cspawn

Interdisciplinary research and education, particularly related to human-environment interactions, has a rich history and a bright future at Arizona State University. With the proliferation of several new graduate programs that have something to do with human-environmental interactions (or social-ecological systems) from various perspectives, including the School of Sustainability, Environmental Social Sciences, Environmental Life Sciences, and the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology, a group of students associated with the IGERT in Urban Ecology have felt the need for a venue through which these various programs can work together.

Towards that end, we invited you to participate in Graduates in Integrative Social-Ecological Research – GISER – a newly forming graduate student led program aimed at providing graduate students from schools and departments across ASU with the opportunity to move from talking about interdisciplinarity to engaging in product-driven interdisciplinary research. We conceive of social-ecological broadly and envision a diverse group that includes artists, engineers, ecologists, social scientists, ethicists and more (so if you’re not sure you fall into such a group, come and find out!). We know that many graduate students seek to engage in collaborative research projects that complement their dissertation work or provide new and interesting opportunities to broaden their expertise. GISER, an outgrowth from IGERT in Urban Ecology activities, is an opportunity for ALL motivated graduate students from ALL departments and backgrounds to engage in collaborative integrative work.

GISER will be launched in Fall 2009. We need the support of a critical number of bright and motivated students from diverse backgrounds for GISER to succeed. This is a great opportunity for you to get involved in the development and planning of this exciting program. This is a bottom-up approach driven by students with the support of key faculty contacts and dedicated funding.

We are holding a planning meeting on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 from 4-5:30 PM at LSE106 to engage with various graduate student groups on campus and invite your participation.

Please RSVP to David.Iwaniec@asu.edu by Tuesday, May 5th. If you can’t make the meeting but would like to be involved, please let us know. We look forward to working with you to spread the word and generate ideas.

I don’t think I’m alone (at least I hope not) in my occasional bewilderment at some of the jargon used in the day to day study of CSPO/CNS-type things. Certain terms and usages seem to keep popping up in this particular corner of academia that one would rarely encounter in typical conversation.

The aim of this post is to provide a robust, reflexive space for symmetrical, bottom-up public engagement on the constellation of complexified, paradigmatic terminological imaginaries that CSPAWNers inevitably encounter… Get it?

Continue reading »

Oh, the ol’ elevator speech…  I am so bad at this.  Lately, my “speech” has been so boring that I find myself tuning out after just a few words.  The problem is complicated by the fact that I keep changing my topic.  (THIS IS A VERY BAD IDEA AFTER 3.5 YEARS IN GRAD SCHOOL, just in case you were wondering…)

Here’s my speech:

I study bioethics committees in the federal government and in bioscience companies.    Specifically, I’m looking at the presidential bioethics committees under President Clinton and President G.W. Bush, and the bioethics committees of SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) and Advanced Cell Technology.  I compare the motivations that led to their creation, the expectations of what the committees would do (as well as the reasons given for their creation - which may be quite different than the initial motivation), and the actual work the committees do.  I’m interested in understanding what the similar tensions and challenges are in public and private sector bioethics, in terms of mandate, membership, legitimacy, and advice.

There’s a big debate in bioethics about whether the integrity of bioethics is diminished if ethics advice is “sold” to companies.  But we actually know very little about what bioethics committees in the private sector do, and how their advice is used.  Why/are we more suspicious of bioethics committees in the private sector than the public sector, where the committees face charges of politicization, political manipulation, and bias?

***

So, yeah… I struggle with this.  I love my project (because it makes me uncomfortable), but I have trouble describing it quickly.  In part because I’m not yet terribly clear on the term of comparison between public and private sector committees.  In my head I know there’s an interesting point of comparison, I just have to make it explicit.  A common problem for comparative studies, I think?  Maybe?

Et tu?  What are y’all working on?

Partly as a way of introducing the people in our ranks to each other and to a broader readership, I thought it would be interesting to ask:

how do you describe your work in 100 words or less?

I always find this challenging, and my own account is constantly changing, partly depending on who I a am talking to, and also on my mood. How do you adapt this to different audiences (your parents, a person in another department, a policy maker, etc.)? What’s the hardest thing to explain succinctly?

Here’s my own attempt:

My research, at a general level, is all about how we decide what science to do. We spend all this money on research, but there are infinitely many research questions. Which ones should we pursue? In my dissertation, I am applying this question in the area of climate science. I do interviews with people in the various agencies that fund climate science to look at how they make decisions, and how they figure out the best way to produce information that will help society to deal with climate change and other environmental problems.

The biggest issue that I have with this is that if I come right out and say, “I study climate science policy,” then even if I go on to explain what that means, people seem to fixate on the “climate science” part. So they tend to think that I either do climate science, or that I am into climate policy issues like the Kyoto protocol or cap and trade. So this is my round-about way of avoiding that, but it is not exactly pithy.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear how other people deal with this, either in a separate post, or in the comments below.

The Graduate Student Conference on Science and Technology in Society, which is about to get under way in Washington DC this weekend, affords an appropriate occasion on which to launch this blog. cspawn (spawn of CSPO!) is a combined effort of students at Arizona State University and elsewhere whose work carries forth, or at least in some way brushes against, the mission of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) at ASU:

The Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes is an intellectual network aimed at enhancing the contribution of science and technology to society’s pursuit of equality, justice, freedom, and overall quality of life. The Consortium creates knowledge and methods, cultivates public discourse, and fosters policies to help decision makers and institutions grapple with the immense power and importance of science and technology as society charts a course for the future.

Our goals with this blog are fairly similar to those of the conference mentioned above. Without drawing hard and fast boundaries along disciplinary and institutional lines, we want to form, engage, and learn about the group of individuals who are working to understand a broad set of issues related to science, technology, and society.

This is a student organization in that it is run by students, but the blog is open to anyone who would like to contribute interesting and relevant material to our community. We hope that this will become both a resource and a discussion venue for anyone interested in this space. And so, when it comes to posting material, the possibilities are wide open at this point. As the first “managing editor” of the blog (we will be serving 3 month terms), I have begun to form some broad categories that I find promising:

• Career
• Community
• Conferences
• Education
• Institutions
• News
• Research

But of course, there may be many more. We will have more appearing here over the next couple weeks, including a report from the grad conference in DC, and some additional thoughts about what it means to be a grad student purusing a career in science, technology, and society. But in the mean time, feel free to chime in with your thoughts on what this space can and should be, or with posts that you think might be of interest to the community!