Science & Justice Working Group Meeting

November 27, 2012, 4:00-6:00pm

Engineering 2, Rm. 599

Panelists:

Ruth Langridge: Legal Studies/ Politics Department, UCSC

Lori Pottinger: International Rivers Network

Bruce Daniels: Earth and Planetary Sciences, UCSC; Soquel Water District Board of Directors

Decades of anti-dam activism around the world have generated a greater public awareness of the social and ecological consequences of large dams. But urbanization and increasing fears over the hydrologic effects of climate change have slowed this anti-dam momentum. Climate models play a crucial role in the decision-making process, meaning that an understanding of the limits and possibilities of these models is more important than ever. This event addresses this problem by bringing together a water policy analyst, an advocate for healthy rivers, and a climate modeler to explore the relationship between hydrologic climate modeling and regional water resource planning. The event will explore how data are constructed, analyzed, and used to make water resource planning decisions; what challenges arise in this process for scientists, policy makers, and everyday people in affected watersheds; and what possibilities for social and environmental justice arise from a better understanding of these factors.

We will hear from Ruth Langridge, an expert on water law and policy in the Politics and Legal Studies Departments at UCSC; Lori Pottinger, an advocate for healthy rivers with the International Rivers Network in Berkeley; and Bruce Daniels, a PhD Candidate working on hydroclimatology in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at UCSC and a member of the Soquel Water District Board of Directors. The event will explore how data are constructed, analyzed, and used to make water resource planning decisions; what challenges arise in this process for scientists, policy makers, and everyday people in affected watersheds; and what possibilities for social and environmental justice arise from a better understanding of these factors.

Co-Sponsored by the UCSC Department of Anthroplogy

Scott Gilbert (Howard A. Schneiderman Professor Swarthmore College)

UCSC Philosophy Department Colloquium

Thursday, November 15, 4 – 6 pm. Humanities 1, rm. 210

The notion of the “biological individual” is crucial to studies of genetics, immunology, evolution, development, anatomy, and physiology. Each of these biological sub-disciplines has a specific conception of individuality, which has historically provided conceptual contexts for integrating newly acquired data. During the past decade, nucleic acid analysis, especially genomic sequencing and high-throughput RNA techniques, has challenged each of these disciplinary definitions by finding significant interactions of animals and plants with symbiotic microorganisms that disrupt the boundaries which heretofore had characterized the biological individual. Animals cannot be considered individuals by anatomical, or physiological criteria, because a diversity of symbionts are both present and functional in completing metabolic pathways and serving other physiological functions.

Similarly, these new studies have shown that animal development is incomplete without symbionts. Symbionts also constitute a second mode of genetic inheritance, providing selectable genetic variation for natural selection. The immune system also develops, in part, in dialogue with symbionts, and thereby functions as a mechanism for integrating microbes into the animal-cell community. Recognizing the “holobiont”—the multicellular eukaryote plus its colonies of persistent symbionts– as a critically important unit of anatomy, development, physiology, immunology, and evolution, opens up new investigative avenues and conceptually challenges the ways in which the biological sub-disciplines have heretofore characterized living entities.

COLLOQUIUM CO-SPONSORED BY:

History of Consciousness Department, Center for Cultural Studies, and Science & Justice Working Group

Jenny Reardon, Science & Justice Research Center Co-Director and Associate Professor of Sociology

Sociology Department Colloquium

Monday, November 26, 2012

12:30-2:00PM

301 College 8

Today ideals of participatory democracy that have long grounded Euro-American imaginaries of truth and freedom play important structuring roles in the natural sciences.  This represents a dramatic change for a domain of human activity that in the 20th century built its credibility largely through circumscribing itself as apolitical. While some celebrate these developments as part of the new spring for democracy, might this “unnatural” spread suggest a different reading?  This talk takes up this question through an analysis of a decade-long effort to render genomics democratic.  It explores what the rise of the “democratic genome” reveals about the limits of dominant narratives of “science and politics,” and what it might tell us about contemporary practices and conditions of democracy, justice and knowledge.

Interdisciplinary Development Working Group

Saturday October 27, 2012

9AM-5:30PM 

Oakes College

Invited speaker: Dr. Hallie Eakin, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University.

Increasingly climate change impacts have called into question the sustainability of development policies and practices. At the same time, development efforts share many of the goals of climate change adaptation and mitigation. Scholars and practitioners in both areas have recognized the need for more collaboration across these two fields to address the critical challenge of integrating development planning and climate action in ways that promote positive synergies and avoid past failures. This conference brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore to what extent the awareness of climate change causes and impacts is transforming development theories and practices.

For more information about this event please click here.

About the Interdisciplinary Development Working Group (IDWG): IDWG at UCSC provides a forum for faculty and students from all disciplines to discuss issues of development.  Our sessions center around members’research, close readings of selected texts, and presentations from invited guests. We engage with several of the sub-themes in development such as rural/urban dynamics, environmental change, social justice, natural resource management, and international  governance.

This event is made possible through the support of CGIRS, the Science and Justice Working Group, the Sociology Department and the Environmental Studies Department at UCSC.

Please direct any questions to idwg@ucsc.edu

Science & Justice Working Group Meeting

October 25, 2012

2:00-4:00 PM

Oakes Mural Room

This event brings together different accounts of salmon, some from social scientists and some from natural scientists who each will describe, and reflect upon how ‘their’ salmon is constituted, first in describing their particular research on questions of wild and domestic salmon in the US, and in then in a public conversation with each other and with the audience. We will hear from Robin Wapless, from NOAA in Seattle, from Rachel Barnett-Johnson from the Biology department at UCSC, from John Law a sociologist at the Open University in the UK, and from Marianne Liene, an anthropologist from the University of Oslo. Together, these scientists know salmon through widely different practices, from salmon hatcheries in California, to aquaculture sites in Norway, from laboratories, from textbooks, and from scientific articles and environmental regulation.

What are the defining traits of the salmon, and what distinctions do they look for? How were they attracted to salmon, and what are the practices through which they come to know salmon? What material, historical, and perhaps ethical entanglements are involved in the practices through which salmon is rendered known?

A special focus is on the notion of the wild; and its semi-domesticated other: What is a wild salmon, and how is it different from a hatchery salmon or a farmed salmon? How can we contribute to an environment that accommodates and nurtures different kinds of salmon?

This is not so much a debate about what salmon really is, as a dialogue across disciplines about all the different forms that are involved in our shared, but different, efforts to know the world we all inhabit.

Co-sponsored by the University of Oslo and the UCSC Environmental Studies and Anthropology Departments.

John Kadvany: A Very Short Introduction to Risk

Wednesday, October 5, at our normal time and place (Eng 2 599. 4:15-6:15).

John Kadvany will join us to discuss the concept of risk. Oxford University Press recently published John’s book on risk, entitled Risk: A Very Short Introduction. Given that so many of us in the group are interested in thinking well about risk–whether in the context of genomics or the climate or engineering design–we are particularly pleased to have John kick the year off.

Click here for an introduction to some of John’s ideas about risk.

Kadvany often works on project teams organized by an engineering company in charge of a large public works project. His role is to design and help implement a decision process in which engineers, external stakeholders, lawyers and regulators work their collective way through multiple competing options in an efficient, democratic and cooperative manner. He will design an analytical frameworkthat’s useful all around including the measurement techniques which can be used to accommodate relevant models, data, and professional or lay judgment of various qualities. Often these processes lead to a group “opinion survey”, a combined technical-policy document which summarizes stakeholder perspectives. His methods combine the analytical techniques of multiple values decision analysis with the approaches developed in the last two decades through the public participation movement.