Seminar
Does STS Have a Special Sauce, or Is It Just Gravy?
Cautionary Notes on Cautionary Notes about STS Interventions in Law
December 7, 12:00 – 1:30 PM
Social Ecology, Room 306
Simon Cole
Professor of Criminology, Law and Society
University of California, Irvine
Discussants
Evan Schofer
Department of Sociology
UCI
Carroll Seron
Department of Criminology, Law and Society
UCI
Biographies
Simon A. Cole specializes in the historical and sociological study of the interaction between science, technology, law, and criminal justice. He is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2003 Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science. Dr. Cole is a member of the American Judicature Society Commission on Forensic Science & Public Policy, he has spoken widely on the subjects of fingerprinting, scientific evidence, and science and the law, and he has consulted and testified as an expert witness on the validity of fingerprint evidence. He has also written for many general interest publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, and Lingua Franca. His current interests are the sociology of forensic science and the development of criminal identification databases and biometric technologies. He teaches courses on Forensic Science and Society, Surveillance and Society, Miscarriages of Justice, The Death Penalty, Historical Criminology, and Science, Technology, and Law.
Evan Schofer has made wide-ranging contributions to the field of sociology, with studies in the sociology of science, civil society, education, environmental sociology, and globalization. He has published prolifically in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and other top journals. Professor Schofer recently arrived in Irvine with several major projects underway. One uses cross-national data to examine the impact of educational expansion on patterns of economic inequality. Another looks across societies to explore how global and national institutions shape political participation and associational life.
Carroll Seron joined the Department of Criminology, Law and Society in 2005. Her research examines the social processes of legitimating legal activities. In earlier work, Seron studied the organizational structure of the federal courts, focusing on the ways in which techniques of administration and rationalization of dispute resolution may compromise the core legal values of due process and a rule of law. Seron’s recent work flows from a fundamental commitment to understand legitimation of legal activity. Currently, she is completing a study of how citizens and police officers form judgments about the boundary between appropriate police practices and brutality.