Thursday, August 26, 2010

Situating Science Call for Workshop Proposals revision

This is a brief message to inform you of a revision to the Situating Science Call for Workshop Proposals, which was recently announced. Please disseminate.

The timeframe has been extended. The new timeframe of the Call for Workshop Proposals is: Jan. 1 2011 to March 31, 2012.

Deadline remains Friday, Oct. 1, 2010.

Details are available to view here

More information on Situating Science is available at our new website

Lecture & Booksigning: America @ The Pill

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
6:00-7:30pm
San Diego History Center
Casa de Balboa, Balboa Park
Cost $5 SDHC members

$8 general. Book purchase additional.
Reservations requested!

Call (619) 232-6203, or send an email to register.

Fifty years ago, the FDA announced approval for the birth control pill. Within a few years, millions of women were "on the pill," making it the most popular form of contraception in the country and one of the best-selling drugs in U.S. history. But the road has not always been smooth, as historian Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, reveals in her new book.

Join us for an engaging look into the political climate that greeted the pill, the women who are responsible for the pill's success, men's changing relationship with the pill, and the myths and realities that continue to surround it.

Booksigning will follow the lecture.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Call for Papers: "Reading the Middle Ages"

The Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley
invite submissions for the
UC Berkeley conference on the practice of reading in the Middle Ages
25-27 March 2011
UC Berkeley
Keynote Address by
Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn
Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities
at the University of Pennsylvania

Our knowledge of late antique and medieval culture derives primarily from the way in which we read today the manuscripts, images, and artifacts that were created and read in the past. The various intersecting and discrete social strata spanning the Middle Ages each practiced radically different methods of reading, in the broadest possible sense of the term. From the monasteries where the writings and stories of the classical period were transmitted and preserved, to the stained-glass windows greeting worshipers of even the lowest social classes, each reading practice provides us with invaluable information about what the people we study may have valued as well as how they lived and communicated with one another.

This conference will take up the variety of reading practices at play in the Middle Ages as the cornerstone to an exploration of medieval culture. However, proposals are encouraged to push our modern conceptions of reading into new territory, finding medieval reading practiced in ways we would not expect, challenging the way in which we read now, and asking questions of our relationship to medieval texts. Above all, we invite papers from a wide range of disciplines, especially ones that do not limit themselves to a treatment of literary or textual reading, but instead reach beyond the scope of the manuscript page to archeology and the reading of time through physical remains, art and the reading of images, et cetera.

We look forward to welcoming you to our beautiful campus for what promises to be an exciting and intellectually stimulating weekend.

Please send 300-word abstracts for twenty-minute papers to Graduate Medievalists at Berkeley (graduatemedievalists@gmail.com) by Friday, 12 November 2010

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Opportunity for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Climate Change Communication

In partnership with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication we have begun work on a project supported by an NSF-funded planning grant titled Making the Global Local: Unusual Weather Events as Climate Change Education Opportunities. A postdoctoral research fellow, to be based out of GMU, is sought by October 1st to collaborate on research and educational programming with us and America’s broadcast meteorologists. If you know potentially interested candidates, please alert them to the opportunity. Information about the position can be found here. If you have trouble accessing the job description from the link, please go to https://jobs.gmu.edu and search on Job Number F9401z. Thank you.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

International Colloquium - Assembling Colombia (1): natures, cultures, technologies

Dear Friends and Colleagues in Science Studies and related areas, worldwide

We wish to announce a forthcoming colloquium, Assembling Colombia (1): natures, cultures, technologies

What? This colloquium constitutes the launch of the major research project, directed by Professor Olga Restrepo Forero, “Ensamblado en Colombia: Producción de saberes y construcción de ciudadanías” (Colombia assembled: production of knowledges and construction of citizenships). It is the first of a prospective pair, the second being planned for 2011. These events, and the research they project, are related to the 'celebrations' of the bicentenary of the Colombian state

Where? Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá

When? August 10 - 13, 2010

Who? 51 prospective authors of 38 papers, mostly Colombian but including 6 International Guests: Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Duke University, USA), Charis Thompson (UC Berkeley, USA), Pablo Kreimer (Instituto de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, Argentina), Ana María Talak (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina), Dominique Vinck (Université Pierre Mendès-France, France), David Turnbull (University of Melbourne, Australia)

For more information, see www.ensambladoencolombia.org

Naomi Oreskes' book discussed in The Guardian

A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change.

People who claim that climate science is a conspiracy or the work of charlatans are talking rubbish.

Robin McKie
Sunday August 1, 2010
The Observer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/01/climate-change-robin-mckie