Training Program
The Science & Justice Training Program trains graduate students from across the University’s academic divisions in collaborative research practices that are both empirically robust and ethically responsive. Through a grant awarded to UCSC by the National Science Foundation, in the Spring of 2010 UCSC launched the “Ethics and Justice in Science and Engineering Training Program,” known informally as the Science & Justice Training Program. This program grows out of the success of the UCSC Science & Justice Working Group, and creates 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.
Rather than addressing questions of ethics and justice after research questions and engineering practices have formed, the program trains science and engineering 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. Conversely, it teaches social science, humanities and arts students how to trace the links between scientific and engineering practices and practices of equity, equality, and power. Thus, the program promises to open up not only novel epistemologies (the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief), but new sites and practices for pursuing social justice. The program is unique in its effort to broaden the scope of ethics education in science and engineering to include questions of social justice.
The program provides an introductory seminar (268A BME, FMST, SOCY; 267A ANTH), intensive mentoring and independent study, and research support to Science & Justice Fellows, in addition to networking and collaboratory opportunities, a sense of community, access to a wide-range of faculty, leadership and communication skill-building, publishing opportunities, and cross literacy. The program is open to all disciplines.
Interested students are encouraged to attend the Center’s Fall Meet & Greet and SJTP Informational Meeting (check event calendar on website).