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.”
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
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
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.
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?
koverstreet Says:
October 17th, 2011 at 12:49 am edit
While reading Chapter 5 of Jenny Reardon’s Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics, I was particularly intrigued by the debates over representation and informed consent/ choice. There are multiple senses of representation at work here that I’d like to draw out and perhaps we can have further discussion about them in class. The first sense of representation is reminiscent of the Latour piece we read in the spring, in which he critiques the view of science as “merely” recording the ontological reality of the world. Continue Reading Reading Responses: Interviewing
After last week’s discussion, I thought S&Jers might be interested in this Wired blog post on this PLoS Medicine paper highlighting the power of data in both reflecting and perpetuating racial inequality.
akargl Says:
October 10th, 2011 at 5:12 pm edit
I absolutely devoured these readings. I found it extremely useful for the stage I’m at with my project. Also, in commencing to create maps of my project, I appreciated Star & Bowker for, among other things, explicitly implicating the maps we’re about to make in the web of things the maps will organize. (I’m imagining some sort of M.C. Escher-inspired bubble embedding the whole map within itself.) Rather than discuss all that I found wonderfully useful (which I think just seems harder right now because I’m anxious to try stuff out), I want to draw out three areas I needed more help with:Continue Reading Reading Responses: Situational Mapping
Lisa Jean Moore, professor of sociology and gender studies at Purchase College, State University of New York, will deliver the second annual Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture on Wednesday, October 19.
The lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. in UCSC’s Humanities 1 Building (room 210). Admission is free and open to the public. A reception will follow at 6:30 p.m.Continue Reading Of Interest: Lisa Jean Moore to present annual Baskin Ethics Lecture
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 framework that’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.