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
  • 2. Innovative workshop processes
  • 3. Training and capacity-building
  • 4. Repeatable, evolving workshops See Background and Rationale for each objective, including how it will be achieved and evaluated.

    Partial funding for the 2009 workshop has been provided by the Program in Critical & Creative Thinking at UMass Boston and the National Science Foundation grant SES-0634744

    Spring 2009 Workshop
    "Heterogeneity and Development: Methods and Perspectives from Sciences and Science Studies"

    Applications are sought from researchers (including graduate students) and teachers who are interested in moving beyond their current disciplinary and academic boundaries to explore "heterogeneity," especially in processes of development over the life course: It is hoped that participants will be drawn from diverse fields, for example, data analysis, epidemiology, genomics, agricultural breeding, developmental biology, psychology, sociology, science and technology studies, education, ... This year NewSSC will emphasize research more than teaching, but interactive and pedagogical style of past workshops will continue. The participants will be asked to develop--either before or during the workshop-activities or interactive presentations to engage the other participants. To indicate the angles on heterogeneity that participants want to explore, they will be asked to submit "vignettes" in advance. Submitting a vignette is not a requirement to join the workshop, but some of the travel support funding is earmarked for those who do so and who prepare activities in advance. So talk to the organizer to explore this option.

    The funding available to help get people to the workshop is modest, but we have managed to subsidize travel and accommodation in past years according to need (which favors graduate students and independent scholars, but does not count out those with regular positions but no travel budgets). And we are able to keep the meal expenses to a minimum at Woods Hole (and still eat well). Applicants should let us know what you need to be able to attend.

    Location: Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole MA, USA
    Dates April 18 (Sat, 9am)-21 (Tues, 2pm), 2009 (arriving Friday evening)


    Organizer & Lead Facilitator: Peter J. Taylor, University of Massachusetts Boston, Programs in Science, Technology and Values and Critical and Creative Thinking.

    (applications details & arrangements)

    Sections to follow (or to be added in due course) and associated links

    (Much of the working, "in progress" material is developed on a wiki, and only the final products and reports are posted here. Thus some of these links are placeholders for material not yet available.)

    Adjustments relative to previous workshops

    List of participants, short profiles, and webpages (as of 4/1)

    Atsushi Akera
    Rensselaer Polytechnic
    Interests--History of scientific and technical computing in the United States, of invention and innovation, of consumerism, and of the cultural construction of technological images. Author of Calculating a Natural World(MIT press, 2006). (projects)

    Steve Fifield
    University of Delaware
    I work in a program evaluation center on a variety of studies of science education and multidisciplinary research initiatives. Some of these projects give me space to explore connections between evaluation and science studies. I'll come to NewSSC thinking about an ongoing interest in how heterogeneity (i.e., difference that makes a difference) is assembled and contested as science and religion circulate in debates about sexuality, marriage, and family.

    Lynne Heasley
    Western Michigan University
    Environmental historian moving from on analysis of heterogeneous patterns of land tenure regimes and ecological change in southwest Wisconsin to a much broader analytical scale, the Great Lakes. Also writing about the influence of Peace Corps "veterans" on environmental activism in the USA.

    Dana March
    Columbia University
    Dana March is a psychiatric epidemiologist with graduate training in 20th Century American history completing her PhD at Columbia University. She weaves together her training in epidemiology and history to address several research interests: the conceptualization and measurement of social context as it pertains to psychosis, cognition, and related neurodevelopmental outcomes across the life course; the social construction of normality as it pertains to psychiatric diagnoses in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries; and the historical study of quantitative methods and understanding of infectious diseases. A unifying theme in Ms. March's work is social inequalities. She is currently developing a body of epidemiologic work regarding social context, at the crossroads of the contingency of history and the predictive objectives of epidemiology, that examines how a particular place at a given moment in history can be a reservoir of risk or resilience with respect to neurodevelopmental outcomes, depending on social group and timing of exposure during the life course. In her historical work, Ms. March is currently examining the normalization of pathology and the pathos of normality with respect to psychiatric and physical functioning in the context of capitalism, and the paradox of lower rates of depression in African Americans despite rising rates across other social groups in the 20th Century. Finally, Ms. March is engaged in a long-term examination of the social, political, and economic forces that have shaped quantitative methods for characterizing infectious disease transmission dynamics; specifically, how the valuation-or devaluation-of indigenous populations in the British colonies ultimately shaped the development of the mathematics that would enable characterization of the transmission dynamics of malaria.

    Marisa Santos Matias
    U. Coimbra, Portugal
    Relations between health, environment and sustainability, namely through their enactment in situations of public controversy

    Jake Metcalf
    Uni. Califirnia Santa Cruz
    The core question of my research is how to make sense of moments in science and technology when good knowledge practices require addressing ethical problems. One of my case studies regards the entanglement of evidential and ethical standards for making causal claims in genomics about human social categories (esp. racial categories), genetic variation, brain phenotypes, and cognitive function. This case raises serious questions about how bioinformatic evidence can be empirically linked to phenotypes and how that evidence ought to be represented within the sciences and in public venues... For four years I have been co-teaching an interdisciplinary bioethics course with a biochemist and I am a founding member of the interdisciplinary Science and Justice Working Group at UCSC... I find that making sense of heterogeneous methods and philosophical commitments is central to doing good interdisciplinary work at boundaries between ethics and scientific practice.

    João Arriscado Nunes
    Coimbra, Portugal
    Sociologist of biomedicine. Runs training courses for environmental protection staff, activists and members of the Civil Protection Agency, as well as in initiatives in science education and the development of participatory procedures in the fields of assessment of controversial knowledge and technology, health and environment

    Astrid Schrader
    My work is situated within feminist science studies. In very general terms, I am interested in how conceptions of time inform notions of difference, link ecological and evolutionary changes and structures what counts as an environmental problem. My current research explores these questions with the help of toxic microorganisms that contribute to so-called "harmful algae blooms." I investigate the entangled philosophical, biological, technological and political commitments in determining what counts as a "harmful species."

    Carlos Sonnenschein
    Tufts University
    "Our laboratory works on the control of the initiation of the proliferation of estrogen-target cells. This basic biological question is explored under the fundamental premise that proliferation is the default state of all living cells... In collaboration with Dr. Ana M. Soto, we have proposed the tissue organization field theory of carcinogenesis, which proposes that carcinogenesis is a tissue-based phenomenon.

    Peter Taylor (organizer)
    UMass Boston
    Having worked for many years on ecology and environmental research (Unruly Complexity, U. Chicago 2005), I am now taking my interests in heterogeneous complexities in new directions through engagement with various social epidemiological approaches that address the intersections of environment, health, and development. The workshop topic arose from a side-branch of this work examining the underrecognized implications of heterogeneity for analysis of gene vs. environment debates.

    Lee Worden
    McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, and San Francisco
    Self-organization, collective dynamics, and transformation. Ecological evolution, community structure, and dynamics. Cultural change, consensus formation, democracy, cooperation. Critical analysis of scientific discourses. Ways of facilitating global justice, equality, solidarity and sustainability.
    wiki version of program

    Last update 10 April '09