Jenny Reardon, Science & Justice Research Center Co-Director and Associate Professor of Sociology

Sociology Department Colloquium

Monday, November 26, 2012

12:30-2:00PM

301 College 8

Today ideals of participatory democracy that have long grounded Euro-American imaginaries of truth and freedom play important structuring roles in the natural sciences.  This represents a dramatic change for a domain of human activity that in the 20th century built its credibility largely through circumscribing itself as apolitical. While some celebrate these developments as part of the new spring for democracy, might this “unnatural” spread suggest a different reading?  This talk takes up this question through an analysis of a decade-long effort to render genomics democratic.  It explores what the rise of the “democratic genome” reveals about the limits of dominant narratives of “science and politics,” and what it might tell us about contemporary practices and conditions of democracy, justice and knowledge.

Interdisciplinary Development Working Group

Saturday October 27, 2012

9AM-5:30PM 

Oakes College

Invited speaker: Dr. Hallie Eakin, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University.

Increasingly climate change impacts have called into question the sustainability of development policies and practices. At the same time, development efforts share many of the goals of climate change adaptation and mitigation. Scholars and practitioners in both areas have recognized the need for more collaboration across these two fields to address the critical challenge of integrating development planning and climate action in ways that promote positive synergies and avoid past failures. This conference brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore to what extent the awareness of climate change causes and impacts is transforming development theories and practices.

For more information about this event please click here.

About the Interdisciplinary Development Working Group (IDWG): IDWG at UCSC provides a forum for faculty and students from all disciplines to discuss issues of development.  Our sessions center around members’research, close readings of selected texts, and presentations from invited guests. We engage with several of the sub-themes in development such as rural/urban dynamics, environmental change, social justice, natural resource management, and international  governance.

This event is made possible through the support of CGIRS, the Science and Justice Working Group, the Sociology Department and the Environmental Studies Department at UCSC.

Please direct any questions to idwg@ucsc.edu

Science & Justice Working Group Meeting

October 25, 2012

2:00-4:00 PM

Oakes Mural Room

This event brings together different accounts of salmon, some from social scientists and some from natural scientists who each will describe, and reflect upon how ‘their’ salmon is constituted, first in describing their particular research on questions of wild and domestic salmon in the US, and in then in a public conversation with each other and with the audience. We will hear from Robin Wapless, from NOAA in Seattle, from Rachel Barnett-Johnson from the Biology department at UCSC, from John Law a sociologist at the Open University in the UK, and from Marianne Liene, an anthropologist from the University of Oslo. Together, these scientists know salmon through widely different practices, from salmon hatcheries in California, to aquaculture sites in Norway, from laboratories, from textbooks, and from scientific articles and environmental regulation.

What are the defining traits of the salmon, and what distinctions do they look for? How were they attracted to salmon, and what are the practices through which they come to know salmon? What material, historical, and perhaps ethical entanglements are involved in the practices through which salmon is rendered known?

A special focus is on the notion of the wild; and its semi-domesticated other: What is a wild salmon, and how is it different from a hatchery salmon or a farmed salmon? How can we contribute to an environment that accommodates and nurtures different kinds of salmon?

This is not so much a debate about what salmon really is, as a dialogue across disciplines about all the different forms that are involved in our shared, but different, efforts to know the world we all inhabit.

Co-sponsored by the University of Oslo and the UCSC Environmental Studies and Anthropology Departments.

John Kadvany: A Very Short Introduction to Risk

Wednesday, October 5, at our normal time and place (Eng 2 599. 4:15-6:15).

John Kadvany will join us to discuss the concept of risk. Oxford University Press recently published John’s book on risk, entitled Risk: A Very Short Introduction. Given that so many of us in the group are interested in thinking well about risk–whether in the context of genomics or the climate or engineering design–we are particularly pleased to have John kick the year off.

Click here for an introduction to some of John’s ideas about risk.

Kadvany often works on project teams organized by an engineering company in charge of a large public works project. His role is to design and help implement a decision process in which engineers, external stakeholders, lawyers and regulators work their collective way through multiple competing options in an efficient, democratic and cooperative manner. He will design an analytical frameworkthat’s useful all around including the measurement techniques which can be used to accommodate relevant models, data, and professional or lay judgment of various qualities. Often these processes lead to a group “opinion survey”, a combined technical-policy document which summarizes stakeholder perspectives. His methods combine the analytical techniques of multiple values decision analysis with the approaches developed in the last two decades through the public participation movement.

Alondra Nelson (Colombia, Sociology)

Monday March 12, 2012

College 8, 301

Time: 12:30-2:00PM

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care.

The Black Panther Party’s health activism– its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination–was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.

Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was practical and ideological and that their understanding of health as a basic human right anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race.

This event is co-sponsored with Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012
4-6:00 PM in Engineering 2, 599

Narratives of scientific progress are often paired with narratives about political progress, suggesting that the expansion of scientific knowledge always—or at least generally—leads to the betterment of humankind as a whole. But many socially disadvantaged and oppressed peoples contend that such “progress” is distributed unevenly and often comes at some cost to them. Alondra Nelson will share some of her research on Black politics and genetic genealogy to open a discussion on whether science can have progressive ends, if there can truly be a “science for the people,” and how science and justice can have paired or oppositional goals.

Herman Gray (Sociology) will be a respondent.