Science by the People PDF Download

Author: Aya H. Kimura
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813595096
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Longlisted for the Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Citizen science—research involving nonprofessionals in the research process—has attracted both strong enthusiasts and detractors. Many environmental professionals, activists, and scholars consider citizen science part of their toolkit for addressing environmental challenges. Critics, however, contend that it represents a corporate takeover of scientific priorities. In this timely book, two sociologists move beyond this binary debate by analyzing the tensions and dilemmas that citizen science projects commonly face. Key lessons are drawn from case studies where citizen scientists have investigated the impact of shale oil and gas, nuclear power, and genetically engineered crops. These studies show that diverse citizen science projects face shared dilemmas relating to austerity pressures, presumed boundaries between science and activism, and difficulties moving between scales of environmental problems. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.

Author: Sigrid Schmalzer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625343185
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
For the first time, this book compiles original documents from Science for the People, the most important radical science movement in U.S. history. Between 1969 and 1989, Science for the People mobilized American scientists, teachers, and students to practice a socially and economically just science, rather than one that served militarism and corporate profits. Through research, writing, protest, and organizing, members sought to demystify scientific knowledge and embolden "the people" to take science and technology into their own hands. The movement's numerous publications were crucial to the formation of science and technology studies, challenging mainstream understandings of science as "neutral" and instead showing it as inherently political. Its members, some at prominent universities, became models for politically engaged science and scholarship by using their knowledge to challenge, rather than uphold, the social, political, and economic status quo. Highlighting Science for the People's activism and intellectual interventions in a range of areas -- including militarism, race, gender, medicine, agriculture, energy, and global affairs -- this volume offers vital contributions to today's debates on science, justice, democracy, sustainability, and political power.

Author: Caren Cooper
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1468314149
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
True stories of everyday volunteers participating in scientific research that “may well prompt readers to join the growing community” (Booklist). Think you need a degree in science to contribute to important scientific discoveries? Think again. All around the world, in fields ranging from meteorology to ornithology to public health, millions of everyday people are choosing to participate in the scientific process. Working in cooperation with scientists in pursuit of information, innovation, and discovery, these volunteers are following protocols, collecting and reviewing data, and sharing their observations. They’re our neighbors, in-laws, and coworkers. Their story, along with the story of the social good that can result from citizen science, has largely been untold, until now. Citizen scientists are challenging old notions about who can conduct research, where knowledge can be acquired, and even how solutions to some of our biggest societal problems might emerge. In telling their story, Caren Cooper just might inspire you to rethink your own assumptions about the role that individuals can play in gaining scientific understanding—and putting that understanding to use as a steward of our world. “Engaging.” —Library Journal (starred review)

Author: Alan Irwin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134792581
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
We are all concerned by the environmental threats facing us today. Environmental issues are a major area of concern for policy makers, industrialists and public groups of many different kinds. While science seems central to our understanding of such threats, the statements of scientists are increasingly open to challenge in this area. Meanwhile, citizens may find themselves labelled as `ignorant' in environmental matters. In Citizen Science Alan Irwin provides a much needed route through the fraught relationship between science, the public and the environmental threat.

Author: Ruha Benjamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804786739
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
“An engaging, insightful, and challenging call to examine both the rhetoric and reality of innovation and inclusion in science and science policy.” —Daniel R. Morrison, American Journal of Sociology Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don’t—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society. People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research—from African Americans’ struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if “the people” ultimately reflects our democratic ideals.

Author: Carolyn Johnsen
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803234503
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
The American public, government, and the news media continually grapple with myriad policy issues related to science and technology. Those issues include global warming, energy, stem-cell research, health care, childhood autism, food safety, and genetics, to name but a few. When the public is informed on such topics, chances improve for reasoned policy decisions. Journalists have typically bridged the gap between scientists and the public, but the times now call for more engagement from the experts. The authors in this collection write convincingly about why scientists and engineers should shake off their ivory-tower reticence and take science to the people. Taking Science to the Peoplecalls on scientists and engineers to polish their writing and speaking skills in order to communicate more clearly about their work to the public, policy makers, and reporters who cover science. The authors represent a range of experience and authority, including distinguished scientists who write well about science, federal officials who communicate to Congress about science, and science journalists who weigh in with their own expertise. In this long-overdue volume, scientists, engineers, and journalists will find both a convincing rationale for communicating well about science and many practical methods for doing so.

Author: Wolff-Michael Roth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135844771
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Contributing to the social justice agenda of redefining what science is and what it means in the everyday lives of people, this book introduces science educators to various dimensions of viewing science and scientific literacy from the standpoint of the learner, engaged with real everyday concerns within or outside school; develops a new form of scholarship based on the dialogic nature of science as process and product; and achieves these two objectives in a readable but scholarly way. Opposing the tendency to teach and do research as if science, science education, and scientific literacy could be imposed from the outside, the authors want science education to be for people rather than strictly about how knowledge gets into their heads. Taking up the challenges of this orientation, science educators can begin to make inroads into the currently widespread irrelevance of science in the everyday lives of people. Utmost attention has been given to making this book readable by the people from whose lives the topics of the chapters emerge, all the while retaining academic integrity and high-level scholarship. Wolff Michael Roth has been awarded the Distinguished Contributions Award by The National Association for Research in Science Teaching, for his contributions to research in this field. He has also been elected to be the Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

Author: Clifford D Conner
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 0786737867
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 570

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Book Description
We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: How Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary mass of people, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong. A People's History of Science shows how ordinary people participate in creating science and have done so throughout history. It documents how the development of science has affected ordinary people, and how ordinary people perceived that development. It would be wrong to claim that the formulation of quantum theory or the structure of DNA can be credited directly to artisans or peasants, but if modern science is likened to a skyscraper, then those twentieth-century triumphs are the sophisticated filigrees at its pinnacle that are supported by the massive foundation created by the rest of us.

Author: Joan Solomon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136158812
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
How do people understand science? How do they feel about science, how do they relate to it, what do they hope from it and what do they fear about it? Science of the People: Understanding and using science in everyday contexts helps answer these questions as the result of painstaking interviewing by Professor Joan Solomon of all and sundry in a fairly typical small town. The result is a unique overview of how a very wide range of adults, united only by local geography, relate to science. Many of the findings run contrary to what is widely believed about how science is learnt and about how people view it. Chapters include: An Approach to Awareness Publics for Science? Ethics and Action Interpretation and Change Joan Solomon, who sadly died before this book could be published, enjoyed an international reputation in science education. After a long career teaching science in secondary schools she moved into the university sector and ending up holding chairs of science education at the Open University, King’s College London and the University of Plymouth. She was a world leader in her subject and inspired classroom teachers and wrote a number of very influential papers with some of them. She produced many important books, booklets and other resources to help science teachers and science educators get to grips with the history and philosophy of science and the teaching of energy, amongst other topics. This book is essential reading for those involved in Science education and educational policy.

Author: Marco Iacoboni
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429990759
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
What accounts for the remarkable ability to get inside another person's head—to know what they're thinking and feeling? "Mind reading" is the very heart of what it means to be human, creating a bridge between self and others that is fundamental to the development of culture and society. But until recently, scientists didn't understand what in the brain makes it possible. This has all changed in the last decade. Marco Iacoboni, a leading neuroscientist whose work has been covered in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, explains the groundbreaking research into mirror neurons, the "smart cells" in our brain that allow us to understand others. From imitation to morality, from learning to addiction, from political affiliations to consumer choices, mirror neurons seem to have properties that are relevant to all these aspects of social cognition. As The New York Times reports: "The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy." Mirroring People is the first book for the general reader on this revolutionary new science.