Managing big biodata and health equity were some of the hot issues debated at Just Data? Justice, Knowledge and Care in an Age of Precision Medicine, a collaborative meeting to shape the science and justice agenda in the age precision medicine.
Read the full story here.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016 | 4:00-6:00PM | Oakes College Mural Room
In an e
ra of global warming, natural disasters, endangered species, and devastating pollution, contemporary writing on the environment largely focuses on doomsday scenarios. Eben Kirksey suggests we reject such apocalyptic thinking and instead find possibilities in the wreckage of ongoing disasters, as symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes are flourishing in unexpected places. Emergent Ecologies uses artwork and contemporary philosophy to illustrate hopeful opportunities and reframe key problems in conservation biology such as invasive species, extinction, environmental management, and reforestation. Following the flight of capital and nomadic forms of life—through fragmented landscapes of Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States—Kirksey explores how chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions have shaped present and future multispecies communities. New generations of thinkers and tinkerers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages—involving frogs, fungal pathogens, ants, monkeys, people, and plants—by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go.
Selected Readings: Emergent Ecologies: Chapters 5 6 7
Eben Kirksey is a permanent faculty member in Environmental Humanities at UNSW Australia and a Visiting Research Scholar at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Multispecies Salon and the author of Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power, both also published by Duke University Press.
The “Just Data?” meeting at UCSC aims to broaden the public discussion about big data and health from ethical and legal questions about privacy and informed consent to more fundamental questions about the right and just constitution of care, trust, and knowledge in an age of biomedical data. This agenda-setting workshop will gather international leaders in genomics, health and informatics, civil rights, bioethics, indigenous rights, science policy and the social study of health and medicine. The meeting will be broken into two phases: 1) Discussion of critical challenges, problems and promises; 2) Collaborative work to set the science and justice agenda of big biodata and precision medicine.
For full event and registration information, please visit: https://justdataucsc.wordpress.com/
Co-Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the NHGRI program of the NIH, the UC North Bioethics Collaboratory, and the UCSC Genomics Institute.
May 18-19 | Alumni Room, University Center, UC Santa Cruz
Leaders in genomics, health and informatics, civil rights, bioethics, indigenous rights, science policy, and the social study of health and medicine will gather at UC Santa Cruz this week for a workshop that aims to broaden the public discussion of big data and health.
Read the full story here.
The Center for Emerging Worlds and the Center for Cultural Studies together with the Science and Justice Research Center will host a conversation with Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe on the recently released Manifestly Haraway (University of Minnesota Press).
A reception will follow.
Manifestly Haraway brings together Donna Haraway’s seminal “Cyborg Manifesto” and “Companion Species Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway also includes a wide-ranging conversation between Haraway and Cary Wolfe on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.
Donna J. Haraway is distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of, among other works, Primate Visions, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium, and When Species Meet.
Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, where he is also founding director of 3CT (Center for Critical and Cultural Theory). He is the author of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, The Other Emerson (with Branka Arsic), and What Is Posthumanism?
Wednesday, May 4, 2016 | 6:00-8:00PM | Humanities 1, room 210
UC Santa Cruz: Assistant Director of Research and Academic Programs
(Job# JPF00358-16T)
The Science and Justice Research Center (SJRC), affiliated with the Department of Sociology, at the University of California, Santa Cruz is pleased to announce an Assistant Director of Research and Academic Programs position.
The SJRC brings together faculty and graduate students from across all divisions of the University to address contemporary problems that entangle questions of science and knowledge with those of ethics and justice. Reporting to the Director, the Assistant Director (AD) will contribute to SJRC’s efforts to foster a new domain of research, teaching and institution building in science and justice. Possible related areas of research and teaching might include biodata and society, ecology and justice, environmental modeling and environmental politics, and technoscience and difference. The AD will:
Basic Qualifications: Ph.D. or foreign equivalent degree in Science and Technology Studies or closely allied field, expected to be conferred by April 1, 2017. Demonstrated record of research, teaching and grant writing in higher education.
Preferred Qualifications: Evidence of developed research profile or trajectory sufficient to meet the job responsibilities; demonstrated experience in institution-building e.g. developing institutional linkages and forging consensus; capacity to develop long-term visions including three-year plans for fundraising and academic output; training in a field of science or engineering; demonstration of interdisciplinary collaboration; demonstration of national and international leadership potential; experience working with social media platforms.
To Apply: Applications accepted via the UCSC Academic Recruit online system must include letter of application, curriculum vitae, three reference letters*, sample of published material, sample of a submitted grant proposal, statement of teaching pedagogy, and sample of course syllabus in area of research. Optional: applicants are invited to submit a statement addressing past and/or potential contributions to diversity through research, teaching, and/or service. Optional: evidence of teaching excellence, provide a link in your curriculum vitae or letter of application to an audio/video of a public presentation in digital format. Materials must be submitted in PDF format unless stated otherwise.
To apply, visit: https://recruit.ucsc.edu/apply/JPF00358
POSITION AVAILABLE: July 1, 2016; with the academic year beginning September 17, 2016. Initial review date is May 20, 2016.
For more information about this recruitment, visit: http://apo.ucsc.edu/academic_employment/jobs/JPF00358-16T.pdf or contact scijust@ucsc.edu. Please refer to Position #JPF00358-16T in all correspondence.
For more information about this position, please see the Job Description.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016 | 4:00 – 5:30PM | SJRC Common Room (Oakes 231)
A conversation with Erin McElroy (PhD Candidate, Feminist Studies, UCSC) and Sara Tocchetti (SJRC Visiting Scholar, Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris, France).
With the emergence of Silicon Valley’s “Tech Boom 2.0,” so too has emerged the figure of the “digital nomad”—a type of transient technologic worker tethered to Silicon Valley corporations yet able to embody new mobilities vis-à-vis the globalization of high-speed fiber-optics and sharing economy infrastructure. From San Francisco to new global outposts such as Romania, which boasts the world’s fifth fastest internet speed due to postsocialist technologic economization, the arrival of the digital nomad often incites contexts of gentrification, manifesting as increased rental prices, eviction rates, and forced homelessness/nomadism. Critical of this correlation as well as formative histories of nomadic racial fantasy, I also question what other uses of digital technology, such as that of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, emerge not just to critique technologies of displacement, but also to fight for other futures of the digital?
Drawing from the analogy with the personal computer and other personalized technologies, DIYbio members envision biology and biotechnology as a creative and personal technology to be made available to everyone. Such ideology of a ‘personal biology’ can be understood as a variation of ‘digital utopianism’ and seems especially attractive for young and/or disenfranchised students and researchers. Working through several case studies of DIYbio initiatives and engaging with a general sense of enthusiasm for such practices expressed in the STS literature, this presentation questions what type of critical space does digital utopianism occupies in the life sciences and STS and what forms of alternative practices we might need to recollect and/or imagine.
An interdisciplinary event hosted by the Center for Analytical Finance and the Science and Justice Research Center discussed the historical and social problems in tech and finance. more here.
Who wins and who loses as Wall Street transforms from sweaty bodies on the stock exchange floor to quants and physicists designing swift, sleek stealth modes of moving financial data at a distance? What new opacities and inequalities accompany the rise of new financial technologies—such as Bitcoins, roboadvisers, and laser-linked data centers — the new coin and conduits of financial realms? The Science and Justice Research Center in collaboration with the Center for Analytical Finance and the Sociology Department host a discussion with industry, academic and NGO leaders on these critical questions about who benefits and who loses in the high tech worlds of today’s financial markets.
Daniel Friedman, UCSC Distinguished Professor of Economics, Author of Morals and Markets
Anne Price, Program Director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, Insight
Moderated by Joe Klett, Visiting Professor of Sociology, UCSC and Nirvikar Singh, Director of the Center for Analytical Finance, Distinguished Professor of Economics at UCSC.
Co-Sponsored by the Blum Center, Center for Analytical Finance, Center for Labor Studies, Cowell College, Re-Thinking Capitalism, and the Sociology Department.
12:00-1:45 PM | Engineering 2 room 180
The Science and Justice Research Center will host an Informational Meeting on our internationally recognized interdisciplinary Graduate Training and Certificate Program:
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
12:00 – 1:45PM
Graduate Student Commons 204
Our Science and Justice Training Program (SJTP) is a globally unique initiative that trains doctoral students to work across the disciplinary boundaries of the natural and social sciences, engineering, humanities and the arts. Through the SJTP we at UC Santa Cruz currently teach new generations of PhD students the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, and public communication. Students in the program design collaborative research projects oriented around questions of science and justice. These research projects not only contribute to positive outcomes in the wider world, they also become the templates for new forms of problem-based and collaborative inquiry within and beyond the university.
Spring 2016 Course:
Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration
SOCY/BME/FMST 268A & ANTH 267A
Prof. Jenny Reardon
Wednesdays 10-1, College 8 301
Students from all disciplines are encouraged to attend
Prior graduate Fellows have come from every campus Division.
13 Represented Departments:
Anthropology, Biomolecular Engineering, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Environmental Studies, Film and Digital Arts, Digital Arts and New Media, History of Consciousness, Literature, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, and Sociology
As SJTP students graduate they take the skills and experience they gained in the training program into the next stage of their career in universities, industry, non-profits, and government.
Opportunities include graduate Certificate Program, experience organizing and hosting colloquia series about your research, mentorship, opportunities for research funding and training in conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and society.
For more information on the Science & Justice Training Program, please see: http://scijust.ucsc.edu/training/