New England Workshop on Science and Social Change

The New England Workshop on Science and Social Change (NewSSC) organizes innovative, interaction-intensive workshops designed to facilitate discussion, teaching innovation, and longer-term collaboration among faculty and graduate students who teach and write about interactions between scientific developments and social change.

Specific objectives of NewSSC

1. Promote Social Contextualization of Science

To promote the social contextualization of science in education and other activities beyond the participants' current disciplinary and academic boundaries.

2. Innovative workshop processes

To facilitate participants connecting theoretical, pedagogical, practical, political, and personal aspects of the issue at hand in constructive ways.

3. Training and capacity-building

To train novice and experienced scholars in process / participation skills valuable in activity-centered teaching, workshops, and collaboration.

4. Repeatable, evolving workshops

To provide a workshop model that can be repeated, evolve in response to evaluations, and adapted by participants. See Background and Rationale for each objective , including how it will be achieved and evaluated.

Fall 2006 Workshop*
"What can we do? -- Moving debates over genetic determinism and interactionism in new directions"

(*Subject to funding) Everyone knows that genes and environment interact; that we are a combination of nature and nurture. But what do people do with this knowledge in this "Age of DNA"? Some authors portray the environment's role as primarily a trigger for actions that are genetically programmed[1] or claim that scientists have now shown that genes contribute a greater share of the interactive mix than people used to think.[2] Genetic research is still widely promoted as the way to expose the important, root causes of behavior and disease and as the best route to effective therapeutic technologies. Although this picture is being complicated by recent results in which the behavioral consequence of a specific genetic factor is modulated by an environmental factor, and vice versa[3], the media continues to give significant coverage to scientific claims that inborn traits determine what is possible for individuals and render egalitarian social policies and actions unjustified or ineffective.[4]
At the same time, there has been a long tradition of critical commentary on claims about genetic inheritance as an explanation for social inequalities. Notable contributions have been made by biologists, scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS), and other researchers.[5] The impact of such commentary is evident when researchers interested in genetic contributions to behavior and behavioral differences now routinely disavow the idea of genetic determinism and stress their commitment to an interactionist perspective.[6]
This workshop attempts to stretch the tradition of critical commentary by playing around with the question: "What can we do in light of what scientists know about genes and environment in the development of individual lives?" The deliberate ambiguity of the question-what we can do will vary depending on who "we" are, which "scientists'" knowledge we follow, and whether "we" take responsibility for maintaining or changing the status quo-and its emphasis on action invites the workshop participants to move debates over genetic determinism and interactionism in new directions. To this end, participants will be encouraged to bring more attention than has been the case in most debates about biological determinism to complexities of environment and development as explored in educational studies, developmental psychology, and life course epidemiology.[7]
Applications for an interaction-intensive workshop on these issues are sought from scientists, science educators, and STS scholars (including graduate students in all these fields) who are interested in promoting the social contextualization of science through interdisciplinary education and outreach activities beyond their current disciplinary and academic boundaries.

Location: Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole MA, USA
Dates TBA

Organizer: Peter J. Taylor, University of Massachusetts Boston, Programs in Science, Technology and Values and Critical and Creative Thinking.
Facilitator: TBA
Participant-Evaluator: TBA

(arrangements)