Author Archives: Colleen Stone

May 16, 2018 | Assembling Precision Medicine

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Wednesday, May 16, 2018
1:30-3:30pm
Engineering 2, Room 599

 

Join S&J Visiting Scholars Declan Kuch and Matthew Kearnes in an informal discussion on how proponents of the bio-nano sciences, centered around polymer chemistry, have promised a new generation of targeting agents that will carry drug payloads to diseased cells with greater accuracy. Alongside these promises, proponents of precision medicine have sought to build new knowledge about health and illness through massive new databases that combine multiple ‘-omics’ with lifestyle and chemical exposure data. Much has already been written speculating about both the efficacy and social effects ‘downstream’ of these sciences, especially the likely consequences of precision medicine in domains of socio-economics, race and disability (Juengst et al., 2016; Meagher et al., 2016).We instead seek to discuss how these critiques are (or are not) affecting laboratory designs, practices, and methods, starting with a discussion of critiques of bio-nano science (Torrice, 2016; Wilhelm et al., 2016). How can bio-nano science and precision medicine practically address their critics in such disciplines as public health and sociology dismissing them as expensive indulgences to benefit mostly rich white people? What role can data sharing play in building public support? How can the open science ethos of bio-nano and much precision medicine research translate into public benefit considering the expanding ‘pharmaceuticalisation’ of illness (Dumit, 2012) and rising drug prices?

Declan Kuch is a Research Fellow in the School of Humanities and Languagues at UNSW. His research is situated between the fields of Science and Technology Studies and Economic Sociology. He has published on topics including public engagement with science and technology, precision medicine, energy and climate policy, and the sharing economy. He is the author of ‘The Rise and Fall of Carbon Emissions Trading’ (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) and loves riding bikes.

Matthew Kearnes is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, a CI with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Convergent Bio-Nano Science & Technology (CBNS) and member of the of Environmental Humanities Group at the School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales. Matthew’s research is situated between the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), human geography and contemporary social theory. His current work is focused on the social and political dimensions of technological and environmental change, including ongoing work on nanotechnology, precision medicine, geoengineering and the development of negative emission strategies to anthropogenic climatic change. He has published widely on the ways in which the development of novel and emerging technologies is entangled with profound social, ethical and normative questions. Matthew serves on the editorial board Science, Technology and Society (Sage) and is an associate editor for Science as Culture (Taylor & Francis). Matthew is also co-convenor of the 4S 2018 conference, to be held in Sydney in August 2018.

References

  • Dumit J. (2012) Drugs for life: how pharmaceutical companies define our health, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Juengst E, McGowan ML, Fishman JR, et al. (2016) From “personalized” to “precision” medicine: the ethical and social implications of rhetorical reform in genomic medicine. Hastings Center Report 46: 21-33.
  • Meagher KM, McGowan ML, Settersten RA, et al. (2016) Precisely Where Are We Going? Charting the New Terrain of Precision Prevention. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.
  • Torrice M. (2016) Does Nanomedicine Have a Delivery Problem? ACS Central Science 2: 434-437.
  • Wilhelm S, Tavares AJ, Dai Q, et al. (2016) Analysis of nanoparticle delivery to tumours. Nature Reviews Materials 1: 16014.

May 09, 2018 | Timescales, Memory, and Nuclear Geographies: A Conversation with Gabrielle Hecht and Julie Salverson

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Wednesday, May 09, 2018

4:00-6:00 PM

Louden Nelson Center, Room 1

301 Center St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060

Source: Michael Brill, Site Design to Mark the Dangers of Nuclear Waste for 10,000 Years. Buffalo: The Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation Inc. (BOSTI). 1991, pl 15.

Source: Michael Brill, Site Design to Mark the Dangers of Nuclear Waste for 10,000 Years. Buffalo: The Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation Inc. (BOSTI). 1991, pl 15.

Writers and activists researching nuclear things face “the challenge of rendering visible occluded, sprawling webs of interconnectedness” (Nixon 2011, 13). This discussion features two writers whose work traces the sprawling webs of nuclear geographies, binding uranium mining and its dispersed radioactive legacies. Julie Salverson (Professor of Drama and Cultural Studies, Queen’s University) links the mines of Northern Canada with the U.S.’s use of nuclear weapons in Japan, and the later disaster at Fukushima, while Gabrielle Hecht (Professor of History and Nuclear Security, Stanford) examines the afterlives of neocolonial uranium mining by French companies in Gabon. Salverson and Hecht experiment with different conceptual and writerly methods to trace the geographies of these extractive economies and their uneven effects.

This discussion with Salverson and Hecht is moderated by UCSC’s Science and Justice Research Center. We invite event attendees to read a representative article from each author, email Lindsey Dillon at lidillon@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.

  • Salverson, Julie and Peter C. van Wyck. “Through the Lens of Fukushima.” Forthcoming in Through Post Atomic Eyes, edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
  • Hecht, Gabrielle. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109-141.

References

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.

May 02, 2018 | “Sons and Daughters of Soil?” reflections on Life Sciences and Decoloniality in South Africa

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Wednesday, May 02, 2018, 3:30-5:30 PM, Humanities 1, Room 210

Responding, as researchers, to Earth Mastery that includes not only violent machines, but a violation of evidence and epistemes including the scientific episteme, requires accumulating and presenting evidence for existences that do not exist — at least, not in neoliberal discourses. In trying to research and support specific situations of Black environmental struggle in South Africa, I find myself standing with that which has no existence in conventional discourses: for a cliff that no longer exists; for molecules that have no existence in local knowledge; for people who have no existence in the mining companies, for the assassinated Bazooka Radebe, whose existence is now with the Ancestors, and with the soil he died to conserve. Environmental Humanities South had begun by asking a question about how to generate evidence in the geological Anthropocene. By the time our first three years had ticked by and we had encountered the Capitalocene, I had learned that a far more fundamental struggle has to be the focus of our work. What exists? Who exists? In what registers and modes? How do we take on the new conquistadors with their machines called Earth Masters, given that it is their owners’ logic that has come to define who exists and what exists and what can be ground to dust? How can scholarship contribute to the building of a broad-based environmental public? Presented as a dilemma tale, this talk sketches six moves toward an ecopolitics in South Africa, with the question: what else could be in this discussion?

Lesley Green | Fulbright Fellow, Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town; Director of Environmental Humanities South, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town

Hosted by the IHR Race, Violence, Inequality and the Anthropocene Cluster.

Co-Sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center and the Anthropology Department.

May 01, 2018 | Reading Group with Lesley Green

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Tuesday, May 01, 2018, 11:30-1:30 PM, Humanities 1, Room 408

Reading Seminar on #ScienceMustFall and ABC of Plant Medicine: On Posing Cosmopolitical Questions

Email Kristina Lyons (krlyons@ucsc.edu) for the readings.

Lesley Green | Fulbright Fellow, Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town; Director of Environmental Humanities South, Faculty of Humanities, University of Cape Town

Hosted by the IHR Race, Violence, Inequality and the Anthropocene Cluster.

Co-Sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center

April 11, 2018 | Visiting Scholars Roundtable

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Wednesday, April 11, 2018 | 4:00-5:30pm | SJRC’s Common Room (Oakes 231)

S&J welcomes Katharine Legun, (Sociology Lecturer and Researcher at the Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago NZ) to the Science & Justice community.

At this roundtable, we’ll hear from Katharine who will share an overview on her work in plants and aesthetic politics, farmers and intellectual property, and the ever shifting power structures in agri-food systems. More on Katharine’s fascinating work on how the vibrant botany of apples shapes orchard culture and market institutions can be found here and here.

​Katharine Legun holds a PhD in Sociology from UW-Madison and has worked in New Zealand since 2013. ​She has published in Economy and Society, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning A, and is currently co-editing the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology. Her work considers more-than-human approaches to understanding economic and environmental practice, focusing particularly on the role of plants in shaping human agency within agriculture.

This will be a great chance for everyone to connect with the visitors of the Center, learn about their work and foster emerging collaborations! Interested in visiting Science & Justice? Visit our website for more information on the SJRC Visiting Scholar Program.

Spring 2018 | Science and Justice Writing Together

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Tuesday 9:00-11:30am | SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Wanting to establish a regular writing routine exploring science and justice? Join SJRC scholars in the SJRC Common Room for open writing sessions! Engage in six 25-minute writing sessions (with a 5 minute break in between).

Open to all students, faculty and visiting scholars. We will continue to schedule quarterly writing sessions based on interest and availability, please be in touch if you are interested in participating in the future.

For more information, please contact Lindsey Dillon (Assistant Professor of Sociology).

Mar 15, 2018 | Making Worlds with Crows: A Multispecies Ethics Workshop with Thom van Dooren

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Thursday, March 15, 2018 | 3:15-5:15 PM | Humanities 1, Room 202

Thom van Dooren will present an overview of his new book, Making Worlds With Crows; we will then discuss its final chapter, “Provisioning Crows: Cultivating Ecologies of Hope. Please email mfernan3@ucsc.edu for the chapter.

Ubiquitous in their global presence, crows are now found almost everywhere that people are: from critically endangered island crows living in disappearing forests to abundant urban species finding new ways to exploit changing cities. In this way, crows offer a broad range of instructive sites for exploring the challenges and possibilities of multispecies life in the context of escalating processes of globalisation, urbanisation, climate change, and extinction. This talk offers an overview of a recently completed monograph that focuses on changing human/crow relationships in five key sites in an effort to develop approaches and practices for a situated, attentive, multispecies, ethics.

Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017-2021) in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, and founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press). His research and writing focuses on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014), Making Worlds With Crows: A Multispecies Ethics (2018), and co-editor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), all published by Columbia University Press. www.thomvandooren.org

Co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, the Center for Emerging Worlds, and the Science and Justice Research Center.

Mar 14, 2018 | Reflexivity Isn’t Enough: (Re)Making ‘Place’ in Ethnographic Practices

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Wednesday, March 14, 2018 | 4:00-5:30 PM | SJRC Common Room

This presentation consists of two parts. First, Hernández will present a talk that draws on their forthcoming journal publication which narrates an embodied and experiential ethnographic approach, one that reimagines ethnography and ethnographic practices, and works to contribute to healing and Indigenous survivance.

Second, Hernández, who is a Society for Visual Anthropology awardee, will conduct a reading of their ethnographic poetry while inviting bees into the space with the help of photo-ethnography. Hernández’s dissertation work is a relational collaboration with bees, among many more-than-human beings, in and with the borderlands of California and Arizona. Thus, bees and the Indigenous lands from where they live and from which they come will be present and honored through both visual and poetic engagements.

Krisha J. Hernández (Mexica/Aztec, Yaqui (Yoeme), & Bisayan), is an Indígena Ph.D. Candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Hernández is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, UCSC Graduate Division, UCSC Science and Justice Research Center, and is a Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar. She is a researcher in the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society (Indigenous STS) international research and teaching hub lab chaired by Canada’s Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Environment, Dr. Kim TallBear. Her forthcoming dissertation, “Agents of Pollination: Indigenous Bodies & Lives, and U.S. Agriculture Technosciences,” is concerned with Indigeneity and materialisms, (de)colonization and settler colonialism, and collaboration (with more-than-(but including)-human beings) as healing. Hernández researches human-insect relations in food and agricultural systems, more-than-human socialites, foodways, and environmental change in which they employ a critical Indigenous feminist lens toward more-than-human personhood.  Hernández has had the privilege of working as an invited guest on Kānaka Maoli land, and currently works and thinks with desert lands and pollinators in the southern ‘borderlands’ of California and Arizona— primarily in relational collaboration with bees and moths.

 

Feb 28, 2018 | Giving Day

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Wednesday, February 28, 2018

ALL DAY – ONLINE

Join SJRC on February 28th for the third annual UC Santa Cruz Giving Day!

Giving Day is a 24-hour online fundraising campaign where we will raise funds for undergraduate researchers.

Your support creates a vibrant future for science and justice researchers. With your help, we can offer summer support for student research, allowing both undergraduate and graduate students interested in questions of science and justice to extend their projects beyond the normal confines of the academic year. This will both bolster their training and research experience and grow SJRC’s ability to make a difference in these crucial social issues of health, science, and justice.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

Visit our Giving Day project campaign to learn more!