Science & Justice Themes

Curiosity as a Virtue

Doing "science and justice" work means creating an environment that supports efforts to engage with one another across differences. In the context of SJWG research seminars, this means creating an environment in which participants are willing to make mistakes and to revise their own positions, views, and practices. Central to this is the effort to cultivate curiosity as a virtue of the seminar space. "Being curious" implies stepping beyond habitual modes of engagement in order to explore other possible ways of looking, questioning, and intra-acting. Many of our Science and Justice events have been oriented toward cultivating curiosity as a virtue, including our ongoing "critical friends" series.

Scientific Literacy

In recent decades, on both sides of the political spectrum, we have seen an increasing tendency for people to react against new developments in science and technology. Debates about stem cell research and genetically engineered foods are cases in point. We agree that it is absolutely necessary to recognize and address the potentially negative consequences of scientific innovations, but, as SJWG member Donna Haraway suggests, we need to learn to respond to these developments instead of reacting. Whereas "reaction" has the connotation of an unconscious reflex or a conditioned behavior, "response" suggests taking a step back to understand the situation so that one can intervene effectively. In the Working Group, we seek to develop abilities to respond to both developments in biotechnology and each other's different perspectives on the position of science in society. This is achieved partially through incorporating some reflexive discussion about the Group itself within most events.

Our efforts are also bolstered by incorporating Working Group member Karen Barad's approach to "scientific literacy". For Barad, scientific literacy is not simply a matter of educating non-scientists about how science works. Instead, the important question is: What does it mean to do science responsibly, and what kind of literacy is required for that? There is no formula for "how to do science responsibly", and therefore what "scientific literacy" means, and whose literacy we are concerned with, depends on the context. To date, the Working Group's problem-based approach, and its consideration of the ethical, historical, social, and technological contexts and implications of the topics under discussion, have proved fruitful for developing a broad notion of scientific literacy.

Partnerships in Science and Justice

The demands of thinking critically about science and social justice require that we challenge current notions of "expertise." The idea that we can turn to scientific "experts" to interpret recent scientific findings, or "ethical experts" to explain the ethical implications of emerging technologies has become deeply problematic because fields of expertise cannot be separated out so neatly. The really important questions often arise at the limits, boundaries, and intersections of expert domains.

In order to confront the moral and political complexities of our times we need new forms of dialogue, new hybrid languages, and new kinds of research collaborations. This is the idea behind "partnerships in science and justice". Under this heading, the SJWG is committed to discerning what kinds of partnerships can adequately respond to specific situated concerns at the intersection of scientific practice and social justice. Partnerships such as these necessarily transform the meaning of "expertise" because they require a greater degree of communicative competence across fields of knowledge.

In some of our recent events, the Science and Justice Working Group has considered the promises and challenges of partnerships in environmental justice (popular epidemiology, toxicology and toxicogenomics) and alternative energy and transportation systems (biofuels, personal rapid transit).

Reframing Bioethics

Given the interdisciplinary character of SJWG, there are many opinions of what bioethics as a discipline can and ought to do with regard to biotechnological problems. One of the virtues of the SJWG is the ability to illuminate the many points at which ethical decisions get made, and sometimes the places that they fail to get made. Thus, a common theme in our discussions was opening up the methods available to ethical inquiries. We found that bioethics as a discipline and institution often "arrives too late" at the table to make important interventions. A general consensus in the group is that traditional applied ethics methodologies that understand ethics as abstract value mediations are partly to blame for this problem. Because biotechnology often involves practices that remake boundaries that are often taken for granted--such as boundaries between species or individual human subjects--ethical theories that rely on those boundaries being stable and determinate fit poorly within the challenges that biotechnology presents. Our discussions often seek to reframe ethical inquiries around a broader conception of flourishing for the human and non-human actors under consideration. Such an approach understands that an important aspect of ethical inquiry is accounting for the ways that our knowledge producing practices, our ethical concepts, and the materiality of our scientific endeavors are all entangled together. Thus, our conversations often contain critical engagements with ethical theory and methodology, allowing interdisciplinary reflections of the stakes in biotechnology.