As an international interdisciplinary program, USS-SWC brings graduate students in close contact with world-renowned scholars. The program is directed primarily to graduate students and junior researchers in fields related to the annual topic, but the organizers also encourage applications from gifted undergraduates and from people in all stages of their career who wish to broaden their horizon through cross-disciplinary studies of methodological and foundational issues in science.

The topic of the two-week course in 2017 is “Genomics: Philosophy, Ethics and Policy”. Over the last two decades, genomics has emerged as a powerful site for not just re-configuring understandings and enactments of life, but also for understanding how these conceptions and enactments form in tandem with modes of ordering and governing lives. The two-week course explores conceptual innovations that draw these co-productive processes into view, as well as the histories and philosophies that deepen our understandings of not just genomics, but also our ever elusive efforts to make sense of life.

The Main Lecturers:
Robert Cook-Deegan
Paul E. Griffiths
Jenny Reardon