Events

).
Full or partial travel reimbursement and hotel costs are available for those whose paper is selected (for a presentation in the workshop or a poster presentation).

New England Workshop on Science and Social Change Location

April 17 2010 | Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole MA, USA

Deadline: January 15 2010

URL: (http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc10a.html)

Updated: January 14 2010

"Where social theory meets critical engagement with the production of scientific knowledge "

The topic and the processes of this workshop are designed to attract a diverse group of scientists, science educators, and scholars from the various areas of science and technology studies (STS) interested in developing social theory and engaging critically in the negotiated, contested production of scientific knowledge. With an eye to training "interdisciplinarians" the workshop will include graduate students as well as more experienced scholars. Applicants should: a) submit by 15 January 2010 a written account of your innovations (or planned innovations) in research, teaching, and wider outreach in response to the thought-piece on the workshop website (http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc10a.html); b) be prepared to lead an activity during the workshop that helps other participants develop knowledge, skills, and interest in these innovations. (The organizer will consult with participants in February or March to help plan such activities.) Both the products and the processes of the workshop will be documented on the web. The pre-submitted innovations in research, teaching, and wider outreach, supplemented by a record of the accompanying activities at the workshop made by a participant-evaluator, will be assembled for a special edition of a journal. There is no charge for the workshop, but applicants are expected to make every effort to secure support for travel to Woods Hole and accommodation. Limited funds are available to support participants who are unable to find others sources of funding, with priority to students and independent scholars.

Digital Technology Design in Cross-cultural Contexts: Practice & Method

April 22 2010 | University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

Deadline: February 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

Analyzing and designing digital technologies across cultural, religious,
ethnic, national or other boundaries is a challenge. Incorporating our rich
understanding of how differences between people may generate different
technological needs and expectations into how we analyze and design
technologies is a crucial, yet often frustrating, murky, and unevenly
executed process.

This two-day workshop provides an opportunity for scholars and design
practitioners working in these areas to present and discuss their work (or
work-in-progress), with a particular emphasis on methodological challenges
and solutions.

We encourage submissions from academics, practitioners, and technologists in
all fields and in all domains. The workshop will be particularly relevant to
people concerned with (but not limited to) the following areas: culturally
comparative research about technologies, cross-cultural use of technology,
multilingual technology design, accessibility, translation and localization,
globalization of technologies.

We have a small amount of funds to support travel and accommodation. The
University of Twente is located near an international train station, as well
as near several international airports (70 km from Munster, Germany; 150 km
from Dusseldorf, Germany, 165 km from Amsterdam/Schiphol, Netherlands).

PARTICIPATION

To apply for this workshop, please email the following by February 15, 2010
to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

1. A 250-word statement indicating what you hope to gain and contribute from
participating in this workshop, and, if you are requesting travel or
accommodation funds, the minimum amount you would need in order to attend.
2. A 300-350-word abstract of your presentation (completed or in progress)
3. Curriculum vita (CV)

Please note that space at the workshop is limited to approximately 15
participants.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions Due: February 15, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: February 19, 2010
Workshop: April 22-23, 2010

ORGANIZERS

- Dr. Nalini P. Kotamraju, University of Twente, Department of Technical &
Professional Communication
- Dr. Somaya Ben Allouch, University of Twente, Department of Media,
Communication & Organization

“Gender, Bodies and Technology” Proposals are invited for an Interdisciplinary Conference

April 22 2010 | Roanoke, VA

Deadline: September 15 2009

URL: http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/

Updated: January 13 2010

We invite proposals from scholars in the humanities, social and natural sciences, visual and performing arts, engineering and technology for papers, panels, new media art and performance pieces that explore: the technological production of gendered and racialized bodies, historical and contemporary feminist appropriations of technology in aesthetics and representations of embodiment, and the gendered implications of technology in contexts ranging from classrooms to workplaces to the Internet. We construe technology broadly to include material culture and the apparatus of daily life, such as writing, books and the built environment.
Specific topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Technological production and control of classed, racialized, aged and gendered bodies
• Work, healthcare, education and activities of daily life as produced through technologies
• Performance, new media and other creative expressions as sites for engaging/enacting/destabilizing conventions of embodiment and technology
• Biopolitics and medical engineering of reproduction, sexual identity and gender
• Personal narrative and oral history as sources of embodied theorizing
• Surveillance, containment, in/security and militarization
• Identity and technological design, production and use; gender, race, age, class and sexuality in SET (sciences, engineering and technology) fields
• New media art and feminist aesthetics
• Technologies of development and sustainability; eco-feminism
• Activism, participatory decision-making and issues of technological citizenship
As an assemblage of people and technologies we see the conference itself as enacting the conference theme. We welcome innovative uses of technology and creative session formats, including performance and interactive presentations, as well as traditional paper presentations. Using the form attached, please submit a proposal of up to 300 words for each individual presentation, including not only the scholarship you will engage but also the format that you wish to use. For panels, include an abstract for each presentation. Please specify in your proposal any special requirements for technology or space that you anticipate. Proposals will be reviewed by Virginia Tech Women’s and Gender Studies faculty/affiliates with appropriate expertise and notification of the outcome will be made no later than October 15, 2009.
Proposals should be submitted via our website at http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/. If that is not possible, or if you have questions, please contact: Sharon Elber

Problem- and case-based learning about biology-in-society

April 22 2010 | Woods Hole, MA

Deadline: January 15 2010

URL: http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc10b.html

Updated: January 13 2010

The topic and the processes of this workshop are designed to attract a diverse group of scientists, science educators, and scholars from the various areas of science and technology studies interested in the life sciences and pedagogical innovation.
With an eye to training "interdisciplinarians" the workshop will include graduate students (who can get course credit) as well as more experienced scholars.
Applicants should:
a) submit to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 15 January 2010 a written account of your innovations (or planned innovations) in research, teaching, and wider outreach in response to the thought-piece at http://www.stv.umb.edu/newssc10b.html;
b) be prepared to lead an activity during the workshop that helps other participants develop knowledge, skills, and interest in these innovations. (The organizer will consult with participants in February or March to help plan such activities.)
Both the products and the processes of the workshop will be documented on the web. The pre-submitted innovations in research, teaching, and wider outreach, supplemented by a record of the accompanying activities at the workshop made by a participant-evaluator, will be assembled for a special edition of a journal.
There is no charge for the workshop, but applicants are expected to make every effort to secure support for travel to Woods Hole and accommodation. Limited funds are available to support participants who are unable to find others sources of funding, with priority to students and independent scholars.

Social Networking in Cyberspace conference

April 23 2010 | University of Wolverhampton

Deadline: October 30 2009

URL: (http://ijis.net/)

Updated: January 13 2010

All presenters will be asked to submit a paper and the International Journal of Internet Science (http://ijis.net/) will be publishing a peer-reviewed selection of the best papers from the conference.

Postgraduate poster competition
We will be running a postgraduate poster competition on the day of the conference. Prizes will be awarded for the best posters on the day. We invite postgraduate students to submit an abstract by October 30th 2009 for consideration.

For further information please visit
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/Default.aspx?page=19670

Uncertainty: ambiguities and doubt in knowledge production

April 23 2010 | Standford, University

Deadline: February 01 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

What work does uncertainty do? How is it produced and how is it involved in settling questions of classification, causality, and accountability? What types of political engagements are made possible by making uncertainty and ambiguity--rather than certainty and consensus--a central analytical concern? Recent scholarship in science studies and other fields suggests that the production and management of uncertainty is central to political, social, and ethical debates around many of today's most controversial issues. Models of risk and uncertainty have been implicated in the recent financial crisis, and the threshold of certainty required by "sound science" has been a matter of contention in debates about anthropogenic climate change and environmental toxicity. Similar issues of uncertainty have marked a number of sites of critical inquiry, from the court room to the genetics lab to the experimental field plot. While a great deal of work on this topic and related inquiries into risk and ignorance have been motivated by the post-structural critique of certainty, truth, and objectivity, older debates in anthropology and related fields--about value and fetishism, purity and the sacred, risk society, the nature/culture distinction, and the production of race, gender, and sexuality--have also been centrally concerned with ambiguity and uncertainty.

This conference aims to foster productive dialogue across diverse areas of current study and long-standing scholarly discussion around these and related themes.

We invite submissions that engage with the problem of uncertainty from across the critical social sciences and humanities: papers that investigate the production, marshaling, or technical management of uncertainty from a historical, ethnographic, or theoretical perspective. Among other topics, papers might address the role of uncertainty in environmental management, scientific and actuarial forecasting, the deployment of medical technologies and treatments, and the crafting of identity. We also welcome submissions focusing on the methods and ethics of social scientific inquiry and how we understand and communicate uncertainties in our own research.

The conference will feature Hugh Gusterson and Karen Barad as keynote speakers as well as faculty discussants from several institutions for student panels. There is no registration fee.

Please send abstracts for 15 minute papers to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by February 1, 2010. Submissions should include a title, abstracts of no more than 250 words, and a short biography of no more than 100 words. Please email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with any inquiries.

Whither the History of Nineteenth-Century Medicine?, a one day symposium

April 23 2010 | Welcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Manchester

Deadline: January 31 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the nineteenth century lay at the very heart of medical historical scholarship. Indeed, many historians chose to focus on this period precisely because they believed that it was in the nineteenth century that modern medicine was born. Historians charted the 'rise' of the profession and of hospital and laboratory medicine. They traced the development of social medicine and public health and reflected on the increasing involvement of medical practitioners in everyday life. Meanwhile, historians of psychiatry, spurred on by the intellectual legacy of Michel Foucault, sought to understand the asylum as a social, cultural and political institution.
This workshop seeks to address this state of affairs and to ask where the history of nineteenth-century medicine goes from here. Exciting and important research is certainly being carried on but what are the key questions that historians are asking? What are the major themes being examined and what areas remain unexplored? Is it, for example, possible to write 'new' accounts of psychiatry or public health? How are new histories of institutions, such as hospitals and asylums, to be written? Are there new histories of 'big' diseases to be uncovered or histories of neglected diseases and conditions, especially the chronic and non-fatal? Can we elaborate a more effective account of the nineteenth-century medical marketplace? And with all the work that has been done on representation, it is now time to write a history of practice?

Applications to present 20-minute papers are invited from anyone working in the field of nineteenth-century medicine. Please submit a title and one page abstract of proposed papers to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Instruments: Mental and Material:  6th Annual HAPSAT Conference

April 25 2010 | University of Toronto

Deadline: March 19 2010

URL: www.hps.utoronto.ca/hapsat/

Updated: January 15 2010

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”

We welcome papers addressing, but not limited to, the following questions:

• How do we learn from instruments? What roles do scientific
instruments play in scientific investigations of nature

• What is the relationship between science and instrumentation?

• To what extent have medical instruments transformed the
patient-practitioner relationship?

• Can abstract entities like scientific models or mathematical
equations be considered instruments? Is there anything to be gained by doing
so?

• How have social, cultural, and economic contexts shaped decisions
about instruments?

• How can we, as historians, learn from instruments? Can our textual
field learn to effectively marshal material evidence?

• How can we trust scientific instruments?

• What kind of evidence do we get from scientific instruments?

We invite graduate students and recent graduates working in fields such as
HPS, STS, history, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, and
law, to submit paper and panel proposals that critically engage with this
theme. For papers please email abstracts of up to 250 words to
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by *March 19, 2010* and for panels please email a document
with a 250 word abstract describing the panel as a whole in addition to
individual abstracts for each paper (also 250 words). Each presenter will be
given 20 minutes.

We hope to be able to offer billeting and small travel subsidies for
graduate students traveling to Toronto for the conference.

For more details and our past programs, please go to
www.hps.utoronto.ca/hapsat/

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM)

May 01 2010 | Washington, DC

Deadline: November 20 2009

Updated: January 13 2010

This conference should be of interest to anyone doing research on blogs, microblogs (e.g., twitter), and other social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, wikipedia, match, email, eBay, flickr, dopplr, etc.). Up until now social scientists have had only modest representation at the conference. But the organizers are very enthusiastic about including the perspectives offered by social scientists (that's why they invited me to co-chair the program committee). So I urge you to consider presenting your research at the ICWSM this year.

If you would like submit a paper or poster please note that the ICWSMuses the model common in the computer sciences where submissions are full papers (up to 8 pages), are subject to peer review, and, if accepted, are printed in full in the conference proceedings where they count as full publications. New research paradigms in CSCW come with unforeseen ethical challenges. This workshop will focus on methodological challenges in doing Internet research,
with a focus on:
data collection and analysis, differing ethical norms in various research communities studying the Web, unanticipated consequences of new kinds of online research, pedagogical approaches and issues in teaching online research ethics Instead of traditional position papers, participants should submit a case study (can be more than one) of up to four pages describing an ethical issue that they find particularly tricky or controversial with pro and con arguments for both sides, as well as a brief cover letter describing their research interests and background in this topic. Submissions should be formatted in standard ACM SIGHI format and submitted in either Adobe PDF
(.pdf) or Microsoft Word document format (.doc or .docx) to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by November 20, 2009.

WEBSITE:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi/ethics-cscw2010.htm

Conference workshop: Bio-Objects – Life in the 21st Century, Institute for Advanced Studies on Scien

May 03 2010 | Graz, Austria

Updated: January 13 2010

The workshop is part of a series of annual meetings of the Marie Curie Research Network BioStep, which emerged from the New Genetics /New Society? Integrating Science, Society and Policy Marie Curie Fellowship programme at the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) of the University of York, UK. BioStep stands for 'Bio (social) science,technology, and policy'.

*Bio-Objects – Life in the 21st Century

Bio-objects, or concepts, materialities and processes that are related to "life", play a crucial role in the 21st century in which increasing knowledge of life and its components are fundamentally transforming what life means and where its boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences - especially the molecularisation of life - and their influence on healthcare and other aspects of our society are analysed in a diverse body of literature, looking into ethical, legal and social implications of these new developments.
We argue that new bio-objects deserve a special focus, because they are produced by, and in their turn, are producing these developments in special ways. We define "bio-objects" as a new mixture of relations to life, or perhaps more specifically spatio-temporal configurations to which 'life' is attributed. They are new ongoing boundary projects between entities that were once considered 'pure' substances making up particular, discreet forms of living organisms. As a consequence, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and nonorganic, living and suspension of living, time and space, subject and object, agency and effect are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established.

Making the study of bio-objects explicit enables us to use it as a heuristic device – to point out and start tracing the new relations that make speaking about life and living as objects possible. However, with the concept we do not intent to reduce life to a thing or an entity - a mute object without agency. Rather, by questioning life’s status as an 'object' – bio-object – of current technological innovations we want to point out how life is in constant interplay with novel techniques aiming at re-routing, diversifying, collecting and commodifying the vital processes that 'life' consists of. Thus, bio-objects cannot be reduced to any pure form preceding them - rather, their plane of existence is something that could be seen as a network of unstable ontologies, an ongoing process rather than a stable form of being. As such, bio-objects contest the boundary lines between entities we are often accustomed to take for granted as existing by themselves and for themselves, and open up a new space for thinking what is it that we think is scientifically graspable in ‘life’.

The workshop on bio-objects traces a variety of contemporary bio-objects in their emergence, stabilisation and circulation through a number of European countries. The workshop consists of diverse empirical investigations that provide new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter our contemporary life and societies. They range from traditional to advanced configurations of life and living such as artificial hips, cloned animals, embryos, cybrids, genetic resources, biobanks and the forms of governance that surround them. During the workshop the network members will discuss the edited-volume on bio-objects on which they are already working as well as future research opportunities.

*The MC network: BioStep
Between 2002 and 2005 fifteen young scholars from various countries and disciplines –all involved in STS research- participated in the Marie Curie programme at SATSU. On the basis of their common interest and shared experiences in York, the Marie Curie fellows, together with SATSU staff and director Andrew Webster decided to establish a network to explore common research (interests) and prepare publications. The first network meeting took place in York in April 2007. The second meeting, funded by the Brocher Foundation, took place in Geneva, Switzerland, in April 2008. This meeting was clustered around three themes: the changing boundaries of human, animal and society; the new forms of governance engaged in the social regulation of these boundary shifts; and the new social and cultural relations that are made possible by these changes. In trying to find common ground between the various specific areas of research, the idea of bio-objects emerged as a theme the network wanted to explore further. Therefore, the third meeting at the Centre for Gender research at Uppsala University centred around bio-objects and took place in June this year. We have discussed the outline of our edited volume on bio-objects on which we will work in the upcoming year.
Participants of the upcoming workshop in Graz includes fellows from various countries including Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Hungary, Estonia, Austria, Germany, UK and Canada. In addition, scholars from the host country Austria as well as a small number of guest expert speakers working on the same area from
Autralia and US will be invited to present their work in the workshop.

*Meeting schedule
The workshop is arranged parallel to the IAS-STS 9th Annual Conference arranged by the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science Technology and Society in Graz, May 3-4 2010.

The workshop has been awarded a significant amount of funding by 4S. Other funding sources include SATSU and IAS-STS. The organizers of the workshop would sincerely like to thank all of them for making this 2010 meeting possible.

Contact persons: Niki Vermeulen (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and Sakari Tamminen (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

International Conference: History of Science in Practice

May 06 2010 | Athens, Greece

Deadline: February 15 2010

URL: http://www.hpdst.gr/contact

Updated: January 13 2010

We are pleased to announce the International Conference "History of Science in Practice", organized by the Programme of History, Philosophy and Didactics of Science and Technology (National Hellenic Research Foundation and University of Athens) and the Hellenic Society of History, Philosophy and Didactics of Sciences. The Conference will be held in Athens, Greece from 6th to 9th May 2010 and updated info will be available at http://www.hpdst.gr/events/conferences/history-of-science-in-practice
As its title suggests, the Conference will explore the possibilities of putting history of science into practice, both in teaching and in communication with the public. The http://www.hpdst.gr/publications/hsi
Submission of papers: Abstracts must be submitted using the Abstract Form at http://www.hpdst.gr/events/conferences/abstract-upload
All abstracts will undergo a peer review process. Abstracts should be uploaded electronically to the Congress website between 1 December 2009 and 15 February 2010
Registration:
Participants to the Conference are kindly asked to register on-line at http://www.hpdst.gr/events/conferences/registration
Registration will open 1 December 2009.
You may also use the following contact form: http://www.hpdst.gr/contact

The Informal and the Formal: Contested Categories of Socio-Economic Life Convenor: Italo Pardo

May 07 2010 | Gioiosa Marea, Italy

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

This conference recognizes both the empirical difficulty in categorising human activities as belonging strictly to the formal sector or the informal sector of the economy and the blurred boundaries between these sectors. It brings together anthropologists who specialise in different ethnographies with the main aim of addressing the complexity of the informal sector, the attendant challenges in attempting to define it and the problematic relationships between activities that take place within and without the officially set boundaries of the formal sector.

The ethnographer is often confronted with small-scale businesses and other economically significant actions and forms of exchange (individual or collective) that, not exclusively rooted in what is officially defined as ‘the informal sector’, generally address the market as a whole. From a worm’s eye viewpoint, it could be reasonably suggested that such activities may not always be strictly legal and they may not always agree with the ‘laws’ of market capitalism, but not for this should they be misread as evidence of marginality - cultural, economic, political and moral. On the contrary, it should be asked whether even people with a disadvantaged background may be actively engaged in negotiating the messiness of their lives and redefining their place in society. Contested knowledge acquired through prolonged involvement in the flow of local life brings out the weakness of the distinction between employment and work and of a view of informal work activities as a separate mode of production or as belonging to a ‘casual economy’. Of course, such complexity must be set against the background of the graded relationships between the legal and the illegal sectors that colour many dealings at various levels and in various sectors of associated life, which raises stimulating questions as to the extent to which the blurred boundaries of the ’divide’ mirror other aspects of social and cultural life (such as kinship, marriage and social and moral networks) in each specific ethnographic setting. It is not unusual to find complex links, in terms of production, distribution and consumption, between the formal sector and activities that are rooted in the informal sector, at the limits or beyond the limits of the strictly legal. For example, ethnographically diversified findings suggest that small- to medium-range formal businesses often rely on workshops that produce goods illegally (evading tax on the purchase of raw materials and the sale of finished products, as well as employment tax and other welfare state contributions) and that a proportion of such products finds its way into the legal market. In this context, the complex relationship between the legal and the illegal is a key issue, the empirical analysis of which may help us to clarify broader, far-reaching economic processes in view of ever-growing global competition. Such an approach needs to account for problematic processes whereby what is illegal at a given time in a given place may be legal in another place or may become legal at another time in the same place; it should indeed be borne in mind that changes in the law may turn given situations on their head.


Bringing together diversified ethnographic analyses, this Conference will stimulate a comparative view of this complex topic.

Participants are asked to draw on their diverse research experiences to examine ways to address effectively the analytical and theoretical issues raised by this topic.

This event will be organized in such a way as to allow ample time for presentation of working papers and discussion.

Proposals (max 500 words) should be sent by 15 March 2010 to Dr Marcello Mollica:

Chief Coordinator, CUA
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Fribourg
Bd de Pérolles 90
Bureau G 302
1700 Fribourg Switzerland
Tel. ++41 26 300 74 79
Fax ++41 26 300 96 64
e-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

The Archive and Everyday Life Conference

May 07 2010 | McMaster University, Ontario

Deadline: October 15 2009

URL: http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/taylor_10/index.html

Updated: January 13 2010

This conference will bring together academics, advocates, artists, and other cultural workers to examine the intersecting fields of archive and everyday life theory. From Simmel through Mass Observation to contemporary Cultural Studies theorists, the objective of everyday life theory has been, as Ben Highmore writes, to ?rescue the everyday from conventional habits of the mind?to attempt to register the everyday in all its complexities and contradictions.? Archive theory provides a means to explore these
structures by ?making the unfamiliar familiar,? hence opening the possibility of generating ?new forms of critical practice.? The question of a politics of the archive is critical to the burgeoning field of archive theory.

How do we begin to theorize the archive as a political apparatus? Can its
effective democratization be measured by the participation of those who engage
with both its constitution and its interpretation? ?Archive? is understood to cover a range of objects, from a museum?s collection to a personal photograph album, from a repository of a writer?s papers in a library to an artist?s installation of found objects. Regardless of its content, the archive works to contain, organize, represent, render intelligible, and produce narratives. The archive has often worked to
legitimate the rule of those in power and to produce a historical narrative that presents class structure and power relations as both common- sense and inevitable. This function of the archive as a machine that produces History?telling us what is significant, valued, and worth preserving, and what isn?t?is enabled through an understanding of the archive as neutral and objective (and too banal and boring to be political!). The archive has long occupied a privileged space in affirmative culture, and as a result, the archive has been revered from afar and aestheticized, but not understood as a potential object of critical practice.
Please see website for more conference topics. Following the conference, we intend to publish an edited collection of essays based on the papers presented at the conference to facilitate the circulation of ideas in this exciting field of inquiry.

Paper Submissions should include (1) contact information; (2) a 300-500 word
abstract; and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio. Panel Proposals should include (1) a cover sheet with contact information for chair and each panelist; (2) a one-page rationale explaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference; (3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and (4) a one page curriculum vitae for
each presenter. Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via
e-mail attachment by October 15, 2009 to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with the subject line ?Archive.? Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats. Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required information in one attached
document).
Conference organizing committee: Mary O?Connor, Jennifer Pybus, and Sarah Blacker
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~english/taylor_10/index

MS4: Models and Simulations

May 07 2010 | University of Toronto

Deadline: November 20 2009

URL: http://www.hps.utoronto.ca/ms4/index.htm.

Updated: January 13 2010

Scientific models and computer simulations play numerous roles in the sciences, but as a class of tools for use in the articulation of theory, experiment, technological design and application, and prognostication for purposes of public policy, they have only relatively recently come under systematic scrutiny by the community of scholars in history and philosophy of science. The conference aims to raise and investigate important questions about the methodology of practices of modelling and computer simulation, providing a forum for ongoing debates and new angles of approach, on such topics as: how models and simulations are constructed; how they are confirmed; how they may be understood to represent and explain worldly phenomena; how they function in cutting-edge research; and how they influence decision making in the arena of public policy. A number of bursaries for graduate students presenting papers will be available to help defray the cost of travel and accommodation.

Submissions of proposals for individual papers and symposia are welcome in
the form of an extended abstract. For information on submissions, registration, etc., please visit the conference website: http://www.hps.utoronto.ca/ms4/index.htm.

fPET-2010 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology

May 09 2010 | Colorado School of MinesGolden, Colorado USA

Deadline: December 28 2009

URL: www.philengtech.org

Updated: January 13 2010

Call for Papers - Deadline 28 December 2009 (Monday)
Background: The 2010 Forum on Philosophy, Engineering & Technology (fPET-2010) is an outgrowth of the Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2007 in Delft and WPE-2008 in London). The mission of the Forum is (1) to encourage reflection on engineering, engineers, and technology by philosophers and engineers alike and (2) to build bridges between existing organizations of philosophers and of engineers. fPET-2010 will be held as an intensive one-day meeting on 9-10 May 2010 (Sunday evening-Monday) at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO.
Abstracts (500-750 words) are invited for submission in one of three tracks:
Track One: Philosophy (reviewing by philosophers)
Track Two: Engineering ethics and other interdisciplinary topics (mixed reviewing)
Track Three: Reflections of practitioners (reviewing by engineers)
All submissions will be blind-reviewed by the program committee. Those accepted for presentation at fPET-2010 will be scheduled for 30-minute talks (inclusive of Q&A). All abstracts accepted for fPET-2010 will be published online at the Forum website and in a printed volume available at the meeting. A volume of selected papers from fPET-2010 will be published by a major publisher.
Instructions: Abstracts may be submitted electronically at www.philengtech.org/submissionNotification of acceptances will be sent by 1 March 2010. Abstracts (500-750 words) due Monday, 28 December 2009
www.philengtech.org

First Berlin Forum Innovation in Governance

May 20 2010 | Berlin

Deadline: February 14 2010

URL: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Updated: February 14 2010

The Innovation in Governance Research Group at the Technische Universität Berlin is pleased to publish a Call for Papers for the First Berlin Forum Innovation in Governance, which will take place in Berlin on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 May, 2010. This Forum is the first in an initial series of four, which will take place on an annual basis until 2013.

Entitled "Studying the emergence and development of new forms of governance", the first Forum aims to lay the conceptual and methodological grounds for studying the genesis, dynamics and politics of new forms of
governance.

We therefore invite you to submit proposals for papers that discuss and/or probe particular approaches to conceptualise innovation in governance and trace the development of governance patterns through time and space.

We also invite proposals for poster presentations. A planned poster session will include a concourse with five minutes for each poster to highlight questions, approach and findings.

We will be able to cover travel expenses for a limited number of participants. Please therefore indicate your need for travel funds when submitting your proposal.

The deadline for the submission of all abstracts is Sunday, 14 February 2010. Please submit your proposal via email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Applicants will be notified of the outcome by the end of February.

Thinking With Insects**: Entomological Reflections on History, Medicine and Politics

May 20 2010 | London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Anthropologies of African Biosciences Group

Updated: February 14 2010

Knowledge about insects has informed models and manipulations of human
societies, from apiary inspired labour reform in Victorian Britain to large- scale resettlement schemes for controlling sleeping sickness in colonial Africa. Religious, cultural, economic and political authority has been framed by knowledge of bugs; analysis of their behaviours has challenged our concepts of sociability, intentionality and language. Investigations of their habitats have informed how we construct, cultivate and manage public space. Insects are not only embedded in ecosystems but in cultural understandings; folklore, fiction and media constitute the insect as pest,pollinator or pestilence. In many ways, entomology is a political science par excellence; insect knowledge is enmeshed with the problems of governance, population welfare and ecological stewardship. Insect interventions – vector control, pest eradication, specimen collection and colony cultivation – register the evolving relationship between science, society, and technology.

“Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities”

May 20 2010 | The Portland Center for Public Humanities at Portland State University

Deadline: January 04 2010

URL: www.publichumanities.pdx.edu

Updated: January 13 2010

We hear talk of "sustainability" everywhere—sometimes as an ecological vision, an advertising strategy, a countercultural dream or even a business model. Given the diverse uses of “sustainability,” how might those of us who invoke it most effectively address our ecological,
economic, and social challenges? This conference is an invitation to construct bridges across the diverse terrains of sustainability theory and practice, engaging in productive dialogue and debate that might lead to innovative green frameworks for environmental scholarship,
activism, research, and policy.

Proposal Guidelines:
We welcome proposals both for traditional academic paper presentations as well as other formats, including panel discussions, interviews, workshops, art installations, and media screenings. Presentations that speak broadly to an interdisciplinary audience and that seek to
stimulate broad conversation about the future direction of green or environmental knowledge and practice are especially encouraged.

Please send proposals of 250 words or less by Monday, January 4, 2010 to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Please write “Understanding Sustainability” in the subject line and attach your proposal in the form of a Microsoft Word compatible file. Both the e-mail text and document should include name, affiliation,proposal title, and full contact information (address, phone, e-mail) for all participants. More information about this conference and the sponsoring Humanities Sustainability Research Project may be found at

Fourth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-10)

May 23 2010 | George Washington University, Washington, DC

Deadline: December 01 2009

URL: http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php

Updated: January 13 2010

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Featuring a keynote by Professor Bob Kraut on "Designing Online Communities from Theory"

The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media is a unique venue that brings together researchers from the disciplines of NLP, Social Psychology, Data Mining, Sociology and Visualization to increase our understanding of social media in all its incarnations. Research that blends social science and technology is especially encouraged.
SUBMISSION
People interested in participating should submit through the ICWSM-10 website a technical paper (up to 8 pages, not including references), poster or demo description (up to 4 pages) by the deadlines given above (Midnight PST). Papers must be must be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the AAAI author instructions page at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php). Details for the submission procedure will appear at the conference website: http://icwsm.org
CONFERENCE WEBSITE
http://www.icwsm.org For general information regarding ICWSM-10, please write .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). More details about the CFP and the conference will appear on the website over time.

Biomedical Visualisations and Society:  Virtual Reality and its Application to Healthcare

May 24 2010 | University of Warwick

Updated: January 13 2010

An ESRC funded seminar series for early-career researchers interested in the social and political dimensions of biomedical visualisations. Each two-day workshop will combine a lecture from a leading scholar in the field and time for peer discussion with an opportunity to engage with visualisation in practice and ask questions. Attendance is free but places are limited. Some funding is available towards travel and accommodation costs for researchers who have no alternative funding source.
For more information, visit the project website: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/biomedicalvisualisationsandsociety
Or email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Virtual Reality and its Application to Healthcare
24th – 25th May 2010
Keynote Speaker: Rachel Prentice, Cornell University, USA.
Includes a visit to the Digital Lab, University of Warwick, guided by Professor Vinesh Raja.

Identity in the Information Society Workshop (IDIS10)

May 26 2010 | Rome, Italy

Deadline: December 10 2009

URL: http://www.editorialmanager.com/idis/

Updated: January 13 2010

The third IDIS annual workshop provides an opportunity to present leading edge research, exchange ideas, encourage collaboration, andbuild communities across the various research groups working on contemporary identity topics and in the related fields of privacy and
security. Check previous workshops at http://is2.lse.ac.uk/idis/2009/.

Scope

IDIS10 explores the relationship between “Identity and Organizations”, whether public or private sector, local or global, formal or informal, for-profit or not. We welcome contributions ranging across different disciplinary areas, reflecting the broad nature of the study area with
its interwoven concerns of law, technology, and information systems alongside other social, political and management issues.

Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:
• New identity technologies
• Emerging practices and behaviours enabled with identification
processes
• Changing notions of identity: customers, citizens, and audiences
• Information and identity risks and how they are managed
• Surveillance and privacy issues
• Regulatory and legal issues

Important dates:
Submission of papers to Workshop (4-6000 words): 10 December 2009
Decision and Screening Feedback to authors: 19 February 2010
Presentation of selected papers at IDIS10 Workshop: 26-28 May 2010
Submission to IDIS Journal of revised selected papers: 25 June 2010
Feedback from reviewers to authors: 3 September 2010
Submission of final version papers: 5 November 2010
Publication in IDIS Journal from January 2011

Submit papers to IDIS Journal: http://www.editorialmanager.com/idis/
selecting “IDIS10 Workshop” article type.

2nd Workshop on Architecture + Social Architecture

May 26 2010 | Brussels, Belgium

Deadline: February 01 2010

URL:

Updated: January 13 2010

This is the second conference on “Architecture and Social Architecture” which seeks to explore a notion of relationships between organizations and their affiliated architecture. In recent years, organizational scholars have given attention to ways of conceiving space in organizations. However, little attention has been given to the influence of architecture on organizations and social behavior in the context of architectural spaces. Additionally, other disciplines such as, architecture, science and technology studies, and urban design and planning have examined the intersection between physical architecture and the organizations that structure it that may provide new lenses for organizational scholars and vice versa. We are particularly interested in cross-fertilization of disciplines that illuminate new and novel methodological, theoretical and analytical approaches.


Abstract submissions of 400 words should be submitted online by February 1. For more information visit website at:

Ten Years After - Mapping the Societal Genomics Landscape

May 27 2010 | Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam

Deadline: January 08 2010

URL: www.society-genomics.nl/en/conference-2010

Updated: January 13 2010

The Centre for Society and Genomics (CSG, The Netherlands), in collaboration with the UK-EGN network and VALGEN (Canada) will hold its biannual Conference on Society and Genomics on May 27-28 in Amsterdam. We invite submission of abstracts for papers and posters addressing the upcoming conference’s theme: Ten years after - Mapping the societal landscape of genomics.
The basic objective of the conference is to map and assess the emerging societal landscape of genomics. Four zones will be distinguished: the urban, the industrial, the rural and the environmental zone. Within these zones, a range of topics (dealing with innovation, governance, infrastructures and emerging issues) will be addressed in the form of parallel sessions. Besides plenary lectures, the programme includes ~ 50 scholarly presentations in parallel sessions, while participants will also have the opportunity to display posters.
We invite submission of abstracts for presentations or posters no later than January 8, 2010.
Further information about the theme of the conference, the practicalities and the call can be found on CSG’s website: www.society-genomics.nl/en/conference-2010

Venice Summer School on Science and Religion, 2010

May 29 2010 | Venice, Italy

Deadline: November 12 2009

URL: http://www.vssr.info

Updated: January 13 2010

The Venice Summer School on Science and Religion held in Venice, Italy, intends to be a key venue to expand and deepen the work of scholars interested in the interface of two of humanity's most central approaches to the search for truth and meaning. The school is open to all scholars seeking enhanced engagement with central topics in science
and religion.

The theme for the 2010 summer school is "Values & Science." The school will meet 25 May through 29 May 2010. Lecturers include George Ellis, Keith Ward, and David Sloan Wilson. The school's organizing committee includes Karl Giberson, Thomas Jay Oord, William Shea, and Donald Yerxa.

The Venice School on Science and Religion will award scholarships to participants whose proposals are chosen as most relevant for the school's discussion. Interested individuals should submit materials when applying for admission.

All application materials for the school are due 12 November 2009. Notification of acceptance will be 31 January 2010. More information regarding the application and other matters are available on the school website:
http://www.vssr.info

The 21st International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA) Conference

June 01 2010 | Singapore

Deadline: September 30 2009

URL: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/hist/iaha/index.htm

Updated: January 31 2010

The Conference will be held in Singapore in June 2010. The Conference is being hosted by the Department of History of the National University of Singapore with the generous support of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.
The IAHA Conferences offer a unique opportunity for scholars within the Asian region, as well as from other parts of the world, to discuss, share and gain new insights from their latest historical studies, and to foster solidarity and camaraderie among academics working on Asian history.
Proposals for individual papers, panels and colloquia, along with titles and short abstracts, are strongly encouraged from all interested parties and should be sent in no later than 30 September 2009.

Workshop Ethics on the laboratory floor; explorations for a methodology

June 01 2010 | University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

Deadline: March 01 2010

URL: http://www.utwente.nl/ceptes/ceptes_activities/deliberation_engineering/

Updated: January 14 2010

These last years there has been a growing interest in the engagement of ethicists in the context of scientific engineering research, with the aim to anticipate the ambiguous impacts that technological innovations have on the quality of human life. In this way ethicists are thought to be able to contribute to the constitution of the technological product, at a stage when it is still malleable.

Several scholars have developed views on how an ethicist in this context should work, but there is not yet a detailed ‘method’. With this workshop we want to contribute to the development of such a method. We want to focus especially on the themes of reflection and deliberation, for the enhancement of ‘reflection’ and the broadening of ‘deliberation’ is often understood to be the primary aim of the work of an ethicist in the scientific research context. Yet it remains unclear what this involves. Questions are raised such as: what is reflection/deliberation? How should ethicists enhance reflection? What are the consequences of such an enhancement of reflection on the deliberation about research choices? How much should this deliberation be broadened? And what is the specific input of an ethicist in this deliberation?

This workshop aims to act as a platform to discuss and critically engage with these questions. Confirmed invited participants are Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Rosalyn Berne, Ulrike Felt, Armin Grunwald, Alfred Nordmann and Arie Rip.

We invite abstracts (500-1000 words) from philosophers and social scientists. Theoretical philosophical papers about deliberation, reflection and moral linguistics are welcome, but also descriptions and analyses of concrete joint deliberation processes on the laboratory floor about ethical issues. Sub-themes are:

* Reflection/deliberation
* Future scenarios
* Ethical language and communication
* The institutional context

For contact or more information, please look at our workshop website http://www.utwente.nl/ceptes/ceptes_activities/deliberation_engineering/

The deadline for submission is March 1, 2010. The authors of selected papers will be notified by email. Abstracts should be sent to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

“Connected Understanding”, Canadian Communication Association Annual Conference, 2010 (CCA)

June 01 2010 | Concordia University, Montreal

Deadline: January 15 2010

URL: http://acc-cca.ca/en/annual_conference

Updated: January 13 2010

“Connected Understanding” is the theme of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS) 2010 Congress within which the Canadian Communication Association (CCA) will hold its Annual Conference from June 1 - 3 at Concordia University. We are calling for proposals that explore, critique and extend this theme as well as for proposals on any other relevant themes to Communication Studies. Please see website for further information on panels, prizes, travel Please note that Masters students interested in taking part in the
conference must submit through the Graduate Masters Sessions. See the GMS terms of reference: http://acc-cca.ca/en/annual_conference

Full details on submission, proposal forms, prizes, accommodation, etc., are included in our Conference FAQ: http://acc-cca.ca/en/annual_conference
.
Submission Details
All proposals must be submitted using the online submissions form. Full details are available at http://www.acc-cca.ca/reg/ . Please follow the directions on this website carefully and review the
Conference FAQ for more details: http://acc-cca.ca/en/ annual_conference . All proposals will be peer-reviewed by the conference organizing committee.
For additional information, please visit the CCA web site :
http://www.acc-cca.ca/, http://www.acc-cca.ca/en/annual_conference, http://acc-cca.ca/en/conference/upcoming_conference

Fourth Conference on the History of Recent Economics

June 03 2010 | École normale supérieure de Cachan

Deadline: September 30 2009

URL: http://www.hisreco.org/

Updated: January 13 2010

The Second World War and its aftermath marked a major stage in the establishment of economics as one of the dominant discourses in contemporary societies. The spread of economic ideas into many areas of social life invites mutually profitable engagements between historians of economics and historians of other social sciences. It also presents great potential for those working on the history of economics to broaden their audience beyond those that they have traditionally addressed.

The past decade has been witness to a surging interest in the history of economics post-WWII. This new scholarship has made good use of newly available source-materials, rehearsed new methodologies for the study of the past and looked across disciplinary boundaries for insights. The first three HISRECO conferences offered wide-ranging samples of this work. For the fourth consecutive year, we are inviting submissions of papers on the post-WWII era. Papers that deal with the period leading up to this may be considered, but only if they shed significant light on subsequent developments. Though all proposals will be carefully considered, our preference is for papers that place post-war economics in a broader context, whether this is parallel developments in other social sciences, politics, culture or economic challenges. To this end, we solicit proposals from scholars trained in history, economics, sociology, or any field that may yield insights. Proposals from doctoral students and junior researchers are actively encouraged.

If you are interested in participating, please submit a proposal containing roughly 500 words and indicating clearly the original contribution of the paper (if you have a draft of the paper, we would be happy to see that as well). The deadline for the submission of paper proposals is 30 September 2009. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent by 15 November 2009 and completed papers will be due on 1 March 2010 so that we can provide feedback and then give discussants time to prepare worthwhile comments.

Proposals should be sent electronically to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
For further information about the conference please contact Philippe Fontaine.

2010 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society: Social Implications of Emerging Technol

June 07 2010 | Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

Deadline: October 02 2009

URL: www.ieeessit.org or www.uow.edu.au.

Updated: January 13 2010

The IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) is an annual international forum sponsored by the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). ISTAS`10 in Wollongong, NSW, Australia, will bring together participants sharing research, projects, and ideas about: Automatic Identification, Automatic identification technologies including biometrics (DNA), RFID, Surveillance, dataveillance, sousveillance, anti-surveillance, uberveillance, National security, emergency response, border control, e-tollways, e-passports, Location-Based Services, Geographic information systems, digital mapping, geotagging, street view, CCTV, Location-based services, global positioning systems (GPS), tracking, monitoring, Social Networking, Social networking applications, blogs, glogs, cyberstalking, collaboration, Data collection, data merging, data matching, data mining, disclosure, Mobile comms, wearable computing, ubiquity, context-aware applications, Nanotechnology, Microchip implants, biomedical solutions, diagnostics, drug delivery, Nanotechnology, bionics, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, robots, cyborgs, Privacy, Security & Human Rights, Cyberethics, privacy, data protection, trust, control, consent, transborder flows, Security, law enforcement, covert/overt policing, laws, regulations, public policy, Social implications, registers, human rights, intellectual property, social equity.

Additional papers on other traditional fields of interest to SSIT also are welcome. ISTAS ‘10 will be a multi-disciplinary event for engineers, scientists, researchers in the social sciences, arts/law and humanities, and decision makers in the public and private sectors.
Important Dates: Abstract submission (200 words) October 2, 2009
Full/Short paper submission (5000/2000 words): November 13, 2009
Final camera-ready copy: March 26, 2010
All submissions to Katina Michael at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
For more information visit: www.ieeessit.org or www.uow.edu.au.

Risky entanglements? Contemporary research cultures imagined and practised

June 09 2010 | Albert Schweitzer Haus, Vienna

Deadline: January 29 2010

URL: http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/events/conference2010/

Updated: January 12 2010

Recent key macro studies agree that scientific research is
increasingly entangled in various societal rationales. On the one
hand, these analyses should be understood within the context of the
growing importance attributed to scientific and technological
innovation for shaping contemporary societies. On the other hand,
society's readiness to contribute to an innovation-friendly climate is
considered a key-asset for materializing this imagined progress. For
both issues, the human side of science, thus researchers and their way
of doing research, their values and their readiness to engage with
both science and society, is perceived as essential.

As this unfolds on a global scale, it is interesting to observe within
research policy and science institutions the convergence of various
discourses that stress and imagine what seem to be the key values or
myths guiding research today: excellence, accountability, mobility,
flexibility, ethical conduct, societal relevance or application
orientation, to mention but a few. However, far too little analytic
attention has been devoted to (1) how these broad and ostensibly
universal notions impinge on different work and knowledge production
cultures, (2) how specific local histories and contingencies play out
in practice, (3) how these global changes get refracted locally and
personally, and (4) how all this re-frames what being a researcher
today actually means. This lack seems astonishing given the importance
the 'human factor' is attributed in current policy discourses around
innovation.

This conference invites contributions that address change and
continuity of work and knowledge production cultures in research, and
ask in which processes ethical, societal and economic rationales shape
these very cultures. Of particular interest are contributions that are
combining more refined empirical analyses with broader theoretical
frameworks of change. By combining works that address different
regional-historical contexts and different scientific fields, the
conference's explicit goal is to open up comparative perspectives,
thus contributing to a broader understanding of contemporary research
cultures.

Risky entanglements?:  Contemporary research cultures imagined and practised

June 09 2010 | Albert Schweitzer Haus, Vienna

Deadline: January 29 2010

URL: http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/events/conference2010/

Updated: January 13 2010

Recent key macro studies agree that scientific research is increasingly entangled in various societal rationales. On the one hand, these analyses should be understood within the context of the growing importance attributed to scientific and technological innovation for shaping contemporary societies. On the other hand, society's readiness to contribute to an innovation-friendly climate is considered a key-asset for materializing this imagined progress. For both issues, the human side of science, thus researchers and their way of doing research, their values and their readiness to engage with both science and society, is perceived as essential.

As this unfolds on a global scale, it is interesting to observe within research policy and science institutions the convergence of various discourses that stress and imagine what seem to be the key values or myths guiding research today: excellence, accountability, mobility, flexibility, ethical conduct, societal relevance or application orientation, to mention but a few. However, far too little analytic attention has been devoted to (1) how these broad and ostensibly universal notions impinge on different work and knowledge production cultures, (2) how specific local histories and contingencies play out in practice, (3) how these global changes get refracted locally and personally, and (4) how all this re-frames what being a researcher today actually means. This lack seems astonishing given the importance the 'human factor' is attributed in current policy discourses around innovation.

This conference invites contributions that address change and continuity of work and knowledge production cultures in research, and ask in which processes ethical, societal and economic rationales shape these very cultures. Of particular interest are contributions that are combining more refined empirical analyses with broader theoretical frameworks of change. By combining works that address different regional-historical contexts and different scientific fields, the conference's explicit goal is to open up comparative perspectives, thus contributing to a broader understanding of contemporary research cultures.
Please see website for associated details:
http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/events/conference2010/

Forensic Cultures in Interdisciplinary perspective

June 11 2010 | University of Manchester, UK

Updated: February 14 2010

This international conference examines in analytical and historical perspective the remarkable prominence of forensic science and medicine in contemporary culture. It brings together leading scholars from history, sociology and socio-legal studies, media and cultural studies, and practitioners working within the diverse locations of forensic culture -from crime scenes and bio-medical laboratories to television studios. Topics for discussion include the politics and practice of DNA evidence, the use of "cold case review" in re-evaluating celebrated murder trials from the past, the historical invention of "crime scene investigation", the work of forensic identification at mass grave sites, and media forensics - including a dinner event featuring the creators of the BBC forensic dramas _Waking the Dead_ and _Silent Witness_.

_Forensic Cultures_ is sponsored by the University of Manchester's Centre for
the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), and by the
Wellcome Trust.

For further details, including registration information, please see the
conference website at www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/forensics/

or contact the organisers, Dr Ian Burney (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) and Dr
David Kirby (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).

Recycling Textile Technologies

June 14 2010 | University College London

Updated: February 14 2010

This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together researchers who work
on textile recycling, including anthropologists, geographers,
historians, political economists, designers, and materials scientists.
This is with a view to develop a research agenda that explores
innovation in textile recycling technologies in the widest sense, and
how these succeed or fail in becoming socially embedded. Textile
recycling activities, as socio-technical systems, arise in specific
cultural contexts within global trading patterns, and their study may
incorporate the underlying relationships between people and things, raw
materials and technologies and the emergence of entrepreneurs and
innovators in social networks amongst other (f)actors.

We see at least three possible clusters of themes emerging, but welcome
further ideas:

1. Reinventing Old Solutions to New Problems?

Industrial recycling practises are specific, historically situated
socio-technical systems. While pre-industrial papermaking industries
used rags as a source of raw materials, 19th century textile mills
looked to recycled clothing as a cheaper source of raw material for the
wool shoddy industries. In the 21st century, the problem has changed to
what to do with mountains of cast-off clothing, and this drives the
search for technologically solutions appropriate to diverse cultural
contexts. Anthropological understandings of technology embrace
materials, makers, designers, and users in a relational networks
including socio-economic, political, and legal factors. In this broader
context, how are some old technologies being reinvented for the future,
and in what fields are new technologies being successfully developed?

2. The value of knowledge and skills in cultural contexts

As different cultures have developed different somatic skills and
practices, we wish to investigate the importance of tacit knowledges to
recycling. Consideration of these embedded knowledges within the global
perspective raises a number of questions specific to the processing of
waste textiles. How are knowledge and skills valued differently within a
textile waste industry compared to primary production? How intimately do
you need to know used textiles in order to process them effectively, and
how do differing levels of entanglement affect your social status within
a recycling system? For those who are bodily engaged with waste, how
valuable are these tacit knowledges and are they acknowledged by others?
And what are the cultural specificities of the valuing of people and
skills within different textile waste sectors? For example, there are
differences in skills and status between an immigrant rag sorter in a UK
factory, an illiterate migrant woman cutting up rags in an Indian shoddy
factory and the designer creating eco-textiles from recycled materials.
Do these differences come down to a narrowing of knowledge domains? Are
these limitations the only factors affecting personal value ranking
within global systems?

3. Networks of global trade

Since at least the early 19thC rags have been globally traded for reuse
and recycling industries. Many rag businesses are family businesses that
have been trading for generations, and have nurtured valuable networks
of business contacts that span the developed and developing world in
both directions. The movement of second-hand textiles across the globe
both creates social relations and at the same time is enabled by
pre-existing social contacts. Why is it difficult to start up a new rag
trade business? A related question is what can waste do as an actor in
international trade? For example, how does the trade in second-hand
clothing and textile waste facilitate the movement of other goods along
similar networks? To what extent is textile waste trade a conduit for
other licit and illicit goods? How might the degrees of regulatory
frameworks surrounding waste enable or inhibit other flows of goods, and
is this conducive to it becoming the visible front for invisible
commodity exchange? Is this particular to textiles, to waste or raw
materials in general?

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words by Feb 28th to:
Lucy Norris .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) AND Julie Botticello
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Department of Anthropology, UCL.

This workshop is being initiated as part of the ESRC project, the Waste
of the World
www.thewasteoftheworld.org

Objectivity in Science

June 17 2010 | University of British Columbia

Deadline: December 01 2009

Updated: January 13 2010

Over the past two decades questions have arisen regarding the objectivity of specific projects in or fields of science: for example, can we trust medical research when it is funded by pharmaceutical companies? Or, whose research in climate science meets the standards of scientific objectivity? Such questions have become important in framing public debate about science and science policy. At the same time, the objectivity of science has become an increasingly important topic among historians and philosophers of science as well as researchers in other fields in science and technology studies (STS) such as sociology of science, rhetoric of science, and cultural studies of science. This conference seeks to advance scholarly perspectives on the objectivity of science by bringing them into conversation with one another. The conference also asks whether and how such scholarly perspectives on objectivity might or should inform public debate. The conference will investigate, moreover, how the specific concerns of scientists, science policy experts, science journalists, and other groups might be made more salient in the research of the STS community.

The goal of this conference, thus, is to provide a forum for STS researchers of diverse disciplinary backgrounds, practicing scientists, and other researchers to discuss and debate issues concerning the nature of objectivity in science. A particular concern will be to discuss how, when, and why questions of objectivity arise within science, in science policy debates, and in public engagement with science. In addition to conference sessions held during the day, this conference will feature two evening panel discussions, open to the public and focused on particular areas of research wherein the issue of scientific objectivity is particularly salient. The public panel discussions will focus on questions of objectivity in collaborative aboriginal research and in research on harm reduction.
Confirmed keynote speakers include Professor Ian Hacking (University of Toronto and the Collège de France) and Professor Naomi Oreskes (University of California at San Diego).
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
We welcome individual paper and panel submissions related to the theme of scientific objectivity.

Proposals for papers should include author information (including email address), paper title, and an abstract of no more than 500 words. Speakers will have 30 minutes to present and discuss their work.

Proposals for panel sessions should include the name of the panel organizer (including email), a brief description of the panel, author information, paper titles, and abstracts for each paper. Panel sessions will be ninety minutes in duration, including discussion time.

Program Committee: Alan Richardson (UBC), Robert Brain (UBC), Candis Callison (UBC), Lesley Cormack (Simon Fraser University), Flavia Padovani (UBC), and Jonathan Tsou (Iowa State University).

The deadline for paper and panel submissions is December 1, 2009. Please email submissions to Dani Hallet at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Risk, Governance, and Accountability, Society for Risk Analysis

June 21 2010 | King's College London

Deadline: January 11 2010

URL: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/srae2010

Updated: January 13 2010

The 19th SRA-Europe conference in 2010 aims to facilitate an exchange of ideas among all actors in the field of risk: academics from across the disciplines, policy makers, the private sector, NGOs and other interest groups. The conference organisers welcome presentations on all aspects of risk analysis, broadly encompassing risk assessment, risk characterisation, risk perception and communication, risk management, and risk governance.

The special conference theme will be Risk, Governance and Accountability. This theme reflects the increasing centrality of risk analysis to decision-making in a wide range of policy and organisational contexts and the increasing demands by the public for decision-makers to account for outcomes.
The 2010 conference will be held at King's College London and will be co-sponsored by the Environment Agency, the Food Standards Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. King’s College London is one of England’s oldest and most prestigious university institutions, and its central London location is within walking distance of world famous attractions, such as the
Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, Tate Modern, and Covent Garden.

We invite scientists and practitioners wishing to present their work at the conference in the form of an oral presentation, poster, or symposium, to submit an abstract, no later than January 11th 2010.

For more information about the conference and important dates, please visit the website at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/srae2010,
or email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

3rd International Conference on The History of Medicine in Southeast Asia (HOMSEA 2010)

June 22 2010 | Singapore

Deadline: December 30 2009

Updated: January 13 2010

All proposals on the subject of the history of medicine and health in Southeast Asia will be considered, but preference will be given to those on the theme of:

New Medicines, Markets, and the Development of Medical Pluralism

The theme “New Medicines, Markets, and the Development of Medical Pluralism” intends to explore how both local and metropolitan actors in Southeast Asia have contributed historically to the growth and development of medical markets throughout the region, here implying both traditional pharmacopeia as well as the arrival of newer pharmaceuticals in colonial and post-colonial settings. With a time frame preceding formal colonial intervention in the region and ranging up to the present, with the creation of a local infrastructure for biomedical and biotech work, participants are encouraged to submit individual papers and panels with possible themes including:

Women and Health in Southeast Asia
Medical pluralism in Southeast Asia: A Historical Perspective
Medical markets in SEA
Southeast Asian Biopoleis (including the growth of biomedical infrastructure, Science Parks, and Local Production Facilities¬identification of pharmacopoeia, drug development)
New Sources, New Methodologies, New Historiographies

As the HOMSEA meeting will coincide with the IAHA 2010 meeting in Singapore, those interested in expanding the discussion either geographically¬to include North East Asia and South Asia¬chronologically, or methodologically are encouraged to apply to HOMSEA as well as the IAHA meeting to broaden the scope of discussion.

Please see the IAHA website at: http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/hist/iaha/index.htm


Please submit a one-page proposed abstract for a 20-minute talk, and a one-page CV by 30th December 2009 to: Laurence Monnais ( .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))


Please note that it may be possible to subsidize some of the costs of participation for scholars from less wealthy countries.

For further information about funding and the general organization of the meeting, please contact: John DiMoia (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

IPA 2010 Grenoble: Discourse and Policy Practices: Politics – Legitimacy - Power

June 23 2010 | Grenoble, France

Deadline: January 31 2010

URL: http://www.ipa2010-grenoble.fr/discursive-practices-and-legitimate-power-in-forest-and-nature-policy/

Updated: February 14 2010

The social sciences are witnessing a 'practice turn', of which traces are also found in the policy sciences. Policy discourses are for example conceptualized as: (1) the result of 'messy practices'; (2) only loosely embedded in democratic practices; (3) hardly related to social practices; and (4) the opposite of 'what is really happening'. This panel wants to identify how the practice turn impacts the field of forest and nature conservation policy, specifically relating it to accounts of politics, legitimacy, and power in general. Conceptually, the relationship between discourse and practice will be particularly key. This relationship can range from discourse as one of the many components of a practice to discourse as constituting practice. Methodologically, we want to discuss whether a practice turn gives primacy to ethnographic techniques, or that other methods retain equal value. To discuss these, and related issues, we call on you to write papers on the following topics:

The relation between forest and nature discourses and management practices. Is policy 'what is happening'? The politics of policy discourse. How do we retrieve the politics and power of policy discourses from policy practices? In forest and nature conservation policy, public participation and transparency are often expected to contribute to democratic legitimacy. Do these also constitute democratic practices? The methodological consequences of a practice turn. How do we research green policy practices and in what ways do we present our findings?
January 31, 2010:
Deadline for paper submission (Abstract; max 500 words)

February 15,
2010 : Notification of acceptance and registration

May 15, 2010 : deadline for full papers


Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Politics of Design

June 24 2010 | Manchester, UK

Deadline: March 15 2010

URL: http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/marc/

Updated: February 14 2010

In the last decade numerous STS trained scholars engaged in a venture
of unpacking design practices. Yet, to study the practical course of
design means to be simultaneously involved in the subject of politics
and in the particular sort of politics that is centred on objects
(Latour & Weibel, Making Things Public). Recent studies in political
philosophy and STS have argued that politics is not limited anymore to
citizens, elections, votes, petitions, ideologies and particular
institutionalised conflicts (DeVries, What is Political in Sub-
politics?), and have reformulated the question of politics into one of
cosmopolitics (Stengers, Cosmopolitics; Latour, Politics of Nature)
and ontological politics (Mol, Actor Network Theory and After). The
“political” is not defined as a way of codifying particular forms of
contestation but as opening up new sites and objects of contestation
(Barry, Political Machines).

Looking to assess the multifarious ways design can be “political” and
the various sites of politics of design, this workshop will explore a
range of questions pertaining to theory and methodology:

To what kind of politics can we get access when we strive to unravel
design not through ideology but through the work of designers, their
rich repertoire of actions, their controversies, concerns, puzzles,
risk-taking, and imagination? And likewise, what kinds of politics are
embedded in the objects of design, with their multiple meanings of
materiality, pliability, and obduracy?
How does design’s potential to bring an ever-greater number of non-
humans into politics contribute to the re-composition of the common
world, the cosmos in which everyone lives? What are the politics of
the relations invoked by design practices? Is design “political”
because it brings together land and NGOs, gravity laws and fashions,
preservationists and zoning regulations, architectural languages and
concerned communities, dives and stakeholders, land registers and
modernists, and if so, how?
What are the multiple design sites where political action might be
seeping through? How is politics carried out today in sites often
unrelated to the traditional loci of political action: in building
development companies, planning commissions, building renovation
sites, urban spaces, local communities, architectural offices, public
presentations of designers? And what can we learn from the different,
even unexpected forms of concernedness that we may come across in such
contexts?
How and under which conditions does design become one of the means
through which politics is being carried out? How does design turn the
“public” into a problem - and thus engage and mobilise it -
triggering disagreements and generating issues of public concern? How
do designers and planners make their activities accountable to
citizens?
If the “political” is considered a moment in the complex trajectory of
design projects, processes and objects, what are the methods we use to
account for them? How can we map, track, trace and document
ethnographically and historically these moments of becoming political?


The workshop is expected to attract a diverse group of scholars from
the fields of STS, architecture, geography, political economy,
environmental psychology and planning, design studies, sociology,
cultural studies and political sciences.

8th International Conference on new Directions in the Humanities

June 29 2010 | University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA

Deadline: August 13 2010

URL: http://www.HumanitiesConference.com/

Updated: January 13 2010

We are very pleased to be holding this year's conference in Los Angeles, California. Los Angeles is one of the most diverse and dynamic cities in the United States, attracting immigrants and visitors from around the world to its wide range of attractions, activities and professional opportunities. Although Los Angeles is perhaps most well recognized as the center of U.S. movie and television production, its cultural role exceeds that of its most famous industry. Its music, literary and visual and performing arts communities, for instance, reflect the diverse perspectives of Angelinos and are internationally influential. The Los Angeles area is home to some of the best galleries and museums in the country and to distinguished centers for humanities research, such as the Getty Center, the Huntington Library and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. The city is also a center of higher education, boasting many of the finest colleges and universities in the United States, including the host of this year's International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The Humanities Conference provides a space for dialogue and for the publication of new knowledge that builds on the past traditions of the humanities whilst setting a renewed agenda for their future.

In addition to an impressive line-up of international plenary speakers, the Conference will also include numerous paper, workshop and colloquium presentations by practitioners, teachers and researchers. We would particularly like to invite you to respond to the Conference Call-for-Papers. Presenters may choose to submit written papers for publication in the fully refereed International Journal of the Humanities. If you are unable to attend the Conference in person, virtual registrations are also available which allow you to submit a paper for refereeing and possible publication in this fully refereed academic Journal.

Whether you are a virtual or in-person presenter at this Conference, we also encourage you to present on the Conference YouTube Channel. Please select the Online Sessions link on the Conference website for further details.

The deadline for the next round in the call for papers (a title and short abstract) is 13 August 2009. Future deadlines will be announced on the Conference website after this date. Proposals are reviewed within two weeks of submission. Full details of the Conference, including an online proposal submission form, are to be found at the Conference website - http://www.HumanitiesConference.com/.

The First Annual Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ)

June 30 2010 | VIBE Hotel in Sydney, Australia

Deadline: December 30 2009

Updated: January 13 2010

This interdisciplinary and transnational conference is accepting proposals on ALL aspects of popular culture. We are seeking a strong representative presence for the study of Queer Popular Culture at this conference. Graphic novels, comics, popular romance, television, film and internet are only some aspects of the study of queer popular culture. Creative work is also accepted. Proposals for panels are welcome.

We will also be holding a postgraduate poster evening. All postgrads and undergrads (provided they are working with the guidance of a trained scholar) interested in presenting their would-be or current research are invited to submit an abstract. Please mark your submissions: Poster Session.

Abstracts (300 words max.) should be sent as e-mail attachments to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) The deadline for submissions is 30th December, 2009. Please include your name, affiliation, mailing and e-mail address, and the title of your presentation. E-mails should be entitled: PopCanz Conference. If you do not receive an acknowledgment within one week, please resend your submission. Accepted presenters will be notified via e-mailin January 2010.
A selection of papers from the conference will be solicited for publication.
Additional information is available on the PopCanz blogsite: http://popcanz.blogspot.com/
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) URL: http://www.nobleworld.biz

Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Conference, Emerging Spaces: New Possibilities in Critical Tim

June 30 2010 | Adelaide

Deadline: February 01 2010

URL: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Updated: January 13 2010

In a time of rapid social, economic and political transition this conference calls for consideration of the meaning and possibilities of change for gender in Australia and internationally. We invite papers on themes including (but not limited to):
-Indigenous women and political change, -Global feminisms, -Asian women and women in Asia,
-Feminist activism/politics, -Feminist economics, -Gender in technology & science, -Feminist models of governance, -Gender and Health, -Migration and gender, -Gender and youth cultures
Abstracts for oral presentations of 20 minutes duration should include:

Title of the paper, name and institutional affiliation of author(s), and an abstract of no more than 300 words. Contact details for presenter (postal address, phone, fax and email) and a brief biographical note about author/s -100 words.

Abstracts should be sent as an e-mail attachment to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Further information about the conference can be accessed at:
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/womens-studies/awgsa/conference.php
or e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Science and the Public 2010

July 03 2010 | Imperial College, London

Deadline: March 01 2010

URL: http://www.astronomy2009.org/news/updates/687/

Updated: January 15 2010

Now in its fifth year, the Science and the Public conference aims to bring together the various strands of academia which consider science’s relationships with groups generally called ‘the public’. Delegates come from a wide range of disciplines: science and technology studies, history of science, geography, psychology, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, development studies, English literature, science policy studies and more.

The range of topics covered may include (but are not limited to):
* PUS, PEST, PR.
* Surveying public knowledge and attitudes.
* Science and the arts (including science fiction).
* Science, publics and personal identity.
* The role of industry and/ or the third sector in public engagement
and scientific research.
* The challenges of ‘upstream’ engagement.
* Popular science and professionalization.
* Specific public-science issues: e.g. climate change, MMR, energy policy, GMOs.
* Studies of specific media: e.g. film, books, the internet, museums, radio.
* Science, religion and the ‘New Atheism’.
* Politically engaged scientists.
* Churnalism vs. investigative science journalism.
* Edu-tainment.
* Scientific advisers, spin and secrecy.
* Patients and publics in health services.
* Science and the sceptics.
* Amateur science.

Potential contributors should email a 300 word abstract to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 1st March2010. Please include full contact details (name, affiliation, email) of all authors.

Panel proposals should include a panel abstract and individual abstracts for each of the papers on the panel as well as contact information (name, affiliation, email) of the presider (moderator) and all panel members.

All submissions should be emailed to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 1st March 2010. All other enquires also to this address.

Managing Knowledge in the Techno-sciences, 1850-2000

July 05 2010 | University of Leeds

Deadline: November 30 2009

URL: http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/Invention/invention.htm

Updated: January 13 2010

An international conference by the collaborative research project ‘Owning and disowning invention: intellectual property, authority, and identity in British science and technology, 1880-1920’ (University of Leeds & University of Bristol) supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the White Rose IPBio Project (Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York)
The conference brings together researchers investigating the history of knowledge management since the mid-19th century – a period that saw the rise of the techno-sciences, trans-European controversies over the legitimacy of patenting, and the coining of the term ‘intellectual property’. Contributions are welcome from a variety of perspectives concerning ‘intellectual property’ and the 'intellectual commons' in the techno-sciences e.g. the cultures of monopoly, shared ‘open’ knowledge and of sponsored invention. Participants are encouraged to examine critically the foundations and methodology of historical research on the techno-sciences, including biomedical and agricultural forms.
Abstract Submission Abstracts for individual papers or panel sessions should be submitted by 30 November 2009. Abstracts for individual papers should not exceed 200 words and should be accompanied by the author’s short curriculum vitae (1 page). Proposals for panel sessions should comprise: an outline of the session (200 words), abstracts for the three individual papers (200 words) and CVs (1 page) for each of the contributors. All submissions should be emailed as an MS Word file attachment to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 30 November 2009.
A registration fee may be charged for presenters at this conference. Please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for assistance in this regard.
Further Information For enquiries about the academic content of the conference please contact: Prof. Graeme Gooday, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) tel. 0113 343 3274 Centre for History & Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, UK For administrative enquiries please contact Dr Stathis Arapostathis, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) tel. 0113 343 8027, Centre for History & Philosophy of Science, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds For information on the ‘Owning and Disowning Invention’ project, please see http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/Invention/invention.htm

Biomedical Visualisations and Society: 3D Foetal Ultrasound

July 06 2010 | University of Warwick

Updated: January 13 2010

An ESRC funded seminar series for early-career researchers interested in the social and political dimensions of biomedical visualisations. Each two-day workshop will combine a lecture from a leading scholar in the field and time for peer discussion with an opportunity to engage with visualisation in practice and ask questions. Attendance is free but places are limited. Some funding is available towards travel and accommodation costs for researchers who have no alternative funding source.
For more information, visit the project website:
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/biomedicalvisualisationsandsociety
Or email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
3D Foetal Ultrasound
6th- 7th July 2010
Keynote Speaker: Lisa M. Mitchell, University of Victoria, Canada
Includes a visit to 4D scan provider ‘Babybond’, with company director Jan Steward.

The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

July 07 2010 | Gdańsk, Poland.

Deadline: March 07 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration,
will be held this summer in Gdansk, Poland. Starting this year,
WikiSym aims to explicitly broaden its scope, exploring not only the thriving wiki community, but also other open movements and open collaboration initiatives. This includes related areas such as open online communities, collaborative creation of multimedia content (with or without wikis), and open journalism and publishing, just to list a few examples.
Furthermore, our goal is to establish WikiSym as a venue for the
exchange of information, experiences and practices among an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers, practitioners, industry representatives and experts with a wide variety of different backgrounds.

As a result, WikiSym has established 3 complementary tracks to merge
the contributions from such a diverse community:

* Wiki track: Focused on research in wiki technology,wiki websites, wiki communities, and in general any kind of initiative pivoting around wiki software.

* Industry track: This new track will focus on the specific needs of enterprises and private companies interested in sharing and promoting their experiences around wikis and open collaboration projects/products/initiatives.

* Open collaboration track: This track is a dedicated venue for sharing research results and experiences in initiatives that may not be built specifically on wiki software, but share the "wiki way" of organization. These may include open collaborations, open communities,
and open movements that allow the interchange of ideas and contributions
from participants with a range of interests and motivations.

Research manuscripts may be sent to any of these tracks. However, submitting the same manuscript to more than one track at the same time is not allowed. Therefore, please select the most appropriate track for the topic covered in your manuscript before submitting.

IMPORTANT DATES

* March 7th: Submission deadline for research papers.
* March 21st: Submission deadline for Doctoral Symposium
proposals, posters, demonstrations, workshops, panels, tutorials.
* May 4th: Notification of acceptance for research papers.
* May 11th: Notification of acceptance for Doctoral Symposium
proposals, posters, workshops, tutorials, panels.
* July 7-9: WikiSym 2010!

Given the interdisciplinary nature of wikis and open collaboration initiatives, WikiSym invites contributions in a wide range of fields.

Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference

July 08 2010 | Durhan and Newcastle, UK

Deadline: November 01 2009

URL: www.sshm.org.

Updated: January 13 2010

The Society for the Social History of Medicine invites submissions for its 2010 Conference ‘Knowledge, Ethics and Representations of Medicine and Health: Historical Perspectives’, to be held at Durham and Newcastle (UK), 8-11 July 2010, organised by the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine (NCHM).

Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2009

The organisers welcome proposals for 20-minute papers under the theme ‘Knowledge, Ethics and Representations of Medicine and Health: Historical Perspectives’. We particularly encourage papers addressing questions such as:

*    What processes have generated knowledge about the body, illness and health that has become authoritative in different societies?
*    How have claims of medical expertise been justified vis à vis claims from other domains of social and cultural authority such as religion and law?
*    What did it mean for medical practitioners in different cultural and social contexts to claim to be ethical as well as knowledgeable?
*    How did they present themselves to the public?
*    What kind of material, visual and textual representations of body, mind, health and disease have gained ‘defining power’ exerting influence on medical practice and research until today?

Submissions covering all periods (from Antiquity to the 21st Century) and all regions of the world are welcome.

In addition to individual papers, we seek proposals for panel sessions (with 3 papers), as well as suggestions for suitable chairpersons.

Abstracts of up to 250 words should include the title of the paper, information concerning the research question examined, the sources used and preliminary results. Please also include on the abstract your contact details (name, affiliation, e-mail-address).

All papers are to represent original work not already published.

Please send your proposal by 1 November 2009 to the NCHM (Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). Decisions on papers will be made by January 2010.

For more information on the SSHM please see www.sshm.org. For more information on the NCHM, a collaboration of historians of medicine from Durham and Newcastle universities, please see www.nchm.ac.uk.

CFP: AAHPSSS in Sydney, July 2010

July 09 2010 | Sydney, Australia

Deadline: May 31 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

The next conference of AAHPSSS (the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Science) will take place at the University of Sydney, in the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science (New Law School building), on July 9-11, 2010. Information about accommodation and registration is on the AAHPSSS website at http://www.usyd.edu.au/aahpsss/AAHPSSS2010-conference.html . If you need accommodation you are strongly encouraged to book early as the hotels and hostels will fill up.

The conference will take place immediately after the AAP meeting at UNSW in Sydney (more information at http://www.aap-conferences.org.au/) .

Membership in AAHPSSS (now 25 $ yearly, 10 $ for students) allows you to register for the conference at a lower fee. Members register at a cost of 40$ for both days or 20$ / day; non-members register at a cost of 80$ for both days or 40$ /day. Students and unwaged: 20 $ / day or 40 $ / both days. Remember, your membership dues contribute to student bursaries and prizes. Registration information is available on the AAHPSSS website; for further matters concerning payment contact the Treasurer, Dean Rickles, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Student assistance will be available via the Ian Langham Memorial Bursaries, funded by membership fees. Enrolled honours and postgraduate students wishing to apply for an Ian Langham Bursary should submit an abstract as above and indicate that they intend applying for a bursary on the form when submitting their abstract. Bursary applicants will need to provide a full written version of their paper (approx. 3000 words-3500 max.) along with evidence of student status by 31 May 2010 to the Secretary, Charles Wolfe (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). Criteria for selection of eligible papers include whether they engage scholarly dialogues in the HPS/STS literature, whether they evidence knowledge and appropriate use of HPS/STS methodologies, and that the author is a student enrolled in either an honours or postgraduate program. You must also be able to provide, on request, the written support of your supervisor. Bursaries will be allocated subject to these conditions and the availability of funds (monies are generally distributed according to distance between the home institution and the conference venue).The best student paper will be awarded the Ian Langham Prize at the conference although the AAHPSSS Executive reserves the right not to award the Prize.

Please send electronic submissions either of individual papers, panels (typically 3 speakers, maximum 4), or book sessions to the Secretary, Charles Wolfe, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Mention AAHPSSS 2010 in the email subject heading.

Submissions are due by 31 May 2010; registration must be completed by 15 June 2010; afterwards a late fee of 30$ will be added.

RC 25 Language and Society XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Sociology on the Move

July 11 2010 |

Deadline: January 03 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

The Research Committee on Language and Society, RC 25, of the International Sociological Association (ISA) is calling for abstracts for the ISA World Congress on the theme of Sociology on the Move.
RC 25 conceives of studies of language broadly including all varieties of sociological analyses of language/representation. We welcome proposals of on the conference theme that are of specific relevance to language and society. Please submit an abstract of (350 words maximum) by January 3, 2010 directly to the session organizer. The abstract should include your name, organization affiliation, country of residence, and email address. Please do not send your abstract to more than one session.
Hegemonies in Classification Processes
Gianluca Miscione, International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, The Netherlands, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Daniela Landert, University of Zurich, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Classifications serve as shared systems to organize and handle knowledge in any given domain. Classifications depend on language to provide labels for classes and on linguistic practices to establish, apply and reproducing classifications. Successfully established classifications affect thinking and coordination of social activities across different settings and actors. The role of classifications is becoming more evident since organizing processes are increasingly taking place across dispersed individuals, groups, organizations and contexts, a development that is supported by information and communication technologies (ICT). Indeed, when the common understanding and coordination are not facilitated by co-location, classifications are expected to keep patterns of action aligned.
Clear examples for this development can for instance be found in the two empirical fields of health care and of online communities. In the case of health care, information about patients needs to travel with and beyond the patients themselves, in order to allow consequent actions to be performed by a variety of actors. In the case of online communities, classifications are often negotiated collaboratively among globally dispersed laypersons. This leads to shifts in power between these laypersons and the experts of hegemonic classifications.
The mutual dependency of power and classifications raises the question how changes in the roles of the actors who negotiate classifications affect and maybe challenge power relations and hegemonies in a wider sense. Therefore, the “double hermeneutic” between those who are usually termed ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ has to be revised, mutual dependency between classifications and their objects needs to be highlighted.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WORLD CONGRESS GO TO:
http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2010/
http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2010/rc/rc25.htm
http://www.language-and-society.org/conferences/index.html

RC 25 Language and Society XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology, Sociology on the Move

July 11 2010 |

Deadline: January 03 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

The Research Committee on Language and Society, RC 25, of the International Sociological Association (ISA) is calling for abstracts for the ISA World Congress on the theme of Sociology on the Move.
RC 25 conceives of studies of language broadly including all varieties of sociological analyses of language/representation. We welcome proposals of on the conference theme that are of specific relevance to language and society. Please submit an abstract of (350 words maximum) by January 3, 2010 directly to the session organizer. The abstract should include your name, organization affiliation, country of residence, and email address. Please do not send your abstract to more than one session.
Hegemonies in Classification Processes
Gianluca Miscione, International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, The Netherlands, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Daniela Landert, University of Zurich, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Classifications serve as shared systems to organize and handle knowledge in any given domain. Classifications depend on language to provide labels for classes and on linguistic practices to establish, apply and reproducing classifications. Successfully established classifications affect thinking and coordination of social activities across different settings and actors. The role of classifications is becoming more evident since organizing processes are increasingly taking place across dispersed individuals, groups, organizations and contexts, a development that is supported by information and communication technologies (ICT). Indeed, when the common understanding and coordination are not facilitated by co-location, classifications are expected to keep patterns of action aligned.
Clear examples for this development can for instance be found in the two empirical fields of health care and of online communities. In the case of health care, information about patients needs to travel with and beyond the patients themselves, in order to allow consequent actions to be performed by a variety of actors. In the case of online communities, classifications are often negotiated collaboratively among globally dispersed laypersons. This leads to shifts in power between these laypersons and the experts of hegemonic classifications.
The mutual dependency of power and classifications raises the question how changes in the roles of the actors who negotiate classifications affect and maybe challenge power relations and hegemonies in a wider sense. Therefore, the “double hermeneutic” between those who are usually termed ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ has to be revised, mutual dependency between classifications and their objects needs to be highlighted.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE WORLD CONGRESS GO TO:
http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2010/
http://www.isa-sociology.org/congress2010/rc/rc25.htm
http://www.language-and-society.org/conferences/index.html

3rd International Deleuze Studies Conference: Connect, Continue, Create

July 12 2010 | Amsterdam

Deadline: March 01 2010

URL: www.deleuze-amsterdam.nl

Updated: January 13 2010

The third annual International Deleuze Studies Conference will explore how the three ...creative domains of thought - art, science and philosophy - connect, continue and create together. The visionary quality of the profoundly generous and complex philosophy of Gilles Deleuze may provide new and productive ways of understanding connections, in a world that is increasingly globally linked and technologically mediated.
Please send your abstract (max. 200 words) and a short bio to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) before the 1st of March, 2010. Confirmation of acceptance will be emailed before April 15th, 2010. Selections will take place on the basis of the number of
panel presentations. www.deleuze-amsterdam.nl

VIII Latin American Meeting of Social Studies of Science and Technology

July 20 2010 |

URL: Buenos Aires

Updated: February 14 2010

Science and Technology for Social Inclusion in Latin America
July 20 – 23, 2010
Buenos Aires

http://www.esocite2010.escyt.org

Call for abstracts
Fifteen years after the first Latin American Meeting of Social Studies
of Science and Technology, Buenos Aires will be host again the host
for the 2010 ESOCITE Meeting. The growing attendance and the
development of new institutions noticed throughout the past meetings,
highlights the rising consolidation of the field of Social Studies of
Science and Technology within the Latin American countries.

Nowadays, the VIII ESOCITE Meeting faces two important challenges: to
further strengthen the field of Social Studies of Science and
Technology in Latin America and to argue for a public discussion about
the role of scientific and technological knowledge in the region, its
uses in societies which requires the mobilization of S&T in order to
find solutions for long-standing and important problems such as that
of democratization, inequality, development and social cohesion, among
others.

Indeed, throughout the last decades, citizens, governments and
researchers in Latin America have done vast efforts to develop
institutions and projects to produce both: useful knowledge for its
societies and relevant findings for the international scene. However,
social inequalities at most of these countries have barely diminished
until today. In broad terms, the employment of scientific and
technological knowledge in order to mitigate this situation has been
only marginal.

In this sense, the motto for the VIII ESOCITE Meeting: “Science and
Technology for Social Inclusion” means the chance to boost the debate
about the ways in which science and technology can (or should)
contribute to improve the social cohesion and to reduce the social gap
in Latin American countries.


Main topics

1. Science and Technology policies in Ibero-america. History and
challenges
2. Institutions, disciplines and fields of science and technology
3. Technology, innovation and society
4. Process of production and use of scientific and technological
knowledge
5. Public participation, public communication and democratization of
science
6. Risk of science and technology
7. Theoretical and methodological issues in the study of science and
technology
8. International dimensions of science and technology
9. STS Education and Higher Education
10. Rising technosciences

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

On-line registration: http://www.esocite2010.escyt.org/envio_resumen.php
You should create your username on the site. This will allow you to
upload your abstract.

The submission should include: Title, Author(s), institutional
references of the author(s) (Institution, work address, phone number,
e-mail, area of research), Topic number (1-10), Keywords, and
abstract.

The abstract should include: Title, Author(s), institutional
references of the author(s) (Institution, work address, phone number,
e-mail, research area); Topic number (1-10), Keywords.
The abstract should also mention: the problem to develop, central
argument of the article, key conclusions, theoretical and
methodological approach.
Maximum length: 3000 characters (counting spaces) in Word format or
PDF archive.

Abstract approval will be required to upload your paper to the ESOCITE
web page (A complete uploading guide is available on the web site)

IMPORTANT DEADLINES
Second Communication and On-line registration: Available from 3
December, 2009
Third Communication: 8 February, 2010
Abstract submission deadline: 5 March, 2010
Evaluation results: April 2010

Meeting registration:
Early registration: until 22 May, 2010
Late registration: until 3 July, 2010
Paper submission deadline: 19 June, 2010

Questions and queries, please send an e-mail to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Official languages for submission of abstracts and papers: Spanish,
Portuguese, English and French

Thinking, doing and publishing Visual research: The state of the field?

July 20 2010 |

Deadline: March 30 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

Thinking, doing and publishing Visual research: The state of the field?
The IVSA CONFERENCE, Bologna, Italy, on July 20-22, 2010


Mobile mediascape is mix of cultural and institutional settings,
developments, applications, business strategies and consumers' facts,
and it is by accounting this multiple diversity that we will be able to
better understand such a complex subject. But the mobile mediascape
changes so quickly, is uncertain, and so malleable a field that it is a
struggle against time to observe important and pertinent things before
they are out of date. This panel aims to better understand the trends and discourses of the visual mobile mediascape; the way they affect not only how we perceive mobility, but also how we use and visually comprehend our mobile phones. What are the relations between mobile phone technologies, practices, identity formation and sociality within the digital culture? How do these complex and intertwined factors affect cultural transformations? What is visual mobility and what does it represent? What are its historical origins and these cultural mobile trends' logic? How do the cultural discourses and meta-discourses shape our understandings of what the visual mobile mediascape is? In this panel we will analyze different ways of production and consumption of visual mobile outputs.


Case studies, webnography, digital sociology, visual studies, cultural
studies, visual anthropology, different approaches are welcome.


Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. Please send abstracts or completed papers to:

Gaby David (PhD Candidate)
Lhivic - Laboratoire d'Histoire Visuelle Contemporaine
EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Everyday Life in the Segmented City

July 22 2010 | Florence, Italy

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

For the first time in human history, a majority of the world's population
lives in urban areas, and by 2050 more than 2/3 will live in metropolitan
regions across the globe. At the same moment metropolitan regions confront
unprecedented economic, social, and political challenges, the meanings of
everyday life are put into question because of the changing structure and
interdependence of urban economies. North American cities register the
largest number of foreign-born persons in their history, while cities in
Europe confront issues of social integration with emergent minority
populations in the suburbs and inner city neighborhoods. The rapidly growing
urban regions in China and India confront the continuing pressures of rural
to urban migration that will produce the largest urban populations in human
history. While the focus on the global city often emphasizes similarities
in the development of metropolitan regions and neo-liberal regimes, we are
interested in better understanding how individuals and groups respond to and
create dynamic change in everyday life within the ever changing urban
environment.

We invite contributions for a conference on everyday life in the segmented
city to be held in Florence this July 22-25, 2010. The presentations will
be grouped into the following subject areas:

Cinematic urbanism: Images and representation of the segmented city;
emergent symbolic economics of consumption and production; tourism and
visual consumption of the city.

Governance and planning: Multicultural cities and ethnic spaces; strategies
to govern the multicultural city; citizenship and participation in the
segmented city.

Suburbanization and the post-urban city: Suburban growth and urban sprawl;
revolt of the banlieues; social exclusion in the inner suburbs; urbanity and
urbanism in the suburban fringe

Appropriations of urban space: Emerging patterns of social exclusion and
personal security; privatization and surveillance of urban space; reclaiming
public space

The right to the city: Migration and immigration in the 21st century
metropolis; social participation in the segmented city; contested urban
spaces.

We invite submissions for papers on these and related topics. Please send
abstract of your paper or presentation by March 15, 2010 to the address
listed below.

Papers on cinematic urbanism: Dr. Lorenzo Tripodi, Berlin
(.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Papers on governance and planning: Dr. Camilla Perrone, Università degli
Studi di Firenze (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Papers on Suburbanization and the post-urban city: Dr. Gabriele Manella,
Università degli Studi di Bologna (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Papers on appropriations of urban space: Dr. Circe Monteiro, Universidade
Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Papers on the right to the city: Dr. Milan Prodanovic, University of Novi
Sad (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) or Dr. Ray Hutchison University of Wisconsin-Green
Bay (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).

Participants will be contacted with information concerning participation in
the conference by March 15th, 2010. Completed papers will be required by
May 30, 2010.


For other general inquiries concerning Everyday Life in the Segmented City,
contact Ray Hutchison, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Selected papers from the conference will appear in special edited volume
titled Everyday Life in the Segmented City (a volume in the series Research
in Urban Sociology, published by Emerald Press).

Discounted hotel accommodations in Florence will be available to
participants in the conference. This conference is supported with funding
from the Del Bianco Foundation in Florence.

More information concerning conference location and lodging may be found on
the web at Everyday Life in the Segmented City. This will be updated with
additional information concerning housing and other conference details as it
becomes available.

Eleventh Annual Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium: Filmic Representations of Indigenous Peopl

July 23 2010 | Maine

Deadline: April 01 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

Scholars, particularly during the last two decades, have sought to understand cultural representations of Indigenous peoples. In Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Culture, anthropologist Elizabeth Bird explains that when we seek to understand popular constructions of the Native more clearly, we are then better able to counter the mythmaking process and transform those representations. The 2010 Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium will explore how amateur and noncommercial filmmakers around the world have created a wide range of representations regarding Indigenous peoples and cultures. We are interested in presentations focusing on interpretations of moving images that will improve our historical, cultural, global and critical understanding of how filmmakers working outside of the mainstream have been informed by, contributed to, and countered popular representations of Indigenous peoples.

The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of moving images. NHF is located in Bucksport, a town of 5,000 on the coast of Maine (for more info on NHF, please visit: http://www.oldfilm.org). Typically, presentations are in English, and last 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. The symposium is open to archivists, artists and scholars from all disciplines. NHF houses a 125-seat cinema with 35mm, 16mm, videotape, and DVD projection. We especially encourage presentations that include interesting moving images.

We prefer e-mail submissions. Please send 250-500 word abstracts outlining your paper ideas to the symposium organizers at the address below. We are happy to discuss your presentation ideas with you in advance of a formal submission. The Symposium Program Committee (Snowden Becker, Univ. of Texas; Janna Jones, Northern Arizona University; and Mark Neumann, Northern Arizona University) will begin reviewing proposals on April 1, 2010.

Please email questions and submissions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Desiree Alliance 2010 Conference for the Academic Track

July 25 2010 | Las Vegas, NV

Deadline: March 01 2010

URL: http://www.desireealliance.org/conference.htm

Updated: February 14 2010

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Working Sex and the Twilight of Liberation

What is the significance of academic research and theory when it comes to sex work practice and policy? Where should academic researchers stand at a time when sex workers are becoming increasingly vocal in both call and response for social justice?—and in this endeavor sex workers are challenging the Academy through interrogation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of academic methods, theory, and praxis. What is the relationship between research and activism? As human rights activists across the globe call for decriminalization, what should our goals be? How can we reevaluate the ways that we write, think, and apply research among diverse sex work communities, especially where questions of sex work policy are of material concern?

The 2010 meetings of the Desiree Alliance, July 25-30 in Las Vegas, Nevada, will provide a critical space to tackle these scholarly, theoretical, and political concerns head-on as we examine our academic and public roles in relation to the most pressing problems confronting sex work policies and sex workers today. We intentionally offer the double meaning of “twilight” (as both a state of promise and uncertainty) in order to focus attention upon academia’s changing relationship with sex workers and publics who remain concerned with a wide array of interrelated exchange networks and practices. An interrogation of our contemporary goals, contributions, and intellectual heritage must critically examine the relationship between social justice and decriminalization in this twilight of hazy anticipation. We hope to generate serious conversation about these issues as we continue to reinvent sex work as a space of study and activism for this new millennium. Themes we hope to explore include, but are not limited to, the following:

(1) Global Models and Cross-Cultural Comparison: Global models from Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, and the US are examples of places where an array of policies have been implemented to various degrees of success. But success for whom? We encourage papers that offer a critical engagement and cross-cultural comparison to tease out the intricate meanings of policy from macro-level politics to micro-level personal experiences. Furthermore, while decriminalization has been the primary call to action in terms of social justice for sex workers, it has been under direct attack because the rhetoric and realities of global human trafficking remains the most prominent point of discussion in contemporary public discourse. How can we balance our investment in decriminalization with an understanding of popular public discourse on trafficking? How might we continue to renegotiate (and defend) the fundamental call for decriminalization as a basic human right in such a hostile political environment? This theme seeks to illuminate the relationship between policy, practice, and publics.

(2) The Interrelations Between Violence Against Sex Workers and Legal Policy: Violence against sex workers, and those identified as sex workers by law enforcement authorities, continues to be an area that is under-examined and under-theorized. How do we re-think notions of violence over time, space, and identities as sex workers increasingly articulate experiences with violence from private military contractors, police, military personnel, and other government officials? How do we conceptualize the complex of engagements and negotiations that materialize where legal policy and violence against sex workers meet? How do we develop and disseminate research that effectively addresses such serious concerns? This theme aims to interrogate the interrelationship between violence against sex workers and legal policy.

(3) Health Education and Outreach: Contemporary sex work research has championed sex workers as active partners rather than static subjects in health education and outreach projects. However, we continue to struggle to make sense of complex relationships between identity and power. For example, involving sex workers as active partners may often be met with resistance from colleagues. Funding agencies may be reluctant to fund projects that involve sex workers when laws criminalize sex work. How can sex work researchers challenge these obstacles and continue to further develop and deploy research methods and applications that take seriously sex-worker-as-partner paradigms? This theme seeks to explore historic, contemporary, and envisioned projects that holistically address health education and outreach across diverse sex work populations.
_______

We encourage submissions from all areas, genders, backgrounds, and ethnicities.
_______

A PROPOSAL SHOULD INCLUDE:
+ Title for your presentation
+ Affiliation with an organization or university you'd like to have listed (not required)
+ A short paragraph with your background and experience, or interest, in sex work, the adult entertainment industry, or the sex workers rights' movement
+ A bio which will appear in the program and on the website (approx. 200 words)
+ A detailed abstract (the description that will appear in the program and on the website- 500 words or fewer)
+ Technical support needs (e.g., projector, AV, Mac/PC, etc.)

DEADLINE:
Proposals must be submitted by March 1st, 2010 to be considered, and all submissions will be notified of acceptance by March 30th, 2010. Please let us know in advance if you need extra time or if you need to be notified of acceptance earlier. In some cases, panels will be suggested if more than one outstanding proposal on a specific topic is accepted.

CONTACT:
Please submit your proposal to Elizabeth Nanas at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and copy .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), with the subject line, "Academic Proposal". Please also feel welcome to contact her through Skype at enanas72, or by phone at 313-915-4933. You may also contact the Desiree Alliance toll-free at 866-525-7967 or through email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

ABOUT THE DESIREE ALLIANCE:
The Desiree Alliance is a diverse, volunteer-based, sex worker-led network of organizations, communities and individuals across the US working in harm reduction, direct services, political advocacy, and health services for sex workers. We provide leadership and create space for sex workers and supporters to come together to advocate for human, labor and civil rights for all workers in the sex industry. For more information about our organization, please visit us at http://www.desireealliance.org/default.htm

Bringing STS Into Environmental History

August 05 2010 | Trondheim, Norway

Deadline: February 05 2010

URL: http://sts-eh2010.miljohistorie.net/

Updated: January 16 2010

This workshop focuses on the intersection of STS and environmental history, paying particular attention to how conceptual tools, approaches, and insights from science and technology studies might enrich historical studies of interactions between humanity and the natural world. We aim to bring together a variety of international scholars, primarily environmental historians but also historically-minded sociologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists to consider how, for instance, the social construction of science, public understanding of science, actor-network theory, and technological systems can be used in historical studies of human-natural interactions. Participants will present papers that develop specific empirical case studies while also being explicitly reflective about the STS methodological basis and theoretical contributions of that study.

The workshop is limited to 14 participants. Each participant will prepare a draft text that will be pre-circulated to workshop attendees in June 2010. At the workshop, each paper will be briefly presented by the author and then fully discussed by the group in a one-hour session. After the workshop, participants will be asked to revise their papers for possible inclusion in an edited volume to be submitted to an international academic press.

The workshop schedule will be as follows:
Wednesday, 4 August: Arrival, pre-workshop social event.
Thursday, 5 August: Morning and afternoon sessions.
Friday, 6 August: Morning session. Afternoon excursion.
Saturday, 7 August: Morning and afternoon sessions.
Sunday, 8 August: Departure.

Through generous grants from the Research Council of Norway, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, and Cornell University, all participant travel expenses, conference fees, and accommodation and meals during the conference will be paid.

To be considered as a workshop participant, please send an abstract of up to 300 words and a brief CV (2-3 pages) to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 5 February 2010.

We aim to include a range of scholars at various stages of professional development, so advanced Ph.D. students and junior scholars are especially encouraged to apply.

For more information, please visit the workshop web page at http://sts-eh2010.miljohistorie.net

EASA Maynooth, Crisis and Imagination

August 24 2010 | Scotland

Deadline: March 01 2010

URL: http://www.easaonline.org/conferences/easa2010/index.htm

Updated: January 13 2010

Launching ‘Engaging Anthropology in Practice’ a project based in Scotland, this panel will showcase anthropological engagements being carried out in Europe that challenge the division between non-academic/academic audiences, to learn from these experiences and to create possible links of cooperation

The conference theme for the 2010 EASA biennial meeting asks whether at this time of global economic crisis anthropologists should resist the pressure to reframe the discipline in terms of what ‘practical use’ it may have. Rather, we believe that this is a very opportune moment to explore what ‘practical use’ entails. We also ask what imaginative acts are necessary to construe the ‘practical’ as opposed to the ‘theoretical’. It is necessary to trace the theoretical threads of this conceptual opposition in order to avoid reproducing it implicitly in the work we choose to carry out as ‘engaging anthropology’.

During the panel we will launch “Engaging Anthropology in Practice”, a project based within the Scottish Programme of Advanced Training in Social Anthropology (STAR). The project aims to develop a training agenda for postgraduate students and early career anthropologists by creating exchanges with gatekeepers of different forms of media in the UK. The aim of this panel is to showcase this sort of work already being done in Europe, to learn from these and to create possible links of cooperation.

The panel explores what imaginative acts are needed to practice anthropology in a way that reflexively engages in the world without reductionism. We welcome accounts of such engagements and especially ones that identify particular training issues, contributions that challenge the academic/non-academic division of audiences and contributions that are ‘imaginative acts’ in their form as well as content. Non-anthropologists will be invited to present and participate in this panel.

You must supply a paper title, a short 300-character abstract, and a 250-word abstract (NB: the electronic submission software is strict about this and the character count includes spaces).
Call for abstracts will open in mid-December and the deadline for abstracts is 1st March 2010. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact either of the panel convenors.
For general information on the conference, see http://www.easaonline.org/conferences/easa2010/index.htm

Out in public: towards an anthropology of public socialities in urban space

August 24 2010 | Maynooth, Ireland

Deadline: February 23 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

This workshop will explore the formation of urban publics as forms of deliberate stranger sociality that flourish in urban environments. The participation in urban publics is a significant form of place-making through which city residents can both stake symbolic claims to the city and shape the urban fabric. While cities have always presented contexts for the close co-presence of strangers, publics involve a conscious, voluntary stranger-relationality centered around a shared activity. The question of the relationship between publics as fleeting social formations and geographically locatable urban space has not been central to the debates on public spheres that developed out of the famous Habermasian account of decline. The quasi-metaphorical usage of space that dominates in the works of many public sphere theorists elides the question of how public stranger sociality is tied to the use and production of concrete spaces. We invite papers that draw upon
ethnography to reflect upon different forms of public sociality and the production of urban space. Questions to be considered could include the following:
How do different kinds of publics influence the production of urban space?
How do non-hegemonic groups contribute to the formation of urban publics through particular forms of sociality?
How are socio-political dimensions of public urban space affected by increasing privatization and commercialization of urban environments?
How are uses of public urban space regulated in the name of security and/or order, and what consequences does this have for the formation of publics?
How do multiple public spheres relate to hierarchies and hegemonies?

4S Panel:  Portrait of the ARTist: Cross-cultural constructions of ‘woman’ in the context of assiste

August 25 2010 | Tokyo, Japan

Deadline: January 20 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

Category: Biomedicine
Reproductive technologies push the envelope of existing discourse, requiring new definitions of kinship, and new subjectivities to accurately represent the issues at hand. Embedded within this discourse, however, is a larger, long-unresolved paradox in the simultaneous construction of reproductive service users as patient and as consumer; a tension which has been further complicated by the emergence of a globalised “reproductive market” in which gametes, embryos and even wombs are bartered, borrowed and sold. While theorists have wrestled with the meanings and regulatory dilemmas of concepts such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘life’ and ‘choice’, and scientists in the fields of gene therapy and regenerative medicine have become increasingly dependent upon human ova for the technologies they seek to perfect, the discourse of reproductive and genetic technologies relies increasingly on compartmentalization, separating the woman as knowing-subject from her constituent body parts, and leaving her largely outside the frame of debate.

This panel is seeking an international selection of papers which explore similarities and differences in the construction of women within the discourse of assisted reproductive technology (ART) emanating from different political and cultural contexts. By examining these discourses from a more global perspective, we may begin to uncover patterns that can lead to a greater understanding of the differential impact of these technologies upon the bodies of women worldwide, and explore possibilities for returning the woman-subject to the center of the frame. We cordially invite submissions for inclusion on the above panel, particularly from a non-Western perspective.

Possible areas for discussion are (but are not limited to): - construction of the woman user of ART in the popular media, legislative debate, medical literature, etc - self-created support networks for women ART users - rights-based vs other discourses in the regulation of ART services - use of ART on fertile partners of infertile men, or for the production of biologically unrelated children – at what price motherhood? - women ART users’ construction of themselves - motherhood and “desperation” in the context of expected social roles - physical and psychological impact of ART on women’s health

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION Abstracts of 500 words or less should be submitted to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Word or RTF attachments, or in the body of your email. This must include a summary of the paper’s main arguments and methodology, as well as a brief statement on the contribution to the STS literature. You are very welcome to contact us to discuss possibilities for submission in the first instance.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: 20th January, 2010.
Applicants will be notified of the outcome by 25th January.
Further information may be found on the 4S website:
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm

Tokyo 2010: 35th 4S Annual Meeting

August 25 2010 | Komaba I Campus, University of Tokyo, 3-8-1, Komaba, Meguro, Tokyo

Deadline: January 15 2010

URL: http://4sonline.org/meeting.htm

Updated: January 13 2010

Call for Papers: “SS in Global Contexts”

EPIC2010 道 Dō / The way of ethnography

August 29 2010 | Midtown Conference Center, Tokyo, Japan

Deadline: March 14 2010

URL: http://www.epiconference.com/epic2010

Updated: February 17 2010

The start of this new decade marks an exciting new departure for EPIC, as we move beyond North America and Europe for the first time – to Tokyo.

EPIC is the premier international forum bringing together artists, computer scientists, designers, social scientists, marketers, academics and advertisers - and others! - to discuss recent developments and future advances around ethnographic praxis.

We seek original, high quality and engaging papers, workshops, artifacts and presentations concerning ethnographic praxis in industry, including case studies on research investigations, methodological & theoretical advances, discussions on outcomes, standards, and new applications of ethnography around this year’s conference theme:

Dō captures the sense of individual mastery that is achieved only with the help of a community and its rich heritage. Dō implies a body of knowledge and tradition with an ethic and an aesthetic.

Dō is the “path” we have travelled and also the way ahead of us.

EPIC 2010 will feature a wide range of ethnographic applications in industry, different “ways” forward. Ethnographic praxis in industry is global in scope, but adapted to different geographies (Asia, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, North America), different contexts (academia, business, NGO’s, government), different industries (technology, healthcare, consumer goods, advertising) and different purposes (product innovation, strategy, interorganizational collaboration, communications, policy making).

Join Epic 2010 and help define Ethnography’s Dō. Show others “the way” of doing ethnography in your context, in your industry, in your geography, for your goals.

Send any inquiry about the conference to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

To receive updates about EPIC2010 Conference, follow us on twitter(epiconference) or join the Linkedin group (EPIC)

“Probing Technoscience” - a track within the EASST conference 2010

September 02 2010 | Trento

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

Track 8: PROBING TECHNOSCIENCE
The term technoscience emphasises the convergence of the scientific and the technological realm within a new technoscience paradigm. After the terms initial coining by the Belgian philosopher Hottois in the late 1970s, it has been re-introduced by Latour and Haraway, elaborating on the specific relationship of natural and artificial objects or, more broadly, nature and culture. In discussing technoscience, both authors not only point at the ontological differences between what they call technoscience and normal science (referring to the relationship of the epistemic realm of science and the constructionist approach of technology), they also focus on the cultural and material dimension, especially within the everyday perceptions and practices prevalent either within science or, more generally, within western society. During the past decade, an increasing number of scholars have begun to adopt the concept of technoscience, drawing on Latour and Haraway as well as on other literature. The concept has been applied in analytical as well as critical approaches. Technoscience has been discussed as a theoretical concept within STS and as an epistemic approach within science. The latter strand also refers to analyses and research on epistemic cultures initiated by Hacking, Pickering, Knorr Cetina and Rheinberger. The main aim of the proposed track is to probe the concept of technoscience in empirical and theoretical terms. The core of the concept is seen in the (proposed) convergence of science and technology, of representing and intervening, of understanding and performing and of the natural and the artificial. The track is open for discussions on the state of the art of the theoretical conceptualisation as well as for empirical analyses of technoscience (s), e.g. in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology, biomedicine, systems biology, neuroscience and converging technologies, but also ecotechnologies. Furthermore, reflections on the significance of the concept of technoscience for STS, science and technology governance and society in general are welcome. Contributions should address one or more of the following questions: - Do emerging technosciences differ from traditional sciences (e.g. concerning the relationship between science and technology)? - Or does the concept of technoscience mainly represent an alternative analytical background to be applied to all scientific fields alike? - What does the label “technoscience” bring to light and what does it obscure?- What are the societal implications and governance issues raised by the concept of technoscience?- Is it possible to build upon and further develop the concept of epistemic cultures against the background of technoscience studies? Abstracts of no more than 500 words can be submitted online following website instructions on submission between January 20th and March 15th. We plan to organise for sessions with rather empirically grounded approaches (drawing on technoscience case studies) as well as for sessions starting from rather theoretical discussions - depending upon your submissions. Abstracts will be reviewed by the convenors. Authors will be notified by May 15th.

EASST 010 – Practicing science and technology, Performing the social

September 02 2010 | Trento

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

TRACK 16. BIO-OBJECTS – LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY



Bio-objects, or concepts, materialities and processes that are related to "life", play a crucial role in the 21st century in which increasing knowledge of life and its components are fundamentally transforming what life means and where its boundaries lie. New developments in the biosciences - especially the molecularisation of life - and their influence on healthcare and other aspects of our society are analysed in a diverse body of literature, looking into ethical, legal
and social implications of these new developments. New bio-objects deserve a special focus, because they are produced by, and in their turn, are producing these developments in special ways.

In our terms "bio-objects" are a new mixture of relations to life, or perhaps more specifically spatio-temporal configurations to which 'life' is attributed. They are new ongoing boundary projects between entities that were once considered 'pure' substances making up particular, discreet forms of living organisms. As a consequence, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and nonorganic, living and suspension of living, time and space, subject and object, agency and effect are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established.

Making the study of bio-objects explicit enables us to use it as a heuristic device – to point out and start tracing the new relations that make speaking about life and living as objects possible. However, with the concept we do not intent to reduce life to a thing or an entity - a mute object without agency. Rather, by questioning

life’s status as an 'object' –bio-object – of current technological innovations we want to point out how life is in constant interplay with novel techniques aiming at re-routing, diversifying, collecting and commodifying the vital processes that 'life' consists of. Thus, bio-objects cannot be reduced to any pure form preceding them

- rather, their plane of existence is something that could be seen as a network of unstable ontologies, an ongoing process rather than a stable form of being. As such, bio-objects contest the boundary lines between entities we have accustomed to take for granted, as existing by themselves and for themselves, and open up a new space for thinking what is it that we think is scientifically graspable in ‘life’.

The session on bio-objects traces a variety of contemporary bio-objects in their emergence, stabilisation and circulation through a number of countries. It will consist of diverse empirical investigations that provide new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter our contemporary life and societies. They range
from traditional to advanced configurations of life and living such as artificial hips, cloned animals, embryos, cybrids, genetic resources, biobanks and the forms of governance that surround them.



Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent through the abstract submission portal on the conference wbsite (http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010) by 2010 March 15th.

Design, performativity, STS

September 02 2010 | Trento, Italy

Deadline: March 15 2010

URL: www.studioincite.com, www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/

Updated: January 15 2010

This track provides the opportunity to explore the extent to which forms of enactment, rather than description, might allow us to talk about the different material and temporal textures of design, innovation, interventions and STS. It aims to consolidate and push so far dispersed discussions about the relation of concepts of performativity and design through an exchange of ideas and methods from STS and design practice, conceived broadly to include empirical examples and theoretical reflections as well as art-design-STS interventions (Jeremijenko).

There is a longstanding interest amongst STS scholars in the design of new technologies, products and services (e.g. Cockburn & Ormrod, Shove, Suchman, Woolgar), as well as extensive research on design interventions in the fields of science and medicine (e.g. Clarke, Dumit). In addition designers themselves are moving beyond the design of discrete products and have started to look to STS for ways in which open and thus more uncertain challenges may be conceptualized (Kimbell, Whyte). This track encourages papers from those working in a variety of institutional locations, both inside and outside academic research.

There is now a large body of work that explores how realities and representations are enacted simultaneously in user representations, prototypes, concepts and scenarios. A debate about the implications of the performative aspects of these representational and translation devices is long overdue. How does the current developments of non- representation and ‘messy’ approaches relate to process and the performative (Thrift, Law). How does mess relate to the performative? Are designers working in a non-representational way?

The aim of the track is to expand the debates about performativity in relation to processes of enactment and becoming, the material and temporal. These might include papers dealing with scripting, affordance, liveness, ‘performance’ as well as enactments in relation to technical objects, materials and mess.

Presentations might be ethnographic fieldwork reports, synthetic analyses from secondary data or mappings of the field. However following the implication of the conference theme to take seriously the performing of the social, as well as traditional papers we also invite presentation formats which themselves might take on a more experimental or performative mode in relation to design and STS, or are materially ambitious. What kind of materials might perform the social? In this way we recognise that the material and temporal conditions of the EASST conference situation - it’s own liveness in Trento - might themselves be re-designed to explore performativity. We hope this will encourage design practitioners or those working with art, design and STS materials to take up our challenge to intervene and interrogate STS’s own enactments.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions) by 2010 March 15th.

Digital Game Play as Sociotechnical Practice

September 02 2010 | Trento, Italy

Deadline: March 15 2010

URL: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission

Updated: January 15 2010

The Digital Game industry has become one of the fastest growing, innovative and globalised industries in advanced Western economies and Digital Games have become a key cultural artefact and leisure practice in contemporary societies. Developing out of the American military industrial and academic complex in the 1970s the study of Digital Games design and play is the study of a range of sociotechnical practices and the negotiations between a range of human and non-human actors operating within systems of rules. The complexity of these relationships brings forth a series of questions that can be investigated using Science and Technology Studies approaches. However, to date games studies, with few exceptions, have failed to adopt STS approaches and the STS community has largely ignored this area of study.

This track seeks to develop the relationship between the game studies community and the STS community. Several research questions can be used to guide this: What STS theories can be used to understand Digital Games as sociotechnical phenomenon? Is the concept of practice and the practice-based approach useful to investigate Digital Games? Is there a relationship between power as inscribed and imposed by artefacts and the technical dimensions of Digital Games? What rules are inscribed into Digital Games technologies and what social worlds do these rules describe? What contribution can the study of Digital Games make to the STS discipline at large? And what contribution can an STS approach make to game studies? Can we foresee an after-method approach for Digital Games? We invite papers that tackle the sociotechnical dimensions of Digital Games and address some of the questions outlined above. Contributions might include (but are not restricted to):

• Digital Games as material semiotic artefacts
• Digital Games as sociotechnical assemblages
• The mess of digital games
• Innovation in game design as actor-networking and social shaping
• Digital Game design and/or play as performance and practice
• Disruptive sociotechnical users’ practices (e.g. hacking, modding)
• The scripting of gendered gaming practices
• Governance and regulation of gaming practices


Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be sent by email (following website instructions:
http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission) by 2010 March 15th. Please include also a preliminary references list (up to 4). Contact for inquiries: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Convenors

Aphra Kerr is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Her research focuses on the regulation, production and consumption of digital media and in particular of digital games; she established and runs the industry and community website. (http://www.gamedevelopers.ie)

Helen W. Kennedy is Deputy Head in the Department of Culture, Media and Drama at the University of the West of England (UWE) in the UK. She has been researching and writing about games since 1993 and co-founded and chaired (from 2004 – 2009) the Play Research Group at
UWE.

Jennifer Jenson is Associate Professor of Pedagogy and Technology in the Faculty of Education at York University. Her research interests include gender and gameplay and the design and development of digital games for education.

Stefano De Paoli is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. Stefano has worked in STS since 2004 and recently his research interest has embraced Massive Multiplayer Online Games http://www.nuim.ie/nirsa/people/postdocs/stefano_de_paoli.shtml)

Practices and the Environment: Performing Sustainability and Doing STS

September 02 2010 | Trento, Italy

Deadline: March 15 2010

URL: http://events.unitn.it/en/easst010/abstract-submission

Updated: January 15 2010

This track focuses on sustainability technologies as practices, including the practices of innovation, governing and consumption that underlie sustainable and unsustainable behaviours, and the adoption of behaviours that are held to be more sustainable (for example, lower energy consumption, choosing particular modes of transport and waste reduction). Our interest in sustainability as a practice emerges in part from Elizabeth Shove’s (2003) observation that unsustainable patterns of consumption are inscribed in every day, taken-for-granted human activities. Employing Theodore Schatzki’s notion of practice as a nexus of temporally emerging, tangled, differentiated and dispersed performances, sayings, emotions, technologies, people and things, we ask what kinds of understandings, procedures and engagements (Schatzki, 1996; Warde, 2003) mobilize and stabilize practices of sustainability. Further, rather than bracketing sustainability technologies as discrete entities, we ask how a practice-based approach might help us to understand their social shaping within practices. Finally, we ask what a practice-based approach means for doing STS.

We welcome theoretical and empirical papers. Suggested contributions might include, but are not limited to, the following approaches, topics and questions:
• Advantages and disadvantages of a practice-based approach to sustainability
• Social learning and behaviour change; the evolution and adoption of sustainable practices
• The role of institutions in performing sustainability; governance, policy and planning
• Interactions of lay, expert and professional practices of sustainability
• Practice-based approaches to socio-technical systems of sustainability
• Research methods for STS studies of practices
• Case studies of sustainable technologies
• The role of community in sustainability practices
• Normativity and analytical-distance in STS studies of sustainability practices
• The politics of sustainability practices; public participation and democracy
• Language and discourse of sustainability practices
• The role of technology in the performance of visions and expectations (un)sustainability,
• Sustainable technologies as practices
• Global, cultural and gendered variations in (un)sustainability practices

Re-thinking Global Society, The Bauman Institute - International Launch Conference School of Sociolo

September 06 2010 | University of Leeds UK

Deadline: January 31 2010

URL: http://sociology.leeds.ac.uk/bauman

Updated: January 13 2010

We are delighted to announce that the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds will formally launch the Bauman Institute in September 2010, established in honour of Leeds’s Emeritus Professor of Sociology Zygmunt Bauman.

In recognition of the launch, we are holding an International Conference here at the University of Leeds on Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th September 2010. The Conference aims to bring together international expertise amongst scholars, researchers, practitioners, and postgraduate students, working in a variety of fields across the arts, humanities and social sciences. As such, we are delighted to announce amongst our confirmed plenary speakers:
We invite abstracts of not more than 150 words and tied to any of the above themes to be submitted not later than 31st January 2010 to the email address below. All abstracts will be subject to peer-review and should be sent to the Director of the Bauman Institute, Dr Mark Davis: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
For further details: http://sociology.leeds.ac.uk/bauman

Health – A new religious awakening in Western Societies?

September 13 2010 | Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School

Deadline: March 01 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

Some scholars claim that health has taken over the role of religion in contemporary Western societies.  Health has become synonymous with happiness and the possibility of living a perfect life. Health has become a matter of truth, intertwining norms, human practices and power relations. Today life itself is permeated by different kinds of health strategies, which situates the medicalised body as subject and object of regulation. The individual subject is now expected to experience the inner and outer world, and rebuild its own identity in relationship to a discourse of health and well-being. Speaking in the light of health is, as Monica Greco claims, a very powerful rhetoric. In this conference we have invited some of the most influential scholars working in the fields of sociology, history of medicine and the body, politics of bioethics, critical theory etcetera to discuss the prominent, normative role of health today. They will touch upon questions such as: How does the sociology of the body and the way we reflect upon diseases connect to neoliberal thinking? How do technologies of health differ from other technologies of subjectification? How does health and well being discourse define us as human beings? How does the normal differs from the pathological in these discourses? And are we all becoming somatic individuals?
Email contact information: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Abstracts should be approximately 500 words (ONE page, Word document, single spaced, excluding references).New and young scholars with ‘work in progress’ papers are welcomed. In the case of co-authored papers, ONE person should be identified as the corresponding author. Note that due to restrictions of space, multiple submissions by the same author will not be timetabled. Abstracts should be emailed .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Abstracts should includeFULLcontact details, including your name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address.State the title of the track to which you are submitting your abstract.

Conference on health in a sociological/political/philosophical view Department of Organization, Cope

September 13 2010 | Copenhagen

Deadline: March 01 2010

Updated: January 14 2010

Health – A new religious awakening in Western Societies?
Some scholars claim that health has taken over the role of religion in contemporary Western
societies. Health has become synonymous with happiness and the possibility of living a perfect
life. Health has become a matter of truth, intertwining norms, human practices and power
relations. Today life itself is permeated by different kinds of health strategies, which situates the
medicalised body as subject and object of regulation. The individual subject is now expected to
experience the inner and outer world, and rebuild its own identity in relationship to a discourse
of health and well-being. Speaking in the light of health is, as Monica Greco claims, a very
powerful rhetoric. In this conference we have invited some of the most influential scholars
working in the fields of sociology, history of medicine and the body, politics of bioethics, critical
theory etcetera to discuss the prominent, normative role of health today. They will touch upon
questions such as: How does the sociology of the body and the way we reflect upon diseases
connect to neoliberal thinking? How do technologies of health differ from other technologies of
subjectification? How does health and well being discourse define us as human beings? How
does the normal differs from the pathological in these discourses? And are we all becoming
somatic individuals?

The conference will involve a combination of plenary lectures from four key note speakers, and
the presentation of papers by conference participants in smaller, themed groups. The groups will
be organized in following tracks:
1) Health as religion: the normative role of health in contemporary Western societies
2) The politics of bioethics: bio-medicine, neo-liberalism and health
3) Health care professionals, patients, citizens and the re-organizing of private and public
domains.
4) Identity formation in health discourses: the sick body as object and subject of regulation

Important dates:
March 1 2010: Abstract
March 15 2010: Notification of decision of acceptance
June 15, 2010: Full Paper

Email contact information:
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Abstracts should be approximately 500 words (ONE page, Word document, single spaced,
excluding references). New and young scholars with 'work in progress' papers are welcomed. In the case of co-authored papers, ONE person should be identified as the corresponding author. Note that due to restrictions of space, multiple submissions by the same author will not be timetabled. Abstracts should be emailed .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Abstracts should include FULL contact details, including your name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, and e-mail address. State the title of the track to which you are submitting your abstract.

Price of conference: 100 Euro (including lunch, coffee, conference materials)

Sentient creatures: Transforming biopolitics and life matters

September 15 2010 | Oslo, Norway

Deadline: March 15 2010

URL: http://www.cultrans.uio.no

Updated: January 15 2010

The concepts of biopower and biopolitcs, so eloquently and significantly laid out by Michel Foucault, are quite possibly insufficient to our understanding of past and contemporary living. Just think about zoonoses including the ?swine flue? pandemic, and the ways in which the production of facts about the human body have been and continue to be built upon the observation and manipulation of animals. These and similar examples suggest that two correctives or re-emphases are required. First, studies of life and the living alert us to the fact that biopolitics is not only about humans, in the form of the human individual, or in the form of the human population, it is rather about an assemblage of matters of life. Second, there is neither a self evident or totalising human power over life, nor an unproblematic politics of life. The relation between life and politics needs both theoretical and empirical specificity. To expand slightly on each of these:

First, even a narrow focus on the life of living humans immediately takes in nonhumans and other than human lives. Securing life and making life live is always more than human. Indeed, humans are and always have been conditioned upon non-humans: as in laboratory medicine, in our ways of producing and taking life - for food, and as crucial entities in debates about who ?we? think ?we? are. Animals are objects, but also subjects, symbols and signs.

Second, if lives are practised in many places and with many others, then how do we start to understand the lives that are being and have been made? Past work has tended to underline various practices of control and technologies of knowledge and surveillance. Perhaps rather than an overarching framework we need narratives and ethnographies of the living, taking in the multi-sited, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicised. Instead of asking only how is and has control and knowledge been extended over life, we should also look at the imperfect living practices which often defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together.

An aim of this conference is to bring historically oriented narratives and approaches together with contemporary studies, hence to bring the archive into an exchange with, for instance, ethnographic ways of working. It is to link the ways in which we narrate the past now, with ways of approaching and re-presenting the present. Thus our questions will not only evolve around what´s going on, what are these transformations, but also the question of method; how to do the work ? empirically as well as theoretically.

Possible topics for sessions and papers are: Protecting, caring, conserving, killing, enhancing, ordering, securing, displaying, naming, modeling lives

How do we understand current and past interventions in lives and living processes?

Are current and past attempts to politicize biology,and to biologize politics, or biopolitics, sufficient to understand who and what is at stake?

How are practices as diverse as public health, health care, agriculture, field and laboratory science, politics and war changing lives and altering as those lives change?

The conference will take place at the Thorbjørnrud hotel outside Oslo. The event is a joint venture? with CULTRANS (http://www.cultrans.uio.no) and the projects Newcomers to the farm, Animals as objects and animals as signs standardisation and visualization of animals, Nature and Science in Politics and Everyday Practices and the Research network DRUGS.

If you want to take part in the conference: Send an abstract of about 400 words to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) presenting your research interest and the paper you want to present at the conference. Deadline March 15 2010. Deadline for a short version of the paper will be May 15. There will be a conference fee covering hotel and food expenses.

Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge for museums

September 16 2010 | Copenhagen

URL: http://tinyurl.com/ylx5atx

Updated: January 15 2010

The 15th biannual conference of the European Association of Museums for the History of Medical Sciences (EAMHMS) will be held at the University of Copenhagen, 16–19 September, 2010.

This year’s cross-disciplinary conference focuses on the challenge to museums posed by contemporary developments in medical science and technology.

The image of medicine that emerges from most museum galleries and exhibitions is still dominated by pre-modern and modern understandings of an anatomical and physiological body, and by the diagnostic and therapeutical methods and instruments used to intervene with the body at the ‘molar’ and tangible level – limbs, organs, tissues, etc.

The rapid transition in the medical and health sciences and technologies over the last 50 years – towards a molecular understanding of human body in health and disease and the rise of a host of molecular and digital technologies for investigating and intervening with the body – is still largely absent in museum collections and exhibitions.

As a consequence, the public can rarely rely on museums to get an understanding of the development and impact of the medical and health sciences in the last 50 years. Biochemistry and molecular biology have resulted in entirely new diagnostic methods and therapeutic regimes and a flourishing biotech industry. The elucidation of the human genome and the emergence of proteomics has opened up the possibility of personalised molecular medicine. Advances in the material sciences and information technology have given rise to a innovative and highly productive medical device industry, which is radically transforming medical practices. But few museums have so far engaged seriously and in a sustained way with these and similar phenomena in the recent history of medical sciences and technologies.
The contemporary transition in medical and health science and technology towards molecularisation, miniaturisation, mediated visualisation, digitalisation and intangibilisation is a major challenge for the museum world; not only for medical museums, but also for museums of science and technology, and indeed for all kinds of museums with an interest in the human body and the methods for intervening with it, including art museums, natural history museums and museums of cultural history.

Contemporary medicine is not only a challenge to exhibition design practices and public outreach strategies but also to acquisition methodologies, collection management and collection-based research. How do museums today handle the material and visual heritage of contemporary medical and health science and technology? How do curators wield the increasing amount and kinds of intangible scientific and digital objects? Which intellectual, conceptual, and practical questions does this challenge give rise to?

The conference will address questions like (but not limited to):

+ How can an increasingly microanatomical, molecularised, invisible and intangible (mediated) human body be represented in a museum setting? Does the post-anatomical body require new kinds of museum displays?
+ How can museums make sense of contemporary molecular-based and digitalised diagnostic and thereapeutic technologies, instrumentation and investigation practices in their display practices?
+ How can museums make use of their older collections together with new acquisitions from contemporary medicine and health science and technology?
+ What is the role of the visual vs. the non-visual (hearing, smell, taste, touch) senses in curatorial practice and in the public displays of contemporary medical science and technology?
+ What can museums learn from science centers, art-science event venues etc. with respect to the public engagement with contemporary medical science and technology? And, vice versa, what can museums provide that these institutions cannot?
+ How can museums draw on bioart, ‘wet art’ and other art forms to stimulate public engagement with the changing medical and health system?
+ How does physical representations of contemporary medicine in museums spaces relate to textual representations in print and digital representations on the web?
+ How can museums integrate emerging social web technologies (Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) in the build-up of medical and health exhibitions?
+ What kind of acquisition methods and policies are needed for museums to catch up with the development of contemporary medical science and technology, especially the proliferation of molecular and digital artefacts and images?
+ What kind of problems do museum encounter when they expand the acquisition domain from traditional textual, visual and tangible material objects to digital artefacts (including software, audio- and videorecordings, and digitally stored data) and non-tangible scientific objects.
+ How can participatory acquisitioning, crowd-sourcing, wiki-based methods, etc. (‘museum 2.0’) be employed for the preservation and curation of the contemporary medical heritage?
+ How can curatorial work in museums draw on medical research and engineering and on academic scholarship in the humanities and social sciences? And, vice versa, how can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?

The conference will employ a variety of session formats. In addition to keynotes and sessions with individual presentations of current research and curatorial work there will also be discussion panels and object demonstration workshops.

We welcome submissions from a wide range of scholars and specialists – including, for example, curators in medical, science and technology museums; scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of medicine, science and technology; scholars in science and technology studies, science communication studies, museum studies, material studies and visual culture studies; biomedical scientists and clinical specialists; medical, health and pharma industry specialists with an interest in science communication; engineers and designers in the medical device industry; artists, designers and architects with an interest in museum displays, etc.

We are especially interested in presentations that involve the use of material and visual artefacts and we therefore encourage participants to bring illustrative and evocative (tangible or non-tangible) objects for demonstration.

100-300 word proposals for presentations, demonstrations, discussion panels, etc. shall be sent before 28 February 2010 to the chair of the program committee, Thomas Soderqvist, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

For further information, see http://tinyurl.com/ylx5atx or contact Thomas Soderqvist, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). For practical information about travel, accommodation, etc., please contact Anni Harris, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), after 4 January 2010.

The Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies

September 29 2010 | Darmstadt, Germany

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

The Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies
(S.NET) is an international association that promotes open intellectual
exchange towards the ad-vancement of knowledge and understanding of
nanotechnologies in society. S.NET represents diverse communities,
viewpoints, and methodologies in the social sciences and humanities. It
welcomes contributions from scientists and engineers that advance the
critical reflection of nanotechnologies and related developments.

The program committee invites all discussions of anthropological,
cultural, economic, ethical, historical, philosophical, political, and
sociological aspects of nanosciences and emerging technologies. This can
take the form of individual abstracts, proposals for sessions with three
to five presentations, and other formats. 250-word abstracts for
individual papers, up to 1000-word-abstracts for sessions and other
formats can be submitted online until March 15 at www.theSNET.net.
Notifications of acceptance will be mailed by April 30, 2010. Graduate
students are encouraged to submit.

In the spirit of an emerging society that looks at emerging technologies
as an emerging field of inquiry, we welcome all innovative suggestions
about themes and session-formats to foreground critical issues. These
can be submitted informally at any time to the program committee. -
Where needed, we will try to secure travel stipends for speakers. - This
year's plenary speakers include Armin Grunwald, Richard Jones, Bernard
Stiegler, and Jan Youtie.

More information about S.NET, the past meeting in Seattle, and the
upcoming conference in Darmstadt can be found at www.theSNET.net.

Society for the History of Technology (SHOT)

September 30 2010 | Tacoma, Washington

Deadline: March 31 2010

URL: http://www.historyoftechnology.org/

Updated: January 15 2010

The Society for the History of Technology will hold its annual meeting in Tacoma, Washington from September 30 to October 3, 2010. The Program Committee invites paper and panel proposals on any topic in the history of technology, broadly defined. Sessions dealing with non-Western technologies are particularly welcome. Of special interest for 2010 are proposals that engage in themes that resonate with the concerns of the specific locale. These include:

Consumption: In the popular imagination, the Tacoma-Seattle area is associated with several important corporate entities (Boeing, Microsoft, Nintendo, Starbucks, etc.) whose goods and services are deeply embedded in global consumer culture. At a moment in time when consumption, sometimes excessive, sometimes globalized, sometimes exploitative, is of great concern to both the public and policy-makers, Tacoma is an appropriate place for historians to (re)consider technologies of consumption. We are especially interested in papers that see production and consumption as coterminous processes and which historicize consumption as part of broader processes in the history of technology. We define consumption very broadly to include the public's active engagement with technologies and technological systems, which may include environmental, communications, and obsolete technologies.

The Program Committee encourages sessions dealing with topics appropriate to the meeting location, such as aerospace and maritime history, labor history, forest products, information technology, and themes relevant to the Pacific world. We also encourage historians of technology to reach out to scholars in aligned and/or related fields when constructing research proposals as one way to create a more interdisciplinary environment. Finally, we invite papers and panel proposals that emphasize the longue durée, particularly those that problematize demarcations such as modern/premodern, colonial/postcolonial, and preindustrial/industrial. As always, sessions dealing with pre-modern, Medieval, and ancient topics are especially welcome.

The Program Committee's highest priority in evaluating paper and panel proposals is scholarly excellence. The Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers or sessions, as well as works-in-progress from researchers of all stripes (including graduate students, chaired professors, and independent scholars). It welcomes proposals from those new to SHOT, regardless of discipline. Multinational, international, and cross-institutional sessions are also desirable. We especially encourage proposals from non-Western scholars.

For the 2010 meeting the Program Committee continues to encourage unconventional sessions; that is, session formats that vary in useful ways from the typical three/four papers with comment. These might include round-table sessions, workshop-style sessions with papers that are pre-circulated electronically, or "author meets critics" sessions. We also welcome poster proposals for presentation in poster sessions. Please note that in general we discourage panels with more than three papers.

The deadline for proposals is 31 March 2010. Please submit your proposals to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Proposals for individual papers must include:
1. a one-page abstract (maximum 600 words)
2. a one-page curriculum vitae, including current postal and e-mail addresses

Proposals for complete sessions must include:
1. a description of the session that explains how individual papers contribute to an overall theme.
2. the names and paper titles of the presenters
3. for each presenter, a one-page summary (maximum 600 words) of the paper's topic, argument(s), and evidence used
4. for the commentator, chair, and each presenter: one-page c.v., with postal and e-mail addresses

Please indicate if a proposal is sponsored by one of SHOT's special interest groups.

Submission Instructions:
1. Materials should be sent as a single text attachment to an e-mail message to the Program Committee Chair, Asif Siddiqi at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

2. Proposals for complete sessions as well as individual papers should be submitted in one file.
3. Please adhere to the 600-word limit for each paper. Use no unusual fonts or special formatting, and save your attachment either as a Microsoft Word document (.doc or .docx) or as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file. Nearly all word processing programs, including those used on Apple computers can save text in the Rich Text Format. Do not use Adobe Acrobat (pdf).
4. Name your attachment with your last name and the word 'proposal', e.g. 'Smith_proposal.doc'.
5. A session organizer should also deliver a description of the overall session. If you are organizing a session and proposing a paper in that session, you will be delivering both an "abstract" and "proposal", plus your c.v.
6. If you are proposing a non-traditional session you may indicate that in the "abstract." These also require a curriculum vitae.

General information:
While SHOT rules exclude multiple submissions (i.e., submitting more than one individual paper proposal, or proposing both an individual paper and a paper as part of a session), scholars may both propose a paper and serve as a commentator or session chair.

Generally speaking, the Program Committee discourages scholars from presenting papers at two consecutive meetings held in North America. Exceptions can be made for scholars traveling from overseas. Individuals are always welcome to serve as chairs and commentators and are encouraged to let the Program Committee know if they are available.

For more information about the Society for the History of Technology and our annual meeting, please see the SHOT webpage:
http://www.historyoftechnology.org/

For questions, please contact SHOT Secretary Bernie Carlson at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

2010 International Metropolis Conference The Hague

October 04 2010 | The Hague

Updated: February 14 2010

The International Metropolis Project is an international network of
researchers, policy officials and NGOs sharing a common vision of enhancing migration and diversity policy by applying empirical social science research. Now the world's largest such network, it is perhaps best known for its major annual conferences, the next of which takes place in The Hague, 4 - 8 October 2010. Each conference attracts between 800 and 1000 delegates for high-level plenary sessions, a comprehensive study tour programme and more than 60 concurrent workshops. The conferences are an opportunity for delegates - both expert and novice - to discuss critical issues, identify research and policy gaps, compare international experiences and build the Metropolis network. The 2010 International Metropolis Conference will be of interest to policy makers, administrators and representatives from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as academic researchers.

I would like to draw your attention to the Call for Workshop Proposals, and invite you to submit a proposal of your own. The deadline is April 1 for the Workshop proposals. The proposals will be adjudicated according to the strength of the proposal, best fit with conference themes, and representation of a broad range of perspectives from various countries. Workshops must have participation by representatives from more than one sector (academic, government/policy, and NGO/community). Workshops that do not meet this criteria will not be included. Metropolis is actively encouraging participation from Asian and African countries, and encourages workshops that address gender aspects of migration and diversity. Please read the attached calls carefully. Additional information can be found on the conference website (http://www.metropolis2010.org/).
This conference is an excellent opportunity to showcase your own research to a wide and diverse public, to exchange empirical data and theoretical ideas, to extend your network, and to prepare international publications.

Membranes, Surfaces and Boundaries: interstices in the history of science, technology and culture

October 07 2010 | Workshop at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

Deadline: January 31 2010

URL: http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/workshops/en/Membranes-Surfaces-Boundaries.html

Updated: January 13 2010

The world, more of than not, is and has been conceived in its compactness, as stuff, things, and objects; far less so, in its interstices. Science, technology and culture, of course, are permeated and traversed by boundary phenomena: From the materialities of life itself, whether cellular membranes, skin, immune-systems or ecological habitats, to surface, separation and purification processes in chemistry and industry to the making, processing and exhibition of photographs and films, things coalesced at surfaces. They are palpable as well in the history of geography and politics, of urban and private spaces, of literature, art, psychology and the self, and certainly enough, as interfaces, in contemporary media theory.
The workshop Membranes, Surfaces and Boundaries aims to recover and bring together these interstices. We wish to attract contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including the natural sciences, that cross, straddle and make permeable these specialist divides, and that interrogate the historical being of surfaces. We wish to focus the workshop on the materialities of membranes, surfaces, and boundaries themselves. Possible anchors are surfaces and membranes as biological entities; chemical and technical phenomena at boundaries such as catalysis, filtration or electrophoresis; or films, photographic and otherwise, as media of projection and material surface processes. We invite contributions engaging with these and other spheres and their manifold intersections. Some illustrative questions include: In the history of science, can we generate cultural histories of the biological cell, a historiographically rather neglected object? Or related, of the similarly neglected but important, huge fields such as electro-chemistry or chemical engineering? Might we re-read through surface-objects disciplinary histories, experimental practices or the ways science is permeable to its social and cultural settings (and vice versa)? In film and media studies, how can attention to the materialities of surfaces incorporate the histories of science, technology or industry? Or again, more philosophically, how can we bring together concepts and materials, the abstract and concrete, metaphors and physical boundaries in re-thinking the histories of interstices? All submitted abstracts showing some relation to our main theme will be given careful consideration. Abstracts of up to 300 words should include your name, institutional affiliation, and email address. These should be submitted by email to Mathias Grote (mgrote@mpiwg- berlin.mpg.de) and Max Stadler (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). The deadline for abstract submission is 31 January 2010.

“Race-Making and the State: Between Postracial Neoliberalism and Racialized Terrorism”

October 08 2010 | University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Deadline: March 30 2010

URL: http://www.criticalraceconference.arts.ualberta.ca/

Updated: January 13 2010

Despite the ‘wilful forgetting’ evident in much Canadian and international studies scholarship, racial thinking, race-making and racial imaginaries long have served the imperial and colonial designs of empires and states alike. German philosopher Eric Voegelin was among the first to think through the relationship between race-making and the state. In Race and State, he insisted that the racial idea was a fundamental element of the modern state. For Voeglin, it was irrelevant whether race was a biological or genetic fiction; this did not belie its power or its real life political, material or social salience. Hannah Arendt in turn persuasively argued that race thinking has been wide-spread across the west since at least the eighteenth century, and functioned as a political device to differentiate the ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘barbarian’ from the ‘civilized’. Racism was a powerful ideological weapon in imperialist policies including the ‘scramble for Africa’ and in the dispossession of Indigenous lands. In Society Must Be Defended, the French social theorist Michel Foucault advanced the notion of ‘state racism’ as one expression of the biopower of the modern state, which unleashed governing technologies to ‘make live’ some groups and ‘let die’ others. Other important works on the ‘racial state’, prominent among them, Omni and Winant (1994), Anthony Marx (1998), David Theo Goldberg (2002), Sherene Razack (2008) and Sunera Thobani (2007), have linked imperial and colonial racisms to the conceits of modern liberal states, which purport to be race neutral, colour-blind and even postracial, while masking, reproducing and even reinforcing historical inequities.

The nature of race thinking and race-making are differently configured in two dominant logics of the twenty-first century: neoliberalism’s racial imaginaries of an individualized, atomized person who can leave behind her or his racial, ethnic and gendered self and the racial
imaginaries of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, which make clear that ‘outsider groups’ are always already shaped by racial and gendered markers. Arguably neoliberalism has depoliticized race and racism, indeed, all structural inequalities. It has reduced racism to a psychological shortcoming that can be mediated through the promotion of cross-cultural understanding. In this context, we are confronted with the paradoxical claim that while there may be racism, apparently there are no racists and no systemic conditions of racial inequality. This paradox disdains historical memory of institutional and structural racism and ‘forgets’ that racial thinking and race-making have shifted over time, space, and regimes with sometimes devastating effect. What is racism and who if anyone can be called a racist?
Race-making and the ‘racial state’ too often are imagined as cases of exceptions, such as Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. This too elides the everyday and normalized practices of race-making and racism and obscures meaningful anti-racist practices. In such contexts, what
do anti-racism and decolonization mean? How do they manifest intheories, practices and policies?
Please visit website for details of the organization. CALL FOR PAPERS: The primary purpose of this conference is to explore race-making, anti-racism, decolonization and the state. We encourage papers and panels that take an interlocking analysis with class, gender, sexuality and disabilities. Topics may include but are not limited to: the role of the state in producing racial classifications, hierarchies and imaginaries; racial projects including colonialism,indigenous dispossession, slavery and internments; 9/11, violence and the war on terrorism; state inventions of ‘black sites’ of rendition and torture as well as routinized practices such as photographing, fingerprinting, and surveillance of racial others; race in immigration and refugee policies, detention centres and similar securitized initiatives; the political economy of race in a neoliberal era; science, genetics and race; skin, body and identity; race, fantasy and desire; comedy, satire and race; the evasion and even erasure of race from many disciplinary efforts to understand the constitution of advanced liberal states and markets; colonial encounters and racism that informed dominant relations between indigenous peoples and white settler societies; and that think through anti-racisms, anti-colonialism, decolonization and social justice in theory, policy and practice.

The R.A.C.E. 2010 conference organizer is Dr. Malinda S. Smith, Political Science Department, University of Alberta. Please send a 300 words abstract in Word or RTF with title, keywords, institutional affiliation and contact to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and include a 150 words Bio locating your work in critical race /anti-colonial scholarship by 30 March 2010 to:
Dr. Malinda S Smith, 2010 R.A.C.E. Conference Organizer, University of Alberta, Telephone: 780.492.5380 / Fax: 780.492.2580, Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address),
Web site: http://www.criticalraceconference.arts.ualberta.ca/

Globalizing Beauty: Body Aesthetics

October 14 2010 | German Historical Institute, Washington, DC

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: January 13 2010

Beauty matters. That it matters more and more in modern societies can easily be measured in the amount of money people spend on cosmetic surgeries, on fashion, on cosmetics, on looking at beautiful stars, and, since the 1990s in particular, in the number of scholarly articles and books analyzing exactly this phenomenon. Challenging the myth of eternal, unchanging, and cross-cultural beauty ideals, this conference inquires into the rise of powerful and yet ambiguous discourses on and practices of body aesthetics in the 20th century; it explores the interaction of hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses on body aesthetics; and it tracks the impact of globalization and commodification on the struggle for beauty.

What is considered beautiful depends on time and space, that is, on cultural and social settings. Beauty is linked to other categories of difference—the good, the strong, the wealthy, the healthy people. Beauty is highly gendered, closely affiliated with racial hierarchies, and has
always been a tool of social distinction. Owning beauty and accessing beautiful things are privileges. As with consumerism in general, the acquisition of beauty relies on and reinforces preexisting social hierarchies. At the same time, the modern discourse on beauty is embedded
in ideas—one may say, illusions—of social advancement. Beauty defines identity, and it causes controversy.

Please submit materials via email to both - Hartmut Berghoff, Professor of Economic History, Director, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, email: Ms. Baerbel Thomas (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) - Thomas Kühne, Professor of History, Strassler Family Chair in the Study of Holocaust History, Clark University, Worcester, MA, email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

University history, university collections and university practices

October 14 2010 | Trondheim, Norway

Deadline: April 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

After very successful meetings in Oslo in 2008 and Tromsø/Lofoten in 2009 we are pleased to announce the Third conference on the history of science in Norway, which will take place from 14 to 17 October 2010 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. The conference is being hosted in collaboration between the Forum for Kunnskapshistorie and the NTNU Anniversary History Project.

The theme of the conference will be “University history, university
collections and university practices”. In 2010 the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the city of Trondheim will be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in 1760 and the 100th anniversary of the Foundation of the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1910. We invite submission of papers and organised sessions related to the theme as well as to the history of science in its broader sense, including the history of social sciences and humanities. Please send proposals of no more than 200 words (word doc or rtf format) to the email address below before 15 April 2010. Please include a short biography highlighting main research interests no more than 50 words. Proposals will be
reviewed by the Programme Committee. Participants will be notified by 31 May.
Presentations are limited to 20 minutes, with additional 10 minutes for
discussion. The conference language will be English.
For submission of abstracts and requests for more information, please
contact:
Ragnhild Green Helgås (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

Cross-National and Comparative History of Science Education:  4th European Society for the History

October 18 2010 | Barcelona, Spain

Deadline: January 20 2010

URL: http://4eshs.iec.cat/

Updated: January 15 2010

This session assesses the need of further cross-national and comparative work in history of science, medicine and technology prompted by current perceptions of disciplinary crisis, around questions such as "big pictures", European centres and peripheries, the rise of global history, and the integration of non-Western science in the historical canon. It intends to do so, by focusing on the study of science education, and by promoting interdisciplinary communication between two subjects which rarely interact (the history of science and the history of education). Cross-National comparison was a major driving force in the nineteenth-century organization of education. Educationists, scientists and students circulated across national boundaries and compared different educational systems, producing accounts which contributed to inform educational reforms in their own national or local contexts. In the same period, the history of education emerged as a discipline aimed at illuminating contemporary educational research and organization through a historical perspective. Cross-National comparison was a key method, which, in spite of various epistemological challenges has survived up to our days, giving rise to well-established academic fields such as comparative education.

Historians of education have often approached the study of science from the point of view of institutions and curricula, producing in certain cases large scale international comparisons, and mainly focusing on primary education, and (increasingly) on secondary education. In contrast, historians of science have favoured tight accounts of pedagogy and training in local context, and commonly focused on higher education. In the last decade, some major works in this field have produced international pictures on science pedagogy, through the study of circulation of scientists and pedagogical tools. However, approaches are still too often restricted to local or national contexts, as they are in the history of science at large.

The aim of this session is to contribute to the historiographical development of the history of science and the history of education, by presenting papers dealing with more than one national context in comparative fashion, and including historiographical and methodological reflection on the characteristics, advantages, and limitations of this approach. The purpose of this session is neither to break national boundaries, nor to reaffirm them, but to discuss about them and through them and to show how cross-national comparison offers more accurate results than traditional approaches -explicitly or implicitly- restricted to the nation. Papers may not cover a whole country and can instead focus on comparison of regions or more local unities of analysis. Intra-national comparisons will be admitted if justified, although we will favour cross-national comparisons. Papers are invited to deal in comparative and cross-national perspective with the following objects and themes: - Pedagogical practices - Curricula - Pedagogical tools (teaching collections, pedagogical diagrams, pen and paper technologies, etc.) - Institutions - Examination frameworks - Textbooks - Teaching spaces - Teachers - Students - Comparisons by contemporary circulating or transnational actors (teachers, students, educationists) - Interactions between Pedagogy and Research

Abstracts for this session should include justification of What is going to be compared, Why, and How, and arguments explaining how you think that your comparative and cross-national analysis might contribute to change the current historiography of the topic tackled in your paper. Due to the complex nature of producing comparative research on more than one national context, collaboration between scholars from different countries -although not strictly required - is encouraged and always welcomed. Analogously, we seek to promote collaboration between historians of science and historians of education. Please, include name and affiliation, and a 300-word abstract, making clear the objects of your comparative and cross-national study and the relevance to this session (What, Why, How, Historiographical Arguments). Send it as a Word or RTF document to Josep Simon (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). DEADLINE: 20th January 2010

Contacts previous to the deadline are more than welcome. If you intend to submit a paper for this session and wish to discuss your contribution, do not hesitate to contact Josep Simon (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). For information on the conference and registration deadlines see: http://4eshs.iec.cat/

Sustainable Cities? Fifth Biennial Urban History Association Conference

October 20 2010 | Las Vegas, NV

Deadline: February 01 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

The Program Committee seeks submissions for panels, roundtable discussions, and individual papers on all aspects of urban, suburban, and metropolitan history for the Fifth Biennial Urban History Association Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 20-23, 2010. The local host is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

While “sustainability” has often been defined as planning for the future, we will be investigating the history of urban futures across many time periods in many metropolitan areas and many countries. We encourage submissions on questions of land use, energy, space, place, the built environment, and the natural environment in historical perspective. We would like sessions on the host city, Las Vegas, and its history of rapid, expansive growth. We welcome sessions on the history of urbanization in North America, as well as Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, in ancient and pre-modern as well as modern periods.

Beyond the theme of the conference, the committee encourages all types of historical analyses, including:

Work on qualitative research methods across urban history and the social sciences

Work on digital humanities, geography, GIS mapping, and photography

Comparative, regional, transnational studies

Work focusing on race, gender, class, and space

Research on architecture, the environment, technology, and science

Presentations on historic preservation including small cities and towns

Sessions that revisit classic works of urban and suburban history

Preference will be given to complete panels. Panel proposals should designate a single person as contact and include a brief explanation of the overall theme as well as one-page abstracts of each paper and a 250-word biography for each participant. Round table proposals follow this format but organizers should submit one page on the theme and a 250-word biography for each presenter. Those submitting an individual paper, please include a one-page abstract and a 250- word biography. Submissions are due February 1, 2010 and should be sent via e-mail to Professor Janet R. Bednarek at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

As part of the conference, the UHA will organize workshops for graduate students writing dissertations in urban and suburban history. Students who have written a prospectus and who wish to participate in a workshop should apply with a 2-4 page letter of interest by February 1, 2010 to Janet.Bednarek @ notes.udayton.edu.

Pharmaceuticals in Historical Context

October 22 2010 | University of Wisconsin

Deadline: March 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy invites submissions for the 2nd Madison Medicines Conference, “Pharmaceuticals in Historical Context,” to be held 22-23 October 2010.
Pharmaceuticals – whether from natural sources or research laboratories – have been central to the treatment of disease throughout human history. The conference organizers welcome proposals for 20-minute papers that address the theme of placing medicines into
the social, political, economic, or philosophical context of any era or place using the tools of history.

Papers will be presented in plenary sessions over the two days in a workshop-style conference that seeks to foster and reflect the growing body of pharmaceutical scholarship across historical disciplines. Newer scholars are especially encouraged to submit abstracts. Some travel funds will be available for graduate students, and established scholars interested in using the scholarly resources of the American
Institute of the History of Pharmacy can apply for travel funds through the Sonnedecker Visiting Scholar Program (www.aihp.org).

Send abstracts of up to 250 words to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 15 March 2010. Abstracts should include the title of the paper, information concerning the research question examined, the sources used and preliminary results. Please also include your contact details (name, affiliation, e-mail-address). All papers are to represent
original work not already published.

”Africa for Sale” Analysing and Theorizing Foreign Land Claims and Acquisitions

October 28 2010 | Groningen University, Netherlands

Deadline: May 15 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

While foreign land acquisitions in Africa are no recent phenomenon, the last several decades have witnessed an unprecedented level of large-scale land acquisitions all over the continent;
millions of hectares of land in Africa are increasingly claimed by and leased out to transnational entities, government businesses, multinational corporations, and international organisations.
Sometimes referred to as “neo-colonialism” due to their resemblance to colonial land exploits, these acquisitions have been largely driven by a global “scramble” for food security and access to natural resources. Foreign actors gain access to land in part by employing discursive tools and media to portray African farmland as “unused” or “unproductive” while the local farmers are portrayed as “backwards”, underdeveloped, environmentally destructive, and desperately poor.
Access is also secured through the market capitalist economy and often legitimized as “economic growth” or “sustainable development”. Indeed, proponents argue that land deals bring new technologies, improved agricultural practices, poverty alleviation, and modernisation to
developing countries.

However, the presence of foreign stakeholders in local territories also involves an encounter of often contradictory cultural paradigms, leading to pervasive social, economic and cultural changes and/or conflicts. In practice, these new land deals often result in the forced eviction of subsistence farmers from land which is simultaneously viewed as their “cultural heritage”, thereby severing them from their cultural and socio-economic attachments to past, present and
future.

While the nature and scope of large-scale, foreign land acquisitions has been taken up by the non-governmental arena (e.g. NGOs) very little academic scholarship has addressed these deals both analytically and theoretically, from [comparative] historical and contemporary perspectives. In turn, several important questions remain unanswered: What are the implications of foreign land leases for local populations? How are these deals mediated, structured and legitimized?
What is the role of multinational corporations in the economic, political, social, and environmental governance of developing countries in Africa?

Submissions addressing historical and contemporary aspects of foreign land acquisitions are welcome. We also encourage papers that offer methodological tools and theoretical models to analyse these land acquisitions. Due to the multifaceted theme of the conference, we seek and welcome abstracts from a variety of disciplines.

Contributions addressing the following four fields are particularly welcome:
1.) Food security: Foreign (government or company) investments in “unused,” arable land for large-scale agricultural production.
2.) Large-Scale Mining: Multinational claims to land for mineral exploitation.
3.) Conservation Projects: International environmental NGO acquisition or control of land for biodiversity conservation and/or protected area management.
4.) Tourism: Land acquisitions for purposes of tourism development.

The following thematic list is provided to help orient potential submissions:
Cultural Implications; Poverty and “Sustainable Development”; Food and Human Security; Neoliberalism; Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR); China's Engagement in Africa; Environmental, Social and Cultural
Impacts; Socio-cultural dimensions of “compensation”; Multinational Mining; Land Tenure Conflict; Food and Financial Crisis; Bio-engineering; Corporate Governance; Offshore Food Production;
Debt-for-Nature Swaps; REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation); Carbon Trades; Biopiracy; Ecotourism; Mining-Conservation Partnerships; Biodiversity Offsetting;
Climate Change; Land as Cultural Heritage; Cultural Change; Resettlement; Indigenous Environmental Knowledge; World Bank “Growth Poles” Project; Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

Important dates:
- 15 May 2010: deadline for abstract submission of individual papers (max. 400 words) including
brief biography of the author(s) (max. 100 words)
- 15 June 2010: selection of papers by the Conference Organising Committee and designing of the
final programme
- 1 September: deadline for submission of selected papers (max. 8.000 words)
Abstracts and papers should be written in English. The conference language is English. Please forward your submission to:
Conference Organising Committee: Michel Doortmont (Groningen University), Sandra Evers (VU University Amsterdam),
Froukje Krijtenburg (Institute of Historical Justice and Reconciliation), Caroline Seagle (VU)

Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

NACBS Roundtable Proposal: The “Object” of Early Modern Science

November 12 2010 | Baltimore, MD

Deadline: January 31 2010

URL: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Updated: January 15 2010

This roundtable (4 papers) will treat the question of early modern scientific methods and instruments, particularly uses of a technology by which an object is examined, rendered, or recognized as scientifically significant. For example, papers might consider microscopes, medical instruments, or measuring devices. But the paper should also be focused on the particular object of study. Does the object under examination change through different technologies? Do different technologies yield different understandings of the same object? Are these understandings politically, ideologically, culturally inflected? How does that inflection temper our understandings of “science?” But papers could also “object” to the ways that early modern science is currently framed in the discipline. What do we need to consider now in order to understand science then? Are there helpful (or less helpful) ways of considering the idea of “objectivity?” (“Early Modern” here is broadly defined; papers pre-1800 or so will be considered) Please send a 300-word abstract and brief CV by January 31, 2010 to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Circulation, Obstruction, and Decay in the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Medicine

November 17 2010 | New Orleans, LA

Deadline: February 01 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

American Anthropological Association Meetings
New Orleans, LA, Nov. 17-21, 2010

Sponsored by the Science, Technology, and Medicine Interest Group of the
Society for Medical Anthropology
Organizers: Betsey Brada, Lara Braff, and Ian Whitmarsh


This session explores circulation in the anthropological study of science, medicine and technology. How might flow and obstruction, movement and stasis be constitutive of the circulation of bodies, medical systems, pharmaceuticals, or scientific techniques and ideas?

The movement, uptake, re-imagination, and reshaping of medical and scientific regimes have long been central themes in the social study of
science and technology. The circulation of medical and scientific models creates not merely new flows of pharmaceuticals and new modes of
treatment, but also different visions of the person and the body, and
new relations among patients and practitioners. Circulation relies on
infrastructures and regimes, often made invisible or masked in the
discourse of flow. Our focus on circulation leads us to consider not
only the structure of movement but also its viscosity or quality of
flow: What is allowed to travel and how? How might the regimes that
makes circulation within science and medicine possible be said to decay,
or dissolve? In addition to conceptualizing circulation as ordered
spatial distribution, we welcome explorations of temporal circulation,
of the future and past in constituting the present.

Circulation also draws attention to blockage, and to the central role of
constrictions and clogs. Indeed, flows might be said to rely on
constraints that obstruct or redirect previously active flows. For
example, the transnational movement of medicine relying on legislation
and regulation that constrains its distribution, while the institutional
configuration of NGOs, commerce, and research may redirect the movement
of scientific expertise. We also want to explore how occlusions may be
productive and important in and of themselves, not merely representing
the absence of flow or its precondition. How might anthropological
ideas of flow and circulation be productively troubled by explorations
of clogs, blockage, or decay?

We welcome abstracts based upon ethnographic work in the area of
science, technology, and medicine that challenge our understandings of
spatial or temporal circulation as flows and/or obstructions. Please
submit an abstract of 250 words to Betsey Brada at
by Feb 1, 2010. This panel will be submitted
early for consideration as an SMA invited panel.

Language as a Scientific Tool. Managing Language as a Variable of Practice and Presentation

November 29 2010 | Vienna, Austria

Deadline: March 01 2010

Updated: January 15 2010

Language has played an important and extended role in the history and philosophy of sciences, with language itself also becoming the subject of scholarship. Linguistic environments of scientists have unavoidably affected scientific research at various levels by, for instance, imposing cultural constraints and preconceptions, and by affecting the bounds of communication that structure science as social engagement. Despite the relevance of this phenomenon, insufficient historiographical and philosophical consideration has been paid to scientists' own thoughts on language as the essential medium of their practice, and as a malleable element that can be shaped to suit their goals.

The aim of this conference is, thus, to consider the history of language as an object of scientific concern, whether for epistemological or semantic reasons, stemming from scientists' understanding of language as a tool for conceptualising the world, from concerns on successfully communicating within the scientific community among specialists or merely between scientists and the general public. In either case the examination of the historical circumstances that have motivated such reflection appear paramount.

Language can also be considered as a consciously modelled tool for achieving definite scientific and political goals. Indeed, Bacon began his natural philosophy explicitly criticising scholastic ideas on language, which for him obscured nature instead of clarifying it. Therefore, it seemed to him that language had to be reformed and properly redefined to serve in the natural philosophic endeavour. Locke gave specific attention to language as a prior question to setting an epistemological basis to natural philosophy, in turn enforcing a separation between word and meaning that put natural philosophers in direct control over their language. This revolution in language was also one of the key points of the new science hailed by members of Royal Society such as John Wilkins, who was appointed a treatise on a new philosophical and universal language. Other voices argued that gaining explicit control over language was the only way to free it from past misconceptions. The claim that science needed to formulate a theory of language able to underwrite scientists' epistemic activity recurs right up until logical positivism. At the same time, the Renaissance witnessed the struggle between Latin and the vernacular languages as means for the written codification of knowledge. From a dominant and hegemonic position, Latin gradually ceased being the only appropriate means for learned discourse, the vernaculars taking its place. Then, language critics displayed diverse arguments intertwining language with politics. In Germany, for instance, the main argument in linguistic change at the universities was the need of the introduction of a "new science" requiring a language distinct from scholastic Latin (Christian Wolff, Christian Thomasius), and thus not pervaded with scholastic ideas. This conference focuses on the question of how the process of linguistic change was effected, perceived, and conducted by scientists. From the field of philosophical discussions, to the field of "language in use", it is possible to pose crucial questions such as the following: . How has science sought to manage language through philosophical conceptions or rhetorical techniques to obtain particular goals, epistemic or otherwise? To what extent have scientists engaged in linguistic argumentation to criticize competing paradigms? . Has language been considered to be perfectly manageable? How have influences from e.g. other languages been coped with? Can it be said that linguistic purism relates only to alien words, or also to changing reality such as technology or geographical discoveries? . How has the communication of science been discussed in relation to both the "existing world" and the learned community? Has science been seen as corresponding more accurately with the "reality" (following Herder) if written in the national language of a community? How has the communication of discoveries with other scientists been perceived if this was the case? Which were the points of conflict between perfect translatability and innate and unique features of natural languages in this respect? . In what contexts have issues of language been raised and to what ends? Is it a purely philosophically-driven debate for the purpose of articulating science, or are political and social factors (co)responsible for the crises of languages commonly used in the past? . Who were the actors of linguistic change? Did scientists/natural philosophers play only a minor role, or did the impulses and crises of used languages come from other sources? . Did scientists try to develop their own definitions of language as competing with philosophical ones? How did the endeavors for perfection of language differ among different groups?

Postgraduates are particularly encouraged to submit proposals for twenty-minute papers. The language of the conference is English. The organizers plan to publish a selection of papers from this conference. Please e-mail 300-word abstracts or proposals with a brief CV to Rocío Sumillera: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by Monday, March 1st 2010.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION Abstracts of 500 words or less should be submitted to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Word or RTF attachments, or in the body of your email. This must include a summary of the paper’s main arguments and methodology, as well as a brief statement on the contribution to the STS literature. You are very welcome to contact us to discuss possibilities for submission in the first instance. DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: 20th January, 2010. Applicants will be notified of the outcome by 25th January.

IASTE 2010 The Utopia of Tradition 12th Conference of the International Association for the Study

December 15 2010 | Beirut, Lebanon

Deadline: February 12 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

In recent years IASTE scholars have examined traditions and their multitude of built forms in an increasingly interconnected global landscape. To advance this effort, this conference seeks to study how tradition inspires and informs changing concepts of Utopia in theory and space. Utopian theories and plans emerge from a complex symbiotic relationship with traditions that are based on notions of the ideal. Indeed, utopias cannot be understood without understanding the traditions from which they develop.

At its etymological root, utopia embodies both the theoretical paradox of an ideal place, eu-topia, and a non-place, ou-topia, rendering it an impossibility. As an ideal place, utopia relies on tradition, but as a non-place it attempts to negate it. Although most utopias have spatial manifestations, they often attempt to harness and make static the traditions used to create these spaces. The geographies of utopia physically ground tradition, but tradition simultaneously controls these very same geographies. This contemporary moment of economic crisis necessitates a re-examination of this dynamic.


The word ‘utopia’ is no longer as commonly referenced in professional practice as it was a few decades ago. However, architects, planners, and politicians continue to look for and disseminate notions of ideal forms. Regulated by ethnicity, religion, or race, the identity enclaves of many modern nations use territory to perpetuate the vision of a perfect community based on specific traditions. The continuation and strengthening of tradition, cloaked in the language of utopia, may thus be seen to provide the focus for new gated communities in the developing world, the dreamscapes in cities around the Persian Gulf and the Pacific Rim, and the faux-colonial homes in American suburbs. On the other hand, there is an emerging discourse that reconceptualizes utopia itself, not as a product but as an open process aimed at transforming, rather than transcending, the existing condition.

Perhaps the relationship between utopia and tradition can best be understood by examining dystopia, utopia’s twin other. Dystopia finds its clearest manifestation in literary and filmic representations, such as 1984 and Blade Runner, which embody complex imageries of terror, control, and urban anxiety. Tradition, in these brave new worlds, has often been explicitly rejected, and new forms are introduced as alternatives.

The historical development of utopia both draws upon and creates anew certain traditions of space, citizenship, and government. Those engaged with the idea of utopia have always come back to its physical realization within space, however elusive and/or illusory. In writing his Republic, Plato drew heavily on Greek traditions of warfare, civic engagement, and physical form, while Augustine of Hippo’s City of God was a response to a particular moment of empire and decadence. Thomas More created a sketchy ideological geography of ‘no place’ as a mythical island with a-spatial intonations. Since the Renaissance, when architects and artists such as Vitruvius searched for the citte felice, practitioners have tried to create physical spaces that would provide Eden-like environments for humankind. In more recent times, the modernist schemes of Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier envisioned ideal spaces that claimed to erase difference. This IASTE conference will focus on the theme of utopia and tradition in the twenty-first century.

The conference will attract an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners from around the world working in the disciplines of anthropology, architecture, art and architectural history, city and regional planning, cultural studies, geography, history, landscape studies, sociology, and urban studies. They will present papers related to the following three themes:

Track 1. Utopian Ideals versus Traditional Physical Realities
Central to the conference theme is the main tenet that utopias use tradition in their formulation and perpetuation of the ideal. Inquiries regarding attributes of utopia that may be rooted in certain traditional practices are encouraged in this line of inquiry. This track seeks to explore the convergence of ideals and realities as well as the underlying concepts of utopia and how they relate to a given traditional context or are manifested in space.

Track 2. The Practices of Utopia and the Politics of Tradition
The deployment of tradition demands a certain selectivity that negates some forms of the past while celebrating others, making this exercise inherently political. In constructing utopias, practitioners also draw upon traditional discourses, practices, and forms, thus politicizing the quest for ideal communities. A key component in interrogating utopia and tradition is the political backdrop against which they occur. Examining the linkages between utopias, politics, and tradition, papers in this track are encouraged to investigate how tradition is deployed within the political sphere, and the role the state plays in formulating notions of community and governance.

Track 3. Utopia and the Space of Difference
By the end of the twentieth century, the crisis within modernism and the critical opposition to authoritarianism had caused a retreat from the idea of utopia as an ideal and perfected spatial form. This track seeks to examine new concepts of utopia that have risen to question its previous incarnations and established traditions. Papers in this track are encouraged to explore how the latest utopias have become more of an open process that engages both the present condition and the forbidden, the unseen and the marginalized, straying from the imagined idyllic landscapes towards a new politics of difference.


ubmission requirements
Please refer to our website http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/iaste for detailed instructions on abstract submissions. A one page abstract of 500 words and a one page C.V. are required. For further inquiries, please email IASTE Coordinator Sophie Gonick at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Proposals for complete panels are welcome. All papers must be written and presented in English. Following a blind peer-review process, papers may be accepted for presentation in the conference and/or publication in the Working Paper Series.

Contributors whose abstracts are accepted must pre-register for the conference, pay registration fees of $400 (which includes a special discounted $25 IASTE membership fee), and prepare a full-length paper of 20-25 double-spaced pages. Registered students may qualify for a reduced registration fee of $200 (which includes a special discounted $25 IASTE membership fee). All participants must be IASTE members. Please note that expenses associated with hotel accommodations, travel, and additional excursions are not covered by the registration fees and have to be paid directly to the designated travel agent. Registration fees cover the conference program, conference abstracts, and access to all conference activities including receptions, keynote panels, and a tour of the Beirut Central District.

conference schedulE
February 12
Deadline for receipt of abstracts and CVs

May 5
Notification of accepted abstracts for presentation

July 15
Deadline for pre-registration and full paper submissions for possible publication in the Working Paper Series.

October 5
Notification of accepted papers for the Working Paper Series

December 15-18
Conference program



December 19, 20, 22, & 21
Optional trips


Conference Site & accommodations

The conference will be held at American University of Beirut’s West Hall with accommodation at nearby hotels. In order to be able to obtain special room rates, reservations should be made online, over the phone, or through email at the conference hotel:

Gefinor Rotana Hotel, Hamra, Beirut, http://www.rotana.com/property-.htm, E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)


Other accommodations with a special IASTE discount:

Casa d'Or Hotel, Hamra, Beirut, http://www.casadorhotel.com/, E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

POST-CONFERENCE TRIPS

Two optional one day trips are offered at participant’s expense to Byblos and Tripoli, or to Baalbek and Anjar, on Sunday, December 19, 2010.


A two day/two night trip to Damascus, Syria, is also available on Monday, December 20-Wednesday, December 22, 2010.

To participate in any of the three additional trips, please contact Mr. Charbel Salem, Nakhal Travel, http://www.nakhal.com, E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Note: An additional visa may be necessary for travel to Syria. Please check with your local consulate.

Inquiries
Please use the following information when making inquiries regarding the conference.

Mailing address:
IASTE 2008
Center for Environmental Design Research
390 Wurster Hall #1839
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1839
Phone: 510.642.6801
Fax: 510.643.5571
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Website: http://www.ced.berkeley.edu/iaste

The Stimulated Body and the Arts: The Nervous System and Nervousness in the History of Aesthetics

February 17 2011 | Durham, UK

Deadline: July 31 2010

Updated: February 14 2010

International Interdisciplinary Conference
17-18 February 2011
Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease, Durham University, UK
Venue: Hatfield College, Durham, UK
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31 July 2010

This conference will discuss the history of the relationship between
aesthetics and medical understandings of the body. Today's vogue for
neurological accounts of artistic emotions has a long pedigree. Since
G.S. Rousseau's pioneering work underlined the importance of models of
the nervous system in eighteenth-century aesthetics, the examination of
physiological explanations in aesthetics has become a highly productive
field of interdisciplinary research. Drawing on this background, the
conference aims to illuminate the influence that different medical
models of physiology and the nervous system have had on theories of
aesthetic experience. How have aesthetic concepts (for instance,
imagination or genius) be grounded medically? What effect did the shift
from animal spirits to modern neurophysiology have on aesthetics?
The medical effects of culture were not always regarded as positive. The
second focus of the conference will be the supposed ability of excessive
reading, music and so on to 'over-stimulate' nerves and cause
nervousness, mental and physical illness, homosexuality and even death.
It will consider questions regarding the effects of various theories of
neuropathology and psychopathology on the concept of pathological
culture. What kinds of culture could lead to such over-stimulation? How
was this medical critique of culture related to moral objections and
changes in gender relations, politics and society? How was it linked to
medical concern about lack of attention and willpower?
This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working in a
wide range of fields, including not only the history of medicine but
also in subjects such as art history, languages and musicology.
Abstracts for 20-minute papers (maximum 250 words) should be submitted
electronically to the organisers by 31 July 2010 at the following
address:
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Organisers
Dr James Kennaway
Professor Holger Maehle
Dr Lutz Sauerteig

http://www.dur.ac.uk/chmd/