When Scientific Pursuits and Social Justice Campaigns Clash, Who Wins and Who Loses?

February 13, 2018

Particularly since the election of President Trump, we often think about attacks on science coming from the political right. Yet it’s often been the case in the last few decades that academic scientists have been subject to shut-down attempts by those on the political left who worry that “dangerous” research could harm people with historically-oppressed identities. What are the risks of trying to limit research, and why should social justice advocates care about those risks? Dr. Alice Dreger will draw from her work on this subject as an historian of science and as a person who has been on both sides of the battles between activists and researchers.

Alice Dreger

Historian of medicine, science, and sex

Alice Dreger, Ph.D., is an historian of medicine, science, and sex, an advocate for patients and medical research subjects, and a mainstream writer. Her last book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship, received praise in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Nature, and beyond. Her work has been published in many venues, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, WIRED, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and her TED talk, “Is Anatomy Destiny,” has been viewed over one million times. She is currently co-editing a book for Cambridge University Press, Bioethics in Action, and working on a project that uses a citizen-journalism model for local news to promote media literacy from the ground-up.

Free and open to the public.