The Division of Social Sciences will hold its annual half-day interdisciplinary Research Frontiers Day. This will bring faculty, students, and community members together to present and learn about how social sciences faculty research is engaging key issues of the 21st century. The day will showcase transformative research focused on solving everyday challenges, while fostering collaboration between researchers, students, and community members.

This year’s event will engage research centered on:
• Data: Is Bigger Really Better?
• Environment: Climate, Animals & Food
• Justice: Here, There, Them & Us

Andrew Mathews | 10:50 – 11:20am | Alumni Room, University Center
“Burning questions: Climate change and forest use in Italy and Mexico”

Join the conversation on social media. Follow @UCSCSocSci on Twitter and tag your tweets #rfd2014.

Friday, October 24, 2014 | 8:00am-2:00pm |Full Program

The Science & Justice Research Center is proud to announce the recent campus approval of the Science & Justice Certificate Program. This certificate provides recognition to current graduate students who have developed collaborative research methods for exploring the meeting of questions of science and knowledge with questions of ethics and justice. For more pedagogical information on the nationally and internationally recognized Science & Justice Training Program, please read Experiments in Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Graduate Education in Science and Justice originally published in PLOS Biology.

Graduate students interested in the Science & Justice Training Program, please visit: Science & Justice Training Program.

Faculty interested in supporting the Science & Justice Training Program or for more information on our Broader Impacts Initiative, please read: Broader Impacts.

Please join us in congratulating the following graduate students on their achievements in completing the Science & Justice Certificate Program.

• Tracy Ballinger, Biomolecular Engineering/Informatics
• Celina Callahan-Kapoor, Anthropology
• Zachary Caple, Anthropology
• Ian Carbone, Physics
• Gene A. Felice II, Digital Arts and New Media
• Elaine Gan, Digital Arts and New Media
• Kelly Gola, Psychology
• Elizabeth Hare, Anthropology
• Colin Hoag, Anthropology
• Kathleen Uzilov, Earth and Planetary Sciences
• Martha Kenney, History of Consciousness
• Sophia Magnone, Literature
• Alexis Mourezna, Philosophy
• Andrew Murray, Sociology
• Jennifer Liss Ohayon, Environmental Studies
• Miriam Olivera, Environmental Studies
• Katy Overstreet, Anthropology
• Derek Padilla, Physics
• Felicia Peck, Politics
• Micha Rahder, Anthropology
• Costanza Rampini, Environmental Studies
• Kate Richerson, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• Benjamin Roome, Philosophy
• Tiffany Wise-West, Environmental Studies

On March 7th, 2014 Science & Justice Director, Jenny Reardon along with Erik Aarden of Harvard, and Patrick Taylor from Boston Children’s will discuss Principles in Practice, a panel chaired by Jason Robert from the Center for Biology + Society at Arizona State University, Tempe.

Recent developments at the intersection of biological, information and communications technologies have opened the way to profound transformations in biomedical research and practice by eliciting and aggregating data from human bodies at scale and scope that were previously unimaginable.  Such bodies of data form a critical infrastructure for developing a more precise and personalized medicine. Building such collections depends upon the consent of individuals to supply information and tissue from their bodies, even as the future uses and meaning of such information is necessarily uncertain.

These developments have elicited profound questions about—and new experiments in— architectures of governance.  Increased access to these technologies has attracted new actors, engendered new uses, and elicited new modes of participation in research. Examples include disease advocacy driven research, crowd-sourced citizen science, and products like direct-to-consumer genetic testing.  These new entrants bring different imaginations of rights and benefits, challenging traditional approaches to biomedical research and blurring distinctions between consumer, patient and research subject.

There is a need to rethink established regimes of governance. How will these developments affect the rights, roles and responsibilities of scientists, physicians, regulators, citizens, consumers, research participants, and patients? What opportunities—and obligations—exist for extending public participation in research to include a participatory role in governance? This workshop will examine contexts where existing architectures of ethical governance have been strained and challenged, and where forms of innovation and experimentation have begun to emerge. It will draw together an international group of leaders from the biomedical sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, industry and government.

For full workshop information view bodies of data or visit, http://cbs.asu.edu

Co-Sponsored by: The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, the Center for Policy Informatics and the Center for Biology and Society

The Science and Justice Research Center is hosting an Informational Meeting for a new cohort of our nationally recognized interdisciplinary Graduate Training Program:

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 20, 2014

12:30-2:00 Muwekma Ohlone Conference Room 351

(Bay Tree Building, 3^rd floor, upstairs from the Bay Tree Bookstore)

Lunch Provided

Our NSF-supported Science and Justice Training Program (SJTP) is a globally unique initiative that trains doctoral students to work across the disciplinary boundaries of the natural and social sciences, engineering, humanities and the arts. Through the SJTP we at UCSC are currently teaching a new generation of PhD students the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, and public communication. Students in the program design collaborative research projects oriented around questions of science and justice. These research projects not only contribute to positive outcomes in the wider world, they also become the templates for new forms of problem-based and collaborative inquiry within and beyond the university.

Spring 2014 Course:
Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration
SOCY/BME/FMST 268A & ANTH 269A
Prof. Jenny Reardon
Tuesdays 11-2, College 8 301

Students from all departments are encouraged to attend
Prior graduate Fellows have come from every campus Division

13 Represented Departments:
Anthropology, Biomolecular Engineering, Earth & Planetary Sciences, Environmental Studies, Film and Digital Arts, Digital Arts and New Media, History of Consciousness, Literature, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, and Sociology

As SJTP students graduate they take the skills and experience they gained in the training program into the next stage of their career in universities, industry, non-profits, and government.

Opportunities include graduate Certificate Program (pending), experience organizing and hosting colloquia series about your research, mentorship, opportunities for research funding and training in conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and society.

For more information on the Science & Justice Training Program, please see:
http://scijust.ucsc.edu/what-we-do/training/

Dr. Jenny Reardon, University of California, Santa Cruz, Director, Science & Justice Research Center (UCSC) presents “The Post-Genomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome” at the SBS Seminar Series at UCSF.

Once an area of science oriented around close observation, attention and description—where new technologies like computers were at best an aid, and at worst shunned—today the life sciences are a hub of technological innovation. Genomics is emblematic. The field orients around a series of impressive innovations that offer great new promise but also present a fundamental problem, the problem of the post: what come after? What is the latest and greatest technology this month becomes passé the next: Affymetrix SNP chip 6.0 today, Ion Torrent’s Ion chip tomorrow. Getting caught with the wrong set of machines, on the wrong platform, is a constant concern. Nothing endures; all is in-formation.

Without endurance, Hannah Arendt argued fifty years ago in The Human Condition, the world loses common objects. Without common objects nothing sticks around long enough for democratic deliberation or knowledge-making. Informed decisions become things of the past. The proverbial table around which we gather to deliberate and understand are lost along with the objects that used to sit on the table. We now live in this postgenomic condition, after objects, after democracy, in-formation. How can we know and how can we govern in this state? The talk draws upon a decade of fieldwork focused on meaning-making and governance practices in genomics in order to consider this question that lies at the heart of the postgenomic condition.

Monday, February 10, 2014 | 3:30 – 5:00| Laurel Heights Campus, Room 474, UCSF

Science & Justice is pleased to announce the launching of our bi-annual newsletter. Read about our themes for the year, profiles on our visiting scholars and much more.

Newsletters are available at Reports & Papers.