Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, October 24, 2016, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Pierce Hall, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

"'Three Scientists Walk into a Barricade…' Expert Mobilization in Two Boston-area Social Movements"

Speaker:

Scott Frickel, Associate Professor of Sociology and Environment and Society, Brown University; Community Engagement Core Leader, Brown Superfund Research Program.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Contact:

Shana Ashar
shana_ashar@hks.harvard.edu

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.

Abstract:  

Interactions between social movement organizations and scientific, legal, and other experts have broad consequences for under-resourced urban communities. Yet studying mobilized experts in systematic ways has proven difficult. We investigate whether and how different kinds of experts engage Greater Metro Boston’s environmental and community development movements. Building on previous studies of “expert activism”, this talk summarizes findings from analysis of a stratified random sample of 691 experts working with or on behalf of 134 Boston-area social movement organizations (SMO). Our analysis shows that 1) SMOs invest heavily in expertise, but that the nature of these collaborations and the proportion of expert representation varies by movement and by SMO income level; 2) differences in the structure of mobilized expertise may be explained by the political logic of environmental and community development activism; and 3) a wide range of universities, colleges and professional schools around the world “feed” experts into local social movements, but in ways that are shaped importantly by geography and by the differential dynamics of academic and professional labor markets. These results help us motivate and outline a political sociology of experts and expertise.

Biography:

Scott Frickel is Associate Professor of Sociology and Environment and Society at Brown University and Community Engagement Core Leader for the Brown Superfund Research Program. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of knowledge, environment and politics. He is author of Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens and the Rise of Genetic Toxicology and co-editor of The New Political Sociology of Science (with Kelly Moore), Fields of Knowledge (with David J. Hess), and Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration (with Mathieu Albert and Barbara Prainsack). His current book project (with James R. Elliott) is a comparative history of urban industrial land use and socio-environmental change in four U.S. cities called Urbanization’s Changing Nature.