNY, MATTERING: Feminism, Science and Materialism.

This conference, organized jointly by the Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, will engage with feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by the materialist turn.

In the past decade, feminist theory has elaborated new materialist perspectives to re-imagine nature, biology, and matter more generally and to critically address new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience and other scientific disciplines. This scholarship revisits the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human and non-human and nature and culture, and elaborates on their mutual entanglements. New feminist theories address materialization as a complex and open process and matter as lively and productive. The conference will address: the intellectual and scientific context of the new turn toward materialism; the relation of matter (including the biological body) to the social; the insights, knowledge and methodologies offered by the new materialist studies of science; the political implications of neo-materialism for feminism as a project, theory and a movement for social justice; theoretical innovations for addressing material-discursive relations and the epistemological questions they raise; and empirical research using materialist feminist frameworks.

Green Neuroscience: Re-envisioning how we Study the Brain and Ourselves

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Rap Report > Green Neuroscience: Re-envisioning how we study our brains and ourselves

In this Science and Justice Working Group event, Dr. Ann Lam and Dr. Elan Liss Ohayon present the story of establishing the Green Neuro Lab. They will outline some of the key issues facing the neurosciences and describe the lab’s efforts to advance a sustainable and inclusive neuroscience. They will also outline how their current research directions, in studies of neural imaging, cognition, and computational neural modeling, address their objectives. They hope to engage the audience in a discussion of how neuroscience can be re-envisioned in the context of science, justice and the environment.

There is an urgent need for the neuroscience community as a whole to reexamine its purpose and approach to research. Simply put, the overall trajectory of neuroscience research today is generating toxic waste, causing harm to other species, and creating fractured categories of human health that result in unnecessary stigmatization and marginalization. Many of these issues stem from long-established and largely unchallenged belief systems about the brain and brain-environment interactions. These problems are also systemic in nature in that much of neuroscience research is driven by funding structures and other factors that run counter to individual and community interests.

The aim of the Green Neuroscience laboratory is to advance our understanding of the brain by posing questions and conducting careful research in a sustainable and creative manner. The lab strives to demonstrate that neuroscience research can be less harmful to the environment and improve health while simultaneously recognizing the importance of neurodiversity, community, and the environment. Another central goal of the lab is to improve the dialogue between researchers and the publics they strive to help.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013 | 4:00-6:00 PM | Engineering 2, Room 599

Bios

Dr. Ann Lam received her PhD from the University of Saskatchewan and completed her postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She is Director and Founder of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory. Her work has focused on brain development and cognitive conditions, including Williams Syndrome. She is currently working on developing an open atlas of brain metals to study the relationship between metals and cognition.

Dr. Elan Liss Ohayon received his PhD from the University of Toronto and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Diego. He is currently a research associate at the Salk Institute. He is also Co-Director and Founder of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory. He is a neurocomputational researcher, with research projects relating neural network structure to activity in epilepsy and social cognition.

Science & Justice Announces Artists in Residence

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The Science & Justice Research Center is pleased to announce a new Artists in Residence program for undergraduate students, supported by the OpenLab, SPARC and the Arts at UCSC.

This year we are featuring two artists, Patrick Appleby and Kiko Kolb. Patrick and Kiko will be engaged in Science & Justice Programming throughout the year. They will produce material to be displayed in our rotating gallery and assist our graduate student Fellows with realization of their projects. Their residencies supply them with materials and lab fees for projects that capture the major themes of the Center’s research.

Patrick  is a fourth year Art and History of Art & Visual Culture undergraduate from Benicia, CA. He works mainly in the media of painting and printmaking though his concepts are influenced by photography and the technologies of vision. He has an interest in experimenting with and exploring the visual image and the role of human subjectivity in technological mediations of the world. Recently his projects have aimed to connect photographic and virtual realities in different ways. By exploring the ways in which the world is represented visually he aims to better understand the role of human observation in an increasingly technological world.

His residency is co-sponsored by the OpenLab Network. This is directed by Professor Jennifer Parker and targets a complex education issue of national significance regarding the ability of art and science researchers to collaborate on research endeavors. It aims to help change the current status by providing shared research facilities and create a network for collaborative discourse fueled by academic communities, arts and science communities, and industry.

Kiko is a 4th year art student at the UCSC Art Department working with a range of contemporary print methods and specializing in digital printmaking. She is also interested in installations, especially large scale, and site specific environments, as well as other areas of intermedia that combine print, digital elements, and sculpture. Kiko is also very inspired by the collaborative aspect of Art and the innovation it facilitates, leading to her work for the past year to create collaborative art opportunities at Stevenson’s annual Rock n Roll on the Knoll concert, as well as becoming more involved with the print studios on campus. Kiko’s work reflects ideas of youth and digital culture and how it relates to societies ways of thinking, as well as the playful abstract renditions of her own world.

Her residency is co-sponsored by the Social Practice Arts Research Center (SPARC). This is co-directed by Professors Dee Hibbert-Jones, EG Crichton and Elliot Anderson and fosters knowledge exchange and project building between artists, scientists, the public and others with a vision towards active social and environmental change. Working across disciplines, it aims to engender and support collaborations and projects that have a local, national or international impact on the public sphere.

 

 

Climate Data, Dams, and Water Demand: A Cross-Disciplinary Conversation

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Science & Justice Working Group Meeting

November 27, 2012, 4:00-6:00pm

Engineering 2, Rm. 599

Panelists:

Ruth Langridge: Legal Studies/ Politics Department, UCSC

Lori Pottinger: International Rivers Network

Bruce Daniels: Earth and Planetary Sciences, UCSC; Soquel Water District Board of Directors

Decades of anti-dam activism around the world have generated a greater public awareness of the social and ecological consequences of large dams. But urbanization and increasing fears over the hydrologic effects of climate change have slowed this anti-dam momentum. Climate models play a crucial role in the decision-making process, meaning that an understanding of the limits and possibilities of these models is more important than ever. This event addresses this problem by bringing together a water policy analyst, an advocate for healthy rivers, and a climate modeler to explore the relationship between hydrologic climate modeling and regional water resource planning. The event will explore how data are constructed, analyzed, and used to make water resource planning decisions; what challenges arise in this process for scientists, policy makers, and everyday people in affected watersheds; and what possibilities for social and environmental justice arise from a better understanding of these factors.

We will hear from Ruth Langridge, an expert on water law and policy in the Politics and Legal Studies Departments at UCSC; Lori Pottinger, an advocate for healthy rivers with the International Rivers Network in Berkeley; and Bruce Daniels, a PhD Candidate working on hydroclimatology in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at UCSC and a member of the Soquel Water District Board of Directors. The event will explore how data are constructed, analyzed, and used to make water resource planning decisions; what challenges arise in this process for scientists, policy makers, and everyday people in affected watersheds; and what possibilities for social and environmental justice arise from a better understanding of these factors.

Co-Sponsored by the UCSC Department of Anthroplogy