Projects

The Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) aims to produce and support original research. Our community events and affiliated faculty-initiated research projects inform a range of interdisciplinary research topics at the intersection of science and justice. Find out more information on our fundraising efforts to further support Center researchers and projects as highlighted below. The Center’s completed projects are archived.

Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network (CIHSN)

Colonialism is the fundamental determinant of health and life chances for Indigenous peoples around the world (Greenwood et al., 2022). Institutions, like healthcare systems, are shaped by colonialism (McCallum and Perry 2018). In Canada and the United States, Indigenous health research draws on deficit-based (Kovach 2014; Million 2013) and damage-centered (Tuck 2009) frameworks that pathologize Indigenous peoples, not colonial conditions that shape health outcomes. Such research generates non-Indigenous experts’ narratives about Indigenous peoples that prop up and legitimize anti-Indigenous ideas and practices in health policy and healthcare delivery. To date, scholars largely have not analyzed these critical elements of anti-Indigenous racism and health inequity (Kolopenuk, 2020). They need to.

The leadership teams of the Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society Research and Training Program (Indigenous STS) at the University of Alberta (UofA) and the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) propose to address increasing calls to support Indigenous peoples’ right to govern health research by developing the Critical Indigenous Health Studies Network (CIHSN)CIHSN will support the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s aligned goal to decolonize health systems. In line with leading Indigenous Studies scholars (and in the University of Alberta Indigenous Strategic Plan), we define decolonization as the restoration of Indigenous land, life, and relations appropriated or disrupted by colonialism. While no single project can undo the massive upheavals of colonialism, our project uses decolonial thinking and practice to guide us in our work to build and restore Indigenous expertise and leadership in, and governance of, health research. For more information on this cluster, visit the project website and contact Jenny Reardon, James Doucet-Battle, and Colleen Stone.

Leadership in the Equitable and Ethical Design (LEED) of STEM Research

Increasingly public and private funders recognize the critical importance of incorporating ethical and societal analysis into the design of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) research. Despite this growing demand, there is little guidance on best practices for fostering this integration or for evaluating its effects. This initiative—a national and international collaboration—aims to clarify, review, and revitalize the roles and value of engaging bioethicists and scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and the arts in STEM research. It proceeds in three phases: background research; drafting of LEED Principles and Practices; and International Discussion and Write-Up of LEED Principles and Practices. If you are interested in getting involved, being added to the listserve to receive project updates, or are interested in making a donation to support the project, please send an email to leed@ucsc.eduLearn more.

Just Biomedicine

Just Biomedicine is a UC Santa Cruz-based research collective that examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. Many hope that this convergence will democratize access to health information and produce revolutionary new medical treatments that new companies will make available to the public through market mechanisms. Yet, as in other domains, living with technoscientific transformations over time reveals how they produce new inequalities and injustices: new challenges to democratic governance; new surveillance regimes; and new forms of social stratification. Learn more.

Queer Ecologies Research Cluster

The Queer Ecologies research cluster investigates how sexuality and concepts of nature have been historically linked. In particular, they are interested in how evolutionary and ecological science has informed what is “natural” and how we use this information to delineate certain sexual behaviors as normal or aberrant. Queer Ecologies seeks to examine the historical making of the natural as it relates to sexuality while communicating the overwhelming diversity of sex and gender in biology. For more information on this cluster, visit the Queer Ecology webpage and contact Dennis Browe.

Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine

The engagements that comprise the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” interrogate the intersections among race, empire, and the environment, and their significance in the theory, practice, and structure of American biomedicine. These engagements consist of a series of public lectures, scholarly talks, and a regular interdisciplinary reading and discussion group. The seminar’s geographic frame is that of the American biomedical empire, a formation that includes the United States as well as those places formed by and encircled in the networks of American (biomedical) imperial influence. Within these geographies, race has functioned as a determinant of environmental exposures with deleterious impacts on human health. It also has been a central component of the environmental imaginaries that undergird the theory and practice of medicine and the provision of care. This seminar will approach the history and study of biomedicine from the vantage point of its racialized environments with an eye towards how these critical engagements might be marshaled to produce a more equitable practice of medicine. It is rooted in the proposition that to fully grasp the significance of race in medicine, we must probe how race is made material through environmental imaginaries, practices, and material entanglements, and how these in turn undergird and shape American biomedicine. For more information on this cluster, visit the project website and contact Jennifer Derr or Jenny Reardon.

Science Feminist Anti-Racist Equity (FARE) Collective

Science FARE (Feminist, Anti-racist, Equity) is a collective to stand up for truth and justice. We advocate robust science, evidence based politics, and the integration up stream of justice goals in science and technology infrastructure. Our social and natural contracts are broken, and so is the link between them. For more information on this cluster, contact Jenny Reardon.

The SNU in the World Program: Innovation, Science and Justice at UC Santa Cruz

The SNU in the World Program, administered by the Office of International Affairs (OIA) at Seoul National University (https://oia.snu.ac.kr/snu-world-program-swp) is a university-led and government-funded initiative to train undergraduate students to be globally engaged scholars and leaders. The SNU in the World Program with the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) at UC Santa Cruz is coordinated through the Science & Justice Research Center’s Visiting Scholar Program with Doogab Yi, Associate Professor of Science Studies at Seoul National University (https://bit.ly/2P9b7Wi). The SNU in the World Program at UC Santa Cruz is one of five other programs selected for funding and focuses on Innovation, Science and Justice. Other SNU Programs include visits to Washington DC (public policy), Japan (sustainable development), and Australia (climate crisis). If you would like to take part in or contribute to this partnership, email Jenny Reardon and Colleen Stone. Learn more.

Sociology and Science, Technology, and Society Studies Pathways Project

Focusing on sociology and science, technology, and society studies, the Pathways Project, engages transdisciplinary thought and collaboration, and the critical skills needed for building our capacities to address problems of our time that span disciplines and areas of practice. The broader mission of the Pathways Project seeks to engage undergraduate students in robust intellectual linkages between the social sciences, African Diaspora Studies, history, politics, and genomic science to better understand the question of diversity. For more information, contact James Doucet-Battle.

Theorizing Race After Race

In the post-WWII, post-fascist, post-nationalist moment, a dominant story developed both within and outside the academy that ‘race’ had no meaning or value for understanding human biology. Despite the so-called end of ‘race’ over the last several decades, scholars continued to track the subtle manner in which racial thinking continued under the cover of culture, religion, population and ethnicity. Today, however we see an overt return to race, a return facilitated and mediated by novel forms of science and technology: genomics; machine learning; algorithmically driven media platforms. Learn more.