Jenny Reardon is biking through her home state of Kansas talking to farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the prairie about how best to know and care for the prairie. How does one care for the land and the lives it supports in the face of the water running out in the high plains of Western Kansas, and flooding in Eastern Kansas? In the face of towns struggling to survive, and high tech “precision” approaches to agriculture raising new hopes and new concerns? In the face of the on-going powerful force of settler colonialism?
Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome (Chicago University Press, Fall 2017). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from, among others, the National Science Foundation, the Max Planck Institute, the Humboldt Foundation, the London School of Economics, the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and the United States Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Recently, she started a project to bike over one thousand miles through her home state of Kansas to learn from farmers, ranchers and other denizens of the high plains about how best to know and care for the prairie.
Jenny Reardon is a Professor of