Jenny Reardon Awarded Brocher Foundation Residency
Jenny Reardon, Associate Professor of Sociology, Founder and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz was awarded a Residency with The Brocher Foundation to write her upcoming book The Post-Genomic Condition: Ethics, Justice and Knowledge After the Genome.
The Brocher Foundation is a Swiss non profit law Foundation offering visiting researchers the opportunity to stay at the Brocher Centre in a peaceful park on shores of Lake Geneva, to write a book – articles – an essay or a PhD thesis. The visiting positions are a unique occasion to meet other researchers from different disciplines and countries as well as experts from numerous International Organizations & Non Gouvernemental Organizations based in Geneva such as WHO, WTO, WIPO, UNHCR, ILO, WMA, ICRC.
Since 2007 the Brocher Centre has hosted more than a hundred junior and senior researchers from all around the world for stays ranging from one to six months.
Residencies with the Brocher Centre give researchers (PhD students to Professors) the opportunity to work on projects on the ethical, legal and social implications for humankind of recent medical research and new technologies.
Informational meeting for new cohort of Science & Justice Graduate Training Program
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
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.