Experiments in Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Graduate Education in Science and Justice

Citation: Science & Justice Research Center (Collaborations Group) (2013) Experiments in Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Graduate Education in Science and Justice. PLoS Biol 11(7): e1001619. doi:10.1371/ journal.pbio.1001619 Experiments in Collaboration: Interdisciplinary Graduate Education in Science and Justice Science 0 1 2 3 Justice Research Center (Collaborations Group)" 0 1 2 3 Series Editor: Claire Marris and Nikolas Rose, King's College London, United Kingdom 0 Funding: The training program was funded by NSF Award No: SES-0933027. The University of California Santa Cruz Graduate Division as well as the home departments of the Science and Justice fellows provided financial support. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript 1 Copyright: 2013 Science and Justice Research Center Collaborations Group. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited 2 University of California , Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California , United States of America 3 Abbreviations: BIC, Broader Impacts Criterion; NSF, National Science Foundation; SJTP, Science & Justice Training Program Creating Legitimate Institutional Space Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. - This Community Page is part of the Public Engagement in Science series Over the past two decades, policy changes at the national level have created an increased focus on science-society relations. An example in the United States has been a subtle but significant shift in the foundational principles of the National Science Foundation (NSF): rather than assume societal benefits directly flow from support of science and engineering, the NSF now explicitly seeks to create knowledge that benefits society [1 4]. To achieve this goal, the agency moved in 1997 to adopt the Broader Impacts Criterion (BIC) to review grant proposals [5,6]. Similarly, the 2007 America COMPETES Act increased ethics education requirements for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows without specifying content [710]. While these policy changes require scientists and engineers to practice science and engineering in new ways that engage the public and benefit society, few institutions provide physical spaces for crossdisciplinary contact and intellectual space for figuring out how practically to achieve these ends [1013]. The spaces that do exist tend to focus on meeting relatively The Community Page is a forum for organizations and societies to highlight their efforts to enhance the dissemination and value of scientific knowledge. narrow and instrumental endsteaching professional conduct and making sure mandated ethics courses are offered rather than doing the more fundamental work of discerning the specific ways in which science and engineering research connect to societal issues and public concerns. Within these new policies, however, we note an unexpected and underexploited benefit: where there is a mandate with little guidance, there is also an opportunity to innovate. We offer the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) as one example of the kind of space that is made possible by the current policy focus on creating closer relationships between science and engineering and the people they intend to serve. The SJTP has taken an innovative approach that: (1) emerges from specific research practices; and (2) expands the set of considerations that qualify as scientific responsibility [15]. In this Community Page, we lay out the main components of this approach: creating legitimate institutional space where the links between science and engineering and questions of ethics and justice might be explored; encouraging students to slow down to investigate these questions on the ground; and supporting collaborations that arise organically from common concerns. Funded through an NSF grant awarded to UCSC in 2010, the SJTP is a graduatelevel research and education program that trains science and engineering students alongside students of social science, arts, and humanities to respond to the ethical and social justice questions that arise in their research. Rather than treating justice as a concern to be tacked onto an already formed research project, SJTP graduate fellows are provided with fellowship funding and faculty mentorship that supports them to explore questions of ethics and justice as they arise in their research. They enroll in two seminars, one that emphasizes different models and approaches to the science/society interface, and a second that introduces them to interdisciplinary methods they can use in their own projects. The SJTP encourages collaboration among graduate fellows, faculty, and research staff from across the Universitys academic divisions as well as those outside the University with interests in the students research area. Located under the auspices of the Science & Justice Research Center (http://scijust.ucsc.edu), the SJTP is synergistic with the Centers other efforts: the Science and Justice Working Group, in which faculty, students, and members of the public gather to address problems and issues of common concern, and monthly Cocktail Hours during which fellows can discuss their progress and challenges as they develop their SJTP projects. The Center itself also provides physical space conducive to these interactions. Foregrounding Justice The space, funding, and institutional recognition of the program give fellows the opportunity to reorient their research questions, methodologies, and goals around questions of science and justice. Fellows receive institutional support for projects that might be more difficult to fit into a traditional PhD program. For example, two fellows are part of a physics laboratory working on developing solar greenhouse technology for industrial-scale agricultural operations. The luminescent greenhouse windows contain strips of solar cells that allow photosynthetically active radiation to pass through, while absorbing and converting other wavelengths to electrical energy. Using these luminescent panels, a farmer could produce the energy needed to run the infrastructure of the greenhouse (e.g., fans and electronic sensors and controls). Rather than having the technology solely target industrial agricultural outfits, these fellows planned to develop the technology for concurrent use by small-scale organic farmers. Using skills developed in the SJTPs research methods seminar, they interviewed smallscale organic farmers to explore possibilities for transferring the technology to them for their use. They found, however, that these farmers had deliberately avoided high-tech approaches and were thus not motivated by the solar cell technology the way that the (...truncated)