Is a Democratic Science Possible?, with Myrna Perez

Iris Book Award Presentation and Talk

The Iris Book Award honors outstanding work offering new insights into the meaning of being human in relation to science, religion, and nature. It was established by the Center for Religion & the Human at Indiana University Bloomington in 2019. 

This year's winner is Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) by Myrna Perez, Associate Professor of Classics & Religious Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio University. 

Perez will discuss her research surrounding her prize-winning book and related work in progress. Perez's Criticizing Science offers a history of criticisms of science from the political left and right, while pursuing an ethical question: What would a democratic science look like? Does science itself need to be democratic in order to be part of a democratic society? Her new book project, Little Waldens, pursues a related ethical question at the heart of democratic life: How do we live together when the systems that sustain our lives are implicated in violence?

The question of public trust in science feels newly urgent, but today is not the first time that opposing ends of the American political spectrum have critiqued modern science. This dynamic has historical roots in the early 1970s, when critiques of science emerged simultaneously out of Civil Rights, feminist, and decolonization movements on the left, as well as within the creationism movement of the Christian Right. In Criticizing Science, Myrna Perez follows the public career of evolutionary biologist, political leftist, and anti-creationist Stephen Jay Gould during the final decades of the American twentieth century. Gould believed that denaturalizing scientific objectivity could be part of the greater work of racial and gender justice in the United States. Perez shows the promises and limitations of Gould's view―most famously expressed in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man―that the collective self-reflection on the history of scientific bias would lead to a better, less oppressive science. She argues that we must instead contend with the radical possibilities that are opened by working for a resolutely democratic science.

The award presentation will be followed by remarks from the author and a discussion with Lisa H. Sideris (UCSB), Terra Schwerin Rowe (University of North Texas), and Christiana Zenner (Fordham).

Panelists:

Myrna Perez, Associate Professor of Classics & Religious Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Ohio University

Terra Schwerin Rowe, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Texas

Christiana Zenner, Associate Professor of Theology, Fordham University

Lisa Sideris, Professor of Environmental Studies, UCSB

 

This event is sponsored by the Indiana University Center for Religion & the Human, with funding from the Henry Luce Foundation. This event is co-sponsored by UCSB's Nature, Ethics, and Technology Program and the Walter H. Capps Center.