"Identifying ‘Success’ in a Participatory Science Project: Implications for Environmental Justice"

Abstract:
This research addresses a particular form of public participation called participatory science – projects in which ‘non-experts’ work together with formally trained scientists in a research project with the aims of producing new knowledge, shaping the decision-making process in the environmental regulatory and policy arenas, and perhaps contributing to environmental justice. The purpose of this research is to systematically evaluate the different ways in which participatory science can be ‘successful’, and to identify specific factors that can inhibit and facilitate success in a participatory science project. To examine these issues, I use the case of the Drift Catcher program, a California NGO-managed project in which agricultural community residents monitor the levels of airborne pesticides in their own neighborhoods and then use that data to press for regulatory change. I argue that the degree to which different participants find their Drift Catcher project to be ‘successful’ depends on how widely the results are applied, how well the research project suits the participating community in terms of existing skills and resources, and whether the results are used to challenge (rather than reify) the political authority of science in public debate. I conclude with several recommendations for further research on participatory science and other forms of public participation.

Jill Harrison (Ph.D. 2006, UC Santa Cruz) joined the Rural Sociology Department faculty in Fall 2006 as Assistant Professor of Rural Sociology. Harrison's interests include agrofood studies, environmental conflict, environmental justice, and immigration politics.

Her ongoing research interrogates the structural supports of environmental inequalities through examining political conflicts over agricultural pesticide drift in California. Components of this research have been published in Political Geography in 2006, and her most recent article ("Abandoned Bodies and Spaces of Sacrifice") was published in late 2007 in Geoforum.

Harrison is a faculty affiliate of UW-Madison's Program on Agricultural Technology Studies, and also of the Agroecology graduate program.

"You Say You Want a Revolution? Open Access and Scholarly Publishing: A View from the Trenches"

Abstract:
The Open Access movement promises attractive societal benefits: free online access to articles describing research results, better research processes through sharing of data and distributed processing, and more thoroughly vetted research through public research review processes. But OA demands significant structural changes in the relationships between scholars, editorial boards, publishers, academic libraries, and tenure and promotion boards. OA also demands individual level changes to where researchers choose to publish and how they go about preparing and disseminating their research output.

Uptake of OA, whether through submission to free-to-the-reader open access journals, or through researcher deposit of papers in open online repositories (e.g., ArXiv, SSRN, PubMed Central, Minds@UW), has been variable across fields: Notable success stories exist, but in many cases institutional forces encourage continuation of the status quo.

The presenters will address challenges facing Open Access initiatives bases on their experiences working with University of Wisconsin researchers in a variety of science, social science and humanities fields. Salo will focus on the challenges of convincing researchers to deposit research materials and output into open access repositories such as Minds@UW, the UW System repository. Schneider will discuss challenges of implementing the NIH Public Access policy on campus and faculty deposit of works into PubMed Central. Eschenfelder will provide background about Open Access social movement and the scholarly publishing industries.

Dorothea Salo is the Digital Repository Librarian for the Minds@UW Wisconsin System Repository. She attempts to convince researchers across the UW campuses to submit journal articles, research field notes, audio tapes, slides and photographs, data sets etc. intoMinds for both open access and digital preservation purposes. She has interests in the areas of open science, open access, data curation, and DSpace software bugs. She is also the author of the blog Caveat Lector (http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/) where she editorializes on numerous institutional repository and open access issues.

Julie Schneider is the Assistant Director for Scholarly Communications at Ebling Health Sciences Library at UW-Madison. In 2008 she was charged with aiding faculty to implement the NIH Public Access policy at UW. This policy requires that investigators funded by the NIH submit electronic versions of their accepted peer-reviewed manuscripts to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central. She works with faculty to submit electronic articles to PubMed, edit journal copyright transfer agreements to allow submission, and determine which version of an article must be submitted. She has special interests in the areas of Biomedical Informatics, Open Access Initiatives, and Sequence and other Biomedical Databases.

Kristin Eschenfelder, Associate Professor School of Library and Information Studies, studies intellectual property issues, the scholarly publishing and library industries, and how norms determining access to and use of different types of scientific and cultural materials develop and change over time within these industries. She has been involved with the Open Access movement for two years as an editor for DLIST, an open access repository for the information science field. She also deposits work in SSRN.

"Political Economy of American Medical Research: The National Institutes of Health in the Post World War II Period"

Sejal Patel is a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar (2007–09). Before coming to Wisconsin as a post-doc, she received her Ph.D. in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. She is interested in the methodologies used in population-level health research – specifically, understanding why individual-level analyses of risk have become such a prominent theme in health research, policy and intervention. Sejal's doctoral research focused on the 1960s, a period when methodologies used in health research were rich in variety. Her work highlighted how currently used styles of research in population health were the products of specific institutional and disciplinary contexts, conceptions of disease etiology and prevention, and research and medical center cultures. As a Health & Society Scholar, she is tracing how early and influential investigations guided how later investigators entering the field of coronary heart disease research designed their studies, selected their populations, interpreted their findings, and recommended policy.

*This session will meet in 2435 Social Science.

"Liber-ation: The Technology of the Book and Parisian University Medicine in the Middle Ages"

Abstract:
With the birth of the universities and the the entry of medicine into them, physicians began to apply their new literate technology to manipulating the medieval medical marketplace. How that manipulation occurred and the nature of the novel 'informatic' technologies, particularly as they related to medieval pharmacology will be the focus of this talk.

Walton Schalick is Assistant Professor of Medical History, Rehabilitation Medicine, History of Science, and Pediatrics. Walt’s research embraces a triptych of: the history of medieval medicine and pharmacology, the history of children with physical disabilities in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and the US, and the practical ethics of pediatric emergency research, some of which has appeared in articles and chapters and the balance of which is pending in two monographs.

In addition to being an historian, Walt is a practicing pediatrician and rehabilitation physician. Dr. Schalick’s clinical research interests are in pediatric rehabilitation and disability and the interface of policy and medical ethics with respect to children. He has worked extensively in the areas of cerebral palsy, neural tube defects, and pediatric physical disabilities as well as general pediatrics. He is part of the Disability Studies Cluster Hire, designed to help create a Disability Studies program on campus.

*This session will meet in 2435 Social Science.

"A Conversation with Alberto Cambrosio"

This session is a graduate student brownbag discussion with Alberto Cambrosio, who will also be giving a lecture on Thursday afternoon, November 13.

For details on Prof. Cambrosio's visit, please go here.

"The School Laboratory as Epistemological Hybrid: Dynamic Biology and American High Schools in the 1960s"

Abstract:
The Soviet launch of Sputnik and the national-security anxieties it triggered in the late 1950s brought science education directly into the public consciousness like never before. One of the key federal responses to this crisis was the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, which provided $280 million to equip the nation’s classroom leading to an apparatus boom of unprecedented scale. The resulting era of apparatus manufacture and distribution provides the context for examining how the material components of science classrooms embody important ideas and assumptions about scientific epistemology. This paper examines two important sources of school apparatus at the time, those developed by the university researchers working on the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study and the biology-related materials produced commercially by Ward’s Natural Science Establishment.

John Rudolph is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and affiliated with the Department of the History of Science and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies at UW-Madison. He writes about the history of science education in the United States. He is currently at work on a book that examines portrayals of scientific method in the school curriculum since the late 1800s. His work has appeared in journals such as Teachers College Record, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, History of Education Quarterly, and Isis.