Science for Humane Globalism: a degree program

The time has come to integrate my studies into a degree program. Here’s my proposal. It has almost been approved.

You can also see complete documentation, including course information.

Most of the world’s population during the last quarter of a millennium have been forced to confront the consequences of two interrelated phenomena: globalization and industrialization. Presently, the transnational proliferation of weaponry and the catastrophic deterioration of the biosphere demonstrate that these confrontations have been less than successful. What ought to be emancipatory instruments for peace-making and for sustainable, resilient urbanization have instead become tools for precarity, mass murder, and the consolidation of élite power. Science, the core of modernity, has been largely misappropriated, and it is now time to return it to its rightful place.

There is a profound need to provide basic healthcare in the world’s most exploited regions and to enable access to emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification medicine (Carrico, 02007). This project calls for a more helpful way of addressing technoscientific developments and their accompanying costs, risks, and benefits. The bioethical imaginary, plagued for so long by technophobic science fiction, neoliberal “laissez-faire” fundamentalism, and religiously and culturally conservative defenses of “the natural”, is ready for — and is indeed already beginning to experience in the mainstream — a progressive renewal.

The degree program, “Science for Humane Globalism”, enables a constructive conversation between biomedical science and politics, ethics, morals, and esthetics in a globalized world. Its specific aim is to prepare the student for a vocation of politically progressive intervention in the burgeoning interaction between global civil society (defined by Kaldor, 02003, 44 as the intranational and transnational medium for negotiating social contracts between individuals and political and economic centers of power) and the biomedical research community. The program has as its goals i) a strong theoretical foundation in a few crucial disciplines and ii) the opportunity to become conversant in the vocabularies of different communities, e.g., biomedical engineers, political think tanks, international non-governmental organizations, and ethicists, who hold stakes in developing and distributing biomedical technologies.

The coursework is divided into four categories:

Public and private values. The courses in this category attempt to provide training in the most relevant cultural and religious values that bear upon the project of scientific and biomedical development. The history of moral reasoning; social ethics case studies; a review of the faith–reason dialogue from the medieval era to the present, including religion and science; an exploration of the philosophical, political, and literary confrontation with modernity in “Postmodernism”, and a study of the implications of biological and evolutionary thought for esthetics and metaphysics complete this section.

Politics in theory and practice. How are public decisions made? Political science coursework illuminates the theory of legislative, executive, and judicial action and its actual practice in the United States. A survey of American environmental law and policy unravels the process of rulemaking in federal government. A course in mathematical game theory provides a rigorous entry into rational choice theory. Finally, the independent study, “Artifice and Politics”, explores the politics of design, artifice, and technology and the possible political reactions against science for humane globalism.

Global civil society. Seminars in the Global and International Studies M.A. program at the University of California, Santa Barbara prepare the student for a career in global civil society, including international non-governmental organizations. The seminars nurture a sensitivity to the cultural landscape and transnational political forces that characterize the present age of globalism. In addition, a graduate information technology course in the School of Business prepares the student simultaneously to manage a technologically-savvy organization and to understand, by collaborating with fellow students with established careers in various industries, the habits and culture of profit-driven business.

From laboratory to commonwealth. Classroom- and laboratory-based learning introduces principles of biology, surveys the results of biomedical engineering research over the last few decades, and includes a team-based engineering design process for a stent as well as laboratory research on collagen gel micromechanics. The process of commercialization is examined through I.E.E.E. seminars with leading biomedical researchers and entrepreneurs. Knowledge is then put to use for the common good through ethics and policy research in at Science Progress.