Humanists in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Writing for the Public
Date & time
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As part of the Institute for the Humanities' Year of Humanities & Public Policy, join us for a conversation with Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy professors Shobita Parthasarathy, Paul Courant, Joy Rohde, moderated by Institute for the Humanities director Sidonie Smith.
From the speakers' bios:
Shobita Parthasarathy is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She studies policy and politics related to science and technology, as well as the politics of evidence and expertise in policymaking, in the United States, Europe, and India. She is the author of numerous articles and a book, Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2007). Findings from this book, which compared the development of genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer in the United States and Britain, helped to inform the 2013 US Supreme Court case over gene patents. Her second book, Patently Political: Life, Markets, and Morality in the United States and Europe, is forthcoming with University of Chicago Press. Comparing recent controversies over life form patents in the United States and Europe, it demonstrates how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent systems in fundamental ways. She is starting a new project that aims to develop a better understanding of grassroots innovation in India, which often takes place outside the global marketplace and is low-tech and small-scale, in the hope that it might usefully inform both our theories of innovation and our innovation and development policies. She is a Faculty Affiliate in UM's Science, Technology, and Society and Feminist Science Studies programs. She sits on the Council of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the Governing Council of the Science and Democracy Network.
Paul Courant has served as provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, as associate provost for Academic and Budgetary Affairs, as chair of the Department of Economics, and as director of the Institute of Public Policy Studies (predecessor of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy). He served as a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers from 1979 to 1980. Courant has authored half a dozen books, and over seventy papers covering a broad range of topics in economics and public policy. Most recently, his academic work has considered the economics of universities, the economics of libraries and archives, and the effects of new information technologies and other disruptions on scholarship, scholarly publication, and academic libraries. He is active in a number of national initiatives, including the Digital Public Library of America and the Authors Alliance.
Joy Rohde, assistant professor of public policy, is a historian who works at the intersection of U.S. intellectual and policy history, the history of U.S. foreign relations, and science and technology studies. She is currently working on a book project that explores how ideas about cybernetics and advances in information technology, like research databases and statistical software, impacted the social sciences and policy analysis in the United States since World War II. Joy's first book, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), investigates the Cold War origins and contemporary consequences of the Pentagon’s social research contracting system. At Michigan, Joy is a member of the core faculty in the Science, Technology, and Society Program. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of History. Prior to joining the Ford School, Joy was an assistant professor of history at Trinity University.
Sidonie Smith is the Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the Institute for the Humanities. Her interests include autobiography studies, feminist theories, women’s literature, human rights and narrative, and the future of doctoral studies in the humanities.
For more information, check out: http://lsa.umich.edu/humanities/news-events/all-events.detail.html/3299…