The Center is a place where innovative collaborations advance progress on some of the most important issues confronting us today.
Our remarkable 2016-17 fellows join the ranks of our former fellows and new friends from academia, industry, government, and NGOs in exploring socially significant questions such as the interactions with humans and machines, how values are constructed and reproduced among the digitally native, the social life of climate change, the future of work and workers, and creating growth mindsets. We consider the implications for individuals and society of new discoveries in technology, environmental science, medicine, artificial intelligence, bio-engineering and other frontiers of research.
All of our projects speak to the four concepts that increasingly organize the on-going CASBS research programs. I discussed the first of these in the fall 2016 newsletter and will discuss others in future newsletters.
- Moral economies
- Technology and society
- Inequality and inequity
- Democracy
These are not themes in the usual sense, but, rather, conceptualizations that help to structure our thinking about whether a proposed project or workshop fits with our goals. We are most interested in hosting work that integrates several of these concerns while also being as multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral as is appropriate for the problem under investigation. On-going programs emerge from workshops held at CASBS, from discussions among fellows (current and past), CASBS board members, and as a result of interactions with those at Stanford, Silicon Valley, and others in our ever-growing network. The development and maintenance of a project depends on external funding to support fellows, meetings, research, and dissemination.
CASBS remains a location for great individual scholars to come for the academic year, but over time more and more of the fellows will be those affiliated with one of our collaborative endeavors. In 2016-17, approximately one quarter of the class has such an affiliation, and we hope to make it close to half in future years. All potential fellows still must apply individually and their applications screened by our fellowships selection committee. The standard for selection remains as high as ever, but the synergy and energy among the fellows is definitely on the increase as a result of the injection of program-affiliated fellows.
The Center remains true to its initial mission, but we are successfully reimagining CASBS to achieve that mission for the 21st century. A recent major grant from our initial founder, the Ford Foundation, confirms our success over time and our vision for the future.
New kinds of demands on CASBS and its fellows is revealing the limits of our wonderful campus, constructed for a mid-20th century idea. We are now in the process of redesigning the campus, preserving the studies and indeed all our historic buildings but adding a new building to the mix to ensure that we have the kind of meeting and collaborative space we require going forward. In the next year, we will be actively seeking funding for this redesign of the campus and of CASBS itself.
