Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard

Democratic Imaginations at the Frontiers of Science and Technology

April 16, 2021, 2pm-4pm EDT

Abstract

Join us for “Democratic Imaginations: At the Frontiers of Science and Technology,” with panelists Andrew Jewett, Marcy Darnovsky, Andrew Feenberg, and Jenny Reardon, moderated by Sheila Jasanoff and J. Benjamin Hurlbut.

Panel

Andrew Jewett

Georgia College

Marcy Darnovsky

Center for Genetics and Society

Andrew Feenberg

Simon Fraser University

Jenny Reardon

UC Santa Cruz

Moderated by

Sheila Jasanoff, J. Benjamin Hurlbut

Andrew Jewett has taught at several leading universities, including a decade at Harvard and three years at Boston College as well as shorter positions at Yale, NYU, and Vanderbilt. He is currently the Martha Daniel Newell Visiting Scholar at Georgia College and will serve in 2021-2022 as the Elizabeth D. Rockwell Distinguished Visiting Professor of Ethics and Leadership at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. Professor Jewett is the author of Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge, 2012) and Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard, 2020).

Marcy Darnovsky is Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society. She speaks and writes widely on the politics of human biotechnology, focusing on their social justice and public interest implications. She has worked as an organizer and advocate in a range of environmental and progressive political movements, and taught courses at Sonoma State University and at California State University East Bay. Her Ph.D. is from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Andrew Feenberg is Professor of Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, where he directs the Applied Communication and Technology Lab. His books include Critical Theory of Technology (1991; second edition, 2002), Technology and the Politics of Knowledge (ed, 1995), Community in the Digital Age (ed, 2004), and, most recently, Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason, published by Harvard University Press in 2017.

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2017).

Sponsored by the Global Observatory for Genome Editing.