Sheila Jasanoff Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies - Harvard University |
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02.07.2015-30.07.2015
Science and Governance at the Frontiers of Life
Project objectives are theoretical, practical, and pedagogical, as described below: 1) Advance scholarship on relations between biology and law. Our study will fill critical knowledge gaps in awareness and understanding of the interplay of biological and legal thought. Through cross- national comparison, it will identify and characterize the notions of the natural and the reasonable that shape these processes. In addition to expanding STS scholarship within the discipline, we anticipate this work to make significant contributions to emerging topics in Bioethics, Health Policy and Health Law, and Social Science Perspectives on Health, Medical Ethics. 2) Draw attention to overarching logics that transcend specific empirical cases. We believe that the phenomena we propose to study strongly relate to cultural histories and institutional logics that affect the interpretation of the natural features of emergent biological entities. Our project aims to expose these logics, with the expectation that doing so will allow significantly richer entry points into a wide range of domains that transcend our specific empirical case studies. 3) Improve deliberation, science policymaking, and public reasoning. Our analyses will provide insights into alternative legal, institutional, and policy arrangements for dealing with biological and legal uncertainty. Knowledge of cross-national variations will make scientific and legal institutions more aware of the roles they play in structuring the uses of biological thought. 4) Inform education and policy. A central goal of our prior and current projects has been to open spaces for productive interaction between scientific, social scientific, humanistic and legal communities. The primary applicant (Jasanoff), for instance, has organized successful science and society summer schools at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), drawing graduate students and postdocs from both bench science and the social sciences and humanities. Both collaborators (Hurlbut, Saha) have participated in these summer schools. Notably, the 2014 summer school will focuses on contemporary STS research frontiers of bioconstitutionalism and will feature a mix of lectures, group workshops and discussions of individual projects for students. Jasanoff is also playing a major role in translating STS ideas on biology and society into legal studies through her teaching and program building activities at Harvard Law School.