Geoaesthetics: New Orleans, Landscape, and Eros

The success of contemporary society in producing knowledge serves to highlight the breakdown between knowledge production and its use. New Orleans and Katrina offer one example of this breakdown. All the knowledge necessary for acting beforehand was available; the problem was not one of knowledge but of will. Geoaesthetics, appropriating the erotic nature of our relationship to the land, is offered as an inter- and transdisciplinary means for making disciplinary knowledge more pertinent

Argumentos para el equilibrio en la asignación de fondos públicos destinados a la ciencia

Las recientes llamadas de atención desde la comunidad científica para una «cartera más equilibrada, en la inversión pública en ciencia han sostenido la necesidad de complementar los incrementos en los fondos para la investigación biomédica con aumentos en los soportes de las investigaciones físicas, informáticas y de materiales junto con un apoyo reforzado al nivel superior de educación científica. Tales argumentos presumen que la ciencia es un bien público no cualificado. El presente artículo, sin embargo, sugiere que la ciencia puede ser considerada como un bien cualificado que en ocasiones existe en tensión con otros de diferente género. En cualquier consideración de la relación entre la ciencia y el gobierno, y de lo que constituye un equilibrio óptimo en las inversiones públicas en la actividad intelectual, es deseable incluir la perspectiva de las artes y las humanidades junto a la de las ciencias

The impact of Philosophy and the philosophy of Impact: A guide to charting more diffuse influences across time.

Reflecting on the complexity of influence an individual research project can have, Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman and Britt Holbrook try to get a handle on their own research activities and some of their impacts over the last few years. Their project led to a wide variety of results: scholarly articles, a forthcoming book, blogs and a number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. But what exactly is a share or a like? There is a need for further reflection on how philosophy – and the humanities more generally – can achieve broader impacts

Achieving escape velocity: Breaking Free from the impact failure of applied philosophy

As in the sciences, the humanities also feel the pressure to demonstrate societal relevance. Applied philosophy is a natural place to look. But how has it fared in terms of having an impact? Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman, and Kelli Barr are investigating the impact of philosophical work on both the STEM disciplines and society. Historically, philosophers have not been particularly self-conscious about how their insights are being taken up outside the academy. They argue the problem is not what they say, but to whom they are speaking and where

Peer Review and the Ex Ante Assessment of Societal Impacts

Article discussing peer review and the ex ante assessment of societal impacts

The Promise and Perils of Transformative Research

This report is on the workshop 'Transformative Research: Ethical and Societal Implications'. Workshop conversations cluster under the four headings of the history and definitions, promotion, evaluation, and integration of transformative research

Philosophy Matters - Examining the Value of Knowledge

This paper discusses the University of North Texas' (UNT) Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity (CSID), where philosophers continue to examine the value of knowledge. The authors also discuss one example of CSID's work with the Comparative Assessment of Peer Review (CAPR) project. CAPR is a four-year project (2008-2012) studying the changing nature of peer review processes across six U.S. and foreign public science agencies. CAPR is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation's (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program

Comparative Assessment of Peer Review (CAPR): EU/US workshop on peer review: Assessing "broader impact" in research grant applications

This is the report of a workshop focusing on the use of broader societal impacts criteria as part of the review process at the European Commission. There is both a historical account and some thinking about how 'impact' ought to be incorporated into Horizon 2020 (the funding scheme formerly known as FP8). Since the US NSF is also currently rethinking the details of its merit review process, and since there is an interesting comparison between NSF's and the EC's approaches to impact, the authors have also included a focus on NSF's Broader Impacts Criterion. The workshop was both a research opportunity (under SciSIP grant #0830387) and an effort to use that research to help inform policy for science (in terms of informing peer review models)

Introducing a Policy Turn in Environmental Philosophy

This article discusses policies in environmental philosophy