Science by the People

Science by the People PDF Author: Aya H. Kimura
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813595096
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Longlisted for the Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Citizen science—research involving nonprofessionals in the research process—has attracted both strong enthusiasts and detractors. Many environmental professionals, activists, and scholars consider citizen science part of their toolkit for addressing environmental challenges. Critics, however, contend that it represents a corporate takeover of scientific priorities. In this timely book, two sociologists move beyond this binary debate by analyzing the tensions and dilemmas that citizen science projects commonly face. Key lessons are drawn from case studies where citizen scientists have investigated the impact of shale oil and gas, nuclear power, and genetically engineered crops. These studies show that diverse citizen science projects face shared dilemmas relating to austerity pressures, presumed boundaries between science and activism, and difficulties moving between scales of environmental problems. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.

Science by the People

Science by the People PDF Author: Aya H. Kimura
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813595096
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book Here

Book Description
Longlisted for the Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Citizen science—research involving nonprofessionals in the research process—has attracted both strong enthusiasts and detractors. Many environmental professionals, activists, and scholars consider citizen science part of their toolkit for addressing environmental challenges. Critics, however, contend that it represents a corporate takeover of scientific priorities. In this timely book, two sociologists move beyond this binary debate by analyzing the tensions and dilemmas that citizen science projects commonly face. Key lessons are drawn from case studies where citizen scientists have investigated the impact of shale oil and gas, nuclear power, and genetically engineered crops. These studies show that diverse citizen science projects face shared dilemmas relating to austerity pressures, presumed boundaries between science and activism, and difficulties moving between scales of environmental problems. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.

Science for the People

Science for the People PDF Author: Sigrid Schmalzer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625343185
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For the first time, this book compiles original documents from Science for the People, the most important radical science movement in U.S. history. Between 1969 and 1989, Science for the People mobilized American scientists, teachers, and students to practice a socially and economically just science, rather than one that served militarism and corporate profits. Through research, writing, protest, and organizing, members sought to demystify scientific knowledge and embolden "the people" to take science and technology into their own hands. The movement's numerous publications were crucial to the formation of science and technology studies, challenging mainstream understandings of science as "neutral" and instead showing it as inherently political. Its members, some at prominent universities, became models for politically engaged science and scholarship by using their knowledge to challenge, rather than uphold, the social, political, and economic status quo. Highlighting Science for the People's activism and intellectual interventions in a range of areas -- including militarism, race, gender, medicine, agriculture, energy, and global affairs -- this volume offers vital contributions to today's debates on science, justice, democracy, sustainability, and political power.

People's Science

People's Science PDF Author: Ruha Benjamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804786739
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
“An engaging, insightful, and challenging call to examine both the rhetoric and reality of innovation and inclusion in science and science policy.” —Daniel R. Morrison, American Journal of Sociology Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don’t—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society. People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research—from African Americans’ struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if “the people” ultimately reflects our democratic ideals.

Citizen Science

Citizen Science PDF Author: Caren Cooper
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468314149
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
True stories of everyday volunteers participating in scientific research that “may well prompt readers to join the growing community” (Booklist). Think you need a degree in science to contribute to important scientific discoveries? Think again. All around the world, in fields ranging from meteorology to ornithology to public health, millions of everyday people are choosing to participate in the scientific process. Working in cooperation with scientists in pursuit of information, innovation, and discovery, these volunteers are following protocols, collecting and reviewing data, and sharing their observations. They’re our neighbors, in-laws, and coworkers. Their story, along with the story of the social good that can result from citizen science, has largely been untold, until now. Citizen scientists are challenging old notions about who can conduct research, where knowledge can be acquired, and even how solutions to some of our biggest societal problems might emerge. In telling their story, Caren Cooper just might inspire you to rethink your own assumptions about the role that individuals can play in gaining scientific understanding—and putting that understanding to use as a steward of our world. “Engaging.” —Library Journal (starred review)

A People's History of Science

A People's History of Science PDF Author: Clifford Conner
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 9781560257486
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
Challenges popular beliefs that credit such figures as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein with bringing about modern science, explaining how everyday laborers participated in creating science and continue to do so today, in an account that also documents how the development of science affects ordinary people. Original.

Citizen Science

Citizen Science PDF Author: Alan Irwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134792581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
We are all concerned by the environmental threats facing us today. Environmental issues are a major area of concern for policy makers, industrialists and public groups of many different kinds. While science seems central to our understanding of such threats, the statements of scientists are increasingly open to challenge in this area. Meanwhile, citizens may find themselves labelled as `ignorant' in environmental matters. In Citizen Science Alan Irwin provides a much needed route through the fraught relationship between science, the public and the environmental threat.

Science of the People

Science of the People PDF Author: Joan Solomon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136158812
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
How do people understand science? How do they feel about science, how do they relate to it, what do they hope from it and what do they fear about it? Science of the People: Understanding and using science in everyday contexts helps answer these questions as the result of painstaking interviewing by Professor Joan Solomon of all and sundry in a fairly typical small town. The result is a unique overview of how a very wide range of adults, united only by local geography, relate to science. Many of the findings run contrary to what is widely believed about how science is learnt and about how people view it. Chapters include: An Approach to Awareness Publics for Science? Ethics and Action Interpretation and Change Joan Solomon, who sadly died before this book could be published, enjoyed an international reputation in science education. After a long career teaching science in secondary schools she moved into the university sector and ending up holding chairs of science education at the Open University, King’s College London and the University of Plymouth. She was a world leader in her subject and inspired classroom teachers and wrote a number of very influential papers with some of them. She produced many important books, booklets and other resources to help science teachers and science educators get to grips with the history and philosophy of science and the teaching of energy, amongst other topics. This book is essential reading for those involved in Science education and educational policy.

Disrupting Science

Disrupting Science PDF Author: Kelly Moore
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823803
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In the decades following World War II, American scientists were celebrated for their contributions to social and technological progress. They were also widely criticized for their increasingly close ties to military and governmental power--not only by outside activists but from among the ranks of scientists themselves. Disrupting Science tells the story of how scientists formed new protest organizations that democratized science and made its pursuit more transparent. The book explores how scientists weakened their own authority even as they invented new forms of political action. Drawing extensively from archival sources and in-depth interviews, Kelly Moore examines the features of American science that made it an attractive target for protesters in the early cold war and Vietnam eras, including scientists' work in military research and activities perceived as environmentally harmful. She describes the intellectual traditions that protesters drew from--liberalism, moral individualism, and the New Left--and traces the rise and influence of scientist-led protest organizations such as Science for the People and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Moore shows how scientist protest activities disrupted basic assumptions about science and the ways scientific knowledge should be produced, and recast scientists' relationships to political and military institutions. Disrupting Science reveals how the scientific community cumulatively worked to unbind its own scientific authority and change how science and scientists are perceived. In doing so, the book redefines our understanding of social movements and the power of insider-led protest.

CRISPR People

CRISPR People PDF Author: Henry T. Greely
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262543885
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
What does the birth of babies whose embryos had gone through genome editing mean--for science and for all of us? In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos—as dramatic a development in genetics as the 1996 cloning of Dolly the sheep. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention. The two babies, nonidentical twin girls, were the first “CRISPR'd” people ever born (CRISPR, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is a powerful gene-editing method). Greely not only describes He's experiment and its public rollout (aided by a public relations adviser) but also considers, in a balanced and thoughtful way, the lessons to be drawn both from these CRISPR'd babies and, more broadly, from this kind of human DNA editing—“germline editing” that can be passed on from one generation to the next. Greely doesn't mince words, describing He's experiment as grossly reckless, irresponsible, immoral, and illegal. Although he sees no inherent or unmanageable barriers to human germline editing, he also sees very few good uses for it—other, less risky, technologies can achieve the same benefits. We should consider the implications carefully before we proceed.

Mirroring People

Mirroring People PDF Author: Marco Iacoboni
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429990759
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
What accounts for the remarkable ability to get inside another person's head—to know what they're thinking and feeling? "Mind reading" is the very heart of what it means to be human, creating a bridge between self and others that is fundamental to the development of culture and society. But until recently, scientists didn't understand what in the brain makes it possible. This has all changed in the last decade. Marco Iacoboni, a leading neuroscientist whose work has been covered in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, explains the groundbreaking research into mirror neurons, the "smart cells" in our brain that allow us to understand others. From imitation to morality, from learning to addiction, from political affiliations to consumer choices, mirror neurons seem to have properties that are relevant to all these aspects of social cognition. As The New York Times reports: "The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy." Mirroring People is the first book for the general reader on this revolutionary new science.