Nov 09, 2011 | Information, but Meaning? The Value of Genomics

Andro Hsu with discussion by Ted Goldstein and Whitney Boesel

November 9, 2011

Engineering 2, Room 599

4:15-6:15 PM

Andro Hsu (VP of Products at GigaGen and former science writer and policy advisor at 23andMe) will join us for a discussion of what we are learning—both about policy/society and biology—as increasing resources are put into turning the ever growing amounts of genomic information into something of value. Ted Goldstein, PhD candidate at the UCSC Center for Biomolecular Sciences and Engineering, will provide a response to Hsu presentation.

Nov 09, 2011 | Information, but Meaning? The Value of Genomics

Science & Justice Working Group Meeting
Andro Hsu with discussion by Ted Goldstein and Whitney Boesel

November 9, 2011

Engineering 2, Room 599

4:15-6:15 PM

Andro Hsu (VP of Products at GigaGen and former science writer and policy advisor at 23andMe) will join us for a discussion of what we are learning—both about policy/society and biology—as increasing resources are put into turning the ever growing amounts of genomic information into something of value. Ted Goldstein, PhD candidate at the UCSC Center for Biomolecular Sciences and Engineering, will provide a response to Hsu presentation.

Reading Responses: Experiment

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

Wordle Coding

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

Oct 27, 2011 | “Another World is Plantable!” Film Screening with director Ella von der Haide

Documentary on Community Gardening and Food Justice in North America 2010

 

Urban community gardening is a phenomenon that is spreading throughout the world. At the core of the films are gardening activists who explain how and why their gardens are a “green oasis” within the city, as well as projects of resistance that bring “another world” into being. The films also show the critical and ambivalent ways in which the gardening movements can be instrumented by neoliberal regimes.

North America has a vibrant  community garden scene that is currently developing into a broad social movement for food justice. Through the local production of ecological food for subsistence and for sale at farmers’ markets, community gardeners not only construct an alternative to the agro-industrial business and “food deserts”, they simultaneously create a new local self-reliance and new discourses on justice.

In a series of four documentaries, film director Ella von der Haide features urban community gardens and their connections to emancipatory social movements in South Africa, Argentina, Germany and North America. The community gardens portrayed in this film, in New York, Detroit, San Francisco and Vancouver, are all engaged in different social change processes, from anti-racist resistance and post-colonial healing to indigenous self-determination and queer-feminist environmental politics.

The director will be present for Q&A.

More information on the film and research: www.communitygarden.de

Information on the director:

Ella von der Haide is a Dipl.-Ing. of Urban and Regional Planning, Garden Activist and feminist Filmmaker from Germany.

Contact: post@ella-von-der-haide.de

Sponsored by: SJWG, Film & Digital Media, and Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

October 27, 2011, 4:30-6:30 PM | Studio C (Room 150 in Communications Building)

Oct 26, 2011 | Ella von der Haide: Film Screeing

Ella von der Haide: Film Screeing

Wednesday, October 26 2011

4:15-6:15 PM, Location TBA

Filmmaker, community garden activist, and feminist theorist Ella von der Haide will be screening two new films about agro-ecology and community gardening, titled “Community Gardens in the US” and “Seed Saving, Seed Activism and Seed Legislation.”

Oct 25, 2011 | Comparative Tinkerings: A Roundtable

Comparative Tinkering: A Roundtable

Tuesday, October 25th, 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m.

UCSC Campus, Social Sciences 1, Room 261 (Anthropology’s Colloquium Series room)

Speakers: Karen Barad (UCSC, Feminist Studies), Alan Christy (UCSC, History), Lawrence Cohen (UC-Berkeley, Anthropology), Andrew Matthews (UCSC, Anthropology), Danilyn Rutherford (UCSC, Anthropology), Warren Sack (UCSC, Film & Digital Media), Anna Tsing (UCSC, Anthropology)

Facilitators: Peter Lutz (IT University of Copenhagen, Technologies in Practice) and Heather Swanson (UCSC, Anthropology)

Abstract:

Comparisons are utterly pervasive in anthropology and its neighboring disciplines, including science studies and the sciences more broadly. We compare incessantly, yet we rarely theorize explicitly about our comparative practices. For instance, how do we determine the whats and the whos of our comparisons? At this roundtable we hope to unfold these practices by exploring the risks and virtues of comparison, especially those emerging in empirical travels like ethnographic fieldwork. What are the analytical detours of our comparative ventures? What work is required to render objects stable and comparable? What are the natures of the comparable beings we evoke and harness? Stability is arguably one of the most once deeply problematic yet virtually inescapable aspects of scientific comparison. Yet how might we make do with comparisons – themselves knots of relations – to reveal their underlying messy travel from desk to field and back again? Here we are particularly eager to explore the possibilities of tinkering with comparisons so that they might destabilize and move.

Sponsored by: SJWG and the Anthropology Department

Reading Responses: 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

Oct 19, 2011 | Vibeke Pihl: Modeling pigs and humans

Modelling pigs and humans: Exploring the practices of models across sciences

Wednesday October 19, 2011

Engineering 2, Room 499

PhD Fellow Vibeke Pihl, Medical Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen.

Vibeke Pihl’s research addresses how connections between humans and animals are shaped in contemporary biomedical research on human health. During an ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, Vibeke has followed a group of Danish biomedical researchers working to establish a pig model for human obesity surgery. In biomedicine, the pig is increasingly established as a preferred model organism in biomedical research on human obesity due to an argued biological resemblance between pigs and human anatomy and physiology. The topic of the SJWG event concerns an analysis of how the use of pigs as models for humans does not rest solely on biological connections, but requires social, moral, economical and cultural connections to support the choice of the pig as the appropriate model for obese human bodies. In addition, the presentation will address how models are practised in biomedical science and social science. Drawing upon fieldwork, the presentation will focus on how the analysis of the biomedical researchers’ establishment of a pig model prompt a simultaneous crafting of a social scientific model of human-animal relations. Vibeke asks which connections between humans and pigs are included and excluded in the research practices of biomedical scientists’ and the practices of social scientists like her own. With this presentation, Vibeke wants to provide an opening for a stronger mutual engagement between researchers across sciences working with animals as models of humans.

Broader Impacts?

There was an interesting piece in Science last week about the long-running debates around the meaning and purpose of the “Broader Impacts” requirement on NSF grant applications. The article does a good job of articulating the complaints of scientists doing “basic” science that seems to far removed from “applications” to have anything meaningful to say about societal impacts. But it doesn’t ask whether such requirements over time force applicants to actually change their practices. Continue Reading Broader Impacts?