This project--supported by the Cross-NSF Ethics Education in Science & Engineering Program--is 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. The project addresses a key problem in dominant methods of ethics pedagogy and inquiry: by treating ethics and justice concerns as issues to be addressed after research questions and engineering practices have formed, scientists and engineers experience ethics and justices issues as supplemental, and not fundamental, to their disciplines. This training program remedies this problem through training 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. To do this, it will revise the existing case-study approach in engineering and science ethics education. Instead of training students to step back and look at cases that have already transpired, the program will train students how to create ethical inquiries from within their own practice, in effect creating their own "case studies" as they arise from within their own studies.
Through clarifying how science/engineering and ethics/justice meet, the training program will open up new ways of doing science and engineering that provide better accounts of the natural world and respond to a broader range of human concerns. Fellows trained in producing robust and responsible scientific practice will continue to propagate the methods as researchers and professors, contributing to wider efforts to produce innovative practices that integrate ethic and justice concerns into the very design of science and engineering projects. Results of the project will be disseminated via public symposia and online via the UCSC Science and Justice Working Group website in a format accessible to interdisciplinary audiences. The PI and postdoctoral fellow will disseminate pedagogical outcomes via conference presentations and journal articles.
This grant supported the formation of the Science & Justice Training Program (SJTP) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), a globally unique initiative that trains doctoral students to work across the disciplinary boundaries of science, engineering, humanities, art, and the social sciences. The SJTP addresses a nationally recognized need to train scientists who can respond to complex, socially relevant problems in an ethical and efficacious manner through collaborating across many forms of expertise. While recognized as a need, there are few examples of how to meet it. The SJTP has developed an innovative approach to ethics education that demonstrates one way to address this shortcoming. The majority of science and engineering ethics taught in US universities is limited largely to matters of professionalism, such as maintaining strict honesty in reporting research results. While that is critically important, it does not cover the breadth of ethical and social concerns that scientists and engineers have about their own projects, nor does it build sustainable institutional support for interdisciplinary work that addresses the most critical topics in science and society. We hypothesized that ethics could be taught as an opportunity to make one’s work more empirically robust and socially responsive if students were versed in broader modes of inquiry and given space and time to work with colleagues in historically isolated disciplines. The literature used in the courses emphasized the social, political and historical contexts of science and engineering. Understanding these contexts provided the foundation for making links between questions of science and questions of ethics and justice. Collaborations were fostered by gathering around shared objects from each student's primary research project, giving students the opportunity to find issues of common and public importance within their own dissertation projects. Additionally, we aimed to foster a self-critical understanding of the political and institutional context in which scientific practice occurs so students can contribute to lasting institutional change. By providing intellectual resources, common spaces, time and financial support, we found that students were able to organically develop unexpected collaborations that both expanded the scope of scientific responsibility and generated concrete, modest interventions in matters of public importance. Some examples include: a climate modeler working with an anthropologist to consider the implications of climate model uncertainty for water policy in the developing world; material physicists using social science methods to scale their lab's solar greenhouse technologies for use in small scale agriculture; and a sociologist and humanist studying how the working conditions of young life scientists relate to their ability to do responsible research. In most university settings, let alone in ethics courses, these scholars would never have contact with each other due to long standing institutional and intellectual boundaries. Significant program outcomes include: Establishing a replicable model of institutional support for cross-disciplinary ethics training and student-led research. Training 37 students in cross-disciplinary collaborative research methods. Publication of a collaboratively written paper that was published in PLoS Biology. Leveraging the success of the NSF-funded program into establishment of the Science and Justice Research Center at UCSC with promised support for staff and office space. Future iterations of the training program will be housed at the Science & Justice Research Center. Establishing a Graduate Certificate program through the UCSC Graduate Division and Academic Senate, providing participating students with career-building credentials. Dissemination of results through conference presentations and solicited speaking engagements. Identifying an unmet national need and intellectual niche for broadened science and engineering ethics training opportunities. Establishing relationships with science and engineering departments on the UCSC campus to provide enhanced ethics education experience, and thereby meeting mandates set by federal funding agencies.
