Call for Participants in a Research Group on Science, Civic Legitimacy, and Local Knowledge

Call for Participants in a Research Group on Science, Civic Legitimacy,

and Local Knowledge

The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University, Israel,

and the Israel Association for History and Philosophy of Science are

pleased to announce a new research group in the field of Science, Technology, and

Society (STS) on scientific practices, their legitimacy among various

publics, and the making of local knowledge.

In recent decades, public discussion of scientific and technological

domains has undergone a deep democratization process. Experts' authority to

adjudicate controversial questions has eroded, while non-experts'

legitimacy of participating in scientific debates and decision-making processes

has grown. Following these trends, research on sites of production of

knowledge and technology has started examining the mutual relations between local

non-expert knowledge and credited formal knowledge, as well as

scientific consensus formation processes. We invite scholars whose research deals

with issues such as:

.         Contemporary scientific authority, and the formation of new

bases of  legitimacy;

.         Local knowledge as a political concept;

.         Lay activism and lay participation in science and technology;

.         The integration of local and scientific knowledge;

.         Consensus formation mechanisms and dissent;

.         Scientific controversies, outsiders and rebels.

The group will meet once a month at Tel Aviv University. Leading

scholars from Israel and abroad will be invited to take part in the meetings. A

final workshop is planned, in which group members will present their papers.

We aim at publishing the group members' research papers in a special issue

of a leading relevant journal.

We call for scholars from relevant disciplines to apply to the group.

The relevant disciplines include history, philosophy, sociology,

anthropology, law, science and technology studies, gender studies, and any other

field that studies knowledge generation processes and their outcomes. We

especially encourage young scholars to join the group, including

doctoral students in their ABD stage. Visiting scholars in Israel are also

welcome.

Please send your application by email to safracen@post.tau.ac.il, and

include a short C.V. and a one-page description of your research

project that is relevant to the group.

The group will be administrated by Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, Dr. Anat

Leibler, and Dr. Boaz Miller.