Hugh Desmond, part of Thomas Reydon’s “Agency and Agential Explanation in the Evolutionary Sciences” project, recently wrote, “Personhood, Welfare, and Enhancement” in The American Journal of Bioethics.
Phil Donoghue, PI of the “Chance versus Purpose in the Evolution of Biospheres” project, co-wrote “Evolution of fungal phenotypic disparity” in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
November 22, 2022, 10:00 AM BRT (For conversion, use https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html, choosing Salvador, Bahia - Brazil)
Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84858107395?pwd=S2tmMVpleXNFS2U1NHVnQmJRYjFqUT09
This talk discusses a severe and seemingly inescapable tension underpinning efforts to share and re-use data about plants on a global scale, which are typically regarded as crucial to planetary health. On the one hand, many of those who engage in data sharing are not recognized for their contributions and not consulted when data are interpreted – a situation rife with epistemic injustice, resulting in unreliable biological knowledge and problematic agricultural intervention. Countering such epistemic injustice means making data sharing and modelling efforts more inclusive, thereby allowing for a variety of perspectives on what counts as biological knowledge and acceptable frameworks for agricultural development. On the other hand, the global system of data sourcing and re-use, with its countless contributors and its highly distributed expertise, remains under the powerful knowledge-control regime exercised by agro-tech businesses and data analytics companies, which has been widely critiqued as unjust towards local farmers and biased towards a market-oriented view of agricultural development tied to crop yield. I argue that resolving this tension may involve moving away from the idea of data as an unavoidable starting point for knowledge development, which is part and parcel of contemporary extractivists epistemologies of science. To exemplify my claims, I focus on contemporary efforts to share cassava data, and their history.
Speaker’s biography: Sabina Leonelli is the Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences (Egenis); theme lead for the "Data Governance, Openness and Ethics" strand of the Exeter Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDSAI); and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the international journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review. Her research spans the fields of history and philosophy of biology, science and technology studies and general philosophy of science.
Videos of previous events in the series, Seminar Cycle of the History, Philosophy and Biology Teaching Lab (LEFHBio), are available on the lab's YouTube channel.
