November 12, 2019 | Forensic Genomics for Investigators P.O.S.T. Course

8:30am – 5:00pm

Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office Community Room

5200 Soquel Avenue, Santa Cruz, CA 95062

Course Description

This 8-hour course is designed to assist understanding and engagement with new genomic technologies that are increasingly common as investigative leads, such as, DNA-predicted physical appearance (hair/eye/skin color, face shape) and ancestry estimations.

This course provides foundational information about the use and limitations of genomic technologies in the context of casework (both criminal and missing persons). Through activities and discussions, course participants will engage some of the common contexts in applying these DNA evidences to casework, such as translating ancestry to race labels, accounting for the accuracy of the genetic prediction in your investigation, and using the genetic results to narrow down your leads.

The course also offers a step-by-step guide to deciding which investigative genetics technology is right for an array of casework contexts (e.g. low quality DNA, DNA mixture, lead or no lead, skeletal DNA, touch DNA, diversity of suspect pool).

Cost

No fee

Objectives

To improve the attendee’s understanding of the uses and limitations of genetic predictors of physical appearance and ancestry in case investigations. To develop a protocol for assessing the most useful genetic test (beyond CODIS), given the quality of the DNA and the case context. To provide a network of genetic researchers and practitioners for consultation.

Prerequisites and Eligibility

Must be currently employed by a Law Enforcement Agency. Participation in this workshop is limited to law enforcement practitioners where having an up-to-date grasp of genomic technological applications is imperative. This workshop is formatted and approved as an accredited continuing education course through the Commission for Peace Officers Standards and Training for California law enforcement.

Special Instructions 

An anonymous survey may be emailed to you prior to the start of the course to better understand the incoming perspectives and interests of the attendees.

To Register

Qualified participants are to enroll through https://post.ca.gov/Training. Contact Dr. Cris Hughes at postgenomicscourse@gmail.com refer to POST Plan: N/A POST Course Number: 3180-11160-19. Participation will be capped at 65 attendees.

For information about the hosting agency, contact Dr. Lauren Zephro; lauren.zephro@santacruzcounty.us.

Course Instructors

Dr. Cris Hughes, Assistant Clinical Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Dr. Alison Galloway, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz 

Dr. Chelsey Juarez, Assistant Professor, California State University, Fresno

Dr. Lauren Zephro, Forensic Services Director, Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office

Sponsored By

The UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center, the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Outcomes

This course preceded an on-campus panel discussion Forensic Genomics: New Frontiers and New Considerations, hosted by the SJRC, aimed to explore the big-picture issues of recent, rapid advancements in forensic genomics through an ELSI lens (ethical, legal, & social implications) of novel technologies. The description and rapporteur report can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2019/12/03/dec-03-forensic-genomics/ .

November 06, 2019 | Meet & Greet

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Please join us for a beginning of quarter social hour. In addition to a chance to celebrate the new academic year and enjoy each other’s company over nice food and drink, we will be welcoming new members of our community, and welcoming back others.

This will be a great chance for everyone to meet and foster emerging collaborations! Attendees are highly encouraged to bring and share their objects of study as it is a fun and helpful way to find intersecting areas of interest.

Faculty or students interested in science and justice who want to learn more about SJRC, the Training Program offered in Winter 2020, or would like to affiliate with Science & Justice are highly encouraged to join us.

The Science & Justice Research Center is located on the second floor of the Oakes College Administrative Building, at the end the hallway to the left of the Mural Room as you come up the stairs; an elevator is located at the end of the building to the right.

Due to the PG&E power cut, the Meet & Greet was rescheduled from October 9, 4-5:30PM.

November 06, 2019 | Informational meeting for new cohort of Science & Justice Training Program

The Science and Justice Research Center will host an Informational Meeting on our internationally recognized interdisciplinary Graduate Training and Certificate Program:

Wednesday, November 06, 2019

12:00-1:30PM

Graduate Student Commons Fireside Lounge

Our 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 UC Santa Cruz currently teach new generations 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.

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, experience organizing and hosting colloquia series about the research projects, mentorship, potential for additional research funding and training in conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersections of science and society.

WINTER 2020 COURSE:

Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration (SOCY/BME/FMST 268A and ANTH 267), Prof. Jenny Reardon, scheduled tentatively Wednesdays 9am-12noon (to be confirmed). Enrollment in the course is required for participating in the Training Program. Attending the informational meeting is strongly encouraged, but not required.

Students from all disciplines are encouraged to attend

Prior graduate fellows have come from every campus Division.

20 Represented Departments: Anthropology, Biomolecular Engineering, Digital Arts & New Media, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Education, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Feminist Studies, Film & Digital Media, History of Consciousness, Latin American & Latino Studies, Literature, Math, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, and Visual Studies.

Past collaborative research projects have included:

  • Physicists working with small scale farmers to develop solar greenhouses scaled to local farming needs.
  • Colloquia about the social and political consequences of scientific uncertainties surrounding topics such as climate change research, food studies, genomics and identity.
  • Examining how art can empower justice movements.
  • Working with local publics to improve African fishery science.

For more information on the Science & Justice Training Program, visit: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/about-sjrc/sjtp/

Join the SJRC at the October 9th Meet & Greet from 4:00-5:30 in the SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231!

November 5, 2019 | Theorizing Race After Race

5:00-6:30 PM

SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Join Science & Justice scholars for an open discussion of Theorizing Race After Race!

At this meeting, we will be talking about the following articles:

More information on the cluster can be found at: https://scijust.ucsc.edu/2019/05/17/theorizing-race-after-race/.

October 30, 2019 | Works-in-Progress with Luz Cordoba

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

4:00-5:30 PM

SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Join SJRC scholars in the SJRC Common Room for an open discussion of works-in-progress! This is a wonderful chance to engage with one another’s ideas, and support our own internal work. At this session, we will hear from Science & Justice Training Program Fellow, Sociology Ph.D. Candidate, Luz Cordoba, who will discuss her dissertation that explores giant bamboo forests and their harvesters in Colombia, South America.

Luz Cordoba is a sociology graduate student at UC Santa Cruz whose interdisciplinary ethnographic work engages subjects such as STS, the Latin American Ontological turn, postcolonial critiques of race and nature, terror and colonialism, as well as political ecology and multi species ethnographies.

October 16, 2019 | Ruha Benjamin on A New Jim Code?

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

2:00-4:00pm

Merrill Cultural Center

A New Jim Code? Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (PDF Flyer)

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. Benjamin will present the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. We will also consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. Benjamin will take us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.

Further reading:

Innovating inequity: If Race is a Technology, Postracialism is the Genius Bar

Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice

Ruha Benjamin is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Ruha is the founder of the JUST DATA Lab and the author of two books, People’s Science  (Stanford) and Race After Technology (Polity), and editor of Captivating Technology (Duke). Ruha writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.

Q&A to be Moderated by SJRC’s Theorizing Race After Race cluster.

Co-Sponsored by Crown College.

Rapporteur Report by Dennis Browe

Ruha Benjamin, a sociologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, gave a lively presentation on the interconnections between race and technology and the great potential for bias and discrimination that lies in algorithms and coding. Notably, Dr. Benjamin began not only with an acknowledgment of the indigenous tribal land that UC Santa Cruz is located on – the Uypi Tribe of the Awaswas Nation, represented today by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band – but also acknowledged the intertwining legacies of the devastation of the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism. This was a fitting introduction to her talk, where she connected these devastating legacies to the ways in which current technologies and technological practices continue to reinforce – even inadvertently – these legacies of white supremacy through domination, both materially and at the level of the imagination.

Dr. Benjamin made the case for how technology, which is presented as miraculous and imaginative, can actually be and often is used to subdue and subjugate people. She used three main contentions as the backbone of her presentation:  1) racism is productive, in the literal sense of its capacity to produce things; 2) racism is innovative: race and technology are co-produced, they shape one another, and social inputs that make some inventions appear inevitable and desirable are just as important as the social impact of technologies; and, 3) imagination is a contested field of action; it is not just an ephemeral afterthought, but an ongoing battleground for what becomes important to the social order.

1957 Mechanics Illustrated advertisement for ‘robot slaves.’

Covering a variety of media with implicit and explicit overtones of racial targeting and discrimination over the past seventy years, Dr. Benjamin illuminated how “technology captivates.” Riffing on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Dr. Benjamin sees “The New Jim Code” as a combination of coded bias and imagined objectivity: “Innovation that enables social containment, while appearing fairer than discriminatory practices of a previous era… this now entails a crucial sociotechnical component that not only hides the nature of domination, but allows it to penetrate every facet of social life under the guise of progress.” After detailing its features, she asked: why are techno-fixes so desirable? Noticing the absurdity of relaying on techno-fixes for working toward racial justice, such as ostensibly neutral resume review algorithms that HR departments are beginning to employ, she quipped, “If only there was a way to slay centuries of inequalities and oppressions with a social justice bot.”

We at the SJRC want to continue thinking through how Ruha Benjamin’s work, as a long-time friend and ally to SJRC, meshes with other recent events as they all converge around questions of advances in science and technology and the continual return to questions of race and racism. Race and racism seem to advance in lock-step with these developments even if, often, their optimistic promoters claim that these new technologies will do away with the need for racial characterizations or even race itself as a structuring social category. In April 2019, a team of SJRC graduate fellows hosted an event at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History named, “No Really, What Percentage are You?” Race, Identity & Genetic Ancestry Testing. At this event we interrogated the claims to neutrality and objectivity inherent in advertisements for direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry tests such those by as Ancestry.com and 23andMe. Through a variety of activities including a panel of professors and graduate students, a collage-making table, and an art exhibit, we similarly explored racialized assumptions embedded in the technology of genetic ancestry tests and the myriad ways that users make sense of their test results, including the creative ways they connect these results to their narrative of familial genealogy.

One topic that surfaced during the panel discussion was that with the rapid advancement of genome sequencing technologies and computational biology, we cannot easily predict how genomic information will be taken up and used in five, let alone twenty years from now – by whom, and toward what sorts of purposes genomic knowledge will be employed. For example, we know that government units and police are already beginning to use forensic genomics to solve murder cases as well as to identify those moving through the criminal justice system. Dr. Benjamin’s work raises this same concern: with the rapid advancement of algorithmic technologies for automating more and more aspects of life, we cannot precisely determine the creative ways in which algorithms will be taken up in the near future. Admitting these limitations to predicting the future, how can frameworks for racial and gender-based justice be designed and, importantly, how can justice-based frameworks be implemented into the core design of new technologies, and not just as an afterthought?

Noting that this conversation about the ways in which racialized and often gendered assumptions become embedded in each new generation of technologies happens again and again (new techs; same concerns), Dr. Benjamin’s emphasis on the role of imagination offers at least one powerful way out of this cyclical trap. As she noted: most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination and we must come to grips with “how the nightmares that many people are forced to endure are the underside of elite fantasies about efficiency, profit, and social control.” Thus, not content to simply call out racializing and racist technologies, Dr. Benjamin ended by noting imaginative projects working toward tech & racial justice, including: Data for Black Lives; the Detroit community technology project; Science for the People; Tech Workers’ Coalition; and the Digital Defense Playbook. She stressed that we have to prioritize the proactive seeding of the world that we want – to save much of our energy for intellectual and political organizing, not just naming the problems.

With the proliferation and penetration of new technologies further into the mesh of everyday life, we must continue to ask these questions about the ways that racializing biases and outright discrimination become encoded into the hearts of new technologies, again and again. Following Dr. Benjamin’s lead, we, as a mix of social and natural scientists and engineers, must continue to make the case far and wide to intervene imaginatively. If so many are forced to live within other people’s imaginations, proactively imagining alternatives is one way to seed new presents and new futures. To end with an ongoing question: if the racializing biases embedded in new technologies will arise again and again, in what other ways can this problem be thought about and transformed at a systems level, rather than at a level of counteracting the discriminating effects of each new individual technology as it arises? Dr. Benjamin might have been thinking here not of seeding new trees individually, but of reimagining what the forest itself can be, how it can serve as a container for multiple, overlapping, aspirational forms of justice.

Science & Justice Fall Writing Together

Tuesdays 10:00am-1:00pm

SJRC Common Room, Oakes 231

Wanting to establish a regular writing routine exploring science and justice? Beginning Tuesday October 8th, join SJRC scholars in the SJRC Common Room from 10:00am to 1:00pm 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. For more information or to express interest, please contact SJRC Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe (sociology).

June 6, 2019 | Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence  

Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, June 6, 2019

7:00 PM (registration)

UC Santa Cruz, Kresge College Seminar Room

The Right Livelihood Laureate Lecture presents

an evening with Nicanor Perlas, Right Livelihood Award Laureate, followed by panel discussion with UC Santa Cruz Faculty Anthony Aguirre (Associate Professor of Physics), Lise Getoor (Professor of Computer Science and S&J Affiliate), and Sikina Jinnah (Associate Professor of Politics).

The 21st century is the Age of Science and Technology. It is also the Age in which humanity faces a unique and unprecedented challenge. This is the challenge of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If properly developed and aligned with the values of humanity, AI will bring tremendous benefits to society. However, if AI is used inappropriately, it could undermine human civilization and, ultimately, with the emergence of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), lead to the extinction of humanity, in as little as 10 to 20 years. Scientists, philosophers and engineers call this latter possibility the “alignment challenge” or “existential risk” of AI. The fate of our future lies literally in our hands. In navigating the turbulent waters of extreme technology in the 21st century, two sources of hope are visible in the horizon: new more ethical developments from within science and technology itself, and the rapid and widespread emergence of societal change agents, whether they are activists in the realm of culture and civil society, visionary legislators in the realm of polity and government, or enlightened entrepreneurs in the realm of the economy and business.

For a full “deep dive” experience exploring these unprecedented challenges and possibilities, UC Santa Cruz will also host a week-long summer institute, July 8-12, with Right Livelihood Award laureate Nicanor Perlas, who received the “alternative Nobel” in 2003 for his work opposing corporate globalization.

Co-sponsored by Kresge College, Social Sciences Division, Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, and the Science & Justice Research Center.

More can be found at: https://rightlivelihood.ucsc.edu/events/perlas.html

June 5-7, 2019 | Wrong at the Root: Racial Bias and The Tension Between Numbers and Words in Non-Internet Data

Wednesday, June 5 – Friday, June 7, 2019

Melvin Calvin Laboratory

University of California Berkeley

 

Sponsored by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the Sloan Foundation

Artificially intelligent systems extrapolate from historical training data. While the training process is robust to “noisy” data, systematically biased data will inexorably lead to biased systems. The emerging field of algorithmic fairness seeks interventions to blunt the downstream effects of data bias. Initial work has focused on classification and prediction algorithms.

This cross-cutting workshop will examine the sources and nature of racial bias in a wide range of settings such as genome-wide association studies, social and financial credit systems, bail and probate calculations, black box medicine, and facial recognition and robotic surveillance. We will survey state-of-the-art algorithmic literature, and lay a more concrete intellectual foundation for advancing the field of algorithmic fairness.

Full schedule: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/schedule/10757#

Register at: https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/fairness-workshop-1