Kellie Owens wins the 2017 Nicholas C. Mullins Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science

"Too Much of A Good Thing?: American childbirth, intentional ignorance, and the boundaries of responsible knowledge" by Kellie Owens, PhD

For the 2017 Mullins award the committee received a total of 18 papers. In terms of gender distribution, 10 out of the 18 papers were written by women PhD students. In relation to geographical diversity, 10 out of the 18 papers were from students based in the US, 3 were from the UK, 2 from Canada, 2 from India and 1 from South Korea. The committee selected four criteria to evaluate the submitted pieces: contribution to the STS field, depth of research, writing quality and ethical/political relevance of the piece. Each aspect was scored from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest value. In addition, each paper was evaluated by three reviewers. After a first round of evaluation, we selected the three papers with the highest score and evaluated them again.  The Committee wants to highlight the high quality of the contributions and the complexity of making a decision.

After reviewing the material the committee unanimously selected the paper entitled 'Too Much of A Good Thing?: American childbirth, intentional ignorance, and the boundaries of responsible knowledge' as the winner of the 2017 Mullins Award.

***

Kellie Owens recently completed her doctorate in Sociology at Northwestern University. She was also a Fellow in the Science in Human Culture program at Northwestern and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard. She will soon become a Postdoctoral Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the sociology of risk, knowledge, and medicine. Her dissertation explores variation in risk perceptions and practices in American childbirth.