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SSN seminar: "Right wing open data: Scientific reform in an era of polarization" with Associate Professor Nicole C. Nelson

Please join us for this in-person seminar with Associate Professor Nicole C. Nelson of the University of Wisconsin, hosted by the Deakin Science and Society Network (SSN) and the Melbourne STS Lab. Loup Celllard (University of Melbourne) will be joining Nicole C. Nelson as a discussant after the seminar.

Abstract:

The idea that scientific data, methods, and publications should be accessible to everyone has historically been associated with liberatory, anti-capitalist politics. It may come as some surprise, then, that it was the pro-industry Trump administration EPA that introduced a proposed rule in 2017 to mandate open data practices within the agency. And it may come as even more of a surprise that the editors of multiple prestigious journals, including the open access mega-journal PLOS ONE, came out in strong opposition to the rule. This talk examines the role that conservative-leaning organizations play in the open science landscape. I argue that open data practices have the capacity to shift the longstanding patterns described in the agnotology literature by allowing these organizations to produce competing analyses of influential data sets without needing to produce their own alternative data.

Speaker:

Nicole C. Nelson is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health. Her first book, Model Behavior (2018), is an ethnographic study of how animal behavior geneticists conceptualize and enact complexity in research with mouse models. She is a Collaborating Editor at the journal Social Studies of Science, the founding director of the Health and the Humanities program at UW Madison, and a former scholar in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her current research focuses on the “reproducibility crisis” in biomedicine and its relationship to histories of biomedical and open science research reform.

Loup Cellard is Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society and Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne. Grounded in Science & Technology Studies, media studies and design research, his research is focused on data centers’ ecological impacts and algorithmic accountability.

Details

Date/time: 4 May 2022, 15:30 -17:00

Location: Deakin Downtown, Tower 2 Level 12, 727 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3008

Q&A with the speaker to follow.

If you have any questions, please send to ssn-info@deakin.edu.au