Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s)

This course places science studies in conversation with ethnographic methodologies, decolonial, anti-colonial, and feminist approaches, data and environmental justice, citizen science and disability studies, among other topics. We will be looking at the ways that the natural, social sciences, and community-oriented research agendas come together, and what tensions and possibilities these emergent alliances, intersectional modes of thinking, and practical collaborations may produce. This class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, medical fields, the natural and social sciences, law, humanities, and the school of design to learn how to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental and public health issues. Aspirations for justice and the possibilities for evidence making require translation across different practices, temporalities and scales; negotiations with the forces of economic structures; and endurance within colonial legacies, as well as situations of everyday militarization and social conflict. Throughout the course, the idea is not for us to necessarily give up our disciplinary orientations, but rather to learn how to approach shared matters of concern without canceling out our differences and the generative agonisms that result from collaborative experimentation and practice-oriented approaches.