Our SHARED Future: Science, Humanities, Arts, Research Ethics, and Deliberation

FAIN: EH-272526-20

Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ 85281-3670)
Jason Robert (Project Director: March 2020 to present)
Erica O'Neil (Co Project Director: June 2021 to present)

A four-week institute for 25 college and university faculty, to introduce humanists to the scientific, ethical, and social dimensions of bioengineering.

With the development of genome editing, tissue engineering, stem cell research, and neural interface design, bioengineering is dramatically influencing, and potentially fundamentally altering, what it means to be human. Humanists must take a leadership role in guiding the development and use of novel technologies by educating their students to engage in critical discussions and societal deliberations about our conceptions of ourselves, the shape of human society, and the nature of our shared future. Over the course of four weeks, participants will deliberate on these topics through the lenses of ethics, history, philosophy, literature, and film, while experiencing first-hand what it’s like to do science, from editing the bacterial genome using a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit to peering into the inner workings of a non-human primate research laboratory.

Associated Products

Our SHARED Future: Science, Humanities, Arts, Research Ethics, and Deliberation (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Our SHARED Future: Science, Humanities, Arts, Research Ethics, and Deliberation
Author: Jason Robert
Author: Erica O'Neil
Abstract: With the development of genome editing, tissue engineering, stem cell research, and neural interface design, bioengineering is dramatically influencing, and potentially fundamentally altering, what it means to be human. Humanists must take a leadership role in guiding the development and use of novel technologies by educating their students to engage in critical discussions and societal deliberations about our conceptions of ourselves, the shape of human society, and the nature of our shared future. Over the course of four weeks, participants will deliberate on these topics through the lenses of ethics, history, philosophy, literature, and film, while experiencing first-hand what it’s like to do science, from editing the bacterial genome using a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit to experimenting with neuromodulation techniques to improve cognitive performance.
Date Range: Monday June 12th to Friday July 7th, 2023
Location: Life Sciences C Room 202 and Life Sciences E Room S-04, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
Primary URL: https://cbs.asu.edu/neh-summer-institute
Primary URL Description: Link to the NEH Summer Institute recruitment page, hosted by ASU's Center for Biology and Society.

Our SHARED Future: Lessons from an NEH-funded Summer Institute for collegiate faculty (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Our SHARED Future: Lessons from an NEH-funded Summer Institute for collegiate faculty
Author: Jason Scott Robert
Abstract: The National Endowment for the Humanities funds Summer Institutes as professional development opportunities convening higher education faculty from across the nation to deepen our collective understanding of significant topics in the humanities and enrich our capacities for effective scholarship and teaching. In Summer 2023, a colleague and I ran such an Institute for 10 faculty and advanced graduate students. In this presentation, we provide an overview of and lessons learned from our four-week, intensive, residential program focused on “Our SHARED Future: Science, Humanities, Arts, Research Ethics, and Deliberation”. With the advent of genome editing, artificial intelligence, tissue engineering, stem cell research, and neural interface design, the massively interdisciplinary fields that comprise bioengineering are dramatically influencing, and potentially fundamentally altering, the very matériel of humanities scholarship: human nature and the human condition. Despite the focus on bioengineering, our Institute was very much designed and run by humanists and for humanists precisely because of the challenges bioengineering affords us. Following the 2018 report of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education: Branches from the Same Tree, we agree that the humanities, when properly integrated into science and technology education, serve important pedagogical and civic purposes. But this is not enough. Typically, such integrative efforts focus on bringing the humanities into STEMM. In our Institute, we flipped the dynamic: we integrated STEMM into the humanities so as to help realize the ambition of a genuine liberal arts education for the 21st Century. Given the current and future potential of bioengineering to impact domains far beyond the laboratory, it is imperative that we all have the resources to participate in well-informed, critically e
Date: 10/3/2023
Conference Name: Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum

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