Safe the date and contact Selen Eren for her workshop on reflective modelling if you are interested!

Join us on 9 December for a day of reflection and dialogue on modelling practices, values, and assumptions. We will begin at 9:00 in Stage, Tellus with a keynote by M.V. Eitzel on community-based modelling for socio-environmental sustainability — an inspiring talk open to everyone. No registration is required to attend the keynote. Please see below for the short description of her talk and for her bio.

Following the keynote, a hands-on workshop (11:00–16:30, room KK238) invites modellers working with computational models to take part in an exercise to open up the black box of models. The workshop will be facilitated by me and the keynote speaker. Together, we will surface tacit values, examine gaps between ideals and practices, and discuss how to navigate constraints. Lunch will be provided. Participation in the workshop is limited, so please send an email to selen.eren@oulu.fi to register, including your affiliation, dietary requirements and a one-sentence description of the model you work with/on by Friday, 21 November.

Short description of the keynote: How can models and data science serve community needs and the larger public good? Often this requires training and experience outside typical science curricula and research team norms. In my keynote, I will share some of the insights I've gleaned from working on interdisciplinary teams of biophysical and social science researchers, and how these skills relate to being able to work with communities so that models bring benefit rather than harm. Through interdisciplinary synthesis and discussion, thoughtful self-evaluation, and group intention-setting and implementation of best practices, we can move our projects towards doing the work in the world that we intend it to do.

Speaker bio: MV Eitzel is a community-based modeler working at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Davis. MV's research sits at the intersection of data science, Science and Technology Studies, and community-based participatory work -- focusing on finding the right technologies for community questions and understanding how we can do work that supports the long-term flourishing of people and their environments.

Facilitator bio: Selen Eren is an environmental social scientist, working as a post-doc in the Cultural Anthropology unit at the University of Oulu. Her research focuses on fostering environmental scientific knowledge production that is both responsible and relevant to the immediate environments and communities within which it takes place. She is particularly interested in the dynamics of transdisciplinary and transformative science.