Gretchen Gano
Science and Technology Policy
Social Science Research
Public Engagement
Sustainability Education
Sociotechnical Systems Research & Analysis
Ph.D., Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology
Linked-In
Email: frauline@bway.net
Twitter @Softmegamachine
Research
BOOK PROJECT Another Research is Possible: Setting Otherwise Agendas
Research agenda-setting charts the course not only for the scientific discoveries and new technologies and systems that result from the work, but also informs the institutional and governance arrangements that spring up around them. These arrangements maintain and valorize specific research entities, define expertise, and ensure that fresh agendas align with existing structural and procedural logics. There is growing interest among Science and Technology Studies scholars to call out the ethical, social justice and ecological stakes involved in pursuing and resourcing particular kinds of agendas and leaving others unarticulated, unfunded and ultimately, undone. I am beginning a book project to put several of these strands of scholarship concerning “responsible” research agenda-setting into conversation.
Participatory Technology Assessment
My technology assessment research has national policy impact through the Experts and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology Network (ECAST). ECAST is a U.S. network of policy research institutions, universities, and science museums working together to foster the development of balanced, nonpartisan technology assessments and related public engagement activities.
Between 2012-2015, I consulted on design and research associated with five multi-institutional research projects that engaged stakeholders and citizens in technology assessment of the development of synthetic biology; nanotechnology and emerging technologies in cities; US national space policy; as well as in the formation of international climate, energy & biodiversity policy.
The Winter 2023 Issues in Science and Technology article "How Would You Defend the Planet from Asteroids?" recounts the story of ECAST's engagement with NASA's Asteriod Initiative.
Select publications
Gretchen Gano (2020). “The Megamachine.” The Soft Megamachine: Lewis Mumford’s Metaphor of Technological Society and Implications for (Participatory) Technology Assessment, dissertation Arizona State University, UMI, 2014, pp. 26-73. In C. A. Schwartz (Ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. (Vol. 395, pp. 190–207). Farmington Hills, Mich: Gale, a Cengage Company.
Ramsey, S., Greeson, K., Affolter, E., Gretchen Gano., & Dunbar, R. (2020). 2020 Vision: How a Global Pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement Focused our Teaching. European Journal of Educational Sciences, 07(04). https://doi.org/10.19044/ejes.v7no4a3
Tomblin, David, Zachary Pirtle, Mahmud Farooque, David Sittenfeld, Erin Mahoney, Rick Worthington, Gretchen Gano, Michele Gates, Ira Bennett, Jason Kessler, Amy Kaminski, Jason Lloyd & David Guston. (2017). “Integrating Public Deliberation into Engineering Systems: Participatory Technology Assessment of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission.” Astropolitics 15(2)
141–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/14777622.2017.1340823
Selin, Cynthia, Kelly Rawlings, Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone, Gretchen Gano, Jathan Sadowski, Carlo Altamirano, Sarah Davies, Mindy Kimball, and David Guston (2016). “Experiments in Engagement: Designing PEST for Capacity-Building,” Public Understanding of Science, 1-16, http:/doi.org/10.1177/0963662515620970
Gretchen Gano (2015). Starting with Universe: Buckminster Fuller's Design Science Now, Futures, 70, 3, 56-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2014.12.011
Gretchen Gano and David Sittenfeld (2015). “Amplifying Deliberative Results to Access Policy Networks: The Role of Informal Science Education Institutions,” In Governing Biodiversity through Democratic Deliberation, eds. Mikko Rask and Richard Worthington
Teaching
Mission-based Experiential Education
Mission-based Experiential Education
Mission-based Experiential Education
Between 2019-2023 I taught courses and advised students in the Ph.D. Program in Sustainability Education at Prescott College. As the first doctoral program in sustainability education in North America (started in 2005), Prescott College offers a unique model of a cohort-based experiential curriculum grounded in social and environmental ju
Between 2019-2023 I taught courses and advised students in the Ph.D. Program in Sustainability Education at Prescott College. As the first doctoral program in sustainability education in North America (started in 2005), Prescott College offers a unique model of a cohort-based experiential curriculum grounded in social and environmental justice. I coordinated the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies Program in 2022/23. In my first two years at the College I Directed the Undergraduate Core Curriculum and taught in the Department of Social Justice Studies.
Graduate
Mission-based Experiential Education
Mission-based Experiential Education
Going Public: Strategies for Socially Engaged Scholarship
Concepts for Sustainability in the Social Sciences
Critical Foundations of Research and Scholarship
Advanced Research Design syllabus
Participatory Digital and Visual Research (Anthropology and Public Policy, UMass Amherst) – syllabus / MA project website and press / ASU project site
Global Governance and Biodiversity (Public Policy, UMass Amherst) – syllabus
Art/Science Collisions: Communicating with Data (Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University) – syllabus / course wiki
Undergraduate
Mission-based Experiential Education
Undergraduate
Race, Gender & Technology
Crowds, Clouds and Networks course description
Social Media and Its Discontents
Social Ecology as Ecological Humanism syllabus
The History of Big Data
(History, University of California Berkeley) Syllabus
Core Curriculum 2: Ways of Knowing - The Future and You Syllabus
Science, Tech
Race, Gender & Technology
Crowds, Clouds and Networks course description
Social Media and Its Discontents
Social Ecology as Ecological Humanism syllabus
The History of Big Data
(History, University of California Berkeley) Syllabus
Core Curriculum 2: Ways of Knowing - The Future and You Syllabus
Science, Technology, and Society (History & Interdisciplinary Studies, University of California Berkeley)
Guest Lecturer
on Democratizing Biotechnology and Science and Public Participation