Projects
The Institute combines theoretical work with action-oriented community-based pursuits. Our projects provide technical assistance to citizens, undertake original scientific research, and foster new forms of science literacy.
Quantum Teleportation
Four times in his career as a physicist, Herb Bernstein has proposed experiments on fundamental quantum mechanics which were performed to show his theoretical predictions were correct— some of them important for launching new fields, including neutron interferometry and quantum information. New research addresses the question raised by Albert Einstein in his some of his last “anti-quantum mechanics” writings. More information coming soon.
Genomics with Care
By Mike Fortun.
Forthcoming from Duke University Press.
In Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are driven to encounter structural double binds that are impossible to resolve, and yet are where scientific change and creativity occur.
Economics as IF People Matter
“Economics as if people matter” is a term coined by Herb Bernstein. It well expresses a central problem of modern economics. Much of economics is obsessed with the politically motivated defense of various abstractions––the market, free trade, efficiency, comparative advantage, globalization, et alia. Collectively, these abstractions are often dubbed “the neoliberal consensus.” In light of the manifold failures of the neoliberal consensus, IIS is supporting David Gruber in a project titled Economics as IF People Matter. Read more…
PECELab
PECELab develops the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), open source software supporting virtual research and learning environments that encourage the preservation and sharing of data (especially qualitative data), collaborative analysis and interpretation, and creative research communication. PECELab advances research, education and technology to support open knowledge production across disciplines, generations, and geography, and to support collaborative research and action between university researchers and communities. Learn more about and download PECE.
Currently, PECELab runs multiple instances of PECE supporting different researchers and their community partners working on where scientific and technological matters intersect with communities facing environmental The Disaster-STS-Network is home to the Next Generation Radiation Governance project and the Formosa Plastics Global Archive. STS Infrastructures supports resources like the STS Across Borders project, and Open Research Data: Experimenting Towards a Publishing infrastructure. The Asthma Files hosts the Khaosiung Archives, documenting community work against industrial pollution in Taiwan. Materials from the Institute’s own history will soon be archived on PECE.
IIS Founding Fellow Mike Fortun directs the PECE Lab.
IIS Participation in Scientific Research
As we pursue our new direction of direct service to innovative Science & Art creators and knowledge practitioners, the IIS continues remarkable participation (and participant observation) in scientific research. IIS has long had a role in basic physics inquiry. Remarkably enough this has led to our association with not just one but two Nobel prize winners in physics. Read more…
Past Projects
MilWaste
We joined technical review committee at Westover Field which is the world’s largest air reserve base. After a while the guidance came out that the technical committees should become restoration advisory boards with lots of citizen/residents participation. They chose us to be the non-profit convener and establisher of RAB: Restoration Advisory Board.
They had 43 different sites that were polluted with all kinds of chemicals. They were exempt from environmental laws and even had one site that had radioactive waste in it. It was quite a polluted dangerous situation there. We became pretty prominent in Military Waste clean up. We had a small influence on some of the clean up work. We co-sponsored a regional meeting at Amherst college and held three National Conferences.
Recoding Life
The institute supported Mike Fortun’s research on gene manipulation and the ethics of genetic engineering. We were watching, commenting and a part of the biologists considering what rules for laboratory safety and ethics of scientific research should be adopted as they went forward with molecular biological research that got into changing the genes themselves. Mike was heavily involved in studying DeCode Genetics and Kari Stefanson.
Postdoc Scientists Fellowship
We tried two years in a row to get funding for post docs who would do some extra research that had a Reconstructive Knowledge analysis and design of research project in their field. They would come together two weeks a year and we would train them in Bohm Dialogue. You can actually find the three types of people in most research settings but they are not connecting. You can find the role of the citizen in the building – janitor or staff in the school. And they may be able to use the Bohm Dialogue training to hear from more people and be more democratic. When we couldn’t get funding we split the Dialogue component and moved forward on Bohm Dialogue as a project of its own.
Bohm Dialogue
Bohm Dialogue emerged from the post doc scientist fellowship in June, 1995. We failed to get funding for the fellowship. So we took Bohm Dialogue and got a lot of sponsors, but by this time, Bohm had died. His widow and his coworker agreed to work with us. We had a weekend with 42 people from the Five Colleges who got trained in Dialogue and started a Dialogue Group. We had a lot of funding from unusual groups who were interested in the cross between doing good in society and science itself. Most of the people who stayed with the project were students and it kept meeting monthly as a mostly student offer for 25 years.
Reconstructive Theoretical Physics
In the early days of the development of New Ways of Knowing and its emergence from Reconstructive Knowledge, Herbert Bernstein had foreseen —and written— that there would be some entanglement between morality and physics. It turns out that quantum teleportation was an embodiment of this: an amazing effect of the free choice experimenters have to decide what to measure. Where he had hoped it would illuminate the experimenter’s role in creating microscopic reality, it turns out that quantum teleportation already had the Alice and Bob characters of cryptography written into it: spies, the state and the military.
Herb productively applied this kind of analysis —the move that emphasizes the narrative aspect of science— to the first quantum teleportation experiments ever performed. He found inspiration from the politics of the spycraft embedded in the A and B characters; recognizing that they serve two additional characters named Charles and Diana led him to invent SuperDense Teleportation (SdT). By using more advanced forms of entanglement, with more dimensions than mere qubits, SdT increases the efficiency of ordinary information for sending quantum information from A to B. The increase approaches a factor of 2, which attracted NASA funding to do earth-bound demonstrations and prepare to teleport from a low earth orbit laboratory on the International Space Station.
Multiple Chemical Sensitivities
Multiple Chemical Sensitivities is a condition that isn’t well understood. People by exceeding some threshold become sensitive to all kinds of things and have wide ranging symptoms from it. Karen Sutherland had MCS and she connected us to a lot of the people working in that field including scientists and new agers. We used it in the Muddling Through book as a question that shows how power and legal structures and knowledge are all interconnected. She did work that helped promote clean air in school and asthma education and protection and a lot of great actions and offerings in MCS. She had the best local registry for all people with MCS and great resources for buildings and furnishings to be non toxic and medical doctors who could help people with their illness. This project dissolved when Karen moved.
Secoya Project
Through Karen we got connected to Indigenous people from Ecuador, the Secoya who needed support with their Aquaculture. This project became invested in all kinds of issues in Ecuador. It’s director became interested in not being a sub project and the resolution was to spin off the Secoya Project as its own institute called Las Lianas. At the same time, we gave the Military Waste Clean Up project to Mount Holyoke. (They failed to raise money for any renewals and we continued with local participation).
Muddling Through – Book
Muddling Through: Pursuing Science & Truths in the Twenty-First Century
Michael Fortun, RPI & ISIS Institute, and Herbert J. Bernstein, Hampshire College & ISIS Institute
For most people, understanding the sciences means familiarity with the end products of science – a new drug, a new theory of the cosmos, yet another technological advance. But the fascination with and emphasis on these end products obscures the processes that underlie every stage of scientific inquiry from the earliest posing of a question, to the application of scientific truths, to many of our most urgent and complex social problems. In their provocative, now classic, book Mike Fortun and Herbert J. Bernstein advocate a new approach to the sciences of the twenty-first century based on the processes scientists and the sciences actually follow: “muddling through,” the combined operations of language, experiment and human social judgments. The authors draw on historical events, the writings of scientists and cutting-edge science to convey the complex interactions that determined how and why ideas, experiments and expert interpretations are shaped into truths that are at once messy and reliable, ambiguous and robust, incomplete and illuminating. Click here to read the book’s excellent review in Physics World, the European equivalent of Physics Today, March 2000, page 47. (Reproduced here below the line for those who do not have an IOP account.)Counterpoint Press, 1998. Autographed hardcover. $16 (special for 2016 only) To order simply eMail our publications staff with a book order request.
Marcus Raskin convinced the Gillman Foundation to have a conference at White Oaks Plantation in Florida (near the Georgia border.) This conference brought together people, many of whom had been at the Reconstructive Knowledge conferences. We met a guy who was a lawyer and literary agent and got a book contract with CounterPoint Press. This allowed us to look back at the first five or six years of the Institute’s work. We came up with a theoretical framework for the first third of the book, then applications using our projects.The book has some interesting frameworks for looking at science and good write ups of the projects we had done up to that point. It was finished in 1998. We had a rare and unusual discussion about the book at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The journal “Physics” wrote a review calling it a “masterpiece that everyone should read.”
New Ways of Knowing – Book
New Ways of Knowing: The Sciences, Society, and Reconstructive Knowledge
Marcus G. Raskin, Institute for Policy Studies, and Herbert J. Bernstein, Hampshire College (contributions also from Susan Buck-Morss, Noam Chomsky, Michael Goldhaber, Edward Herman and Joseph Turner)
Although the need to limit and control our runaway technologies is widely recognized, the current debate on this subject is primarily concerned with technical questions that largely overlook the social and ethical issues at the heart of the knowledge process. Noted physicists and social scientists challenge the paradigm of scientific thinking whose applications can prove destructive to existing social systems. They shift the debate to the need for a radical change of direction that would replace traditional “value-free” inquiry and research with a knowledge model that incorporates social responsibility, democratic principles and comprehensive ethical standards. Rowman & Littlefield, 1987. Uncorrected text available online here. Autographed new corrected edition, available by ordering from The Institute published 2012 by CBLS, Marietta OH $30
Sustainable Agriculture
We ended up part of 6 organizations that founded “Be a Local Hero: CISA” organization. We failed as a group to get Kellog Foundation funding the first time but succeeded the second time. Our role was to do the assessment. We got the transfer of power to the local farmers. It became one of the most successful ongoing projects of the integrative farming system funding.
Seminars
All along we had lots and lots of seminars related to Science and Society. They were wildly popular and very effective. For many years before there was an Institute there were Science and Society lectures and events under the School of Natural Sciences at Hampshire. It was standard people who talked about scientific issues that happened in the news. Our series became much more interesting ranging from topics such as: “When Did Humans Become Human?” to “How Did Smallpox Vaccination Really Get Discovered?”. We had a number of them on various physics topics. We had four or five lectures on aspects of Yucca Mountain – the storage space of spent nuclear fuel. One year we did a movie series.
Energy
Scott Tunderman had a sideline in repairs and renovations and was interested in the U.S. didn’t do better at conserving energy and deploying renewable energy and solving what we called “the energy crisis.” The energy project is an area that hasn’t been taken up by any organization. We never got enough money or people interested. The idea is that making people choose more consciously what they were doing with energy would make a dent, and energy conservation would most certainly occur. We saw excess energy as a social choice problem.
Anacapa Society
The Anacapa Society came out of a conversation at a quantum information conference in England where we noticed that three or four of the significant pioneering theorests worked at liberal arts colleges. Herb, Bill Wooders, Ben Schumacher. We helped make the whole new field of quantum information happen.
We figured out that there was something good about how Primarily Undergraduate Institutions that supported innovative work in unpopular fields – such as quantum information. I had connections with KITP UCSB, Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics and the University of California Santa Barbara. They did one conference led by Don Spector and Arjendu Pattanyak — a colleague from Carleton College, in WI. Then Don and Herb did two more conferences at the ITP and at one of them we formed the Anacapa Society.
This project is currently dormant, though in principle the agreements signed with Amherst College are still in effect. Work on Anacapa has Taught the IIS many lessons about how to help professionals in STEAMM produce mindful reconstructive knowledge that follows their passions, interests and values in the sciences.