Date/Time
Wednesday
31 Jan 2018
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Location
Engineering 2, room 599, UCSC Campus

Event Type
Non-CSTMS Event

How do we practice a socially just science? Join Free Radicals, a Los Angeles-based feminist and anti-racist community organization of scientists, that aims to incorporate a critical social justice lens into science, for an interactive workshop on feminist practices and socially conscious frameworks for building feminist research and engineering practices. Justice provides a framework for scientists to think through the hidden assumptions in their methodological approaches, and challenges researchers to think more deeply about the political implications of their work.

Participants will be challenged to apply principles and practices of justice to their own work, interrogating questions such as: Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who is most vulnerable?

In our communities of practice and beyond, whose well-being are we responsible for? How do our individual and collective identities affect the questions we ask? And ultimately, who do we do science for, and why? The workshop will conclude with practical skills and resources for participants to push their research communities to be more inclusive, equitable and attentive to social justice.

Free Radicals is a collective that envisions an open and responsible science that works toward progressive social change. Our work focuses on creating resources for political education through workshops and our blog: freerads.org.

Paloma Medina is a second year Ph.D. student in Biomolecular Engineering and Bioinformatics (UCSC) studying genetic ancestry and the evolution of sex. She has worked with the science of de-extinction, developmental biology, and animal behavior. As part of the Science and Justice Research Center Training Program, she helped initiate the Queer Ecologies Research Cluster and is continually seeking new creative ways to promote biodiversity. More information about Queer Ecologies can be found at: https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~pmedina/queer_ecology_reading_list.html.

Co-Sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD), Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators (ISEE), Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE)