ptmacdon

Mar 5, 2024

Climate Justice in a Time of Expansive Climate Coloniality

Amidst growing ecological crises, escalating climate-induced disasters, and increasing losses and damages from climate change, the need to confront systems that perpetuate and exacerbate such harms appears to be a unanimous global desire. Yet that is not the case. I have argued in recent years that climate coloniality disrupts simplistic narratives of climate justice. Climate…

Jun 5, 2023

Ariana Frazier and Alisa Andrews Named Spring 2023 Patterson Fellows

Our Spring 2023 Bob Patterson Interdisciplinary Studies Fellows, Ariana Frazier and Alisa Andrews, graduated as a double major in Africana Studies and Self-Design with a concentration in “Public Health: Health Equity Promotion” and as a double major with a bachelor of arts in Science, Technology, and Society and a bachelor of science in Agricultural Science respectively.

Feb 6, 2023

Abdlh Antabli Named Spring 2022 Patterson Fellow

Our Spring 2022 Bob Patterson Interdisciplinary Studies Fellow, Abdullah Antabli, graduated with a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature, with a concentration in Arabic Studies.

Jan 31, 2023

Are innovation systems stacked against equity?

There is growing awareness that our innovation system reflects and sometimes even reinforces social inequity and injustice. Marginalized communities rarely experience direct benefits from innovation investment. Structural biases are built into devices like facial recognition and the pulse oximeter, while many life-saving technologies are inaccessible to those who need them most. In response, governments, philanthropic…

Jan 10, 2023

Sabrina Hurtado Named Fall 2022 Patterson Fellow

Our Fall 2022 Bob Patterson Interdisciplinary Studies Fellow, Sabrina Hurtado, graduated in summer 2022 with a bachelor’s in Arts Studies, with a concentration in Visual Arts, and also earned a minor in Arts Entrepreneurship.

Mar 8, 2021

Indigenous Science and Technology Studies, Governance, and Decolonization

with Dr. Kimberly TallBear, University of Alberta Like traditional Science and Technology Studies, the new field of Indigenous STS studies the cultures, politics, and histories of non-Indigenous science and technology efforts. In addition, it studies Indigenous-led science and technology, including knowledges classified as “traditional.”  Indigenous STS refuses the purported divide between scientific and Indigenous knowledges,…

Feb 6, 2020

Our Attention Should Not Be For Sale

with Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillOur personal, psychological, social and religious profiles are being distributed on a larger scale than we know. For years Dr. Zeynep Tufekci has researched the impact of social networks on social change and the threat of unchecked data collection and exploitation by those in power.…

Mar 29, 2019

A Just Anthropocene? Water, Climate, Community, and Resilience

What can we learn from environmental recoveries over the past century, as we face new interconnected challenges from climate change, synthetic chemicals, and forest change? In her new book on Lake Superior, the world’s largest and fastest warming lake, Nancy Langston describes several significant conservation success stories in the past half century: the recovery of forests…

Mar 19, 2018

Calling Bull: Data Reasoning in the Digital World

Do you know whether the TED talk you watched last night is bull — and if so, can you explain why? Can you see the problem with the latest New York Times or Washington Post article fawning over some startup’s big data analytics? Can you tell when a clinical trial reported in the New England Journal or JAMA is trustworthy, and when it…