Lecturer: Dr Joe Cain

Outline of topic: All academics publish. We must do so in ways that avoid ethical compromise. This workshop surveys the range of ethical issues relevant to academic publishing, especially for early career researchers. We’ll avoid first-step issues (this is not a workshop about plagiarism, faking data, or other cheating). We’ll focus our attention on four areas: constructing texts, submitting texts, reviewing texts, and moving on. This workshop will be flexibly structured, ready to incorporate concerns of those in attendance.

Learning objectives:

1. identify the variety of issues relevant to early career researchers,
2. investigate case studies and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of possible solutions,
3. consider underlying principles and guides for ethical action, and
4. identify resources useful for later work should the need arise.

Required Reading: Read the guidance offered by Nature Publishing Group related to their policies concerning publication . Come prepared to discuss.

Lecturer: Dr Jon Agar

Outline of topic: Good science, we are told, can be replicated by anyone supplied with suitable resources. But what if most scientific knowledge is not explicit knowledge that can be easily communicated, but more like the kind of knowledge we have when we know we can ride a bike? Knowledge of how to ride a bike is largely tacit knowledge - we know it, but find it very difficult to express it. Collins argues that there's a lot of tacit knowledge involved in making science work. But does that make science local, not universal, knowledge?

Required Reading:
H.M. Collins, 'The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks', Science Studies (April 1974) 4(2), pp.165-185. Download online from JSTOR
Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi, ‘Tacit Knowledge, Weapons Design, and the Uninvention of Nuclear Weapons’, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 101, No. 1, Jul., 1995 Download online from JSTOR

Lecturer: Dr Bill Maclehose

Outline of topic: This key concepts course is designed to provide the student with an introduction to the concepts and images of the body in classical, medieval, and renaissance medicine. We will study the major theories of physiology and anatomy in western medicine before 1800, and examine important medical illustrations of the body from these periods. The course will meet for a lecture and then reconvene in the Strang Print Room to study the anatomical images held in that collection.

Required reading:
Harcourt, Glenn. ‘Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of the Antique Sculpture,’ Representations 17 (1987) 28-61.

Advanced reading:
Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘The Uses of Pictures in the Formation of Learned Knowledge: The Cases of Leonhard Fuchs and Andreas Vesalius,’ in Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, 2006, pp. 73-96.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1990.
Givens, Jean, Karen Reeds, and Alain Touwaide, eds. Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.
Moe, Harald. 'The Art of Anatomical Illustration in the Renaissance and Baroque Periods.' 1995. L’Illustration anatomique de la Renaissance au siècle des lumières. 1998.

Lecturer: Professor Steve Miller

Outline of topic: It is now over 50 years since C.P. Snow first advanced the idea that the intellectual life of the Western World was split between an old and reactionary arts/humanities culture and a scientific one that "held the future in its bones". Over-simplistic, inappropriate, ignorant - these were just some of the epithets that flew in Snow's direction.
And yet the "Two Cultures" concept still makes its way into (semi-)official documents concerning relations between science and society and discussions about the way the non-science media cover research discoveries and their implications. It remains a powerful rhetorical image for those who advocate a better deal for science and a harder time for those who are ignorant of it.

So maybe Snow got something right, or at least nearly right.

This workshop will re-examine Snow's original idea and look at its modern advocates with a view to understanding where science does or does not stand with respect to the rest of our culture.

Required reading: "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow. I suggest the Canto (1993) edition with a great if now dated discussion by Stefan Collini.

Anyone who has read "The Geek Manifesto: why science matters" by Mark Henderson (Bantam Press, 2012) might also enjoy this workshop.

Lecturer: Dr Simon Werrett

Outline of Topic: What does history teach us about the relationship between scientific research and the environment? Is modern science sustainable? This session explores the interactions of scientists, industrialists, plants, politicians, and animals as they have made and remade environmental concepts, landscapes, and identities in the past. Focusing science as a form of practice and material culture, and looking at modern history (after c. 1600), we will consider how science has allowed us to know the environment, how research has impacted on species and habitats, and how scientific inquiry into the environment is connected to other pursuits in politics, business, and culture.

Required Reading:
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper Collins, 1980), chapter 7 “Dominion over Nature”

Lecturer: Dr Inga Kroener

Outline of topic: Surveillance has become a ubiquitous feature of everyday life. Our image is captured hundreds of times a day and our activities are continuously available for inspection. However, surveillance technologies occupy an ambiguous position: they are simultaneously vital for security and invade privacy; help to cut crime and provide an occasional sense of disquiet. Some suggest that we are ‘sleepwalking’ our way into a ‘surveillance society’. Others suggest that we are already there, or that we have always been one. This session explores Science and Technology Studies perspectives on surveillance; analysing its history, political context, and the role of the public.

Required reading: Ball, K. and Murakami Wood, D. (2006) ‘A Report on the Surveillance Society’ Summary Report

Lecturers: Dr Chiara Ambrosio and Dr Brendan Clarke

Outline of topic: The view that one of the aims of science is to represent the world is fairly well established in philosophy of science. What models and representations actually amount to, however, remains contentious. Recent contributions on this issue range from explorations of the uses of different kinds of models and representations in different domains of scientific inquiry, via work comparing artistic and scientific representative practices, to treatments of models as merely linguistic, theoretical entities. Working with an exciting range of visual material, we aim in this session to use models and representations themselves to cast light on these issues. We will test the merits (and drawbacks) of these diverse approaches against examples of models and representations used in recent - and not so recent - scientific practice.

Required reading:
Mauricio Suárez, ‘Scientific Representation’, Philosophy Compass, Volume 5, Issue 1, pages 91–101, January 2010 (available online)

Further readings:
Ankeny, R. 2007. "Wormy Logic: Model Organisms as Case-Based Reasoning." in Creager, Lunbeck and Wise (eds.) Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press.
Frigg, R. and Hunter, M. 2010. “Editors’ Introduction” in Frigg, R. and Hunter, M. (eds.) Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science. Dordrecht: Springer. XV-XXX.
Griesemer, J. 2004. "Three-Dimensional Models in Philosophical Perspective" in de Chadarevian, S. and Hopwood, N. (eds) 2004. Models: The Third Dimension of Science, Stanford University Press. 433-442.

Further Readings and web resources: to be made available to participants during the sessions.

Lecturer: Dr Jack Stilgoe

Outline of topic: Science is instinctively and increasingly global. It deals in supposedly universal knowledge. Scientists have historically travelled and collaborated across the world in search of the best ideas, the best equipment and the most interesting projects. Scientists are interested in global problems, and may be involved in international governance mechanisms such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But for all the talk of universalism and a ‘Flat World’, what is the reality of global science and global governance? Politics, governance and ethics across the world are farfrom flat. They look very spikey indeed. In this session, we will explore the implications of globalisation for scientists and other individuals, especially those at ‘London’s global university’.

Required reading: Caroline Wagner's The New Invisible College: Science for Development (Brookings Institution Press), free chapter available online

Others: The global governance of science, Report of the Expert Group on Global Governance of Science to the Science, Economy and Society Directorate, Directorate-General for Research, European Commission (available online)
J Wilsdon and C Leadbeater, The Atlas of Ideas, How Asian innovation can benefit us all Demos, 2007 (available online)
Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Lecturer: Dr Emma Tobin

Outline of topic: In this session we will take a look at an important and ongoing debate in contemporary philosophy of science: are we justified in accepting the most secure findings of scientists “at face value”? In other words, are scientific theories literally true and do scientific systems of classification carve nature at its joints? You will be invited to reflect on systems of classification in your own particular area of study, taken either from the history of science or from current scientific practice and to think about their implications for scientific realism and anti-realism.

Required reading:
The entry on ‘Scientific realism’, from the online Stanford Encyclopaedia Of Philosophy (link) 
The entry on ‘Natural Kinds’ from the the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (link)

Lecturer: Dr Simon Lock

Outline of Topic: How is science reported in the mass media? Is it fair? Balanced? Sensationalised? How has the rise of the internet changed access to scientific information. How should the mass media cover complex issues such as global climate change? This session will think about how the mass media (newspapers, film, television and the internet) frames public understandings and debates about science and technology. It will introduce key concepts in media theory and science communication and encourage students to think about how they might present their own research to fit with general media frames.

Required reading:
Gregory, Jane & Miller, Steve (1998) Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility (New York & London: Plenum) chapter four.

Others:
Gauntlett, David (1998) ‘Ten things wrong with the media ‘effects’ model’, available online
Hulme, Mike (2009) Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) chapter three.

Lecturer: Dr Brian Balmer

Outline of Topic: In December 2011 the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity suggested that two papers describing how to make avian flu virus (H5N1) more transmissible should not be published in their entirety because the information in them posed a security threat. Although the papers were eventually published in full, this raises the complex question: what responsibility do scientists (and other researchers) have for the use made of their work? In particular, how do we address this question when an increasing amount of cutting-edge research in science has been termed “dual-use”, work done for benign purposes but capable of being used for malign purposes? This session will focus on the governance of dual-use science and technology in the life sciences, although it is open to anyone interested in their own social responsibility as a researcher.

The workshop will begin with a background lecture and then we will be using a role play exercise “The Life Science, Biosecurity and Dual Use Research” designed as part of a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Note: This session depends on a minimum number of people attending. If you register for this course and cannot attend please notify me at b.balmer@ucl.ac.uk

Required reading:
Royal Society and Wellcome Trust (2004), Do no harm: reducing the potential for the misuse of life science research (London: Royal Society), (available online)

Additional reading:
Steven Shapin, “Don’t Let That Crybaby in Here Again,” London Review of Books (September, 2000), (available online)
McLeish, C and Nightingale, P (2007), ‘Biosecurity, Bioterrorism and the Increasing Convergence of Science and Security Policy’, Research Policy Vol.36 No.10 pp.1635-1654