The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (SERRC) consists of 52 members, having diverse intellectual backgrounds and interests, representing 19 countries. Please take a look at our biographies. If you have any questions relating to the SERRC, including submitting a contribution, please contact Jim Collier jim.collier@vt.edu.
Dr. Guy Axtell, Radford University, US, gsaxtell@radford.edu
Dr. Thomas Basbøll, Copenhagen Business School, DK, thomas@basboell.com
Nathan Bell, University of North Texas, US, xnathanbellx@gmail.com
Dr. Anya Bernstein, Harvard University, US, abernstein@fas.harvard.edu
Dr. Adam Briggle, University of North Texas, US, Adam.Briggle@unt.edu
Dr. Laura Cabrera, University of British Columbia, CA, cabreral@mail.ubc.ca
Dr. Jim Collier, Virginia Tech, US, jim.collier@vt.edu
Dr. Finn Collin, University of Copenhagen, DK, collin@hum.ku.dk
Dr. Sarah Chan, University of Manchester, GB, sarah.chan@manchester.ac.uk
Emma Craddock, University of Nottingham, GB, emmacraddock1@gmail.com
Trevor Croker, Virginia Tech, US, tcroker@vt.edu
Dr. Fred D’Agostino, University of Queensland, AU, f.dagostino@uq.edu.au
William Davis, Virginia Tech, US, widavis@vt.edu
Dr. Marianne DeLaet, Harvey Mudd College, US, Marianne_DeLaet@hmc.edu
Dr. Susan Dieleman, Dalhoisie University, CA, susan.dieleman@dal.ca
Josh Entsminger, University of Edinburgh, UK, josh7@vt.edu
Dr. Martin Evenden, National Taichung University of Education, TW, evendenmartin@hotmail.com
Dr. Melinda Fagan, Rice University, US, mbf2@rice.edu
Dr. Robert Frodeman, University of North Texas, US, frodeman@unt.edu
Dr. Steve Fuller, University of Warwick, GB, S.W.Fuller@warwick.ac.uk
Dr. Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Aberystwyth University, GB, inh3@aber.ac.uk
Morteza Hashemi, University of Warwick, GB, S.M.Hashemi-Madani@warwick.ac.uk
Sreejith K K, University of Hyderabad, IN, sreejith997@gmail.com
Dr. Eric Kerr, National University of Singapore, SG, erictkerr@gmail.com
Dr. Janja Komljenovič, University of Ljubljana, SI, janja.komljenovic@guest.arnes.si
Dr. Joan Leach, University of Queensland, AU, j.leach@uq.edu.au
Clarissa Ai Ling Lee, Duke University, US, clarissa.lee@duke.edu
Veronika Lipinska, Lund University, SE, veronika.lipinska@googlemail.com
James MacFarlane, University of Warwick, GB, J.MacFarlane@warwick.ac.uk
Dr. Carlo Martini, Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, FI, uni.c.martini@gmail.com
Dr. Jonathan Matheson, University of North Florida, US, j.matheson@unf.edu
Dr. Fabien Medvecky, University of Otago, NZ, fabien.medvecky@otago.ac.nz
Dr. María G. Navarro, Spanish Council for Scientific Research, ES, ordinaryreasoning@gmail.com
Dr. Stephen Norrie, Loughborough University, UK, sjenorrie@gmail.com
Dr. Phil Olson, Virginia Tech, US, prolson@vt.edu
Melissa Orozco, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, MX, meg_orozco@hotmail.com
Victoria Peake, University of Warwick, GB, victoriapeake3@gmail.com
Dr. David Budtz Pedersen, Aarhus University, DK, davidp@hum.ku.dk
Dr. Patrick J. Reider, University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg, US, PJR23@pitt.edu
Dr. Verusca Reis, Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), BR, verusca.reis@gmail.com
Dr. Francis Remedios, Independent Researcher, CA, francisxr28@gmail.com
Dr. Adam Riggio, McMaster University, CA, adamriggio@gmail.com
Diana Rishani, American University Beirut, LB, diana.rishani@gmail.com
Dr. Gregory Sandstrom, European Humanities University, LT, gregorisandstrom@yahoo.com
Dr. Frank Scalambrino, University of Dallas, US, fscalambrino@udallas.edu
Dr. Elena Simakova, University of Exeter, GB, E.Simakova@exeter.ac.uk
Dr. Elisabeth Simbürger, Universidad Valparaíso, Valparaíso de Chile, CL elisabeth.simbuerger@uv.cl
Todd Suomela, University of Tennessee, US, tsuomela@utk.edu
Miika Vähämaa, University of Helsinki, FI, miika.vahamaa@gmail.com
Dr. Mark West, University of North Carolina, Asheville, US, westinbrevard@yahoo.com
Emilie Whitaker, University of Birmingham, GB, e.m.whitaker@bham.ac.uk
Pedro Saez Williams, University of Warwick, GB, petesaez@me.com
Short Biographies
Dr. James Collier, Founding and Acting Editor
Jim Collier is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society and an Affiliated Member in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought, at Virginia Tech. His scholarly interests center on the place, features and conduct of philosophy in Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS, Collier contends, remains circumspect in its attitudes toward philosophy. Consequently, STS does not possess a fully realized, coherent philosophy to call its own. The contention, of course, assumes that STS needs and indeed wants a unique philosophy. Specifically, Collier takes up his position through research in social epistemology, an approach to knowledge as a collective, governable achievement, and in the nascent philosophy of science and technology studies. Collier’s dissertation outlined aspects of a philosophy of STS and, after a detour into research involving scientific and technical communication, he returns to this work. In part, this work analyses issues involving normativity, case study methodology (problems involving empiricism in STS — observation, localism, inference and universality), interdisciplinary and the status of STS as an academic field, the governance of knowledge including, finally, how we determine significance. He retains interest in scientific and technical communication through the theoretical and practical concerns raised by work as the Executive Editor of the journal Social Epistemology and the founding, in 2011, and editing of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.
Homepage: http://www.collier.sts.vt.edu/
Dr. Susan Dieleman, Book Review Editor
Susan Dieleman received her PhD in Philosophy from York University, Canada in 2011, and her MA in Public Policy and Administration from Ryerson University, Canada in 2012. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women’s Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and Secretary of the Richard Rorty Society. Her areas of specialization are feminist philosophy, pragmatism, and philosophy of public policy. In her current research, she expands the scope of the pragmatist feminist approach she developed in her dissertation and in recent publications to interrogate and develop issues that arise at the intersections of social epistemology, deliberative democracy, and philosophy of public policy. Some questions that reside at the intersections of these three areas that she is interested to pursue include: Should public deliberation contribute to public policy decisions and, if so, how? How can we navigate the tensions between democracy and expertise? What is the epistemic role of diversity and inclusion in policy decision-making? What are the philosophical underpinnings of disagreement and its resolution? What is the function of testimony and trust in developing and implementing public policy? She is also exploring related issues arising from recent initiatives in the field of K* (knowledge mobilization, knowledge management, knowledge transfer, etc.).
Homepage: www.susandieleman.com; Email: susan.dieleman@dal.ca
Dr. Patrick J. Reider, Editor
In 2011, Patrick Reider received his PhD in Philosophy from Duquesne University. His research primarily concerns contemporary analytic thinkers such as Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell, and the manner in which they borrow from Kant and Hegel for the expressed purpose of refining their integrated models of conceptual experience, reason, knowledge, and agency. Patrick is interested in what it is to be human, as outlined in their reworking of German idealism, and in particular, the central role norms play in the obtainment and execution of knowledge, reason, and cognition. He is currently working on the problem of preserving Greek and Roman conceptions of happiness and virtue in light of the normative pluralism of historicism and multiculturalism. He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.
Trevor Croker, Associate Editor
Trevor Croker is a third year PhD student in the Department of Science and Technology in Society (STS) program at Virginia Tech. His primary research interests revolve around the nexus between digital technologies and their manifestations in physical space. Trevor’s research draws upon historians of technology, infrastructural studies, and STS scholars. His current dissertation project looks at the historical origins, and contemporary concerns, with cloud computing and distributed networking. Internet architecture and access are central to his project. Trevor approaches his research with a background in sociology. He earned his undergraduate degree in this field at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dr. Elisabeth Simbürger, Former Editor
Elisabeth Simbürger was the online-editor of the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective from July 2011 – February 2012). She is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile. Elisabeth’s research focuses on the idea of the university and its discourses in Higher Education, geared towards a critique of the neoliberal university and its impact on academic work and the intellectual development of disciplines. She is particularly interested in visual epistemologies and has recently carried out a visual ethnography of Higher Education advertisement in public spaces (metro) in Santiago. Between October 2011 and October 2014 Elisabeth is carrying out research on academic identities and practice in neoliberal contexts of Chilean Higher Education, looking at the disciplines of sociology, education and biology (funded by the Chilean National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Fondecyt)). Elisabeth studied sociology at the universities of Vienna, Bielefeld and Warwick. She holds a Mag. in sociology from the University of Vienna, Austria and an MA in Comparative Labour Studies and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick, UK. Her thesis (supervised by Steve Fuller) was about British sociology and sociologists and how they practise or compromise their own disciplinary aspirations as sociologists.
Homepage: http://udp.academia.edu/ElisabethSimbuerger/About
Dr. Steve Fuller
Steve Fuller is the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. A Professor of Sociology at Warwick since 1999, Steve founded the journal Social Epistemology in 1987 and published the first edition of Social Epistemology in 1988. Social epistemology is an interdisciplinary field that brings the resources of the humanities and the social sciences to bear on philosophical and policy questions concerning the production of knowledge.
Homepage: Steve Fuller’s Homepage
Twitter: @profstevefuller
Dr. Guy Axtell
Guy Axtell is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at Radford University and serves as the Editor of JanusBlog: The Virtue Theory Research Forum. JanusBlog has links to many of his recent and forthcoming papers in his research areas of epistemology and analytic and comparative philosophy of religion. Teaching interests include epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of science, STS and philosophy of religion. When not teaching or writing, “Dr. Ax” often seeks his ataraxia through biking, tennis, skiing, windsurfing, and curiously speaking about himself in the third person. Ataraxia: Ancient Greek term for psychic balance and “freedom from disquiet.”
Dr. Thomas Basbøll
Thomas Basbøll receieved his PhD in 2004. His dissertation was about what Steve Fuller has called “the profound ambivalence of Western philosophers towards the equation of knowledge and power”. Believing that he has overcome this ambivalence, at least in his own case, he has been working as a “resident writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School more or less ever since. He thinks of himself as a practicing social epistemologist in a rigorous sense: not holding an academic post himself, he helps academics situate their knowledge in their respective discourses, i.e., he helps them meet the demand to “publish or perish”. Thomas may one day return to academia, and does do some critical scholarship on the side, but so far he is happy to think of himself as a modern-day, professionalized Socrates: a midwife, or at least handmaid, to the sciences.
Nathan Bell
Nathan Bell is currently a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas. He holds a MA in Philosophy from UNT, as well as a Bachelor of Science, with majors in Philosophy and Business Administration, from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He is currently a Teaching Fellow at UNT, and has previously been a Research Assistant for the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity. Much of his work focuses on environmental hermeneutics and narrative, including a hermeneutic conception of envrionmental identity and how it mutually influences and is influenced by various elements of media and society. He is particularly interested in using hermeneutic and narrative theories to look at how different disciplines and different modes of knowledge production interact and influence/are influenced by society and culture.
Dr. Anya Bernstein
Bernstein holds a BS in Linguistics from Georgetown University, an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in Anthropology from New York University. From 2010 to 2012 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows. As an anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, Bernstein’s main work has been on the changing geopolitical imaginaries of mobile religious communities across Eurasia. Her forthcoming book, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (Chicago, edp 2013), explores the transformation of Buddhist practice among a Siberian indigenous people known as Buryats, foremost through their post-Soviet renewal of transnational ties with their fellow co-religionists across north and south Asia. As a visual anthropologist Bernstein has directed, filmed, and produced several award-winning documentary films on Buryat Buddhism and shamanism, including Join Me in Shambhala (2002) and In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006).Bernstein is currently at work on two projects. The first one deals with religion, secularism, and censorship in Russia. In this project, Bernstein attempts to think through the moral dilemmas that have animated passions behind recent post-Soviet culture wars, particularly conflicts between contemporary artists, the Russian Orthodox Church, and perceptions of society at large. The second project explores the interplay between imaginaries of immortality and industries of life extension in the Soviet Union and postsocialist Russia, combining historical archival and ethnographic methods to investigate the politics and poetics of dead and dying bodies, personhood and its attribution and contestation, and the role of medicine and religion in organizing life and death in Russia.
Dr. Adam Briggle
Adam Briggle is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies and a Faculty Fellow in the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. He holds a PhD in Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado and served for three years as a postdoctoral fellow working on the philosophy of technology at the University of Twente in The Netherlands. His research and teaching interests focus on the intersections of ethics and policy with science and technology. He is author of A Rich Bioethics: Public Policy, Biotechnology, and the Kass Council (2010, University of Notre Dame Press), co-author of Ethics and Science: An Introduction (2012, Cambridge University Press), and co-editor of The Good Life in a Technological Age (2012, Routledge Press). For the past three years, he has served as a field philosopher working with a diverse range of stakeholders around the issue of natural gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing in the city limits of Denton, Texas. He has written about fracking in Slate, Truthout, Science Progress, and The Guardian, and he also has a contract with Liveright Publishing Corporation to publish a book in 2015 tentatively titled Let a Thousand Gas Wells Bloom: A Field Philosopher’s Guide to Fracking. He is Vice President of the grassroots Denton Drilling Awareness Group, which is currently leading the Frack Free Denton campaign to bay hydraulic fracturing in Denton’s city limits.
Dr. Laura Cabrera
Laura Cabrera is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. Laura received a BSc in Electrical and Communication Engineering from the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico City, a MA in Applied Ethics from Linköping University in Sweden, and a PhD in Applied Ethics from Charles Sturt University in Australia. The topic of her PhD was “The Role of Nano and Neurotechnology and the need for a different enhancement paradigm”. Laura’s current research focuses on neuroethics as well as ethical issues around human enhancement and emergent technologies. She works on projects that explore the attitudes of the general public regarding cognitive enhancement as well as regarding brain stimulation technologies.
Dr. Sarah Chan
Sarah Chan is a Deputy Director and Research Fellow in Bioethics and Law, Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Her current research interests include the ethics of new biotechnologies and their impact on humans and our concept of humanity: in particular, genetic manipulation, enhancement and interspecies technology. Prior to this, she conducted work on the EU-CLEMIT project involving the ethics of “creating and redesigning human beings,” including ethics in gene and cell therapy, artificial and assisted reproductive technologies, genetic modification and enhancement; the ethics of stem cell research; and regulation of new technologies and public policy. She has previously worked on regulation of embryo and stem cell research in Australia and public attitudes and education regarding gene technology. She conducted laboratory-based research in molecular biology examining the genetics of male reproduction, and trained as a lawyer specialising in legal theory, health care law and scientific regulation
Finn Collin
Finn Collin is a professor of philosophy in the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. He received the mag. art. degree in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen in 1974, a Ph.D.-degree in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978, and the Danish Doctorate (dr. phil. degree) in philosophy from the University of Copenhagen in 1985. His research interests comprise philosophy of science, with special attention to the social sciences and the humanities, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is concerned about the situation of the humanities in modern “knowledge society”, and about the use of the knowledge produced by those disciplines. A current research interest is the relationship between the classical humanities and the emerging neuro-evolutionary paradigm in the human sciences. His book publications in the areas mentioned above include Theory and Understanding. A Critique of Interpretive Social Science (Oxford 1985), Social Reality (London 1997), Meaning, Use and Truth. Introducing the Philosophy of Language (Aldershot 2004, with Finn Guldmann), Konstruktivismus für Einsteiger (Paderborn 2008), and Science Studies as Naturalized Philosophy (Dordrecht 2011). He was a member of the Danish Research Council for the Humanities in 1998 –2002, of the Board of the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 1999-2004, and has been a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters since 2003.
Emma Craddock
Emma Craddock graduated in 2010 with a first class undergraduate degree from the University of Warwick in sociology. She has since been awarded ESRC 1+3 funding to do a Masters in Research Methods in sociology followed by a PhD in Sociology. As part of the MA, Emma is taking a philosophy of research module during which she will be encountering many of the complicated concepts involved in the field of social epistemology. The focus of her PhD will be the ways in which political activist groups in Nottingham (UK) have utilised the internet in order to mobilise their opinion against public spending cuts. As part of this she intends to explore how political involvement has transformed with the rise of new technology and how specifically a local public sphere has been constructed via the use of new media. This will also involve contrasting ‘new’ media with ‘old’ media, in terms of their influence on the public sphere and political opinions. She is also interested in research concerning the position of and the future of humanity as a concept, as well as the sociology of religion and the social theory of the enlightenment and secularisation. In her undergraduate dissertation, she studied the (in her eyes, problematic) relationship between the British Humanist Association (BHA) and the New Atheist movement, looking at the (clashing) intellectual backgrounds of both and interviewing the chief executive of the BHA as part of this. She has also written a textbook review for the Times Higher Education magazine in May 2010. Emma is looking forwards to learning from the other members of the collective and to being challenged by complex ideas and theories.
Dr. Fred D’Agostino
I am Professor of Humanities and Executive Dean of Arts at The University of Queensland. My work straddles political philosophy and epistemology, in line with Steve Fuller’s observation that “the philosophy of science is nothing other than the application of political philosophy” to the scientific community. Some recent work is Naturalizing Epistemology (Palgrave, 2010), The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy (co-edited with Gerald Gaus, 2013), and, reporting preliminary results on my most recent project, “Disciplinarity and the Growth of Knowledge”, Social Epistemology, vol. 26 (2012). Other significant work is Free Public Reason (Oxford UP, 1996) and Incommensurability and Commensuration (Ashgate, 2003). I have edited the journal Politics, Philosophy and Economics and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. My interests are at the intersection of analytic and critical techniques of the philosopher and empirical and theoretical approaches of the social sciences. I taught philosophy of social science for twenty years before coming to UQ in 2004.
William Davis
William Davis is a graduate student in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Virginia Tech. He received his B.A. in Literature from Virginia Tech where he also minored in philosophy. He completed an M.A. in Literature from Northern Arizona University, but since then has strayed from that part of the humanities. His acquaintance with STS began when he was teaching in Mexico City (2006-8) and met colleagues who were pursuing degrees in a related area and who introduced him to some authors in the field. As he began reading essays and articles by Albert Borgman, Andrew Feenberg, Langdon Winner and Carl Mitcham, he was fascinated by how technology, broadly construed, affects epistemology and what it means, generally speaking, to know something. His focus at Virginia Tech has been specifically on subjects as philosophy of science, philosophy of technology and most recently on the relationship of knowledge and expertise in the sciences and other disciplines. Of particular interest are issues of governance through forms of states, institutions, as well as other communities, and their implications for disciplines like the sciences, philosophy and sociology. A specific example of a concerning question is: What is the role of the academic in public debate, and how should we (people in general) make judgments about issues that affect numerous heterogeneous stakeholders? Trust clearly plays a large role in this negotiation, but how do we reach this when we start from such varied positions and have seemingly (or, perhaps, actually) conflicting goals? William is giving special attention to the conflicting views regarding social epistemology provided over the last 25 years by Steve Fuller and Alvin Goldman.
Dr. Marianne de Laet
Marianne de Laet is an anthropologist/STS person who teaches (about) practices of knowing at a small liberal arts college for science and engineering in southern California. As an anthropologist of knowledge-making practices, she studies scientists and engineers-in-the-making. One might say that at Harvey Mudd College, she lives with her tribe. Marianne’s (research) life has brought her into the spheres of knowing and knowledge-making in anthropology and astronomy, intellectual property and appropriate technology, extremely large telescopes, training practices in dogs athletes and scientists, and, currently, the conjunction of tasting and knowing in the eating body. In her personal life (inasmuch as personal and research can be separated) she lives with a person and two very large dogs, who will all show up, periodically, in her posts, as they all have tremendous influence on her work. She is very interested in collaboration, collaboratories, collective authorship, and communal imaginations and in her view and experience such collaborations are not limited to those among humans. Among the many courses she offers is a new one, called “thinking about knowing,” which has to be further developed — having fallen into the trap of making it too much like a traditional epistemology 101 course in its first rendering. Marianne would like to direct it towards thinking and knowing as collaborative action rather than the concentrated effort of the individual genial mind.
Website: http://www2.hmc.edu/~delaet/index.htm
Josh Entsminger
Josh Entsminger is a first year masters student at University of Edinburgh pursuing a degree in International Relations. His primary research interests, as they concern epistemology, bear upon the circulation of narrative structure and social beliefs in the production of inference, intuition, and deliberative inquiry. His work currently deals with the applied practices of cultural transmission and heritage, group violence analysis, standpoint epistemology, and the common terms of interpersonal and interinstitutional practices.
Dr. Martin Evenden
Martin Evenden finished his PhD in Sociology at the University of Warwick in 2010, which combined the insights of Spinoza and critical realism (the British philosophical movement associated with the work of Roy Bhaskar) in focusing on the nature of freedom and selfhood. Currently, his main interests lie in how knowledge can be positively used to have emancipatory effects at the level of and be made more accessible to the individual, critical rationalism (in particular issues that inform judgemental rationality – which explanations are better on the balance of existing evidence) and issues pertaining to reflexivity.
Dr. Melinda Fagan
Melinda Bonnie Fagan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rice University. Her research focuses on biomedical experimental practice and philosophical conceptions of objectivity and evidence. Before joining the Rice philosophy faculty in 2007, she studied History and Philosophy of Science (Ph.D. 2007, Indiana University), Philosophy (M.A. 2002, University of Texas at Austin) and Biology (B.A. 1992, Williams College; Ph.D. 1998, Stanford University). Her research in biology focused on colonial organisms (plants and protochordates) and evolution of histocompatibility. At Rice, she teaches courses in philosophy of science, theory of knowledge and social epistemology. Her current research is on philosophy of stem cell biology, with emphasis on experimental evidence for models of biological development, and the role of collaborative interaction in biomedical research. She has authored over a dozen journal articles and book chapters, and is currently writing a book about stem cell research (see http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~mbf2/ for links to articles and CV).
Dr. Robert Frodeman
Robert Frodeman is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies at the University of North Texas. He specializes in environmental philosophy, science policy, and questions concerning interdisciplinarity. Holder of advanced degrees in philosophy (a PhD, from Penn State) and geology (a masters from the University of Colorado), he has held positions at the University of Texas, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Colorado. He served as a consultant for the US Geological Survey for eight years, was the 2001-2002 Hennebach Professor of the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, and was an ESRC Fellow at Lancaster University in England in the spring of 2005. Frodeman is Editor in Chief of the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity as well as co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Enviromental Ethics & Philosophy.
Dr. Inanna Hamati-Ataya
Inanna Hamati-Ataya received her PhD in Political Science from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France, in 2006, and has since served as Head of Department and Assistant Professor of Political and International Theory at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and as Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield, UK. She joined Aberystwyth University as a Reader in International Politics in November 2013. Inanna’s research focuses on the socio-historical and ideological foundations and conditions of knowledge-production in the social sciences, specifically in the field of International Relations (IR). She is especially interested in how exogenous factors have shaped the field’s (meta)theoretical orientations and debates, on issues ranging from objectivity and explanation to power, ideology, and values. This interest was first shaped by her PhD thesis on the place and role of values in the epistemic postulates of Realism in IR theory, and has since developed into a sustained exploration of sociological reflexivity as both a critique of idealist, analytical epistemology and philosophy of science, and as an alternative foundation for social-scientific knowledge and critical scholarly praxis. The problem of the socio-political and institutional obstacles that undermine the development of reflexivity itself has also become an important aspect of this investigation. Inanna is currently working on an EC-funded project that aims to investigate the macro- and micro-social factors and processes that govern the production, organisation, and transmission of knowledge in IR in the UK, combining a socio-historical analysis of the development of the field within its national academic and political environments, with an ethnographic investigation of IR scholars’ dispositions, worldviews, values, and practices. This project aims not only to illuminate the socio-political and material factors that shape scholarly standpoints and practice, but also to interrogate the socio-political condition, as well as the role and responsibility, of academics within the public sphere.
Webpages: http://www.shef.ac.uk/politics/staff/inannahamatiataya and http://sheffield.academia.edu/InannaHamatiAtaya
Morteza Hashemi
Morteza Hashemi is a final year PhD researcher at the sociology department of the University of Warwick. His research fields are philosophy of social sciences, sociology of knowledge and science studies. Morteza’s main interest in his PhD thesis lies in how the Christian theology shaped modernity. Considering the theological roots of the modern age, he is intellectually more on the side of a tradition of thinkers such as; Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, John Milbank and Steve Fuller. More specifically in his thesis, he searches for the theological foundations of the modern atheist conceptions of humanity. Moreover in the past ten years, Morteza has been an active blogger and journalist in two languages; Persian and English.
Homepage: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/pg/currentphds/phdstudents/current/syrjab/
Twitter: @morteza_hm
Sreejith K K
Sreejith K K is currently a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. He is working under the supervision of Prof. Prajit K. Basu. Sreejith holds a BSc in Botany, and MA and MPhil degrees in Philosophy. His M.Phil thesis is titled “Teasing out the Social in Socializing Science: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Social Dimensions of Objectivity and Justification in Science”. He holds a Juniour Research Fellowship (JRF) from Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR). Sreejith’s primary interest is in Virtue Epistemology. He is also interested in Social Epistemology and General Philosophy of Science. His ongoing doctoral research critically examines the view in Virtue Epistemology that “knowledge is belief whose success is ‘creditable’ to the believer”. Two important concerns which he is trying to address therein are: (1) the argument that testimonial knowledge can be cited as a counter example to the virtue epistemological view of knowledge, and (2) the worry that Virtue Epistemology might be in conflict with some of the central tenets of Social Epistemology. His occassional reflections on general topics in philosophy can be found on the blog: http://epistemepuzzles.wordpress.com/. You can also find him on academia.edu here: http://uohyd.academia.edu/SREEJITHKK
Dr. Eric Kerr
Eric Kerr received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in 2013. Prior to that he trained as a lawyer at the University of Aberdeen. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society cluster at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds a joint appointment at the Asia Research Institute and Tembusu College, NUS. Eric’s research addresses issues that arise in the intersection between epistemology and the philosophy of technology. He is currently working on a project entitled ‘Analysing Knowledge Cultures in Engineering in East Asia and Europe’ which is based on fieldwork he conducted with petroleum engineers in South-East Asia.
Janja Komljenovič
Janja Komljenovič holds a degree (University Diploma in Psychology) from University of Ljubljana. Soon she became interested in higher education and works in the field from two perspectives for several years: policy and research. Her policy and practical work began already while she was a student representative being involved in national and European higher education policy making, especially in the Bologna process and quality assurance in higher education. After graduating she was employed at the European University Association where she made a study on higher education financing in Europe and contributed to several others projects. Between 2009 and 2011 she was an advisor to the Minister of higher education, science and technology where she was involved in national policy making. Her main accomplishments were work on legislative changes for quality assurance in higher education (2009) and National Programme for Higher Education 2011-2020 (2010-2011). She was also national representative to the Bologna Follow-up Group and EQAR. Now she is employed at the University of Ljubljana working on institutional development and quality. The higher education field caught also her academic attention and she returned to the university. Currently she is a PhD Student in Education Policy and works as a part-time researcher at the Centre for Educational Policy Studies, University of Ljubljana. There she is a part of a research project team on “Differentiation, equity and productivity in expanded higher education systems – an internationalization perspective”. Her PhD is on ‘idea of a university’ and university autonomy mentored by Pavel Zgaga (University of Ljubljana) and co-mentored by Steve Fuller (University of Warwick). Her research interests are mainly: concept of a university, university autonomy, the role of universities in modern society and new circumstances for higher education. She is particularly looking into a university as an institution where old expectations (such as knowledge production and institutional support replacing genetic social reproduction) and new expectations (corporate university and world class initiative) clash.
Dr. Joan Leach
Joan Leach is Convenor of Science Communication at the University of Queensland in Australia and Deputy Head of the School of English, Media Studies, and Art History. Joan has had positions at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) and Imperial College London before moving to the ‘top 100′ University of Queensland. She was editor of Social Epistemology from 1997-2010. Her own work has centred on applied social epistemology in science communication, science popularisation, and the history of persuasion in knowledge contexts, better known as rhetorical theory. Her worry is that STS (science and technology studies) has evacuated the normative, mainstream epistemology has tried to eliminate the social, and sociologists have forgotten about knowledge. Social Epistemology should fix all that.
Clarissa Ai Ling Lee
Clarissa Ai Ling Lee will be receiving her PhD in Literature from Duke University, with concentration on science and technology studies, comparative media studies, and feminist epistemologies, in September 2014. Her dissertation has been an attempt at doing a thorough interdisciplinary (in the strictest sense of the word) interrogation of the ontologies (and therefore also the epistemologies) of quantum physics of high energy particle physics with the peculiar quirks of hard science fiction, and its theories of genre, therefore leading to a result that does not quite fit into any disciplinary mold, marking the dissertation as a failure in terms of a discipline-based product. However, that experiment in epistemology (and ontology) has unleashed a rich array of answers and further questions she had not formerly considered, which she hopes to pursue post-doctoral. As she transitions from being a graduate student into becoming an early career researcher, she is interested in pursuing projects that straddle the theoretical-abstract with real world problem solving. She would like to pursue, more deeply, inquiries into intellectual history and the history of science as part of her strategy for delving further into the global history of epistemology. Her ‘expert’ blog can be found at scandalousthoughts.wordpress.com and she tweets as @normasalim. She hails from Malaysia.
Veronika Anna Lipinska
Veronika Anna Lipinska holds a BA(Hons) in Law and Sociology from the University of Warwick (England). Currently she is pursuing an LLM in International and European Tax Law at Lund University, Sweden at the Department of Economics and Management where she does research into VAT and tax design. Her research interests are centred around social and legal theory, jurisprudence and tax design. She has been heavily involved in Model United Nations during her undergraduate years heading the Warwick MUN Society and the biggest UN crisis conference in Europe – WarMUN 2012. She has chaired academic conferences all over Europe and won numerous academic awards. Her focus is on the issue of ‘future generations’ and the consequences of contemporary policies on the development of human populations, technology and ecology. She is a strong advocate of the state as a guardian of freedom and to expand intellectual horizons as well as being the facilitator of science and entrepreneurship. She is a co-author (with Steve Fuller) of The Proactionary Imperative (Palgrave Macmillan).
James MacFarlane
James MacFarlane is postgraduate student currently studying for the MSc in Science, Media and Public Policy within the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick (England). For his final year undergraduate thesis (BA Hons Sociology with Social Policy Specialism) he examined the variable standing of both Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and lay health knowledge in recent UK public health policy. This work considered the extent to which ‘alternative’ healing modalities and experiential knowledge of illness might be taken as either competing or co-extensive with biomedical orthodoxy, while reflecting upon the challenges of epistemic pluralism as a means to overcome scientistic reductionism in public health-care. Since continuing to postgraduate study his focus has included 21st century molecular bio-politics, the reconceptualisation of ‘progress’ as a normative ideal amid accelerating sociocultural processes of late-modernity, and STS’s role in the anticipatory governance of post-normal science and technology. His immediate interests are split between self-identification and expression in hyper-technological societies, non-human capacities for agency/personhood, and the blurring of identities between humans, animals and machines. After completing his MSc he plans to begin pursuing a Ph.D supervised by Steve Fuller investigating how affiliative bonding to the non-human might correspond with ‘proactionary’ versus ‘precautionary’ attitudes toward risk, an area of inquiry which he hopes will supplement future ‘trans’ versus ‘post’ human discourses.
Dr. Carlo Martini
Carlo Martini is a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Centre of Excellence in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (TINT in short). He completed his Ph.D. at Tilburg University in 2011, under the supervision of Stephan Hartmann and Pieter Ruys, and later lectured at the Philosophy & Economics program at the University of Bayreuth. His primary interests are in philosophy of science and epistemology, particularly in philosophy of economics and social epistemology. He is currently working on problems of expertise and expert deliberation in economics and the social sciences. He also works on epistemic disagreement and the formation of consensus, and he recently started running some experiments on on biases in judgment.The core of Carlo’s research is in philosophy, but his academic formation and research are interdisciplinary. At Tilburg University he wrote a Ph.D. thesis in collaboration with the Department of Economics and Business Administration, and he studied economics and public policy, besides philosophy, at UCLA and the University of Padova. He has been a visiting student first, and then researcher, at several universities, including St. Andrews, UCLA, UPenn, and the University of Sydney.
Dr. Jonathan Matheson
Jonathan Matheson is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville Florida. He received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2005, and his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Rochester in 2010. His research interests are in epistemology and on the epistemic significance of disagreement in particular. His research has focused on questions like the following: Can reasonable people disagree? What is the rational response to disagreement? Are we justified in believing controversial propositions? When is it reasonable to defer to the majority? He is also working on related issues concerning theories of epistemic justification and the nature of epistemic defeaters. Homepage: http://www.unf.edu/~j.matheson/
Dr. Fabien Medvecky
Fabien Medvecky is at the University of Otago (NZ), at the Centre for Science Communication. He has degrees in economics and philosophy and completed his PhD at the University of Sydney on philosophical issues in climate change economics. He is currently working on a number of issues at the intersection between science, values and knowledge. Of particular interest are questions around the value of knowledge the rights to acquire knowledge, and the scope and limits of science and science communication as a both a producer and a distributor of knowledge.
Dr. María G. Navarro
María G. Navarro is a postdoctoral Juan de la Cierva fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council where she carries out a research project entitled ‘Ordinary Reasoning and Folk Epistemology: Towards the Logic of Interpretation’. At the moment she is visiting scholar at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham (UK). After finishing her doctoral thesis on philosophical hermeneutics and argumentation theories and publishing her book Interpretar y argumentar reviewed in six scientific journals, she spent two years as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam. As a result of her interest in the epistemic foundations of interpretative processes, she has been appointed as affiliated researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Spain. She has received funding to make research stays in the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg i/B, the Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Management in Valencia, the Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence at the Complutense University, and the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include philosophical hermeneutics, argumentation theories, studies in abduction, and social epistemology. You can read some of her articles in Philpapers and visit her folk epistemology blog.
Dr. Stephen Norrie
Stephen Norrie has several degrees in sociology from two UK universities (York and Warwick), and is currently reworking his PhD thesis into publishable form. His intellectual project concerns the reconstruction of social theory and political action through a re-examination of the Marxist idea of an Aufhebung of philosophy, a methodology which he considers closely connected to a reflection on the connection between forms of thought and their institutional locus, leading to an interest in theory of the university as an important political site, especially in relation to a reconstructed theory of socialism. His thought can be located in the tradition of evaluating Marxism relative to its German Idealist spawning ground, as exemplified by the work of Georg Lukács, and continued (though with every step forward matched by at least one backwards) by the Frankfurt School. He has also been influenced by Alvin Gouldner’s reflexive sociology and ‘Marxist’ critique of Marxism, Roy Bhaskar’s ‘critical realism’, Descartes’ theory of method, neo-Trotskyism and other recent developments in Marxist theory, neo-Durkheimian theories of ritual, and Foucault’s work on material practices—and would like to find time for a fresh look at Freud. The underlying aim of his work is to expose the current institutional barriers which prevent apparently critical knowledges from serving the cause of genuine social enlightenment and the organisation of effective alternatives to a capitalist system that, far from exhibiting the ‘smartness’ of markets lauded by neoliberals, instead increasingly approximates the brainless lurches of a zombie haplessly wandering towards inevitable splattery annihilation, simply because it doesn’t know how to do anything else.
Dr. Phil Olson
Phil Olson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society and a faculty affiliate in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) Ph.D. program at Virginia Tech. Phil completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Emory University in 2007. Phil’s research centers on ethics and epistemology—and particularly on the ways that moral and epistemic responsibilities and values intersect. His work is influenced by classical American pragmatism (especially John Dewey) and by virtue theories (both ancient and contemporary). His recent publications include studies in feminist epistemology and pedagogy, applied virtue ethics, epistemic virtue and value, and the sources of epistemic normativity. One of his current research projects seeks to understand how “epistemic burdens” ought to be distributed within epistemically just communities. Phil has taught graduate courses on virtue epistemology, contemporary epistemology, feminist epistemology, bioethics, American pragmatism, and neoliberalism and society, as well as numerous undergraduate courses on epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and ancient Greek culture.
Melissa Orozco
Melissa Orozco is a PhD student at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filósoficas of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM). She studied Social Psychology at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (UAQ), Mexico and then completed a Master degree in Commercialization of Science and Technology at CIMAV and UT-Austin, USA. She is currently developing a research project about the Converging Technologies Agenda in Mexico. Her particular interest is in the development of empirical studies and improving people’s understanding of social psychology of science. As part of her activities related to this, in the last two years she has been coordinating a psychology of science group (GIPSYCYT) at UAQ.
Victoria Peake
Victoria Peake holds a BA (Hons) in Sociology from the University of Warwick, towards which her dissertation explored the value of art practice as a method of sociological enquiry, by exhibiting a painting depicting the cyborg aesthetic of human enhancement technologies and recording viewer responses. She found that visual representation was a powerful tool for getting to people’s preconceptions about a future of uncertainty. Moreover, overall, viewers obtained the main points and debates within the transhumanist discourse, even when no prior knowledge was present and no verbal or written explanation was provided for the piece. Victoria’s interests therefore lie with transhumanism and debates around human enhancement, bioart, and the role of the aesthetic in the pursuit or the production of knowledge.
Dr. David Budtz Pedersen
David Budtz Pedersen is Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Co-Director at the Humanomics Research Centre, Aarhus University (Denmark). His background is in philosophy of science and science policy studies. He holds PhD, MA and BA degrees from University of Copenhagen and University of Vienna, and was Visiting Scholar at New York University in 2009. He is former Speical Adviser to the Danish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education (2005-2012). He has organised and facilitated numerous international workshops and conferences and written and co-written a number of papers on social epistemology. In his dissertation “Political Epistemology” (mentored by Finn Collin) he focused on questions regarding the epistemic analysis of political institutions and the (hidden) epistemology of neoliberal university reforms. He belives epistemic realism can be reconciled with the normative study of scientific institutions. In short, this strategy consists in accepting the influence of institutional factors on knowledge production while at the same time recognising that social aspects do not impede scientific progress but might – under the right conditions – promote it. Lately, his research has focused on the study of the humanities, including the policies underlying the current neuro-turn in the human sciences. His latest publications include the book How to manage the knowledge society? (da. Hvordan styres videnssamfundet?) with Jan Faye.
Homepage: http://mapping-humanities.dk/
Twitter: @HumanomicsMap
Dr. Francis Remedios
In 2000, Francis Remedios received his PhD from Higher Institute of Philosophy, Leuven University, Belgium. The title of his dissertation was “A Critical Examination of Steve Fuller’s Social Epistemology.” In 2003, his book Legitimizing Scientific Knowledge was published. He has published several papers on social epistemology. He is also on the editorial board of the journal Social Epistemology. His current research is on neoliberalism and its impact on science and the problem of humanity. As an independent scholar, Francis is pleased to be a collective member.
Homepage: http://members.shaw.ca/francisr/pub.html
Verusca holds a PhD in Philosophy from Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), a Masters Degree in Philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a Degree in Social Sciences (UFRJ). Her main research field is philosophy of science, especially its relation with sociology of science and science studies. In her PhD thesis, she undertook a critical evaluation of the ethos of science in the new mode of knowledge production. This mainly focussed on the work of the physicist and epistemologist John Michel Ziman as a starting point to understand what has been called “post-academic science” and its consequences for epistemology. She currently holds a post-doctoral research position at UERJ with a scholarship from the Brazilian funding agency CNPQ (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico). Her current research has two lines of interest: on the one hand, investigating the changing values in academic research systems in what has been defined as “commodification of academic research” (or “post-academic science” in Ziman’s view). She is interested in the relationship between various conceptions of ‘science’ and ‘university’ and what we consider as ‘knowledge.’ On the other hand, she continues her research on Ziman’s work, who thought that the strength of science was its ability to produce public knowledge cooperatively. She has presented papers in many congresses in Brazil and also abroad.
Her full CV can be seen on: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?metodo=apresentar&id=K4768463U6
Dr. Adam Riggio
Adam Riggio completed his PhD in Philosophy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His thesis research, which he is searching to publish as a book, involved grounding the more implausible, but most interesting, ideas of environmental ethics in an ontology where movement is understood as affectivity, and all bodies are assemblies of parts and fields of force all the way down. Adam’s interest in social epistemology (both the journal and the sub-discipline) comes from his work tracing the historical development of academic and intellectual disciplines, and understanding the normative habits that keep them separate or bring them together. This is a central idea underlying many of his diverse intellectual projects. His planned post-doctoral work is in political philosophy: a critique of radical revolutionary politics of both the right and left (fascism, communism, anarchism), how despite the wide divergence in the content of their doctrines, they share a vision of time itself that prioritizes the ideal Eden of a distant future over the lives and concerns that surround them in the present. Adam is crazy enough to imagine a discipline called Philosophy that in the twenty-first century welcomes the disciplines from which it has segregated itself over the last hundred years back into its conversation, and thinks that kind of conversation would be the most creative philosophy has been in a long time. Here is Adam’s writing blog and he can be found on twitter: @adamriggio.
Diana Rishani
Diana Rishani is a student currently pursuing a double degree in Philosophy and Anthropology at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She aims to later on hold a PhD in Developmental Anthropology having the analysis of power relations and their connection to society and knowledge production as the central topic, as well as questioning the nature of the ‘default’ in which knowledge stems from. As well, her interests extend to the process of aesthetic conceptualization in relation to the human condition and its evolution.
Dr. Gregory Sandstrom
Gregory Sandstrom’s education has been in three fields: sociology, economics and philosophy. Undergrad degrees were done in Canada (University of British Columbia & Wilfrid Laurier University), Masters in the Netherlands (Vrije Universitet), and PhD (called Кандидат Социологических Наук) in Russia (St. Petersburg State University/Sociological Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences). Most recently, he completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Autonomous National University of Mexico in Mexico City at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems working on themes of development and knowlege production. He first came across Steve Fuller’s work in connection with the evolution and intelligent design ‘controversy,’ which was demonstrated most practically in Fuller’s participation in the Dover, Pennsylvania school board trial, as science studies expert witness for the defense. His research on Fuller’s work includes the new sociological imagination, collaborative science, philosophy and religion discourse and most recently, the provocative notion of Humanity 2.0. Some social epistemology themes Gregory explores are the biological challenge to social science, contrasting ‘red’ and ‘green’ approaches to culture and society, (neo-)Darwinism & other related -isms, the notions of academic freedom and knowledge production in the electronic-information age, and Fuller’s curious notion (2006) of ‘zoocentric misanthropy.’ The major focus of his work since 2003 has been to begin overturning evolutionism-as-ideology in the human-social sciences, moving beyond it with ‘human extension’ as a reflexive contribution in sociology. Gregory works at the Belarusian exiled European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania and has been awarded a fellowship by the Lithuanian Research Council.
Homepage: http://ehu-lt.academia.edu/GregorySandstrom
Human Extension Blog: http://humanextension.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @risengrisha
Dr. Frank Scalambrino
Frank Scalambrino is an affiliate assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas in Texas, USA. He earned his PhD in philosophy from Duquesne University in 2011, an MA in philosophy with a concentration in Ethics/Practice from Kent State University, and a BA in psychology from Kenyon College, where he studied sociology with John Macionis. He has also completed graduate coursework toward an MA in Education. He has worked in multiple community clinic settings including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and was the founding director of Emergency and Community Psychiatric Services covering two counties of Ohio. He has presented his academic work internationally, and has received recognition for teaching excellence in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Texas. Regarding Social Epistemology, Dr. Scalambrino writes at the intersection of society and technology, especially issues including solidarity, irony, collective imagination, image management, redemptive memory, public interest and social engineering. The contemporary figures informing his work include Richard Rorty, Heidegger, Jung, Foucault, and Deleuze. He is currently working on an edited volume to be titled Social Epistemology and Technology.
Dr. Elena Simakova
Elena Simakova, currently a Lecturer in Innovation at Exeter University, holds a DPhil in Management Studies degree from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. After Oxford, she took a three year postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University studying the brokering of collaborations and university-industry knowledge and technology transfer around emerging technologies. Elena also holds a BSc and MSc in biophysics and radiation ecology (1996) from the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI). Her interest in the social dimensions of science and technology was prompted by her professional experience in international public communications for an intergovernmental non-proliferation programme (ISTC) based in Moscow, Russia. She received the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Chevening scholarship to pursue an MSc in Science, Culture and Communication at the University of Bath (UK) in 2001/2002, and a three-year Science and Technology Studies studentship from the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford (2002-2005). As a visiting scholar, she conducted research at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2008; the Centre for Sociology of Innovation (CSI), Ecole des Mines, Paris in 2006; and at the Virtual Knowledge Studio (VKS, formerly Nerdi) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Amsterdam in 2002. Between April and October 2011 she served as project manager of the exploratory internationalisation project between the University of Exeter and the European University at St Petersburg (EUSP) to develop the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Russia. Between 2012 and 2017 she is serving as Scientific Director of the Policy Analysis and Studies of Technologies (PAST) Centre at the National Research Tomsk State University, Russian Federation, supported by the George Soros | Open Society Foundations (OSF) under Higher Education Support Programme (HESP).
Todd Suomela
Todd Suomela studied philosophy and English and Yale University and completed an MS in information science at the University of Michigan in 2007. He is currently a Ph.D candidate at the University of Tennessee in information science and communication. His major research interests are citizen science, expert communication, and science and technology studies. He is currently working on a dissertation project to study the communication frames and information exchanges between scientists, project managers, funders, publicists, and journalists involved in citizen science. He has taught classes in information technology and the philosophy of the commons. Before returning to school he worked in information technology, retail, consulting, and education. He has volunteered as an instructor for a free school, a museum docent for the Walker Art Center, and an interpreter at the Science Museum of Minnesota. His interests include creativity, libraries, classification, ontology, epistemology, ethics, interpretation, sociology, psychology, astronomy, meteorology, programming, business, music, postmodernism, juggling, metaphor, mutation, and more. Much more can be found online at his personal website http://toddsuomela.com.
Miika Vähämaa
Miika Vähämaa works as researcher and lecturer in social psychology and communication at Department of Social Research at the University of Helsinki, Finland. In the final stages of receiving his PhD, Vähämaa holds Master´s in Social Science from the University in Helsinki and recently submitted his doctoral dissertation on “Groups as Epistemic Communities: Reconsidering the Social Psychology of Knowledge” for academic review at the University of Helsinki. Vähämaa´s research interests focus on the intersection of social psychology of knowledge, communication and social epistemology. He believes that much of social science has crossed epistemic issues, even developed important aspects of social epistemology, but then failed to promote the epistemological aspects of the results gained in social scientific research, resulting in the expansion of the formal logical epistemology of natural sciences to take over the field of “epistemology” even in social science. Vähämaa´s theoretical work pursues to map the existing contributions of social psychology and communication to the field of social epistemology. In his empirical work Vähämaa keeps focusing on the function of social epistemologies in practice. He has studied by quantitative social science methods epistemic communities around mathematics, attitudes towards science across ethnic groups, as well as epistemic groups in international political communication. Vähämaa´s work has been published in Social Epistemology, Nordic Studies in Mathematics Education, Javnost – The Public, Kulttuurintutkimus and Nordicom Review. He has also conducted non-academic survey research to the Prime Minister´s Office in Finland. Parallel and prior to academic career Vähämaa has worked as a journalist in leading Finnish print and television media as well as a musician at the Uusi Teatteri – a Finnish speaking theatre in Stockholm. Upon graduating from high school in small-town Finland, Vähämaa joined the Finnish army and returned to civilian life as a lowest ranking sergeant of Finnish special forces. He then commenced his studies at the University of Helsinki. Inresistant to the enchanting world and its adventures “out there” Vähämaa has also studied medicine at the Moi University in Western Kenya, physics and biology at the University of Lund in Sweden and vocals the University of North Carolina at Asheville. At Asheville Vähämaa met Dr. Mark D. West, a member of Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, with whom he started to work together on papers tapping into social epistemology. Their collaborative efforts have now lasted a decade and Dr. West worked as Vähämaa´s dissertation advisor.
Dr. Mark West
Mark West is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville in its mass communication department, which he has chaired twice. He took his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina, and his dissertation, on the effect of media coverage of the Tet 1968 offensive in the Vietnam conflict, won two international awards. He has written five books, numerous book chapters, articles and presentations, and is presently completing a book on the linkages between Kantian perspectives on communication and modern empirical research. He is interested particularly in the question of doxastic voluntarism — do we have a choice about what we believe? West was a participant in the research projects which led to much of the modern legislation concerning television violence as profiled in the Presidential Commission on Television Violence, devised the statistical analytic methods used by television networks for real-time analysis of presidential debates, and has published extensively on the relationship between television violence and the levels of fear in communities. West is a member of numerous scholarly organizations, including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the Southern Association for Public Opinion Research. West has served extensively as a consultant for governmental agencies on the analysis of large-scale bodies of textual materials, such as the real-time evaluation of extremely large databases of emails or related materials. West is a Perl programmer, user of Linux, and has experience in Forth, SNOBOL 4 / Icon, and other string-oriented languages. Prior to pursuing an academic career, West was a print journalist.
Emilie Whitaker
Emilie is a final year doctoral researcher at the Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham. She has an MSc in Public Policy from Queen Mary, University of London and a BA Hons in History and Sociology from the University of Warwick. Prior to commencing her doctoral research Emilie held policy roles within local government, the Department of Health and a leadership role within the children’s voluntary sector. Her policy work centred on challenges facing children, young people and families in contemporary Britain and the nature of the policy response. Emilie has guest lectured at Queen Mary, University of London on the sexualisation of childhood, on teenage pregnancy and on the moral aspects of British sex education. Building on her research and policy experience Emilie is interested in the interplay between knowledge and action, theory and practice. Her ethnographic work centres on social work and how paradigmatic and practice knowledge is constructed, enacted and challenged in everyday frontline encounters between professionals, families and institutional actors. Her recent work has focused on a reclaiming of Aristotle’s phronesis and the importance of this for re-grounding conceptualisations of praxis in UK health and social care. She is interested in changing notions of expertise in an era of the marketization of health and social care. Emilie has a developing interest in transhumanism. In particular, she is interested in the inter-relational aspects of our transhuman future particularly how we love, the nature of family and matters of intimacy. More immediately she is interested in exploring how young people today conceive of the future, where they draw their ideas from and how they feel about the increasing intermeshing of the human body with technology.
Emilie tweets at: @Whitaker_Emilie
Pedro Saez Williams
Pedro Saez Williams is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology in the University of Warwick. His intellectual project is concerned with the metaphysics of authority, particularly cognitive authorities that purport to transcend nature and/or the social, and the relationship between cognitive authority, the body, and the involuntariness of doubt. Originally trained as a lawyer, Saez Williams has been involved in political activism, political work and legal practice before deciding to engage in graduate study. He holds a LL. B. from the Universidad Iberoamericana, an M. A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Vienna, and an M. Phil in Sociology from the University of Cambridge.
