Science and Social Justice - Theory and Practice

Science and Social Justice is a short, accessible textbook aimed at practicing scientists, physicians, technologists, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics and Medicine) or STEMM high school and undergraduate students across fields, and general public readers, such as citizen scientists, who are interested in doing community-based research. It will also be of interest in undergraduate health sciences fields (Global Health, Public Health, Medical Anthropology, Engineering), as well as in the natural sciences, Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies classrooms.
This short textbook takes readers, step-by-step, through the journey of designing and implementing an intervention or research project that is intended to forward both scientific and social justice ends. By taking concepts, methods and epistemologies of equity and justice from the humanistic social sciences and making them accessible to audiences in STEAM/STEMM, this short textbook can transform how community based projects in the sciences and applied sciences are taught, designed and researched. The book offers critical concepts, examples, tips and friendly warnings for how to develop collaborative, non-hierarchical, and long-term relations, practices and research tools for working with communities. Science and Social Justice is a guide for practicing science for and with the people.
The arc of the book takes the reader through the timeline of a community-based collaboration between STEMM/STEAM practitioners and 'lay' communities. We begin by presenting questions of urgency and orientation that are needed before beginning a collaboration. We then move to examining what it means to do social justice driven community work, to how to build and maintain relations with community partners, and to dealing with the effects of research or interventions and any unintended consequences. The length of the book (approximately 5,000 words) is designed for readability and to offer a range of illustrative examples of community-based scientific research gone both wrong and right.

List of contents

Chapter 1. The Invitation, or How to Use this Handbook Self-Reflection Prompt: Understanding where I am A word of advice.- Chapter 2. Science with a capital S.- Chapter 3. Slowing Down, Building Relations.- Chapter 4. Co-labbing with Care .- Chapter 5. Backpocket Methodology: Seven Radical Scientific Inquiries.

About the author

Christoph Hanssmann  is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. He has published articles in Social Science & Medicine,Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy, and authored a chapter in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Temple Univ. Press 2012). His first book, Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists are Changing Medicine is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.
Leslie Quintanilla  is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University. She earned her Ph.D. in ethnic studies, with a graduate certificate in critical gender studies, from University of California, San Diego, in 2019. Her book manuscript is titled, “Towards a Transnational ‘No Ban, No Wall’ Movement: Contemporary San Diego-Tijuana Border Activisms,” and she has published articles in journals including American Quarterly.
Saiba Varma ([e-mail]) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego. She is affiliated with the Science Studies and Global Health programs as well. She is author of The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir (Duke University Press, 2020), winner of the Edie Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing. She has written for public outlets including The Nation, Al Jazeera, Truthout, Salon, and Warscapes.
 Kalindi Vora  is Professor of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and Ethnicity Race & Migration at Yale University. She is author of Reimagining Reproduction: Surrogacy, Labour and Human Reproduction (Routledge 2023), Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures (with Neda Atanasoski, Duke UP 2019), and Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2015, Winner of the Rachel Carson Book Prize for Social and Political Impact), and with the Precarity Lab, the multigraph Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths University Press, 2021).
Salvador Zárate is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine. Winner of the 2018 Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for best dissertation by the American Studies Association, his reviews, essay, and creative works have appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, Cultural Anthropology, University of Chicago’s Next Chapter from the Race & Capitalism Project, and in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicana and Chicano Studies.
 
 
 
 
 

Summary

Science and Social Justice is a short, accessible textbook aimed at practicing scientists, physicians, technologists, STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics and Medicine) or STEMM high school and undergraduate students across fields, and general public readers, such as citizen scientists, who are interested in doing community-based research. It will also be of interest in undergraduate health sciences fields (Global Health, Public Health, Medical Anthropology, Engineering), as well as in the natural sciences, Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies classrooms.
This short textbook takes readers, step-by-step, through the journey of designing and implementing an intervention or research project that is intended to forward both scientific and social justice ends. By taking concepts, methods and epistemologies of equity and justice from the humanistic social sciences and making them accessible to audiences in STEAM/STEMM, this short textbook can transform how community based projects in the sciences and applied sciences are taught, designed and researched. The book offers critical concepts, examples, tips and friendly warnings for how to develop collaborative, non-hierarchical, and long-term relations, practices and research tools for working with communities. Science and Social Justice is a guide for practicing science for and with the people.
The arc of the book takes the reader through the timeline of a community-based collaboration between STEMM/STEAM practitioners and ‘lay’ communities. We begin by presenting questions of urgency and orientation that are needed before beginning a collaboration. We then move to examining what it means to do social justice driven community work, to how to build and maintain relations with community partners, and to dealing with the effects of research or interventions and any unintended consequences. The length of the book (approximately 5,000 words) is designed for readability and to offer a range of illustrative examples of community-based scientific research gone both wrong and right.

Product details

• Authors: Christoph Hanssmann, Leslie Quintanilla, Saiba Varma, Saiba et al Varma, Kalindi Vora, Salvador Zárate
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English, German
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 13.04.2026
• EAN: 9783032134158
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3213415-8
• No. of pages: 170
• Illustrations: V, 170 p. 30 illus.
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Labour, economic and industrial sociology; Soziologie, Gender Studies, Humangeographie, Gender Studies: Gruppen, Sociology of Science, Social Justice, Human Geography, Science and Technology Studies, Research Design, research tools, Community-based research, STEM and social justice, STEMM, science and social justice, community based participatory research