Univie Summer School 2017 "Genomics: Philosophy, Ethics and Policy"

As an international interdisciplinary program, USS-SWC brings graduate students in close contact with world-renowned scholars. The program is directed primarily to graduate students and junior researchers in fields related to the annual topic, but the organizers also encourage applications from gifted undergraduates and from people in all stages of their career who wish to broaden their horizon through cross-disciplinary studies of methodological and foundational issues in science.

The topic of the two-week course in 2017 is "Genomics: Philosophy, Ethics and Policy". Over the last two decades, genomics has emerged as a powerful site for not just re-configuring understandings and enactments of life, but also for understanding how these conceptions and enactments form in tandem with modes of ordering and governing lives. The two-week course explores conceptual innovations that draw these co-productive processes into view, as well as the histories and philosophies that deepen our understandings of not just genomics, but also our ever elusive efforts to make sense of life.

The Main Lecturers:

Robert Cook-Deegan is a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, and a researcher in ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes. He was previously the founding director of the Center for Genome Ethics, Law & Policy in Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, 2002- 2012, and remained at Duke through June 2016.

Paul E. Griffiths is a philosopher of science with a focus on genetics and development. He is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney and a Domain Leader at the Charles Perkins Centre, a major research institute of the university devoted to interdisciplinary approaches to lifestyle-related disease.

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Science and Justice Research Center at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College in London. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research.

USS-SWC operates under the academic supervision of an International Program Committee of distinguished philosophers, historians, and scientists. Its members represent the scientific fields in the scope of USS-SWC fields of research, make contact to their home universities and will also support acknowledgement of courses taken by the students. USS-SWC is organised every year by the Institute Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna, headed by Friedrich Stadler. (red)