The STS Graduate Program at UBC draws on a rich set of resources at UBC, in Vancouver, and at our sister universities, Simon Fraser University and the University of Washington.
STS Colloquium Schedule (2024/5)
STS Colloquia will be held in Buchanan Tower 1112 unless otherwise indicated
TERM 1 (Sep – Dec, 2024)
September 26-27: Angela Potochnik, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Engagement with Science, University of Cincinnati
https://www.angelapotochnik.com/
A philosopher of science, Angela Potochnik has written extensively on scientific practices of idealization. In Idealization and the Aims of Science (Chicago, 2017) she argues scientific inquiry is deeply configured by human cognitive and practical ends, and that strategies of idealization are crucial to our ability to navigate the world’s complexity in ways that give us an understanding of this world relevant to the wide range of purposes science serve.
Potochnik is also well known for her work on participatory research in which she explores a variety of modes of stakeholder engagement across the sciences, and also makes the case that these principles extend to philosophical science studies. She is an influential advocate of “socially engaged philosophy of science” (with Cartieri, 2014), and recently published Science and the Public (CUP Element, 2024). It is this latter body of work that Potochnik will discuss when she visits UBC this September.
September 26, Thursday 5:00-6:30 pm: “Science and the Public”
Abstract: Science is a product of society: in its funding, its participation, and its application. In this talk, I outline a strong view of the obligations that science’s institutions bear to the public in virtue of this dependence. I then explore how expanded participation in science—diversified professional as well as the participation of amateurs or non-academics in scientific research—can contribute to public trust of science. I suggest that such expanded participation can give rise to what we might call “responsive science,” thereby helping scientific institutions discharge their obligations to the public.
September 27, Friday 1:30-3:00 pm: “PEWS” – an informal discussion of the activities and history of the University of Cincinnati Center for Public Engagement with Science
Location Buchanan E-274
Abstract: Established in 2017, PEWS is an interdisciplinary initiative to conduct, teach, and research public engagement with science in a variety of forms, ranging from science communication and outreach in educational settings to public participation in scientific research. A comprehensive overview of PEWS and its activities is available at https://ucengagingscience.org
October 10: Logan Smilges, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literatures,
https://english.ubc.ca/profile/j-logan-smilges/
“Toward a Crip Metaphysics”
To ask about disability at the end of the world is tautological because, in the public imaginary, disability is the end of the world. Broken bodies. Missing limbs. Scattered minds. Disability as apocalyptic synecdoche. In this talk, Smilges dials in on the relationship between disability and the apocalypse by rendering it a metaphysical problem, one concerned with our collective orientations to time and space. A crip metaphysics, building on the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Margaret Price, and Kris McDaniel, illuminates how disability is operationalized as the negative grounds out of which spatiotemporalites are contested. By attending to these contestations when it feels as though the world is coming apart, it becomes easier to glimpse how they underpin our understanding of the world as it is.
November 21: Alan Richardson, Professor of Philosophy
https://philosophy.ubc.ca/profile/alan-richardson/
“Expanding the Framework for Understanding Mistrust of Science: Decentring (Mis)Information”
Abstract: This talk will, through a series of vignettes and using resources from a variety of researchers across several disciplines, argue that the current foregrounding of mis/disinformation in the trust in science literature is (a) a lingering after-effect of the deficit model in science communication and (b) too impoverished a framework for understanding the current landscape of trust and mistrust of science among various groups. Among the suggestions for further research I will argue that STS researchers (perhaps especially philosophers) (1) need to think beyond values as preferences and include in our theorizing other conceptions of value and matters such as interests and duties and (2) would do well to bring education per se back into philosophical attention and not theorize it on the model of communication.
TERM 2 (Jan – Apr 2025)
January 16: Robert Brain, Professor of History
https://history.ubc.ca/profile/robert-brain/ | https://sts.arts.ubc.ca/dr-robert-brain/
“A Cold War Quest for Soil-Less Food: Warren Weaver and Rockefeller Foundation Techno-Futurism”
Abstract: In 1952, John D. Rockefeller III convened an advisory meeting of distinguished experts in energy, soil, demography, food, economics, and reproductive physiology to meet in Williamsburg, Virginia, to contemplate solutions to a perceived global crisis of soil, food, and population. The soil-food-population cadence had recently gained public attention from popular works such as William Vogt’s Road to Survival (1948), Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (1948), and UN FAO Director-General John Boyd Orr’s Soil Fertility (1948). These works, written before the large-scale availability of synthetic fertilizers, reinvigorated a decades-long fear among policy-makers that the worldwide degradation of soils and growing population would outstrip the carrying capacity of the planet and produce catastrophes more devastating than atomic war. Humankind had become a “geologic force,” Osborn wrote, resulting in an imperiled “earth-home.”
The framework for the Williamsburg meeting was provided by a pre-circulated document entitled “Population and Food,’ written by Warren Weaver, polymath and head of Rockefeller Foundation Natural Sciences Division and recently famous as the co-author (with Claude Shannon) of the founding text of information theory, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949). Formulated in direct analogy with the Weaver-Shannon information theory, Weaver proposed a stripped-down assessment of metabolic processes to bypass the cumbersome legacy of agriculture and social problems of soil. Against those who, like Boyd Orr, thought about schemes to provide bread, eggs, milk, and meat to a hungry world, Weaver proposed thinking about three core metabolic conditions that enable energy to be derived and bodies rebuilt and repaired, and sufficient vitamins and minerals obtained. At a conceptual level this would allow human nutrition to be arrayed within global discussions of energy needs; at a technological level it would entail inventing and producing synthetic nutritive foodstuffs through chemistry and microbiology, circumventing problems of land (as soil, and as geopolitics). Participants in the meeting considered various approaches to soil-less food, from unicellular algae to direct methods of photosynthesis, as well as recent methods for converting waste into consumable energy.
This paper examines the epistemological, scientific, and political quest for soil-less food in this early Cold War U.S. context, with reflections on both eighteenth century debates on cornucopianism versus limits between Condorcet, Malthus, and Godwin, and the tribulations of recent Silicon Valley initiatives for cellular agriculture and synthetic foodstuffs.
2025 Stephen Straker Memorial Lecture
March 13, 5:00-6:30, Buchanan A202
Alison Li: “Science, Hormones and Transformation: Harry Benjamin and the Early History of Transgender Medicine”
This annual STS Lecture honours Stephen Straker who was an historian of science at UBC and played a central role in founding the UBC Science and Technology Program. This year’s Straker Lecturer, Alison Li, is a Canadian historian of science who is known for her work on medical research in Canada, including a 2003 study of J. B. Collip’s contribution to the discovery of insulin. With the 100-year anniversary of this discovery in 2021, Li’s work on this topic has drawn renewed attention.
Li’s most recent book, Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution (UNC Press, 2023), is an important study in the medical history of transgender identity and politics and, more broadly, of hormones in the medical and cultural imagination of the 20th century. She focuses on the contributions of German-born American physician Harry Benjamin, who is credited with developing supportive therapies for transgender patients in the 1950s and 1960, working with a community of physicians and psychologists who were sympathetic to sex change. Her current project is Molecules of Influence: Hormones and our Lives for Reaktion Books (Fall 2026.)
March 27-28: Heather Douglas, Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University
https://people.cal.msu.edu/dougl239/
Heather Douglas’s work has been pivotal to current debate about the implications of recognizing that ‘value free’ ideals of objectivity are untenable; scientists and their institutions cannot exclude social, contextual values from inquiry and its results. In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal (2009) she focused on questions about the roles values can (and should) legitimately play in science, a line of argument she has since developed in terms of a number of controversial policy issues, including research ethics, scientific freedom and regulation, science funding, and science-informed risk governance.
In her current work Douglas addresses questions about the role of scientific expertise in the context of democratic policy and decision making. She gave the 2016 Descartes Lectures, The Rightful Place of Science, and she recently published an article on “The Social Contract for Science and the Value-free Ideal” with T. Y. Branch (2024). Douglas has also edited several collections on science, policy and values, and authored reports on industry funding guidelines and on local decarbonization strategies, including one for the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy. When Douglas visits UBC she will be presenting work on these topics.
March 27, Thursday 5:00-6:30: “Responsible Innovation within the Social Contract for Science”
Abstract: The 20th century social contract for science removed societal responsibility for scientists pursuing basic research. It was not their job to be concerned with the societal impact of their work. The 21st century found such removal untenable (in part because of concerns about dual-use research) and now scientists are widely regarded as having some responsibilities for the impact of their work, even if pursuing science solely for curiosity reasons. However, it has not been clear what the nature of these responsibilities are, what norms should shape that responsibility, whether such responsibility should limit scientific freedom, and what accountability structures should accompany such responsibility. In this talk, I will discuss this terrain, and provide some answers to these questions, answers that will be central to any new social contract for science.
March 28, Friday: “Fostering Trustworthy Science”
Time/location TBA
Abstract: Although many have argued that science as an institution should be generally trusted by the public, others have noted that there are lots of reasons for distrust between the public and science. This focuses our attention on what should be considered trustworthy science, how to generate that kind of science, and how to signal its presence. I will argue that there are three interelated bases for grounding the trustworthiness of any particular piece of science, and that these bases can be utilized by the non-expert to assess the trustworthiness of scientific expertise. These bases are 1) a method for detecting the presence of expertise, 2) an assessment of the expert community with which the expert is engaged, and 3) shared relevant social and ethical values. With this view, scientific expertise is capable of being assessed for trustworthiness by the non-expert. These bases provide reasons for trustworthiness in both cases of expert consensus and dissensus. I will conclude with implications for the practices and institutions of science for fostering trustworthy science.
(Postponed to Fall 2025): Heidi Tworek, UBC History and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs
Dr. Heidi Tworek is Canada Research Chair and Professor of History and Public Policy at UBC, where she directs the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Her work examines the history and policy of communications and media.
https://history.ubc.ca/profile/heidi-tworek/ | https://sppga.ubc.ca/profile/heidi-tworek/
“Online Harassment of Health Communicators: Causes and Consequences”
Abstract: This talk will examine online harassment of health communicators during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on interviews, surveys, focus groups, and social media data, I explain the phenomenon and explore how online abuse affected health communicators’ personal and professional lives. Finally, I consider the broader consequences for communicating about science and public trust in scientists and healthcare professionals.
