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 ScienceTo 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-buildingTo 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.
Spring 2010 Workshop
" Where social theory meets critical engagement with the production of scientific knowledge "
The topic and the processes of this workshop are designed to attract a diverse group of scientists, science educators, and scholars from the various areas of science and technology studies (STS) interested in developing social theory and engaging critically in the negotiated, contested production of scientific knowledge. With an eye to training "interdisciplinarians" the workshop will include graduate students as well as more experienced scholars.
Applicants should: a) submit by 15 January 2010 a written account of your innovations (or planned innovations) in research, teaching, and wider outreach in response to the thought-piece below; b) be prepared to lead an activity during the workshop that helps other participants develop knowledge, skills, and interest in these innovations. (The organizer will consult with participants in February or March to help plan such activities.)
Both the products and the processes of the workshop will be documented on the web. The pre-submitted innovations in research, teaching, and wider outreach, supplemented by a record of the accompanying activities at the workshop made by a participant-evaluator, will be assembled for a special edition of a journal.
There is no charge for the workshop*, but applicants are expected to make every effort to secure support for travel to Woods Hole and accommodation. Limited funds are available to support participants who are unable to find others sources of funding, with priority to students and independent scholars. (*A deposit will be required to secure your accommodation.)
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Thought-piece, 4 August '09: No entry for "social theory" can be found in the index of the latest Handbook of Science and Technology Studies; the classical "isms" and theorists of society barely register either. Is it that the social order that is co-constructed with scientific knowledge is too contingent and transitory to be theorised? Or that the category "social" needs to be abandoned if we are to move beyond unproductive society/nature dualisms and build freer associations with non-human actants? Or that "theory" connotes explanation and causality, which are problematic from a performative, mangling perspective?
Perhaps. Yet are there really no traces we can discern of the training some older STSers have received in sociology, anthropology, and political science when the "isms" were debated and social theorists were read? Is no one taking stock of unfulfilled STS agendas about bringing in social structure, such as the third stage of the empirical program of relativism (i.e., examining limits on the 'potentially endless debate about interpretation' in relation to the wider social and political structure; Collins, Soc. Stud. Sci., 1981)?
Conversely, where do concerns about science and technology enter in areas of newer areas of social theory (or some replacement term) such as:
Postmodernism and poststructuralism;
Postphenomenology and other inquiries into materiality;
Identity and ethical imaginaries;
Ethics and complexity;
Language and practice; and
Psychological bases for social behavior?
All these questions could elicit lively debate, but this workshop's goal is not to address directly (and over-ambitiously) the range of positions STSers could take on them. Instead, the idea is to explore the particular pockets in which participants practice, to elicit and build on our diverse and partial experiences in developing or applying some angle of social theory to help them engage critically in the negotiated, contested production of scientific knowledge in a wide range of arenas-labs and fieldsites, classrooms, training programs, and textbooks, policy formation and contestations, the media and public conversations.
Concerning critical engagement, one of the forefathers of STS said, the "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." The question then-one Marx spent the next forty years of his life grappling with-is what mode of interpretation should guide people in effecting change? What is needed to effect change and how to make it needed? Expressed in another way: the workshop participants are expected to be concerned both with the conceptualisation of the structure (or structuredness) of the social context of scientific and technological developments and with the shaping of human agency in the ongoing restructuring of that context.
Location: Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole MA, USA
Dates (to be confirmed) April 17 (Sat, 9am)-20 (Tues, 2pm), 2010 (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
wiki version of program
Last update 4 August '09