DATE: March 28, 2025
TIME: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
VENUE: Buchanan D324, 1866 Main Mall, Vancouver
Speaker
Dr. Heather Douglas, Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University
Dr. Heather Douglas’s work has been pivotal to current debate about the implications of recognizing that ‘value free’ ideals of objectivity are untenable; scientists and their institutions cannot exclude social, contextual values from inquiry and its results. In Science, Policy and the Value-Free Ideal (2009) she focused on questions about the roles values can (and should) legitimately play in science, a line of argument she has since developed in terms of a number of controversial policy issues, including research ethics, scientific freedom and regulation, science funding, and science-informed risk governance.
In her current work Dr. Douglas addresses questions about the role of scientific expertise in the context of democratic policy and decision making. She gave the 2016 Descartes Lectures, The Rightful Place of Science, and she recently published an article on “The Social Contract for Science and the Value-free Ideal” with T. Y. Branch (2024). Dr. Douglas has also edited several collections on science, policy and values, and authored reports on industry funding guidelines and on local decarbonization strategies, including one for the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy.
A Science and Technology Studies Colloquium, funded by the Public Humanities Hub-supported Research Cluster, Reasonable Trust: Fostering Humanities Methods in Public Engagement with Science and Technology.