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.

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