November 10, 2021 | Book Launch! Life As We Made It + SJTP Fellow Presentation

Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)

On Wednesday, November 10, 2021 from 4:00-5:30 PM we joined in celebrating the launch of SJRC affiliate faculty Beth Shapiro’s new book, Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined—and Redefined—Nature (Basic Books, 2021)! (poster – PDF)

Science & Justice Training Program Fellows, Jonas Oppenheimer and Jenny Pensky presented findings from their collaborative research project exploring the relationships between “invasive” plants, botanical gardens, and colonialism – as well as – put their work into conversation with Shapiro’s Life as We Made It.

A link to the research and a rapporteur report will be posted once available.

Learn more about Life as We Made It in this campus news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/10/shapiro-book.html

Beth Shapiro is a professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and PI of the UCSC Paleogenomics Lab.

Jonas Oppenheimer is a member of the paleogenomics lab with Beth Shapiro in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics. Jonas works to understand the evolutionary dynamics of Beringian megafauna through ancient DNA, investigating the consequences of climate, population history, and hybridization on these species. Jonas is also a Fellow with CITL (Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning) learning pedagogical techniques to make an education in science accessible to all.

Jenny Pensky is a member of Professor Andrew Fisher’s hydrogeology lab in Earth & Planetary Sciences. Jenny focuses on how managed aquifer recharge (MAR) can be used to improve both water supply and quality.

 

November 10, 2021 | Graduate Training Program Informational Meeting

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

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

12:00-1:30PM

Zoom Registration

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 2022 COURSE:

Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration (SOCY/BME/FMST 268A and ANTH 267), Assist. Prof. James Doucet-Battle, scheduled Monday’s 1:30-4:30pm, Rachel Carson College, 301. 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.

22 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, History of Consciousness, Latin American & Latino Studies, Literature, Math, Philosophy, Physics, Politics, Psychology, Social Documentation, 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 6th Meet & Greet from 4:00-5:30!

November 03, 2021 | Giving Day

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday, November 3rd, for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help support our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) and the next cohort of student researchers by giving through the Science & Justice campaign. Incentives to give include matching funds: if you are interested in matching funds, please email scijust@ucsc.edu.

ABOUT the SJRC’s SJTP

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, 2020 marked the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP), and will be offered again in 2022. Now more than ever the training offered by the SJTP is critical to addressing the problems of our times: ecological destruction and pandemics; data justice in an age of AI; growing inequalities in access to novel therapeutics; access to basic health care in the jails and prisons. These are problems that are not the domain of one discipline or area of practice. They require working across fields and industries of knowledge, methods, and practice. The SJTP provides the space and transdisciplinary tools and thought needed for social science, humanities, engineering, physical and biological science, and arts students to collaborate with each other and our community partners to respond to core concerns of our times.

Our Science & Justice Training Program trains graduate student researchers to place a commitment to ethics and justice at the heart of science and technology.

Why Support S&J

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on their Science & Justice projects during the summer. With your help, we can offer summer fellowships that support this critical dimension of the training of future leaders in the emerging field of Science and Justice.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 3.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

October 06, 2021 | Meet & Greet

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

4:00-5:30 PM

Zoom Registration

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, we will welcome new members to 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. Some previous objects shared have been: soil samples, a piece of the Berlin wall, bamboo, newly launched books, a stick, sugar, human blood, a human liver, and food.

Faculty or students interested in science and justice who want to learn more about SJRC collaborative projects, the Training Program seminar* offered in Winter 2022, or would like to affiliate with Science & Justice are highly encouraged to join us.

 

*The Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration seminar is the introductory course in the training program. The course draws together masters, early career PhD students and faculty from across all five Divisions. Fostering experimental and innovative practices for working together, this class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts to learn to labor together to understand and address critical issues. The seminar is cross-listed in multiple departments, including Sociology, Anthropology, Feminist Studies and Biomolecular Engineering and will be offered Winter 2022 and taught by medical anthropologist James Doucet-Battle (Professor of Sociology).

November 3 | Support Science & Justice on campus fundraising day

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday November 3rd, for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help support our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) and the next cohort of student researchers by giving through the Science & Justice campaign. Incentives to give include matching funds: if you are interested in matching funds, please email scijust@ucsc.edu.

ABOUT the SJRC’s SJTP

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, 2020 marked the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP), and will be offered again in 2022. Now more than ever the training offered by the SJTP is critical to addressing the problems of our times: ecological destruction and pandemics; data justice in an age of AI; growing inequalities in access to novel therapeutics; access to basic health care in the jails and prisons. These are problems that are not the domain of one discipline or area of practice. They require working across fields and industries of knowledge, methods, and practice. The SJTP provides the space and transdisciplinary tools and thought needed for social science, humanities, engineering, physical and biological science, and arts students to collaborate with each other and our community partners to respond to core concerns of our times.

Our Science & Justice Training Program trains graduate student researchers to place a commitment to ethics and justice at the heart of science and technology.

Why Support S&J

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on their Science & Justice projects during the summer. With your help, we can offer summer fellowships that support this critical dimension of the training of future leaders in the emerging field of Science and Justice.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and tell your friends to join us on Wednesday, November 3.

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

CITRIS logo

SJTP concludes comparative cross-campus review of graduate curriculum that make questions of gender and social justice fundamental to STEM training

With colleagues at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute (FRI) and the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center concluded a seed fund grant awarded in 2019 from CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at the University of California under “2019-0112: Comparative Analysis of Interdisciplinary Training for STEM Scholars”.

More at: UC Santa Cruz researchers win four CITRIS seed funding awards

Summary

This project set out to compare two graduate training programs that center issues of gender, race, and social justice as fundamental to science training in STEM curriculums. Our comparison centered around the introductory seminars to the training programs taught during Winter 2020 by Dr. Kalindi Vora (UCD) and Dr. Jenny Reardon (UCSC).

FRI gathered data using field notes and a retrospective survey to analyze Seminar participants’ experiences. Notes, taken by the Graduate Student Researcher Maya Cruz, consisted of observations and analysis of seminar modules, discussions, and group activities. SJRC also gathered data through a retrospective participant survey, and Graduate Student Researcher Dennis Browe conducted an interview with SJRC’s Founding Director Jenny Reardon about the evolution of the Training Program and her experience teaching the introductory seminar. Due to IRB delays and campus disruptions, SJRC did not gather Seminar field notes. Both surveys asked participants to reflect on their learned capacity to recognize power and injustice in research environments; to intervene in research cultures and enact change-oriented research and practice; how their understandings of science and justice shifted throughout the course; and their experiences of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in their fields. GSRs Browe and Cruz met over Summer 2020 to compare findings and share the results with the team for discussion.

While each Seminar was taught through the unique lens of FRI and SJRC, overall they offered the same types of tools, models, and skillsets for guiding STEM graduate students through thinking about issues of gender, race, and justice in their work and fields. They covered topics such as the politics of doing science; critically interrogating how knowledge gets produced and claims to objectivity and neutrality; and thinking about intersectionality, race, and the promises and pitfalls of anti-racist technoscience. Additionally, we found that enrolling graduate students from a wide range of disciplines is key to fostering generative conversation. FRI enrolled students from eight disciplines and SJRC enrolled students from six. Building trust within the Seminar communities was necessary to being able to think through the hard questions that often lay implicit within the students’ scientific fields. Both Seminars also found it pedagogically effective to invite relevant postdocs, visiting scholars, and faculty as module participants and discussion leaders. Both Seminars focused on experiential learning through hands-on projects. The culmination of both classes was a final project that effectively guided students to apply a feminist and justice-oriented lens to their fields. At SJRC, this took the form of a collaborative project, while at FRI, this took the form of instructional design. 

Based on our findings, FRI and SJRC will continue to proactively recruit more science and engineering graduate students into their seminars. Further, both FRI and SJRC recognize the pedagogical importance of linking the course syllabus assignments to the events and projects happening concurrently at the Institute/Center during the academic year. Both will continue to build these connections within each respective Institute/Center, while also developing further collaborations between the campuses. Specifically, FRI and SJRC plan to host a cross-campus graduate student event over Zoom later this year, consisting of a roundtable discussion and manifesto writing workshop.

Vivian Underhill standing outside in front of a snowy mountain and water

SJTP fellow awarded AAUW fellowship

Congratulations to Science and Justice Training Program Fellow, Vivian Underhill, who has been awarded a 2020-21 fellowship from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). The fellowships recognize recipients whose academic work and community projects empower women and girls.

Vivian Underhill is a PhD student in the Feminist Studies program with an emphasizing in critical race science studies at UC Santa Cruz. Previously, Vivian worked for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, a small, grassroots environmental nonprofit in Fairbanks, Alaska, that focuses on economic and climate justice in central and northern Alaska. Vivian’s work currently focuses on intergenerational environmental-justice activism around fracking and groundwater in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

More in this UCSC news article: https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/10/underhill-women-fellowship.html

SJTP Fellow and GSR Lizzy Hare (Anthropology) was awarded a AAUW award in 2016-2017.

Science & Justice Training Program celebrates 10-year anniversary

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The SJTP is creating the next generation of path-breaking researchers who have the tools needed to not only be powerful stewards of socially robust science, engineering, and technology but to become more engaged as citizens concerned with racial, gender, and economic justice.

The introductory seminar of the SJTP, Science & Justice: Experiments in Collaboration, will be offered again Winter 2022 as BME/FMST/SOCY 268A and ANTH 267A and taught by James Doucet-Battle (Sociology). The course brings early career science and engineering graduate and masters students together with social science, humanities and arts students to foster experimental collaborative research practices and models collaborative conversations that pair a science and engineering scholar with a scholar from the social sciences, humanities and arts. Students develop the skills of interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical deliberation, social and political analysis. Enrollment is by permission and limited to 15. Contact James Doucet-Battle and Colleen Stone to get on the list for a permission code (once available).

Learn more about our History, the Training Program, a cross-comparison study of the program, and meet the 10th anniversary cohort.

DONATE NOW to support the Science & Justice Training Program!

September 30, 2020 | Giving Day

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday September 30th, for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help us celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) by supporting our graduate student researchers through the Science & Justice campaign. Incentives to give include matching funds: if you are interested in matching funds, please email scijust@ucsc.edu.

(SJTP Fellows Ian Carbone and Derek Padilla with undergraduate Artist-in-Residence Kiko Kolbi inside greenhouse) **picture taken pre-COVID**

ABOUT the SJRC’s SJTP

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, 2020 marks the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). Now more than ever the training offered by the SJTP is critical to addressing the problems of our times: ecological destruction; data justice; growing inequalities. These are problems that are not the domain of one discipline or area of practice. They require working across fields of knowledge and practice. The SJTP provides the space and transdisciplinary tools and thought needed for social science, humanities, engineering, physical and biological science, and art students to collaborate to respond to core concerns of our times.

Our Science & Justice Training Program trains the next generation of researchers to maximize the public good of science and technology.

Why Support S&J

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on their Science & Justice projects during the summer. With your help, we can offer summer fellowships that supports this critical dimension of the training of these future leaders of science and justice.

Over the last decade, our students have produced innovative research and projects. An SJTP graduate fellow from Biomolecular Science and Engineering worked with marine biologists and illustrators to self-publish the children’s book Looking For Marla (Buscando a Marla), a tale of diverse expressions of gender and sexual identity among marine creatures. Physics graduate students and artists came together to develop a novel solar greenhouse that highlighted problems of energy use and access to new material sciences in agriculture. They went on to secure tenure-track positions in which they found a route to incorporating justice into both their teaching and research. In these and many other instances, the SJTP is part of the next generation of researchers who seek to place justice at the heart of the best science and technology.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and ask your friends to join us on September 30 by making a gift on Giving Day to support the Science and Justice Training Program!

Thank you for making a more just world possible!

SJTP Fellows Ian Carbone and Derek Padilla with undergraduate Artist-in-Residence Kiko Kolbi inside greenhouse

Giving Day fundraiser for Science & Justice Training Program

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

All-Day

Join the Science & Justice Research Center at UC Santa Cruz on Wednesday September 30th, for Giving Day, a 24-hour online fundraising drive!

Help us celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) by supporting our graduate student researchers through the Science & Justice campaign. Incentives to give include matching funds: if you are interested in matching funds, please email scijust@ucsc.edu.

ABOUT the SJRC’s SJTP

Started in 2010 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, 2020 marks the ten year anniversary of the internationally-recognized Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP). Now more than ever the training offered by the SJTP is critical to addressing the problems of our times: ecological destruction; data justice; growing inequalities. These are problems that are not the domain of one discipline or area of practice. They require working across fields of knowledge and practice. The SJTP provides the space and transdisciplinary tools and thought needed for social science, humanities, engineering, physical and biological science, and art students to collaborate to respond to core concerns of our times.

Our Science & Justice Training Program trains the next generation of researchers to maximize the public good of science and technology.

Why Support S&J

Central to the success of our students is their ability to work on their Science & Justice projects during the summer. With your help, we can offer summer fellowships that supports this critical dimension of the training of these future leaders of science and justice.

Over the last decade, our students have produced innovative research and projects. An SJTP graduate fellow from Biomolecular Science and Engineering worked with marine biologists and illustrators to self-publish the children’s book Looking For Marla (Buscando a Marla), a tale of diverse expressions of gender and sexual identity among marine creatures. Physics graduate students and artists came together to develop a novel solar greenhouse that highlighted problems of energy use and access to new material sciences in agriculture. They went on to secure tenure-track positions in which they found a route to incorporating justice into both their teaching and research. In these and many other instances, the SJTP is part of the next generation of researchers who seek to place justice at the heart of the best science and technology.

Share our Campaign for Justice!

Post on social media and ask your friends to join us on September 30 by making a gift on Giving Day to support the Science and Justice Training Program!

Thank you for making a more just world possible!