Past Events

Science Journalism: Education, Entertainment or Instigation?

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Sally Lehrman and Joe Palca

How much can you educate someone about DNA tests or climate change in three and a half minutes?  Is “education” even the goal? NPR science journalist Joe Palca discusses what he hopes to accomplish in his science segments for public radio, as well as the reporting and production effort behind them. Palca was joined in a conversation with Science and Justice Professor and fellow journalist Sally Lehrman about the role of science news in society, including the interplay of scientists and audience in its expression.

Read Rap Report > Science Journalism: Education, Entertainment or Instigation?

Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. Since joining NPR in 1992, Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, “Joe’s Big Idea.” Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors. Palca comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology.

Sally Lehrman is the first Visiting Professor in the Science & Justice Training Program. She is an award-winning reporter and writer specializing in medicine and science policy with an emphasis on genetics, race and sexuality. Lehrman has written for some of the most respected names in national print and broadcast media including Scientific American, Nature, Health, Salon.com, and The DNA Files, distributed by NPR. As a senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, she also directs the Executive Roundtable on Digital Journalism Ethics initiative. The roundtable brings together journalism executives and entrepreneurs to discuss the responsibilities of the news media to accuracy, inclusion, transparency and accountability in the digital public square.

Plant Intelligence or Plant Signaling?

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In recent years, plant scientists have been increasingly interested in complex forms of plant behavior, including in the ways in which plants communicate with each other by long distance electrical signals and by vesicle mediated transduction of auxins and other chemicals. For some scientists, the capacity of plants to anticipate, remember, and learn, is best captured by the concept of plant intelligence, in the emerging field of ‘plant neurobiology’, which focuses on plants’ capacities to share important information. For some researchers, the very term ‘neurobiology’ is a potentially distracting anthropomorphism which diverts attention from the actual capacities of plants which they see as utterly different from human conceptions of intelligence. Anthropologist Natasha Myers has studied practices of anthropomorphism in the natural sciences, and described how anthropomorphism can enable research questions as well as limiting them. In this event, Elizabeth van Volkenburgh will present her research on plant growth and adaptation to stress and then engage in a conversation with Natasha Myers around what is gained or lost by seeing plant communication as a form of intelligence.

Hosted by Andrew Mathews

Read Rap Report > Plant Intelligence or Plant Signaling?

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Natasha Myers, Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University, Canada, is Director of the Institute for Science and Technology Studies. As an anthropologist of science and technology, her research examines a range of visual and performance cultures alive in the contemporary arts and biosciences. Her forthcoming book Rendering Life Molecular: Modelers, Models, and Excitable Matter (Duke University Press, 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. With support from SSHRC and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Government, she convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory to serve as a node for interdisciplinary research on plants in the ecologies and economies contoured by technoscience. In new work, she is investigating how the phenomena of plant sensing and communication are galvanizing inquiry in both the arts and the sciences.

E. Van Volkenburgh majored in Botany at Duke University (B.S. 1973), and worked for two years as a technician, at the Smithsonian Botany Department and at the Duke University Phytotron. She obtained a Ph.D. in Plant Physiology from the University of Washington (Ph.D. 1980) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana (1980-81), University of Lancaster, UK (NATO Fellow 1981-82), and the University of Washington (1982-1985). Following two years as Research Assistant Professor, she was hired as an Assistant Professor in Botany at the University of Washington (1987) where she remains as Professor of Biology, and Adjunct Professor of Environmental and Forest Science. Her research is focused on the physiological mechanisms regulating cell and leaf expansion in plants. This work includes photobiology, electrophysiology, and connections to ecophysiology and agriculture. She is also exploring the new field of plant behavior, and leads the Society for Plant Signaling and Behavior.

Co-Sponsors: Departments of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Literature, and Sociology.

Collaborating to Learn about Wicked Problems: Water, Food, and Energy in Rural India

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Ashwini Chhatre, Professor of Geography at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Senior Research Fellow/Visiting Professor at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad presented a talk about sustainable development in rural India as a wicked problem.  Hosted by Andrew Mathews, SJRC Acting Director, the discussion following the talk was moderated by Ben Crow, Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Cruz.

Rap Report > Collaborating to Learn about Wicked Problems: Water, Food, and Energy in Rural India

Full program audio >

A wicked problem is difficult or impossible to solve because of complex interdependencies, and the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem reveals or creates other problems. This is particularly true for agriculture-based rural livelihoods in India’s vast hinterland, which require tightly, connected household strategies to secure water, food, and energy under the shadow of an unpredictable monsoon regime. Interventions to improve rural livelihoods, with the best possible intentions, fail to have an impact in an unacceptably high proportion of cases, and often produce unintended and undesirable consequences for society and the environment. For example, an intervention to increase organic manure to improve soil fertility can easily set off a cascade where cowdung is used as domestic fuel. Women will have to collect more firewood, perhaps from farther forests, decreasing forest condition. The firewood will be of inferior quality, increasing adverse health impacts from indoor air pollution. Greater workloads for women will translate into higher classroom absenteeism and some girls will drop out of school completely. The diversity of disciplinary lenses required to simply outline the boundary of such a cascade is challenging enough; to try and bring these diverse perspectives to bear on improving the actual outcomes is a herculean task. But the pattern of outcomes is not unusual at all. Such a pattern with respect to a long list of well-meaning development interventions can only be described as shooting in the dark, and occasionally shooting ourselves in the foot. This requires a creative response to the design and evaluation of interventions for improvement of rural livelihoods. It requires harnessing research, education, and practice in ways that enable a learning-while-doing approach to sustainable development. By definition, wicked problems do not have a solution. The sustainable development challenge can, however, be formulated as one of identifying the combinations of interventions necessary in specific contexts that improve the possibility of improvements and reduce the incidence of adverse outcomes. This presentation describes such a collaboration between NGOs, researchers, and public agencies in India, with an emphasis on the challenge of producing a body of knowledge that is credible, legitimate, and salient with all relevant actors across multiple scales.

Ashwini Chhatre has recently relocated from the University of Illinois to India from the US to serve on the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. Ashwini has an undergraduate degree in Economics from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University. In between, he spent 11 years working with local communities and social movements on democratic governance of natural resources in India. Ashwini was the Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University during 2006-07, and serves as a faculty member in the Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2007. Ashwini’s research investigates the intersection of democracy with environment and development, with a more recent focus on rural livelihood dynamics in rainfed systems across agro-ecological and socio-political contexts. Ashwini has co-authored one book and published articles in Science, PNAS, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Conservation Biology, Journal of Peasant Studies, World Development, and other journals.

Ben Crow is a professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. He trained and worked as an engineer in London and Africa, and was an activist and volunteer in South Asia, before becoming a social scientist. His PhD is from Edinburgh University in Scotland, and he taught at the Open University in UK and at Stanford and UC Berkeley before coming to UCSC. He has done research on conflict and cooperation over international rivers in South Asia, leading to a book Sharing the Ganges: the politics and technology of river development; on traders, township markets and the making of social classes in rural Bangladesh (Markets, Class and Social Change: Trading Networks and Poverty in South Asia); on global inequalities (The UC Atlas of Global Inequality (online) and The Atlas of Global Inequalities, with Suresh Lodha). His current work explores how access to household water in low-income urban settlements shapes the time and constrains the prospects of poor households and how the global idea of adequate water access promoted by international institutions – ‘safe drinking water’ – limits understanding and social change to improve water access and reduce poverty.

A Conversation with Jim Kent on the Ebola Genome Browser

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 Jim Kent joined the Science & Justice Working Group for a conversation on how he and his team created the ebola genome browser. He will discuss not only their successes but the challenges they faced as they provide insights into the larger problems of knowledge and justice raised by the ebola crisis.

Jim Kent directs the genome browser development and quality assurance staff of the UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group. He created the computer program that assembled the first working draft of the human genome sequence from information produced by sequencing centers worldwide and participated in the informatics associated with the finishing effort. The UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group participates in the public consortium efforts to produce, assemble, and annotate genomes.

For more information on the bowser, see Kent’s interview by the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the UCSC Genome Browser Blog.

Engineering 2, 475 | December 03, 2014

Is Bamboo the Next Green Gold?

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 “Is Bamboo the Next Green Gold? Balancing the Needs of Vernacular Builders, Non-human Forest Dwellers and Green Architects in the Age of Sustainability”

Rap Report > Is bamboo the Next Green Gold? Balancing the Needs of Vernacular Builders, Non-human Forest Dwellers and Green Architects in the Age of Sustainability

One of the fastest growing plants in the world; bamboo has emerged as a silver bullet for sustainable design and architecture. However, bamboo also has long been used in artisanal construction in Asia and South America, where it is part of important ecological and cultural systems. Its commercialization brings us back to a now familiar problem: How should we manage nature without damaging the systems that bring us these materials? Can bamboo satisfy all its lovers or – like sugarcane for ethanol – will it become the next green gold? Darrel DeBoer, Jennifer M. Jacobs and Rudolf von May will examine this significant problem, while focusing on tropical bamboo as an emerging case study.

Panel speakers

Darrel DeBoer is a leading figure for Architects for Social Responsibility and Green Building, who was named by Metropolitan Home magazine in 2001 as “one of the 100 most influential designers” and by Natural Home magazine 2005 one the 10 “Green Architects.” In thirty years of practice, he has used structural bamboo, straw bales, earthen & lime plasters, earthen floors and salvaged materials in an effort to find alternatives to toxic or scarce materials used more often today. Darrel has written and co-authored seven books on building with these materials, including Bamboo Building Essentials and The Art of Natural Building. In addition, he has taught sustainable building techniques through UC Berkeley Extension, the Academy of Art University, Merritt College, the County of Alameda and the City of San Francisco. See his work at: http://www.deboerarchitects.com/

Jennifer M. Jacobs is a biologist, who has studied bamboo forest biodiversity in Peru’s Amazonian region. Her latest research focused on beetle community ecology in bamboo forests. In collaboration with Rudolf von May, she co-authored the article titled: “Forest of Grass: Discovering Biodiversity in the Amazon’s Bamboo Jungles” in the Journal of Natural History. Jacobs is also interested in teaching environmental education in K-12 schools.

Rudolf von May is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley, who grew up in the rain forest region of Central Peru and has studied frogs living in bamboo forests. For the last 15 years, in collaboration with other scientists, he has been tracking amphibian biodiversity in the Andes-Amazon region. This research has been featured in National Geographic and Los Angeles Times, among others (see video at: https://sites.google.com/site/rvonmay/).

Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Politics, and Sociology | Hosted by Luz Cordoba

November 19, 2014 | 4:00-6:00PM | Engineering 2, room 475

Sea and Cities: Interdisciplinary Research in the Baltic

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Baltic_SeaThe Baltic Sea is one of the largest brackish water bodies in the world. It is an especially sensitive sea, because it is a shallow and semi-enclosed body of water that receives a considerable load of pollutants from the surrounding countries. The pollution of the sea has become one of the most important common environmental issues for countries in Northern Europe. Today’s environmental problems are, however, the collective result of political decisions made in the past (not unlike the San Francisco Bay). Environmental historian Simo Laakkonen (Adjunct Professor of Social and Economic History, University of Helsinki) will draw from his experiences in directing multidisciplinary research networks in the BSimo-200x186altic Sea Region as he speaks about doing research on different spatial scales, time spans and with scholars representing science and technology. Maya Peterson (Assistant Professor of History, UCSC) will ask him to reflect upon his experiences of directing this interdisciplinary research group.

Rap Report > Sea and Cities: Interdisciplinary Research in the Baltic

4:00-6:00pm | Engineering 2, 475 | October 15, 2014

Bike-Body-Trail Assemblages

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The Science & Justice Working Group presented “Bike-Body-Trail Assemblages,” exploring a comparative approach to mountain biking in California and Austria.  This panel explored how riders’ subjectivities are attached to and enacted by (changing) technologies of leisure, in context of local discursive and bodily practices.

Rap Report > Bike-Body-Trail Assemblages

In today’s late modern society the increasing importance of leisure activities, of having fun, of getting or staying fit and healthy is suggested by the media and a plethora of artifacts as found in sporting goods. When viewing leisure practices as mutual co-formation of making one-self available to what happens in contact with things, investigations can be anchored at debates on (new) technological objects. However, not only the talk surrounding technological objects is of interest here but how incremental changes of them can have effects on the activity, hence on us. Therefore the incremental change of wheel standards in mountain biking is chosen to finely investigate how classifying products, positioning and evaluating them leads to the formation and classification of subjects attached to those goods.

What makes this case particularly interesting is how this incremental innovation seems to provoke or allow questioning and (re-)negotiating affiliated subjectivities, pointing to the entanglement of capabilities of the subject and the object. As debates on the matter of bigger mountain bike wheels often suggest, all discourse is arbitrary if not also experiencing the ride, trail, and artifact with the body. To account for bodily and discursive practices in the field and the cultural embeddedness of this bike-body-trail assemblage, a multi-sited comparative approach between California and Austria is chosen to see one site through the lens of the other. Methods contain the observation of online forum discussions, sales situations in shops, participant observation of test rides, and interviews with riders and sales persons. The research addresses a shortage of international comparative small- to medium-scale leisure studies, extends existing studies on media and mountain biking into the practices themselves, and aims to offer insights on how subjects and objects are (re-)configured in leisure and sporting practices.

Robin Rae: Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, SJRC Visiting Scholar

Wade Hall: Owner and Fitter, Spokesman Bicycles

Emilie Dionne: Postdoctoral Researcher, Feminist Studies, UCSC

Engineering 2, room 506 | October 8, 2014

Preventing cervical cancer in Nicaragua

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“Preventing cervical cancer in Nicaragua.  Can vaccines and screens be means of solidarity?”

Speaker: Kaye Edwards, Associate Professor, Haverford College
Host: Jake Metcalf

Rap Report > Preventing cervical cancer in Nicaragua. Can vaccines and screens be means of solidarity?

Kaye Edwards will talk about why cervical cancer, which is largely preventable, remains the most common cancer among women in impoverished countries like Nicaragua. Her talk will cover the natural history of this disease to highlight potential points of intervention; the social, political and economic factors that help explain why cervical cancer mortality rates are up to 12-times higher in some countries than in the United States; and the larger issue of the need for community engagement in discussions about how to prevent and treat diseases.

A member of Haverford’s faculty since 1986, Edwards received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology and did post-doctoral research in tropical parasitology in Boston. She currently teaches courses that explore various facets of social justice, including how they are embodied in the health of communities and how they are informed by Quaker faith and practice.  She is the coordinator of Haverford’s new interdisciplinary minor in Health Studies and currently serves as the faculty director of Haverford’s Quaker Affairs Office. Edwards was Director of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship from 2003-2006 and is the founder of Haverford House, CPGC’s post-baccalaureate community-action program in Philadelphia.  She is a convinced Friend and a member of Radnor Monthly Meeting; she serves on the Board of ProNica, a Quaker organization working in solidarity with community groups in Nicaragua, and on the Corporation of Haverford College.

 

May 28, 2014 | Engineering 2 Room 599

Broadening Participation in Science and Engineering: Social and Intellectual Diversity

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Rap Report > Broadening Participation in Science and Engineering: Social and Intellectual Diversity

At this panel discussion, we will discuss how cultural values shape what research questions are asked and how research is conducted. Science and engineering have long been portrayed as merely merit-based domains, or, as historians of science have called it, a ‘culture of no culture’. The demographic within these fields is commonly viewed as unrelated to the quality of knowledge produced, and therefore only a concern in so far as funding agencies mandate it to be. Drawing on specific examples we will examine how research questions change depending on who is asking them, teasing apart the complex relations between research agendas and the socio-cultural identities of scientists and engineers. Investigating these questions will contribute to a better understanding of the importance of diversity within STEM fields. Furthermore, a shared examination of the experiences of inclusion and exclusion will help develop a better grasp of how to pursue social equity within science and engineering fields. Finally, it will also produce insights about what kind of knowledge is produced and for whom.

Moderator:

Ruth Müller a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Policy Group, Lund University, Sweden and lecturer in Gender Studies, Biology & Science-Technology-Society, at the University of Vienna, focuses her research on the relations between research policy, institutional frameworks and scientific work practices, currently in the fields of climate science and epigenetics. Müller is interested in critical reflection of contemporary academic work practices and social movements in this area, such as the slow science movement. Dr. Ruth Müller joins UC Santa Cruz for a second Visiting Scholarship with the Science & Justice Research Center.

Panelists:

Faye Crosby, Provost of Cowell College, Chair of Council of Provosts, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCSC specializes in social justice. Her research interests looks at the relation between objective (i.e., consensual) and subjective reality; she has looked at individual attitudes in the context of social change and stability. Crosby’s current work investigates the bases of people’s reactions to affirmative action and has launched a new series of studies on how people can undertake non-revolutionary changes in rules that come to be revealed as unfair. She is also examining other ways, such as mentoring, of enhancing the peaceful evolution of work organizations.

Barbara Gee, has 35 years of experience in the computer industry, where she has held leadership positions in all functional areas. She has worked for HP, Silicon Graphics, TiVo, and other well known tech companies. In addition, Barb has served in leadership roles in the non-profit sector (including Huckleberry Youth Programs), and prior to joining the Anita Borg Institute was the Executive Officer of Human Resources for the Oakland Unified School District. She has also served on the San Mateo County Commission on the Status of Women, the Board of Global Exchange, and is an Advisory Board member of the STEM Academy at McClymonds High School in Oakland California. Barb currently serves as the Vice President of Programs for ABI, where she oversees the execution and development of programs focused on increasing the participation of women in technical roles, with the belief that when the inventors of technology mirror those who use it, society gains. Barb received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and her Masters in Management at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

Joan Haran, a Research Fellow at Cesagene (Cardiff Centre for Ethical and Social Aspects of Genomics and Epigenetics) at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences whose research revolves around gender, representation and technoscience. She is particularly interested in the policing of boundaries between science fact and science fiction. Haran has a BA (Hons) in Literature and History from North Staffordshire Polytechnic, an MA (Dist) in Gender, Society and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Sociology from Warwick University. She co-authored the monograph Human Cloning in the Media: From science fiction to science practice (Routledge 2008) which drew together media, cultural, and feminist technoscience studies preoccupations and methodologies to document the symbolic and material labor of making genomics in the media.

Melissa Jurica, Associate Professor of MCD Biology at UCSC oversees the Jurica Lab, a research lab at UCSC working to understand the structural and functional analysis of spliceosomes a tiny molecular machine found in all human cells, as it plays a critical role in how our genes encode for an organism as unique and complex as a human being. She has recently become the director of the UCSC Initiative to Maximize Student Development program, which supports both undergraduate and graduate students in an effort to increase diversity in biomedical research.

Thanks to Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) for facilitating the following recordings of the event:

Broadening Participation Video: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Engineering 2, Room 599 |  May 14, 2014

ANTHROPOCENE CONFERENCE: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

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Can humans and other species continue to inhabit the earth together? Through noticing, describing, and imagining, we renew conversation about life on earth.

Full schedule: ANTHROPOCENE: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Video documentation of the conference: 

“Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet” begins Thursday evening with a talk by acclaimed science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz. The talk has long been sold out, but simulcast video streaming will be available at two locations on the UCSC campus: the Humanities Lecture Hall (Room 206) and Social Sciences 1 Room 110. The talk and broadcast are scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.

“Through noticing, describing, and imagining, we renew conversation about life on Earth,” is how organizers describe the conference’s objectives.

Le Guin spoke of her views on the subject in an extensive interview with the Good Times weekly newspaper. “Well, we’re at a point where how many species go extinct everyday due to human interference? How many oil spills are we going to have? How many people are running around shooting school children with repeater guns? Things are not going well,” she said.

The conference was conceived by UCSC anthropology professor Anna Tsing and is co-presented by the UCSC Anthropology Department’s Emerging Worlds initiative and Denmark’s Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene project. The term Anthropocene is a new one, used to describe the geologic epoch defined by human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems.

Last year, Tsing won a $5 million Niels Bohr Professorship from the Danish National Research Foundation with which she is establishing a program encompassing the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts in an exploration the Anthropocene.

Aarhus is Denmark’s largest and second oldest university. Founded in 1928, it is located about 120 miles west of Copenhagen. Tsing spent last fall quarter at Aarhus and will teach and conduct research there during the 2014-2015 academic year. She spent time at the university in 2010 on a Guggenheim fellowship.

The conference will continue Friday and Saturday with series of talks that are free and open to the public. All will be held at the Colleges Nine and Ten Multipurpose Room on the UCSC campus. A complete schedule can be found at anthropo.ihr.ucsc.edu.

May 8, 2014 7-9pm at the Rio Theater
May 9, 2014 9-5:45pm in the College 9/10 Multipurpose Room
May 10, 2014 9:30-6pm in the College 9/10 Multipurpose Room