I thought some of you might find this article interesting: basically a woman was jailed (with a $100,000 bail) for stealing ~20 of her old lab notebooks, flash drives and other materials from her former place of work. There’s also underpinnings of the subjectivity in science in the controversial nature of her earlier work. Its kind of a sad story all around, but relevant to some of what we’ve discussed this past quarter.

Dispute over Lab Notebook Lands Researcher in Jail

akargl Says:
November 29th, 2011 at 2:40 pm edit

The quarter has gone by so fast! I’m looking forward to the interesting things we’ve brewed up for next year, and to conversations about what else to do. For my part in the blog part of these conversations, I’d like to offer a provocation:

A main thing I’d like to see in S & J’s future has to do with the kind of re-worlding going on in the occupation movement, including the hope its form may signal for the ongoing struggles with inequality within it. How might we re-world the space in which we find ourselves in such a way that we resistance-occupy it? Continue Reading Science and Justice Moving Forward

egan Says:
November 29th, 2011 at 2:25 pm edit

Not sure if we’re supposed to be posting these, but here are my thoughts on expanded spaces for science and justice. Perhaps openings for future discussions:

1. Universe… and Pluriverses
I’m still holding out for multiplicities: other worlds and pluriverses that are historically constituted, precarious, and aleatory. How to speak about “justice” as shifting practices of inclusion and exclusion, without the promise of a Universe or the melancholy of relativisms? Continue Reading ideas, new spaces for s&j

icarbone Says:
November 22nd, 2011 at 12:32 am edit

I think this may be a bit more of a rant than an Op-Ed at this point, but maybe you all can help me focus it a bit.

Frustrations over socioeconomic disparities and the influence of corporations on the US political system reached a critical point on September 17th. Protesters swarmed to Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street, and since then demonstrations have been springing up in over 1000 US cities. The Occupy movements have empowered a growing community to push for Continue Reading Op-Ed Thread

icarbone Says:
November 22nd, 2011 at 12:35 am edit

The occupy movements have empowered a growing community to push for significant societal change. This change need not be confined to Wall Street. The OWS movement should inspire us all to reclaim science, technology, and the health of the natural world. The fearless abandon that protesters are exhibiting across the country can be our greatest asset in movement away from fossil fuels and towards renewable alternatives in the United States. This article will encourage the Bay area to continue building a community, and to extend the occupy movement to the greatest political and environmental threats that the global community faces.Continue Reading Op-Ed Pitch Thread

carbone Says:
November 7th, 2011 at 5:00 pm edit

This weeks reading reinforced in me a feeling that certain research methods are more narrow in their approach, and this characteristic can be both limiting and powerful. I come to this class as an applied physicist. My personal motivations are less focused on unlocking the secrets of the natural world and more focused on using physical models to produce objects that provoke societal change. I agree with concepts along the lines of “inertia of belief,” but I also sympathize with Pickering’s point of view. Every bit of understanding that we have is based on some model that may or may not be grounded in some experiment or academic Continue Reading Reading Responses: Experiment

The images below were recently passed along to me from another Sociology grad student. They were made at the Wordle website, where you can generate a word cloud out of any text. The more often a word appears in the text you enter, the larger it appears in the word cloud. I was introduced to this tool in a graduate qualitative methods class in the Anthropology department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Continue Reading Wordle Coding

kricherson Says:
October 31st, 2011 at 2:44 pm edit

Coming from a science background, I had some difficulty with this section of Glaser and Strauss’ book. Again, perhaps because I know little about sociology or sociological theory, I was confused by some of their (seemingly foundational) assertions. They write that in comparative analysis, “[n]othing is disproved or debunked, despite that those who are overly concerned with evidence constantly believe” (22) and that the evidence theories are based on “…may not necessarily be accurate beyond a doubt…but the concept is undoubtedly a relevant theoretical abstraction about what is going on in the area studied” (23). Continue Reading Reading Responses: Coding

koverstreet Says:
October 17th, 2011 at 12:49 am edit

While reading Chapter 5 of Jenny Reardon’s Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, I was particularly intrigued by the debates over representation and informed consent/ choice. There are multiple senses of representation at work here that I’d like to draw out and perhaps we can have further discussion about them in class. The first sense of representation is reminiscent of the Latour piece we read in the spring, in which he critiques the view of science as “merely” recording the ontological reality of the world. Continue Reading Reading Responses: Interviewing