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Dr. Samantha Copeland came to philosophy through the humanities, graduating at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She did a Masters of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario and for her PhD dissertation, ‘The Case of the Triggered Memory’, she joined her interests in how scientific knowledge is produced and changes when new technology is developed with the ethics of curiosity-driven science when human participants are needed for research. From there, she joined the CauseHealth project for three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Norwegian University of Life Science. In the meantime she co-founded the Serendipity Society and joined TU Delft as an Assistant Professor in 2018.
At TU Delft she is working on the ethics of resilience, bringing what we know about how positive results can come out of unexpected events—like in cases of serendipity—together with how we ought to prepare a response to unexpected but potentially disastrous events and disruptions. In both of these contexts, issues of distributive and epistemic justice are intertwined with the epistemology of knowledge production. It is at this intersection that her work resides.
Shownotes:
00:02:00 Introduction Samantha Copeland / 00:04:00 Politics, discoveries and messy contexts / 00:09:00 Definition of ‘serendipity’/ 00:16:00 Serendipity and imagination / 00:19:00 Encountering serendipity / 00:24:00 Abduction or imagination? / 00:26:00 Possible narratives and super encounters / 00:29:00 Attentiveness and serendipity / 00:33:00 Imagination as a catalyst for serendipity? / 00:39:00
Links and resources:
Resource page Serendipity Society
Horace Walpole: The invention of the word serendipity
Garud, R Serendipity Arrangements for Exapting Science-Based Innovation
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