PreMiEr Seminar Series: Andrew Hardwick

PreMiEr-sponsored seminar hosted by North Carolina State University.

Speaker: Andrew Hardwick, Graduate Student and PreMiEr Scholar

Ghosts in The Built Environment – Evaluating the Use of Socially Defined Variables in Microbiome Research

Halloween may have passed, but ghosts still linger. Ghost variables are cases where socially defined variables like race and sex/gender are improperly used to study and create narratives about socially defined groups. The narratives people use matter with stories having the power to shape the development of future healthcare policy and scientific funding. This research project evaluates the use of different socially defined variables correctly and incorrectly in the context of the built environment to map out their prevalence in a network that spans academia, funding agencies, and the news. This talk will focus on the methods developed to systematically study the use of ghost variables in the built environment and some preliminary results so far.

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