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Title:
Science as a Care Practice: Virtuous Inquiry and the Socio-Ethical Relevance of Science

Abstract:
Ethics is an expansive branch of philosophy that, in STEM education, is often reduced to an appendage of scientific disciplines as opposed to something fundamental to the scientist’s identity, their pursuit of knowledge, and the public purposes of their work. In this seminar, Dr. Grant Fore will examine ethics as the co-creative and processive expression of freedom by which self, others, and worlds are critically fashioned from a great diversity of potentialities into beautiful (i.e., harmonious and intense/potent) actualities, which lure one to the creation of future novel and moral actualizations. In such a conceptualization, morality is akin to a toolkit of values, virtues, and principles animating and affecting life as it is ethically lived. Building on these definitions and pragmatic, aesthetic, and post-structural articulations of virtue ethics, Dr. Fore will introduce the notion of science as a care practice, a mode of virtuous inquiry intended to be a model for imagining scientific inquiry as caring ethical inquiry. 

Biography:
Dr. Grant A. Fore is the Assistant Director of Research and Evaluation at Indiana University Indianapolis’ STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute (SEIRI). In SEIRI, he coordinates, designs, and conducts mixed methods and qualitative research projects. As a design anthropologist, he is interested in using ethnographic methods to holistically understand education environments. He then uses these ethnographic insights to imagine new educational futures for STEM ethics education in experiential learning contexts. Over the past decade, Dr. Fore has studied ethics education in the disciplinary contexts of architectural technology, engineering design, biomedical engineering, the earth and environmental sciences, urban agriculture, and, most recently, entomology.

Publications:
Fore, G. A. (2022). Ethical Becoming, Ethical Fetishism, and Capitalist Modernity: An Ethnography of Design Education. Faculty of Humanities, Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, South Africa. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/37263

Fore, G. A., & Hess, J. L. (2020). Operationalizing ethical becoming as a theoretical framework for teaching engineering design ethics. Science and engineering ethics, 26(3), 1353-1375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-019-00160-w

Fore, G. A., Nyarko, S. C., Hess, J. L., Coleman, M. A., Price, M. F., Sorge, B. H., & Sanders, E. A. (2024). Ethical Becoming and Ethical Inquiry Among Earth Sciences Faculty: Case Studies from a Faculty Learning Community. Teaching Ethics, 24(1).