Monday, April 26, 2010

Circulating Knowledge, East and West Conference

Announcing the conference CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE, EAST AND WEST
Inspired by Dalhousie University's online launch of their Dinwiddie Archives, this conference aims to further international dialogue and scholarly exchange between those working on the history of science in Asia, Europe and North America by examining the global circulation of
scientific knowledge from the Early Modern Period to today.

CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE, EAST AND WEST will culminate in a half-day facilitation workshop to plan for further Science Studies dialogue and exchange, "East" and "West", with future conferences in Bangalore and Singapore.

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

Fa-ti Fan, State University of New York at Binghamton
Yves Gingras, l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire
Jahnavi Phalkey, Imperial College London
Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Kapil Raj, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
Sundar Sarukkai, Manipal University
Jon Topham, University of Leeds

CIRCULATING KNOWLEDGE, EAST AND WEST will be held at the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada from July 21-23. For further details - including information on registration and accommodations - please visit: WWW.SITUSCI.CA

Sponsored by the Situating Science Knowledge Cluster, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (University of King's College)

The James Dinwiddie (1746-1815) papers were donated to the Dalhousie University Archives in 1999 and are now being prepared for online access. Dr. Dinwiddie (1746-1815) was the scientific attaché of the first British embassy to the 18th Century Chinese imperial court, and the first Professor of Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Chemistry at the College of Fort William in Calcutta, India. One of the most important of the new itinerant Newtonian natural philosophers and lecturers of the Early Modern Period, the bulk of Dinwiddie's papers consist of his scientific observations, experiments, lecture notes, and journals with dates ranging from 1767 to 1815.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Karen Johnson Freeze Fellowship launched

The Foundation for the History of Technology and the Society for the History of Technology are proud to announce the launch of the Karen Johnson Freeze Fellowship Fund. This fund was established in memory of Karen Johnson Freeze. Through her efforts, the history of technology has begun to develop as a field in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Fund seeks to encourage scientific research and wants to facilitate active participation of early career scholars in Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe, in particular in Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, the Ukraine, and Turkey.

Deadline for applications for 2010 is May, 12. The first Karen Johnson Freeze fellows will be announced during the Tensions of Europe conference in Sofia, June 17-20, 2010.

The Karen Johnson Freeze Fellowship Fund is supported by the Foundation for the History of Technology, the Society for the History of Technology and the Bulgarian Centre of Excellence Dialogue Europe.

Monday, April 12, 2010

6th Annual HAPSAT Conference

Instruments: Mental and Material
6th Annual HAPSAT Conference

On Sunday April 25, HAPSAT, the Graduate Student Society at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at Technology at the University of Toronto, will host its sixth annual conference, Instruments: Mental and Material.

Scientific instruments have emerged as a central theme in the history and philosophy of science and in science and technology studies. In Leviathan and the Air Pump, Shapin and Schaffer cite instruments, together with writing style and modest witnessing, as the technologies that enable the new scientific life. More recently, Galison’s Image and Logic gives instrument makers equal standing with theorists and experimentalists within the trading zones of scientific discovery. The historiography of medicine has also explored how instruments played a significant role in changing the diagnostic acumen of doctors and revolutionizing concepts of disease. However, there is still a great deal of work to be done in order to consider instruments as both a serious subject of study, and a resource for historical investigation and argumentation. Similarly, since Hacking’s seminal Representing and Intervening, philosophers of science have acknowledged instruments as being of central importance to the practice of science. They have become a nexus for worries about empiricism and standards of evidence; Latour (Science in Action) for instance, has argued that facts and artifacts are constructed in the same way, while Davis Baird (Thing Knowledge) argues that instruments contain knowledge of how to produce effects.

The keynote address will be given by Jacalyn Duffin (Queen’s University): “Stethoscope: Technology and the Meaning of Life”

Registration is $10 for the conference, breakfast and lunch; $20 for the conference, breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

We hope you are able to attend. Please visit the website, http://www.hps.utoronto.ca/hapsat to register or for more information.

Sensory Communication Symposium

You are invited to attend a two-day international symposium on Sensory Communication: Expressive Culture and Youth Media cosponsored by the UCSD departments of Communication and Visual Arts April 14-15. Please see schedule below, attached flyers and websites at:

http://youthmediasymp.ucsd.edu

http://youthmediasymp.ucsd.edu/accessible/

All daytime panels and workshops will be held at the Visual Arts Performing Facility (VAF) in the Visual Arts complex near the Gilman Parking Structure.

The screening of the film Chants of Lotus by Fatimah Tobing Rony will be in MCC 201 (Comm Building) at 7pm Wednesday. This event is sponsored by the Institute for International, Comparative and Area Studies.

SCHEDULE

Sensory Communication: Expressive Culture and Youth Media

A two-day symposium sponsored by the Departments of Communication and Visual Arts, UCSD. Supported by the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies, UCSD.

Wednesday April 14 and Thursday, April 15

**All daytime events in Visual Arts Facility (VAF) Performance Space, evening screening in MCC 201**


Wednesday, April 14

10:00 AM-12:30 PM: VAF Performing Space: Sensory Mediation

· Yvonne Eriksson (Malardalen Univ., Sweden) “Children with visual impairment in a visually oriented world”

· Roberto Manduchi (UCSC) “Following Ariadne's thread: Sensing technologies for assisted mobility and way finding without sight”

· Moderated by Anna Sparrman (Linköping University, Sweden) and Barry Brown (UCSD)

1:30-2:00 PM VAF Performing Space: “Sing as the following objects pass through your throat: Sensory Modalities of the Everyday Voice” by Zeynep Bulut (UCSD)

2:00-3:30 PM VAF Performing Space: Workshop on Making Sensory Media. Moderated by Lisa Cartwright (UCSD), Yvonne Eriksson, and Roberto Manduchi

7:00 PM: Location: MCC 201
Screening, Chants of Lotus (2007), with discussion by Fatimah Tobing Rony (UC Irvine), moderated by Nour Al-Timimi, Lisa Fang, Hwan Lee, and Zheng Zhang (UCSD)

Thursday, April 15

10:00 AM-12:30 PM: VAF Performing Space: Self-Produced Youth Media and Cultural Conventions.

· Alexandra Juhasz (Pitzer College) “Faking Fred: The Formal Limits on Youth Self-Representation”

· Richard Chalfen (Children’s Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School) “Participant Media Research: Using Young Patient Visual Narratives to Better Understand Living with Chronic Illness”

· Moderated by Lauren Berliner, Elena Buenrostro and Andy Rice (UCSD)

2:00-3:30 PM: VAF Performing Space: Workshop on Media Practices to Work Through Affect and Experience. Moderated by Brian Goldfarb (UCSD), Trinity de Kervor (High Tech High International), Steven Rubin (Penn State University), Shannon Lowe (Lancaster University) and The AjA Project

Co-convenors:

· Lisa Cartwright, Professor of Communication and Science Studies, UCSD

· Brian Goldfarb, Associate Professor of Communication and Education Studies, UCSD

· Anna Sparrman, Associate Professor, Department of Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Dibner Seminar

The Huntington is pleased to announce a new seminar series in conjunction with the Dibner History of Science Program. The first meeting will be held on Saturday, May 1, 2010, at 10:00 a.m. in Classrooms 1 & 2 of the Munger Research Center at The Huntington. Coffee will be available starting at 9:30.

Our speaker will be Marga Vicedo, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, and her topic will be "Cold War Emotions: Mother Love and Human Nature in Post-War America." Following World War II, there was an explosion of research on human emotions and its biological underpinnings, instincts. Through scholarly and popular writings, psychoanalysts, ethologists, and psychologists studying child development succeeded in bringing instincts back into scientific and social debates. Dr. Vicedo will examine the work of Konrad Lorenz on geese, Harry Harlow on monkeys, and John Bowlby on children to find out whether children have an innate need for mother love and then explore the reception of their views in the United States during the Cold War era.

All scholars and graduate students with an interest in the history of science are cordially invited to attend. There will be no pre-circulated paper, and NO RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED.


Please save the date for the following:

May 29, 2010

Antonio Barrera
Associate Professor of History, Colgate University
"Indian Doctors and Mexico in the Making of Early Modern Science"


June 12, 2010

Andreas Killen
Associate Professor of History, City College of New York
"What is an Enlightenment Film? Cinema and Social Hygiene in Germany between the Wars"


All seminars begin at 10:00 a.m. and will meet in Classrooms 1 & 2 of the Munger Research Center at The Huntington. An email with details will be sent a few weeks ahead of each seminar.