Areas of Inquiry & Themes

Areas of Inquiry

The Working Group considers a very broad set of topics at the intersection of science and society, but over time have focused on a cluster of areas of inquiry that recur in our research and programming.

Genomics and Justice: How does genomics make use of, and create friction with, commitments to a just society?

Energy Worlds: What sorts of worlds are envisioned within possible future energy regimes?

Climate Cluster: An interactive and collaborative experiment to explore the potential for fruitful interdisciplinary communication between climate change scholars from across the disciplines and divisions.

Themes

The Working Group has developed a series of themes that guide our research and programming.

Curiosity as a Virtue

Doing “science and justice” work means creating an environment that supports efforts to engage with one another across differences.  In the context of S&J research seminars, this meant creating an environment in which participants were willing to make mistakes and to revise their own positions, views, and practices.  Central to this was the effort to cultivate curiosity as a virtue of the seminar space.  “Being curious” implies stepping beyond habitual modes of engagement in order to explore other possible ways of looking, questioning, and intra-acting [this term is too technical to be included in an end-of-year report without a footnote explaining what it means—perhaps replace with a different term, or explain what it means]. Many of our Science and Justice events have been oriented toward cultivating curiosity as a virtue, including our ongoing “critical friends” series.

Scientific Literacy

In recent decades, on both sides of the political spectrum, we have seen an increasing tendency for people to react against new developments in science and technology.  Debates about stem cell research and genetically engineered foods are cases in point.  We agree that it is absolutely necessary to recognize and address the potentially negative consequences of scientific innovations, but, as SJWG member Donna Haraway suggests, we need to learn to respond to these developments instead of reacting.  Whereas “reaction” has the connotation of an unconscious reflex or a conditioned behavior, “response” suggests taking a step back to understand the situation so that one can intervene effectively.  In the Working Group, we sought to develop to our ability to respond to both developments in biotechnology and each other’s different perspectives on the position of science in society.  This was achieved by incorporating some reflexive discussion in about the Group itself within most events.

These efforts were bolstered by also incorporating Working Group member Karen Barad’s emphasis the importance of “scientific literacy”.  Scientific literacy is not simply a matter of educating non-scientists about how science works.  For Barad, the important question is: What does it mean to do science responsibly, and what kind of literacy is required for that?  There is no formula for “how to do science responsibly”, and therefore what “scientific literacy” means, and whose literacy we are concerned with, depends on the context.  The Working Group’s problem–based approach proved to be fruitful for developing a broad notion of scientific literacy.  The Working Group was able to successfully incorporate ethical, historical, social, and technological contexts and implications of the topics under discussion.

Partnerships in Science and Justice

The demands of thinking critically about science and social justice require that we challenge current notions of “expertise.”  The idea that we can turn to scientific “experts” to interpret recent scientific findings, or “ethical experts” to explain the ethical implications of emerging technologies has become deeply problematic because fields of expertise can’t be separated out so neatly.  The really important questions often arise at the limits, boundaries, and intersections of expert domains.

In order to confront the moral and political complexities of our times we need new forms of dialogue, new hybrid languages, and new kinds of research collaborations. This is the idea behind “partnerships in science and justice”.  Under this heading we explored what kind of partnerships are coming into being that can adequately respond to specific situated concerns at the intersection of scientific practice and social justice activism.  Partnerships such as these necessarily transform the meaning of “expertise” because they require a greater degree of communicative competence across fields of knowledge.

In some of our recent events, the Science and Justice working group has considered the promises and challenges of partnerships in environmental justice (popular epidemiology, toxicology and toxicogenomics) and alternative energy and transportation systems (biofuels, personal rapid transit).

Reframing Bioethics

Given the interdisciplinary character of SJWG, there are many opinions of what bioethics as a discipline can and ought to do with regard to biotechnological problems.  One of the virtues of the SJWG is the ability to illuminate the many points at which ethical decisions get made, and sometimes the places that they fail to get made.  Thus, a common theme in our discussions was opening up the methods available to ethical inquiries.  We found that bioethics as a discipline and institution often “arrives too late” at the table to make important interventions.  A general consensus in the group is that traditional applied ethics methodologies that understand ethics as abstract value mediations are partly to blame for this problem.  Because biotechnology often involves practices that remakes boundaries that often taken for granted, such as between species or individual human subjects, ethical theories that rely on those boundaries being stable and determinate fit poorly within the challenges that biotechnology presents.  Our discussions often sought to reframe ethical inquiries around a broader conception of flourishing for the human and non–human actors under consideration.  Such an approach understands that an important aspect of ethical inquiry is accounting for the ways that our knowledge producing practices, our ethical concepts, and the materiality of our scientific endeavors are all entangled together.  Thus, our conversations often contained critical engagements with ethical theory and methodology, allowing interdisciplinary reflections of the stakes in biotechnology.

Living Technosciences

Understanding the ways in which knowledge is made in science requires among other things investigating the ways in which people live and work in the sciences. What does it means to decide for a life in science today? What are the conditions of working and living, of making a career in science? Are they different for people of different social background, gender, age or ethnicity? What are norms and values that guide these lives in science today?

Under the heading of “Living Technosciences” the Science & Justice Working Group started exploring these questions, proposing that the ways in which people live in science is inevitably linked to the ways science contributes to and interacts with other spheres of society.  Hence the Science & Justice Working Group is engaged with different aspects of contemporary research cultures, such as the way gender matters for living and knowing in science, or the implications of constant acceleration and enhanced competition for the production of technoscientific knowledge and the lives of those who produce this knowledge. Exploring these dimensions of scientific lives enables a better understanding of the potentials and limits of contemporary research cultures, and might further indicate aspects of these cultures that need to undergo change in order to allow for science to be more inclusive to a wider range of people and to be more responsive to a broader variety of societal needs.