Category: Events

STS Majors and minors, please note that the candidate presentations CAN serve as cocurricular events – All presentations will end at 12:55 with a Q&A to follow.  Students and faculty with 1:00 classes can leave when necessary.

Jessica Koski, Ph.D Candidate in Sociology, Northwestern University, degree expected June 2014

Tuesday, February 11th, 12:15-1:15, PB205

Presentation title:  “Social Constructionism and Global Warming: Friends or Foes?”

Summary:  Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have devoted significant attention to how climate change is “constructed” as a scientific and political problem.  But such work is not without controversy.  Many researchers charge that social constructionist accounts of global warming fuel climate skepticism and, as a result, impede policymaking.  Are constructionist analyses worth the risk?  Drawing on research on the mutual production of climate science and climate politics, this talk discusses the promises and perils of social constructionist investigations of environmental concerns.  Classic constructionist accounts underscore how powerful actors distort science to serve particular ends.  Such interest-based accounts deliver a powerful blow to science’s public credibility for many view “good” science as that which is untouched by politics.  At the same time, the lens of social construction also brings to light the ways in which social variables shape scientific practice itself.  Better understanding the co-production of political and scientific agendas, as well as how politics is built into scholars’ research design, may spur more nuanced and reflexive debate.  It also has the potential to unveil sources of political gridlock.  However, it too requires acknowledging science’s inherent social component.  This review encourages a reevaluation of how we differentiate between “good” and “bad” science and further pushes us to consider more explicitly the role of STS scholarship (and scholars) in policy debates.

STS Majors and minors, please note that the candidate presentations CAN serve as cocurricular events – All presentations will end at 12:55 with a Q&A to follow.  Students and faculty with 1:00 classes can leave when necessary.

Jesse Van Gerven, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, University of Missouri, degree expected May 2014

Graduate Instructor, University of Missouri

Tuesday, Feb. 4th, 12:15-1:15 in PB205

 Presentation Title:  “The Social Dimensions of Energy Systems in Contemporary Societies”

Summary:

We will be discussing the ways energy systems (electricity) take on important social, cultural, political, and economic meanings as these systems are developed, implemented, contested and negotiated.  We will focus on how the negative costs of energy systems, manifested primarily through environmental pollution and ecological destruction, disproportionately impact poor and minority communities. More specifically, we will examine the production of nuclear power and the associated nuclear-fuel-chain as a means of demonstrating the social dimensions of energy systems; again focusing on how the associated environmental and human-health burdens become concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color. 

Butler University’s J. James Woods Lectures in the Sciences and Mathematics presents cognitive psychologist Daniel Levitin at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 28 in the Howard L. Schrott Center for the Arts.

Levitin, the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at McGill University, is the author of the book This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton/Penguin, 2006), which stayed on The New York Times and The (Toronto) Globe and Mail bestseller lists for more than 16 months. Two award-winning documentaries based on “This Is Your Brain On Music” have been broadcast internationally: The Music Instinct co-starred Levitin and Bobby McFerrin, and The Musical Brain co-starred Levitin and Sting.

As a musician (tenor saxophone, guitar, and bass), he has performed with Mel Tormé, Nancy Wilson, David Byrne, Roseanne Cash, Sting, Bobby McFerrin, Rodney Crowell, Victor Wooten, Blue Öyster Cult, members of the Steve Miller Band, and Santana.

Levitin earned his doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Oregon. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, where he taught courses in the psychology, computer science, human biology, music, and anthropology departments, and the School of Education. He has also been a visiting professor in psychology at UC Berkeley and Dartmouth.