This off-year ISHPSSB workshop, was held at the Old Fire Station in Woods Hole Massachusetts, USA from May 17-21. The 16 participants came from the USA (10), Canada (3), Spain, Portugal, and Russia (1 each) and included two tenured professors, two post-docs, four independent scholars, and 8 graduate students (most of the latter with travel support from ISHPSSB). We spent four days creating spaces, interactions, support, and connections in formulating plans to extend our own projects of inquiry and engagement around "changing life in times of crisis."
This intentionally broad topic encompassed a wide range of projects: workshops in which epidemiologists would reflect on their personal and professional life course in relation to longstanding and emerging frictions or tensions in their field; development of conceptual tools to fight social injustice rooted in category-based generalizations and explanations; methods to examine the intersection of neo-liberal politics and (for one participant) regulation of biotechnology in the poorer EU countries or (for another participant) menstrual health management campaigns in various regions in the Global South; extending the philosophy of extended mind to “extended sex;” a doctoral proposal in history redesigned to connect toxic chemicals and women’s health issues since WWII as played out in the specific site of New Jersey; the science and politics of extinctions; role of public health research community in reinforcing the superiority of breast milk at the expense of ignoring inequality; an investigative video on weed scientists and invasive species; a multi-year civic science project on how different knowledge communities mobilize information to create change in the face of ocean plastics—and much more.
Activities during the workshop, as they have since 2004 at the annual New England Workshops on Science and Social Change (NewSSC)*, emphasized "connecting, probing, and reflecting" so as to support and learn from each others' inquiries, employing tools and processes such as freewriting, extended autobiographical introductions, office hours, and “five-phase” dialogue hours. (The program, with links that explain the processes used, and evaluations could be accessed via http://sicw.wikispaces.com/newssc14.) The workshop schedule, in brief, included an activity together as a group each morning and again for an hour at the end of the day. In between, time was spent in independent research related to our evolving projects, in conversations, and impromptu mini-sessions. The outcomes included: a) products that reflect our inquiries and plans, conveyed in work-in-progress presentations on the third day and revised in response to feedback so as to be shareable outside the workshop, b) experiences that motivate us to take our individual projects beyond our current scope or level of activity, and c) stock-taking towards developing the workshop format.
Comments expressed in the written and spoken evaluations include: “I now have 15 people I can turn to when I need to.” [This] “is very important work for the people involved and the tools they bring with them into their respective research and communities.” A line of inquiry opened up—“processes that produce crisis” and “heterogeneity and mutual aid” and “which philosophies deal well in practice with messy boundaries?” and how “we tend to stay safe in our areas of interest unless supported through structure an play into other spaces of inquiry.”
The participants are very grateful for the financial support of ISHPSSB, without which many of them would not have been able to attend.
Peter J. Taylor
Organizer of the off-year workshop 2014
* For further reading: Taylor, P. J., S. J. Fifield, et al. (2011). "Cultivating Collaborators: Concepts and Questions Emerging Interactively From An Evolving, Interdisciplinary Workshop." Science as Culture 20(1): 89-10