Ethics and Justice in Science and Engineering Training Program

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project--supported by the Cross-NSF Ethics Education in Science & Engineering Program--is a research and education program that trains science and engineering graduate students alongside social science and humanities graduate students to create ethical inquiries from within their own practice. The project addresses a key problem in dominant methods of ethics pedagogy and inquiry: by treating ethics and justice concerns as issues to be addressed after research questions and engineering practices have formed, scientists and engineers experience ethics and justices issues as supplemental, and not fundamental, to their disciplines. This training program remedies this problem through training graduate students how to identify and respond to moments within their own research in which good scientific and engineering practices require attentiveness to ethics and justice. To do this, it will revise the existing case-study approach in engineering and science ethics education. Instead of training students to step back and look at cases that have already transpired, the program will train students how to create ethical inquiries from within their own practice, in effect creating their own "case studies" as they arise from within their own studies. Through clarifying how science/engineering and ethics/justice meet, the training program will open up new ways of doing science and engineering that provide better accounts of the natural world and respond to a broader range of human concerns. Fellows trained in producing robust and responsible scientific practice will continue to propagate the methods as researchers and professors, contributing to wider efforts to produce innovative practices that integrate ethic and justice concerns into the very design of science and engineering projects. Results of the project will be disseminated via public symposia and online via the UCSC Science and Justice Working Group website in a format accessible to interdisciplinary audiences. The PI and postdoctoral fellow will disseminate pedagogical outcomes via conference presentations and journal articles.