Tracking Ghosts: Hauntings from a eugenic past

Banu Subramaniam (UMass Amherst)

May 11, 2011, 4:30-6:30

Engineering 2, 599

What do morning glory flowers or exotic plant and animal species have to do with the history of race or eugenics? In this talk, I trace the genealogies of ecology and evolutionary biology to explore how histories of gender and race shape contemporary biological theories and what lessons we can learn about the relationships between natures and cultures.

Banu Subramaniam is associate professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is coeditor of Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001) and Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the social and cultural studies of science in the practice of science. Spanning the humanities, social sciences, and the biological sciences, her research is located at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. Her current work focuses on the genealogies of variation in evolutionary biology, the xenophobia and nativism that accompany frameworks on invasive plant species, and the relationship of science and religious nationalism in India.

Wednesday, March 9, 4:15-6:15 pm
599 Engineering 2

Michael Mateas runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, which explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, art, and design. Their goal is to create compelling new forms of interactive art and entertainment that provide more deeply autonomous, generative, and dynamic responses to interaction. A major thrust of this work is advanced artificial intelligence (AI) for video agames, including autonomous characters and interactive story telling. By viewing AI as an expressive medium, their work raises and answers novel AI research questions while pushing the boundaries of the conceivable and possible in interactive experiences. Current projects in the group include automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling.

Standardization on the Hoof: Pedigrees, Genetic Disease, and Genomic-Enhanced EPDs

Scout Calvert (Wayne State University)

April 13, 2011

Engineering 2 599, 4:30-6:30

The SJWG is very pleased to welcome back Scout Calvert, who was one of our original members and earned her PhD from History of Consciousness.

Abstract: For decades, beef breed associations have been gathering performance data on registered animals that have become the basis for “expected progeny differences,” calculations made by comparing the cattle in electronic pedigrees, or herdbooks. The American Angus Association began digitizing its herdbook in the 1960s. In 1978, it launched the Certified Angus Beef branding program, a marketing promotion that has successfully made the Angus breed co-extensive with succulent beef through a voluntary certification process, and which enables small but important premiums for beef growers. As EPDs became popular tools for the selection of artificial insemination sires, three genetic diseases reached frequencies of 10% or more in the pure-bred population. EPDs coordinated a shared quest for Angus certification that also resulted in a catastrophic narrowing of the Angus gene pool. Still reeling from the identification of these three diseases since 2008, in 2010, the Angus Association introduced Genomic-Enhanced EPDs. These pedigrees now include data from genetic markers for desirable phenotype characteristics, an innovation with ramifications for animal breeders and human genealogists alike.

January 19, 2011

Engineering 2, Room 599

4:15-6:15

Tuesday May 22, 2012

4-6:00 PM

Engineering 2, 599

Join us for a discussion of Science & Justice member Andrew Matthew’s recently released book, Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise and Power in Mexican Forests (MIT Press).

Greater knowledge and transparency are often promoted as the keys to solving a wide array of governance problems. In Instituting Nature, Andrew Mathews describes Mexico’s efforts over the past hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. He shows that transparent knowledge was produced not by official declarations or scientists’ expertise but by encounters between the relatively weak forestry bureaucracy and the indigenous people who manage and own the pine forests of Mexico. Mathews charts the performances, collusions, complicities, and evasions that characterize the forestry bureaucracy. He shows that the authority of forestry officials is undermined by the tension between local realities and national policy; officials must juggle sweeping knowledge claims and mundane concealments, ambitious regulations and routine rule breaking.
Moving from government offices in Mexico City to forests in the state of Oaxaca, Mathews describes how the science of forestry and bureaucratic practices came to Oaxaca in the 1930s and how local environmental and political contexts set the stage for local resistance. He tells how the indigenous Zapotec people learned the theory and practice of industrial forestry as employees and then put these skills to use when they become the owners and managers of the area’s pine forests–eventually incorporating forestry into their successful claims for autonomy from the state. Despite the apparently small scale and local contexts of this balancing act between the power of forestry regulations and the resistance of indigenous communities, Mathews shows that it has large implications–for how we understand the modern state, scientific knowledge, and power and for the global carbon markets for which Mexican forests might become valuable.

October 6th, 2010
Slow Science? Fast Science? How Pace Matters in Science
October 6, 2010, 4:30-6:30
Engineering 2, 599
A brief perusal of key scientific journals and science policy documents reveals that questions about how fast science can produce new knowledge and innovation has become a widely acknowledged concern. Scientists promise to be close to breakthroughs, policy makers argue that “we”

Hannah Landecker (UCLA Center for Genetics and Society)

January 26, 2012, 3:00-5:00 PM

Engineering 2, Room 399

Epigenetics has turned food and its metabolism into a problem that is not just about how the body turns food its basic components–carbohydrates, fat, protein-but how food acts as a signal of the environment–both biological and political. Hannah Landecker will explore what this transformation of metabolism and epigenetics reveals about food, environmental politics, and the increased salience of metabolism as a sight for biological understanding and political and moral contestation.