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The CNS-ASU Program RTTA 4: Reflexivity, Assessment and Evaluation Leaders: Erik Fisher, ASU, and Elizabeth Corley, ASU GoalsRTTA 4, implements the integrative agenda of anticipatory governance through activities that CNS-ASU performs with nanoscale science and engineering (NSE) researchers, especially at ASU's Biodesign Institute. It seeks to document the influence of CNS-ASU's research and engagement activities on the knowledge, values and choices of NSE researchers and tracks the participation of natural scientists and engineers in CNS activities. Projects under RTTA 4 include:
Annual InterviewsRTTA 4 conducts annual interviews in late Spring of each year with NSE researchers and students about their experiences with CNS. Interviews find that for both senior faculty and graduate students, high levels of familiarity and involvement with CNS are associated with noted changes in knowledge and emergent changes in practice. Findings from Spring 2008 indicate that some senior faculty and graduate researchers in ASU's Biodesign Institute perceive CNS as a potential influence on the thinking that goes into research and as a potential value provider. Other pre- and post- interviews indicate that D.C. Summer Session students become more comfortable and sophisticated in talking about the societal aspects of their work after the activity. Laboratory Studies and IntegrationRTTA 4 is the programmatic home of CNS's laboratory studies and integration activities. Wetmore and McGregor's integration in the Woodbury laboratory in AY 06-07 focused on a series of meetings and discussions with Woodbury's laboratory group and culminated in a mock hearing on whether the Berkeley, CA municipal regulations on engineered nanomaterials should be adopted by other municipalities. This work led to a publication (McGregor and Wetmore 2009) and to the NSF EESE award on which Wetmore and McGregor are co-PIs. A second early and completed integration activity was Fisher's work in the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) in the DOE's Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, where he trained dozens of DOE personnel and users in the societal aspects of NSE. CNS-ASU collaborates with Lindsay's Center for Single Molecule Biophysics on a $1.1M NIRT award where Fisher acts as an observer, facilitator and lab member, attending lab meetings and interacting with lab members. Fisher organized an April 2008 workshop to explore public values in Lindsay's research. In the Tubes project, CNS-ASU collaborates with a major, use-inspired project in ASU's Biodesign Institute in collaboration with British Petroleum. CNS co-funds Conz and doctoral student Bhadra to observe, interact with project members on relevant societal aspects, and research the societal aspects of the project. To date, Conz and Bhadra have become integrated in the project, conducted two rounds of interviews and jointly designed and operated a focus group. They plan research and intervention activities, including a comparative case analysis with another ASU project and a societal implications workshop with NSE researchers. STIR ProjectTo expand the capacity to both achieve and assess integration, CNS-ASU pursued additional NSF support for the Socio-Technical Integration in Research project (STIR), for which Fisher is PI and Guston is Co-PI. It funds 20 comparative, international, intervention-oriented ethnographies in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Ten doctoral students are learning the STIR protocol to conduct collaborations and assess outcomes. STIR held a January 2009 workshop attended by 16 faculty members (five international, three science/engineering), 14 doctoral students (six international, one physics), and one private sector research manager. As of March 2009, eight of the ten students have begun conducting integration studies. WorkshopsRTTA 4 is the site of several cross-cutting workshops with integrative themes. Selin's November 2007 Medical Diagnostics workshop was both an RTTA 3/1 Scenario Development activity and an RTTA 4 integration activity. CNS-ASU collaborated with Johnston's lab at ASU's Biodesign Institute in a two-day scenario development workshop that identified and explored future visions for the lab's "doc-in-a-box" pre-symptomatic medical diagnostic technology. In addition to the production of the scenarios and a report (Selin 2008), outcomes of the workshop included one graduate student who took the dilemma of detecting diseases without offering cures so seriously that she changed her research from diagnosing an exotic disease to a more common infectious one. In December 2008, CNS-ASU was contacted by a former staffer to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology requesting the full report in order to share it with current PCAST members. Selin also led the October 2008 Visioning Workshop, which involved researchers from across CNS-ASU, including collaborating NSE researchers Woodbury, Lindsay, Posner and Goodnick. The group participated in a scenario building exercise that took RTTA as a social technology and explored what the future of governing new technologies might look like in 2025. Results of the workshop were fed into a CNS-ASU strategic management meeting in November 2008 and are presented in Selin (2008). In February 2009, Wetmore, McGregor, and their colleagues on the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering project held its opening workshop, bringing together senior scholars in the field from across the United States to advise on the program.
RTTA 1: Research and Innovation System Analysis (RISA) |
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