Through a grant awarded to UCSC by the National Science Foundation, in the Spring of 2010 UCSC will launch a Ethics and Justice in Science and Engineering Training program. This program grows out of the success of the UCSC Science and Justice Working Group, and will create a research and education program that trains science and engineering graduate students alongside social science and humanities graduate students to create ethical inquiries from within their own practice. Rather than treating ethics and justice concerns as issues to be addressed after research questions and engineering practices have formed, the program will train science and engineering graduate students how to identify and respond to moments within their own research in which good scientific and engineering practices require attentiveness to ethics and justice. Conversely, it will teach social science, humanities and arts students how to trace the links between scientific and engineering practices and practices of equity, equality, and power. Thus, the program promises to open up not only novel epistemologies, but new sites and practices for pursuing social justice.

The program is unique in its effort to broaden the scope of ethics education in science and engineering to include questions of social justice. Currently, ethics education within science and engineering is typically construed as training students in proper individual decision making within a professional context. Thus, questions of justice-of equity and power-are traditionally out of the purview of professional ethics. As a result, although many engineers and scientists take social justice to be a core concern, their ethics training-with emphasis on narrowly construed case studies-often does not address the breadth of insights necessary to achieve this goal. This new training program addresses this limitation, and offers UCSC graduate students a unique opportunity to learn how to identify and address the fundamental social issues at stake in the creation of novel forms of technoscience.

Infrastructure and Pragmatics

In the Spring term of the first year (2010), UCSC will offer an introductory graduate course that is open to graduate students across divisions. This Introductory Seminar would consist of problem-based inquiry into four topics at the junction of science and engineering and ethics and justice, threading broad questions about epistemology, ontology, ethics and justice through specific contemporary problems. A preliminary topic list would include: 1) Category formation at the interface of bioinformatics and genomics; 2) Uncertainty at junctures of science and policy; 3) Animal experimentation; 4) Energy and transportation infrastructure and policy. All of these topics have been previewed in SJWG and have proven to be fruitful sites for collaborative research on the UCSC campus. Each topic would be covered by two weeks of study. The first week would introduce broad literature around the topic with discussion led by the PI or co-PI of the grant (Jenny Reardon and Karen Barad) and postdoctoral fellow. The second week would pair a faculty member from science and engineering with a faculty member from the social sciences or humanities to model inquiry into the places where questions of science and engineering meet questions of ethics and justice in the topic at hand (David Haussler and Donna Haraway, for example, will be presenting on comparative genomics). Students would complete the course with a short research paper incorporating their insights into an entangled ethical and epistemological challenge in their field.

This introductory seminar would serve several primarily goals. First, by fulfilling their department's ethics requirement, science and engineering graduate students would be encouraged to participate in a style of interdisciplinary research that does not typically have room within science and engineering programs. Second, humanities and social science students interested in ethics and science topics would have unique opportunities to learn about science and engineering practices and create new opportunities for collaboration. Third, even students who choose to not continue with the program might choose to attend SJWG meetings and hopefully contribute to our efforts to reconfigure the relationship between justice and science by carrying insights from this course to other courses they either take or teach.

Entrance to the second stage of the program, including funding for research projects, will be determined by the quality of a research proposal to be submitted shortly after the end of the introductory seminar. Proposals will be judged by the Advisory Board, which consists of faculty from engineering, natural science, humanities, and social science divisions (many of whom are active in the SJWG). Recipients (hereafter called Science and Justice Fellows) of the funding will be announced by early July. Entrance would provide students with two quarters of funding over the course of two years (funding contingent on the progress of their research and participation within the broader Science and Justice community on campus).

During the Fall quarter of the year that follows the Spring Introductory Seminar, students will build on their proposals in a Research Seminar. This second course would provide more in-depth instruction in conducting interdisciplinary research and provide continuing students the expertise to develop a better-formulated research plan. The goal of the course would be to produce a research project that explores how their training might be put to use to reshape their own inquiry in a way that is more responsive to the links between questions of knowledge and questions of justice. By the end of the course, students will be expected to have completed their research proposal and to have conducted preliminary research.

In the Winter and Spring quarters that follow, students will continue their research with guidance from the PI and postdoctoral fellow. Fellows will also be expected to regularly participate within SJWG activities and in a monthly reading group coordinated by the postdoc. There will be at least two SJWG meetings dedicated to providing feedback to Fellows regarding their preliminary research design.

In year three, the Fellows will continue to be mentored by the PI as they complete their research and write it up for publication. During this year, Fellows will also be expected to present their findings to the SJWG in a public symposium that the Fellows will help to organize.

In addition to these obligations, Fellows in the program will be required to produce the following tangible outcomes:

• A yearly summary of research progress and results to compiled in a yearly summary.
• A publicly accessible report about their research and findings. This will be produced at the end of their participation in the program, and will be targeted at outlets for public science journalism, such as Discovery, SEED, and New Scientist in order to contribute to better public understanding of science. For this outcome, we will partner with UCSC's nationally-renowned Science Writing Program for mentoring.
• Report of their research and outcomes targeted at an academic journal.

The following chart summarizes the yearly responsibilities for Fellows:

Hypothetical Research Project

A hypothetical research project produced in the training program could look something like the following (which is based on actual research problems encountered by members of SJWG). A Biomolecular Engineering (BME) student working in human genomics and a sociology student interested in racial categories meet in the Introductory Seminar. The BME student wants to study the evolution of a trait related to cognition using tools in comparative genomics. The BME student has expertise on how comparative genomics collects, interprets, and represents data about human genomes. She recognizes that racial categories have a problematic role in the history of biomedical sciences, but has not had much opportunity to study that history and is wary about stepping on toes when her data gets published. The sociology student wants to study how racial categories get constituted in biomedical sciences, but lacks the expertise and access to track those categories in the making. His expertise lies in the history of racial categories in the social and natural sciences.

A more traditional interaction between these two students would take the course of the sociology student acting as an observer to the collection and representation of the BME student's research. The sociologist's research could then be used to critique (or praise) the BME student's sensitivity to the ethics and justice issues raised by the use of racial categories. Their work would be treated as fundamentally oppositional even if they had common concerns. However, we believe an experimental model that treats their knowledge production as co-constitutive could be profoundly more productive and avoid some of the acrimony and disjunctures that have dogged the Human Genome Project, the Human Genome Diversity Project, and the Haplotype Map Project (Reardon 2005; Reardon 2007). If the BME and sociology student were given the intellectual space for collaboration and had the chance to create shared literacies, then we believe unexpected results could ensue. Rather than presuming that we know in advance what the ethics and justice issues are (and thus also presuming that such issues stand outside of the scientific enterprise itself) a collaborative project that tracked the production of sensitive human categories as they are made could generate surprising opportunities for the integration of ethics, social justice, and science.