Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences

Workshops 2022-2023

 

 

In-Person Convocation - Summer Institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness - July 17-29, 2023

If organizational effectiveness is so important, one might think that academics would be studying the issue actively. To some extent, this is true, but the field is badly fragmented: different disciplines operate mostly in isolation; many professional schools focus on only their own kind of organization (e.g., hospitals, schools, public agencies); social-science departments often regard organizational effectiveness as outside their purview; and doctoral training in professional schools often lacks the depth available in social-science departments. The collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of the CASBS Summer Institute provides an important opportunity to integrate, broaden, and deepen the study of organizations and their effectiveness outside of such traditional methodological and institutional constraints. This year’s summer institute brought together a new cohort in the first week and welcomed back previous participants in the second week. 

Institute on Diversity - June 19-30, 2023

The CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity has a dual mission. Substantively the Institute will engage in field building around social scientific investigation of why, how and when difference makes a difference. In doing so, the institute will develop an on-going collaboration and support network of emerging scholars from backgrounds underrepresented in higher education. By bringing together a multi-disciplinary, problem-oriented group of scholars who share a commitment to rigorous social scientific inquiry, the institute promises to advance our general understanding of how and when social categories like race, ethnicity, gender and religion become meaningful factors that shape human interactions. The initial institute consists of 12 early-career scholars, the Institute directors, and approximately 7-10 external faculty who will share their work with the group.

Speculative Governance - June 13, 2023

Our jumping off point for this conversation is an essay entitled Speculative Governance, written by Dan Honig, Peace Medie, Erica Robles-Anderson, and Martin J. Williams. The authors define speculative governance as the exploration of systematically different governance institutions for our societies. The purpose of the workshop is not so much to give substantive feedback on the essay (although that would certainly be appreciated) as to build community around shared interests and help us brainstorm “where to from here?” for this essay and set of ideas. These issues connect to CASBS’s ongoing project on Imagining Adaptive Societies as well as a host of other initiatives on futuring, speculative thinking and practices, and reimagining governance and democracy.

Political Ideologies of the Silicon Valley - April 27-29, 2023

In recent years societies across the globe have been reckoning with the expansive social, political, and economic influence of Silicon Valley. Writers and thinkers – including some within Silicon Valley itself – have asked how Silicon Valley works, how it thinks, and how it is changing the world. Scholars across a range of disciplines have followed suit, producing a fast-growing body of work exploring the ideological origins, government relations, labor regimes, philanthropic practices, and the social, political, and racial impacts of its leading technologists and technology firms over the past half-century. This gathering is intended to bring scholars and writers working on aspects of these questions – often from very different perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds – in conversation with one another, to assess the current state and future directions of work in the field.

New Moral Political Economy Convening - March 9-10, 2023

The purpose of the convening is to create traction around the accomplishments of the Creating a New Moral Political Economy program, including the publication of a Daedalus issue on this topic. We also hope to pass the baton to the next set of leaders who will carry this work forward as the program, in its current form, officially sunsets this academic year.

enCOREage - February 16-18, 2023

The enCOREage project is a collaboration of CASBS, Honor Education (a technology education company), and CORE, a global collaboration of economic researchers and educators that is changing how undergraduates learn economics. The enCOREage project is the response to the systemic failure of U.S. colleges and universities to educate our least well off and under-represented minority students. Collaborating with the ed tech start up, Honor Education, we will produce an introductory economics ebook and supplementary content targeting students in HBCUs, community colleges, and other under-resourced institutions. The objective of this in-person February workshop is to meet with academic stakeholders and instructors to ensure that we are building content appropriate for those we hope to reach and to create a pathway for feedback among a community of users.

Caregiving - November 10, 2022 (Virtual) and January 12-14, 2023

This workshop series is designed to jump-start a larger interdisciplinary project at CASBS, led by Alison Gopnik, to help rethink the philosophical, biological, political, and economic foundations of care and care-giving and consider how to translate those insights into practical policies and better design principles. The basic aim of these workshops is to try to formulate a coherent interdisciplinary account of this vital and understudied area. 

Operational AI Workshop - October 20-21, 2022

This workshop aims to bring together individuals working on internal AI ethical governance to share insights, identify key challenges, and ideate on potential solutions. Generally, this workshop also aims to build networks with groups working on these internal governance issues across academia and industry. We hope this will serve as a starting point for continued collaboration.

enCOREage (Virtual) - October 17, 2022

This is the first workshop for the enCOREage project. The enCOREage project is a collaboration of CASBS, Honor Education (a technology education company), and CORE, a global collaboration of economic researchers and educators that is changing how undergraduates learn economics. The enCOREage project is the response to the systemic failure of U.S. colleges and universities to educate our least well off and under-represented minority students. Collaborating with the ed tech start up, Honor Education, we will produce an introductory economics ebook and supplementary content targeting students in HBCUs, community colleges, and other under-resourced institutions. 

Dual Use of Machine Learning - October 7, 2022

In 2021, Sadasivan Shankar and Richard Zare submitted a grant proposal to Stanford’s HAI and Ethics & Society Review regarding the use of machine learning to predict the toxicity of chemicals and materials. Faculty panelists from the Ethics & Society Review raised concerns about potential misuse of Shankar and Zare’s proposed research and requested that they identify mitigation strategies to address these concerns before continuing their work. Shankar and Zare sought advice from other experts to solve the dual use problems, but could not identify any systematic efforts to address these. In their paper for Nature Machine Intelligence, the authors documented their struggles in identifying solutions to the dual use problems they faced and called for a conference on the matter. The Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences is partnering with Sadasivan Shankar and Richard Zare to answer this call.

Future of Institutions Dialogue (Virtual) - September 19, 2022

This dialogue will explore how to develop new institutional frameworks that entrench ethical and societal reflection into the research process in academia, business, and government. With the increasing speed of technological innovation and unfolding realities of climate change, researchers are increasingly in need of better mechanisms to address these societal challenges.

Seminar Series for the Organizations and Their Effectiveness Institute (Virtual) - Sept. 30, Oct. 28, Nov. 11, Dec. 9, 2022

This seminar series combines previous classes of the CASBS summer institute on Organizations and Their Effectiveness. It provides an opportunity to present works in progress, receive feedback, and continue collaboration throughout the academic year.