Abstract
Engaged scholarship is an intellectual movement sweeping across higher education, not only in the social and behavioral sciences but also in fields of natural science and engineering. It is predicated on the idea that major advances in knowledge will transpire when scholars, while pursuing their research interests, also consider addressing the core problems confronting society. For a workable engaged agenda in science and technology studies, one that informs scholarship as well as shapes practice and policy, the traditional terms of engagement must be renegotiated to be more open and mutual than has historically characterized the nature of inquiry in this field. At the same time, it is essential to protect individual privacy and preserve government confidentiality. Yet there is a scientific possibility for and benefit to introducing more collaborative and deliberative research approaches between scholar and subject in ways that will not violate these first-order ethics. To make the case, this article discusses the possibilities and perils of engaged science and technology scholarship by drawing on our own recent experiences to conduct and apply STS research while embedded in the National Science Foundation. Brief accounts of these experiences reveal the opportunities as well as the challenges of engaged scholarship. They also provide lessons for those fellow travelers who might follow the authors to this or other like host organizations with ambitions of increasing fundamental knowledge about and applying research to the policies, programs, and decisions of the scientific enterprise.
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Notes
Boundary organizations have different meaning and function in each of the social worlds they inhabit. For NSF this means that academics perceive it as a repository of research support for their fields of science that is guided, by academics and according to academic principles, to allocate those resources for the advancement of scholarship in their field. From a federal perspective, however, NSF is an agency charged with advancing the public good through investments in research and related activities that bring measurable gains in well-being, competitiveness, and international stature.
About half of NSF’s scientific staff are not permanent federal employees but are “rotators” of some sort, on limited-term appointments, typically from universities or research organizations. The fraction of rotators is higher at the higher levels of NSF management.
Examples of interdisciplinary research programs include Human and Social Dynamics, Coupled Natural and Human Systems, and Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability to name but three recent examples. Others can be found at http://www.nsf.gov under the “cross-cutting programs” tab. The IGERT program, which currently spends about $12 M per year on interdisciplinary graduate education (and is highly competitive), is the major training effort. And NSF’s annual expenditures for “major research equipment and facilities construction,” a separate line-item account in the agency budget, has been about $250 M per year.
For example, from 2002 to 2007 the fraction of NSF awards that mentioned some variant of inter- or multi-disciplinarity among their keywords rose from 6 to 10% (Melanie Roberts, personal communication).
In August 2011 the National Science Foundation announced an award of nearly $30 M to the University of Maryland to create and operate a center for socio-ecological synthesis, which would extend the transformative effort from ecology to the wider spectrum of environmental sciences.
This bold justification is stated explicitly in NSF’s annual budget. LIGO, the gravity wave detector that will cost about $400 M when completed, is justified not only as a test of the theory of general relativity but also as a down payment on the creation of the field of gravitational astronomy (NSF FY 2008 Budget).
In its application of PART, OMB asks agencies to answer 25 questions, organized into four categories: (1) what is the purpose and design of the program? (2) what strategic planning has been done, and how? (3) how is the program managed? (4) what are the program’s results? (General Accountability Office 2005, p. 4).
A charrette is an academic exercise, first used at the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, which presented students with a problem in design that they were nineteenth expected to solve in a limited amount of time. The exercise is named after the charrette, or small cart, which was wheeled down the aisle to collect their completed drawings.
The electronic correspondence on this topic in our files extends over 13 single-spaced pages, beginning with an initial inquiry on February 9, 2004 (a week after we received official notice of the award) and ending May 17, 2004. It would be infelicitous and inadvisable to reproduce the complete correspondence here, but we quote portions of the exchange verbatim for their value as example and evidence. In view of the move toward engaged STS scholarship and SciSIP, we would expect such impasses to become increasingly common, until someone finds a way around or through the difficulty. We present some brief excerpts that convey the tenor and substance of the discussion. Your results may differ….
Our initial request to NSF: “We'd like to start by making contact with the …people who are doing the evaluation for NSF….Not sure of the proprieties here, but if they are doing a straightforward evaluation, based on the measures they gathered at Arizona State University, then there is little competition with us and sharing data should not be a problem. It would help us greatly not to redo their inventory, classification, demography, and such of IGERTs.”
After some negotiation over about a month, NSF responded: “I'm certain we will be able to get the lawyers to give you IGERT data … NSF's lawyers may disallow some of your request on the personal identifier side (but not necessarily.) … If we describe it well, I can't think of why the lawyers would object to the project description stuff and most of what you want.”
Another month of back-and-forth exchanges ensued, no data and little progress were in prospect, and so one of us wrote to the other:
“So help me translate this … all I am understanding is: we cannot yet get an answer, there are others in line ahead of us before we get an answer, even if we get an answer we may have to submit something else before we can even collect the data, and the NSF person we’re dealing with is going on detail [temporary assignment in another part of NSF], leaving this in someone else's hands. Is that pretty much it? If this is the right interpretation, what should we be doing other than waiting … I am spending money from this grant on my salary, I assume that's fine?”
By May 17, after further discussions with NSF and a scaling back of our request to the bare essentials, one wrote to the other: “Nothing at all on the NSF request, which is now as simple as we can possibly make it.” We then let the matter drop.
The exact quote is, “We have evidence from some of our fieldwork that there are some IGERT students whose disciplinary technical skills are not up to the level the discipline requires…. We haven’t found the right balance point between enough breadth and enough depth” (quoted in Haag 2006, p. 266).
Legal provisions of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act may be found in 5 USC sections 3371 through 3375, and related regulations can be found in Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), part 5, chapter 334.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to Melanie Roberts and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
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Hackett, E.J., Rhoten, D.R. Engaged, Embedded, Enjoined: Science and Technology Studies in the National Science Foundation. Sci Eng Ethics 17, 823–838 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9307-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-011-9307-x