Events
Events include paper calls for conferences, workshops, lectures, seminars, and exhibits (listed in chronological order).
Last updated 05/10/2013 by Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone.
To Think, To Write, To Publish
October 01 2012 to May 19 2013 | Washington DC and Tempe, AZ
Deadline: June 15 2012
http://cspo.org/projects/think-write-publish/
Updated: May 16 2012
The Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University was recently awarded a generous grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in order to conduct the second iteration of a first of its kind workshop.
Writers of all kinds as well as science, innovation and policy scholars are invited to apply to this competitive program where they will learn sought after literary techniques and publish their work in a collection of creative nonfiction essays that makes science, innovation and policy scholarship accessible to a larger audience using creative nonfiction techniques. Completed essays will be published in various venues including a special book published by an imprint of the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.
The Workshop is an all expenses paid, two-part event, offering participants an honorarium upon completion of the program. The first part of the workshop will take place in Washington, DC in early October 2012 and the second in Tempe, Arizona, mid-May 2013 (nice weather is expected!).
The application deadline is June 15, 2012. More information is available at: http://www.thinkwritepublish.org
Please feel free to pass this e-mail on to other scholars, scientists, writers, bloggers, museum curators, researchers, journalists, short filmmakers, colleagues, graduate students, faculty administrators, departments, and other similar professionals.
CALL FOR PAPERS Celebrating the Achievements and Legacies of Ada Lovelace
January 18 2013 | Stevens Institute of Technology, College of Arts and Letters, Hoboken, New Jersey
Deadline: May 14 2013
Updated: January 10 2013
An interdisciplinary conference celebrating the achievements and legacies of the poet Lord Byron's only known legitimate child, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852). This conference will coincide with the week celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, a global event for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). All aspects of the achievements and legacies of Ada Lovelace will be considered, including but not limited to: -Lovelace as Translator and/or Collaborator -Technology in the Long Nineteenth Century -Women in Computing: Past/Present/Future -Women in STEM -Please submit proposals or abstracts of 250-500 words to: Robin Hammerman (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
2th Annual IAS-STS Conference “Critical Issues in Science and Technology Studies
May 06 2013 to May 07 2013 | Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS), GRAZ, AUSTRIA
Deadline: January 31 2013
Updated: November 28 2012
We invite interested researchers (especially postgraduates and young researchers) in the areas of science and technology studies and sustainability studies to give presentations. The conference provides a forum to discuss on a broad variety of topics in these fields – especially abstracts are encouraged which refer to aspects of the mentioned conference themes and special sessions.
CONFERENCE THEMES:
- Gender – Technology – Environment
- Life Sciences/Biotechnology
- Towards Low-Carbon Energy Systems
- Sustainable and Innovative Public Procurement & Ecodesign
- Sustainable Food Systems
SPECIAL SESSIONS:
-- Special Session: Queer perspectives on STS
-- Special Session: Social justice and Diversity
-- Special Session: Prevention Technologies
-- Special Session: Resources in the Making
-- Special Session: Knowledge Brokerage as participatory interaction processes linking research, policy and civil society
Abstracts should include no more than 250 words, comprising detailed contact information, affiliation and specification of the conference theme or special session you are referring to. Submission of abstracts should please be send to Thomas Berger (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) ) by *January 31st*, 2013 as a DOC/DOCX-file.
For more information on the call and the specific outlines of the conference themes and special sessions please visit the website.
The hosting institution of the IAS-STS, the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ), will also celebrate its 25th anniversary at next year’s conference. IFZ is the Graz unit of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt (http://www.ifz.aau.at). All participants will be invited to join our jubilee celebration on Monday, May 06th 2013!
Governing Technology: Material Politics and Hybrid Agencies
May 09 2013 to May 10 2013 | Stanford Humanities Center
Deadline: March 22 2013
Updated: March 10 2013
This conference aims to bring together two communities of scholars: those examining the ways that states and other institutions have sought to govern technologies, and those examining the ways that technologies have influenced the practice and form of governing. In the process, we will revisit the concept of governance through the lens of material politics. As some technologies promise the world and others threaten to overrun it, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have turned a critical eye to the agentive power and material effects of technology, as well as the responses that this power invokes. Research on technology’s entanglements with states, transnational organizations, and other powerful institutions has often taken its cues from science and technology studies.
In particular, pioneering work in STS on materiality, on governmentality, and on hybrid and nonhuman agency has become more and more a part of mainstream work in history, geography, anthropology, communication, literary studies, sociology, and beyond. Scholars from across these fields have, in turn, developed new frameworks of analysis that go beyond classic conceptions of governmentality and materiality to incorporate their own disciplinary strengths. Cornell professor Steve Jackson will discuss the interplay between governance and technology in his keynote lecture.
The conference will wrap up with a roundtable discussion on building the STS community in the Bay Area and beyond, featuring STS professors from Stanford and several nearby Universities of California.
Call for Participation We invite papers that consider (or critique) the relevance of material politics in understanding the relationship between governance and technology: how states and other institutions respond to challenges imposed by new and emerging technological developments and how technologies, understood broadly, become part of governing. Papers from any discipline or institution are encouraged. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: Natural resource management and extraction The politics of environmental regulation and tourism National or transnational policies on innovation and intellectual property The regulation and development of biotechnology The agency and role of non-governmental organizations Governing dangerous materials The politics of agricultural technologies Medical innovation and regulation The ungovernability of certain technologies The politics of technology in public health or urban planning Historical accounts of technological governance or agency Theoretical discussions or critiques of material agencies Theoretical discussions of governance through the lens of material politics
Please submit the following to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address): A submission abstract of no more than 250 words A brief biography of no more than 50 words to be included in the conference program The deadline for submissions is March 22, 2013. Notifications will be sent and the schedule posted by April 12, 2013. --
STEPS Centre Summer School University of Sussex
May 13 2013 to May 24 2013 | Sussex University campus, Brighton, UK.
Deadline: January 31 2013
http:\\www.steps-centre.org/about/steps-summer-school
Updated: December 10 2012
The STEPS Centre invites applications for its 2013 Summer School.
Applications are invited from highly-motivated doctoral and postdoctoral researchers or those with equivalent experience, working in fields around development studies, science and technology studies, innovation and policy studies, and across agricultural, health, water or energy issues. Participants will explore the theme of pathways to sustainability through a mixture of workshops, lectures, outdoor events and focused interaction with STEPS Centre members.
There is a fee to attend, but scholarships are available. For details of how to apply, financial support, programme information, and materials from last year’s event, visit the STEPS website. Summer school film Watch our film with STEPS Centre directors Melissa Leach and Andy Stirling talking what the Summer School is about, why we do it and what to expect. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQzfBwtAUlA
GOVERNING ALGORITHMS
May 16 2013 to May 17 2013 | New York University
http://governingalgorithms.org
Updated: April 10 2013
A conference on computation, automation, and control. Algorithms are increasingly invoked as powerful entities that control, govern, sort, regulate, and shape everything from financial trades to news media. Nevertheless, the nature and implications of such orderings are far from clear. What exactly is it that algorithms “govern”? What is the role attributed to “algorithms” in these arguments? Can we turn the “problem of algorithms” into an object of productive inquiry?
This conference sets out to explore the recent rise of algorithms as an object of interest in scholarship, policy, and practice beyond computer science. Taking a fresh view on the current wave of interest in this topic, we aim to discuss themes such as: * the very idea of “algorithms” as a subject and object of analysis * issues of methodology and the kind of knowledge claims that come with algorithms * the rhetoric of problems and solutions, success and failure * questions of agency, accountability, and automation * secrecy, obscurity, inscrutability * rules, regulations, resistance
Speakers include: Lucas Introna, Tarleton Gillespie, Evgeny Morozov, Daniel Neyland, Frank Pasquale, Claudia Perlich, Robert Tarjan as well as Mike Annany, Kate Crawford, Lisa Gitelman, Moritz Hardt, Matthew Jones, Karrie Karahalios, and Martha Poon. Everyone is welcome, but registration is required: http://governingalgorithms.org/registration/
Organizing committee: Solon Barocas, Sophie Hood, Helen Nissenbaum, Malte Ziewitz The conference is supported by the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing, the Information Law Institute at NYU School of Law, and the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
CHANGING NATURE: MIGRATIONS, ENERGIES, LIMITS
May 28 2013 to June 01 2013 | University of Kansas, Lawrence
Deadline: November 15 2012
Updated: September 18 2012
The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) invites proposals for its Tenth Biennial Conference. The decennial conference theme is intended to reflect some of the most engaging current conversations within the environmental humanities and across disciplines, and to link those discussions to the transnational nexus of energy, labor, borders, and human and nonhuman environments that are so fundamentally "changing nature," and with it the widely varied kinds of environmental critique we practice, art we make, and politics we advocate. Migrations--of humans, of non-human creatures, of "invasive species," of industrial toxins across aquifers and cellular membranes, of disease across species and nations, of transgenic pollen and GM fish-have changed the meanings of place, bodies, nations, and have lent new urgency to the old adage that "everything is connected to everything."
Energies--fossil, renewable, human, spiritual, aesthetic, organic-radically empower our species for good and for ill, and make our individual and collective choices into the Anthropocene. And those choices are profoundly about Limits on resources, climate, soil, and water; about voluntary and involuntary curbs on individual and collective consumption and waste; about the often porous and often violently marked borders of empire, class, race, and gender. We seek proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, workshops, and other public presentations that address the intersections between representation, nature, and culture, and that are connected to the conference's deliberately broad and, we hope, provocative theme.
As always, we emphatically welcome interdisciplinary approaches; readings of environmentally inflected fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and film; and proposals from outside the academic humanities, including submissions from artists, writers, practitioners, activists, and colleagues in the social and natural sciences. We will evaluate your proposal carefully, and notify you of its final status by January 31, 2013. For questions about the program, please contact 2013 ASLE President Paul Outka, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
For questions about the conference site and field sessions, please contact the Conference Site Host, Byron Caminero‐Santangelo, at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
4th Annual Summer Institute at The Center for the History of Political Economy
June 02 2013 to June 21 2013 | Duke University, Durham, NC
Deadline: March 04 2013
Updated: November 28 2012
The Institute is titled “The History of Political Economy.” The Summer Institute is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and professors in economics, other social sciences, and the humanities are encouraged to apply. We hope to draw half of our participants from economics departments, and half from other social sciences and the humanities. We are allowed to accept a maximum of three graduate students as applicants. The goal of the Institute is to examine a number of texts and arguments from an interdisciplinary perspective. A detailed program as well as an explanation of the application process is available on our website. Successful applicants receive a stipend of $2700 to defray costs.
Summer Institute in Bioethics
June 03 2013 to July 26 2013 | New Haven, CT
Deadline: November 30 2012
http://www.yale.edu/bioethics/summer.shtml
Updated: September 18 2012
Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics hosts an intensive Summer Institute for U.S. and international participants. The Institute is an 8-week immersion consisting of lectures, seminars, and research exploring bioethical concerns relating to medicine, law, religion, public health, animal rights, and the environment.
Tuition is $1,400 (undergraduates), $2,000 (law students, medical students, other graduate students and post-doctoral fellows), $3,000 (professionals).
Housing is available within walking distance for an additional cost. Course credit is available.
Contact Carol Pollard at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or (203) 432-6188
CCA 2013 Annual meeting: Call for papers on the theme “Technology and Emerging Media” *
June 05 2013 to June 07 2013 | Victoria, British Columbia
Deadline: December 10 2012
Updated: December 10 2012
Spurred by the success of last year¹s call, we once again invite you to submit a paper to the Technology and Emerging Media track at the next Canadian Communication Association Conference that will take place in
While the first "TEM Proceedings" are about to be published, we also invite you to consider submitting a short paper (2500-3000 words) relating to the presentation you plan to do in the TEM track next June. Detailed guidelines will be posted on the proceedings website and e-mailed later on.
The "Technology and Emerging Media" track covers works on research objects or problematics which address the following topics:
- Information and communication technologies, notably from the points of view of their design, diffusion, and uses; - Digital media and related social phenomena; - Issues related to recent technological developments in the field of communication: social media/social Web, mobile media, online games, and new diffusion platforms for traditional media.
Encouraged by the positive response we received to the idea of establishing a formal interest group on this theme within CCA, we would like to go ahead with this project. A 2nd meeting will be held during the conference. This time we will discuss the goals, structure and activities of the future interest group, the creation of which will be formally submitted to CCA Annual General Meeting.
Furthermore, we experiment for the first time the "open panel" formula, by inviting you to submit proposals on the theme "Newness and Emergence in Digital Media: Theoretical, Epistemological, and Methodological Considerations" (see the call for papers posted separately).
REMINDER: (Revised) deadline for submitting proposals to CCA conference is: December 10th, 2012.
Researching Architecture and Society
June 06 2013 to June 08 2013 | Bielefeld University, Germany
Deadline: February 15 2013
Updated: January 10 2013
What can a Sociology of Architecture learn from Science and Technology Studies? This workshop deals with the question of how Science and Technology Studies can inform theoretical and empirical studies in the field of the sociology of architecture. Researchers from all qualification levels (graduate students, postdocs, professors) are invited to submit proposals. The proposals are to be send to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Call for Proposals In recent years, researchers from social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies analyzed the relation between societies and their architecture (e.g. Yaneva and Guy 2008; Fischer und Delitz 2009; Delitz 2010). They discuss both theoretical concepts and problems of empirical research in this field. They show that within urban sociology and the sociology of architecture, the specific relations between objects and “the social”, thus between non-human and human actors, and the focus on the constitutive role of materiality for social relations are new topics.
In contrast to this comparatively new approach, Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyzed the influence of materiality and non-human actors for a long time. E.g. authors of the so called laboratory studies analyzed the influence of the laboratory space and the scientific instruments and objects on the production of scientific knowledge (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr Cetina 1981; Star 1995) and showed that technologies have “semiotic power” that enable them to influence the social (Bijker 1997). Others argue that technologies stabilize social organization (Beck 1996) while both human and non-human beings are interactionally and rhetorically re-classified so that the borders between human and non-human actors are challenged (Knorr Cetina 1999). Last but not least, one of the most prominent approaches, Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), conceptualizes the world as a network made of socio-material elements (Callon 1986; Latour 1988).
We start our workshop with the hypothesis that the STS-approach may be fruitful for urban sociology and the sociology of architecture and want to end with an answer to the following question: What can a theoretically and empirically ambitious sociology of architecture learn from STS? Some authors already used the vocabulary of STS to analyze the relation between architecture and “the social” (e.g. Gieryn 2002; Hommels 2005; Yaneva 2005). Still, they focus on the influence architectonic objects have on the society. Some STS-ideas may broaden this perspective, because they claim a reciprocal influence of non-humans and the social world (Law 1987). Thus, the sociology of architecture emphasizes only one side of the relation between buildings and the society, whereas for STS this relationship is potentially symmetrical. How can this supposed symmetry, the mixing of social beings and technical artifacts, be fruitful for the sociology of architecture? Or is it better to speak just about their relations, like ANT-representants do? Furthermore, we ask if architectural objects are open for any possible use or if they allow only specific forms of use, with this being subject to a „located accountability“, as Suchman (2002) suggests. This workshop calls for theoretical and empirical papers that analyze the architecture of societies and aim at including concepts and methods developed by STS. • Which STS-concepts may be translated into questions of the sociology of architecture? • Which conceptual modifications are necessary? • What methodological consequences result from these modifications for the analysis of architecture and its relation to society? • How can empirical studies include the possibility of reciprocal influences of buildings and society? • What can the sociology of architecture learn from authors who criticize the inclusion of non- human actors (e.g. Collins 2010)?
We welcome papers dealing with one or more of these questions. Researchers from all qualification levels are welcome (graduate students, post-docs, professors). We also plan a publication dealing with the question how urban sociology and the sociology of architecture may benefit from STS. • Write your proposals in English or German with no more than 400 words including a summary of your central arguments, research methods, and possible results of your paper. • Please send the proposal to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . • Selection process: The papers will be selected in a two-step process, including double-blind reviews by urban sociologists and STS researchers. • Submission Deadline: February 15, 2013, please send proposals to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Anna-Lisa Müller, HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany Werner Reichmann, University of Konstanz, Germany
Communication and Global Power Shifts
June 06 2013 to June 08 2013 | Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada,
Deadline: February 01 2013
Updated: June 18 2012
The volatile and chaotic nature of the current global system and the central role of ‘communicative capital’ in the constitution of the crisis-ridden global order bring new urgency to efforts to critically analyze enduring issues and new dynamics in global communications. A critical perspective requires that we look beyond dominant ‘power shift’ discourses, which focus primarily on the changing ‘balance of power’ among states, to consider other emerging power shifts, from the global workforce to transnational capital and from established institutions and entrenched power structures to networked individuals and ‘multitudes.’ The ongoing restructuring of the global political economy is at once challenging and accentuating existing forms of domination.
[CALL FOR PAPERS] This multifaceted topic invites interdisciplinary and multidimensional analysis, from the perspectives of political economy and policy, critical cultural analysis, and technology and society studies. The most promising lines of inquiry will involve projects that address political economy and cultural politics as they intersect critical categories such as empire, class, nation, race, and gender. Relevant topics include but are not limited to: Historical and theoretical analysis of communication and global power shifts Continuities and changes in the dynamics of global communications, with specific attention to South-South and/or intra-regional communication and cultural flows Foreclosures and opportunities for a more just global communication order in areas such as Internet governance regimes, social movement media, and communication rights Continuing relevance of the ‘audience commodity’ to current debates about digital labor power and struggles Decolonization of the foundations of knowledge-power and engagement with alternative epistemologies Constraints, challenges and opportunities in communication for ecological sustainability Please submit paper proposals of 250 words to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by February 1, 2013. Include a short biography (75 words).
‘Sea Stories: Maritime Landscapes, Cultures and Histories’ conference
June 12 2013 to June 14 2013 | The University of Sydney, Australia
Deadline: October 01 2012
Updated: May 16 2012
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI)
Maritime landscapes and communities are essential to understanding the historical, cultural and environmental trajectories that have configured the Asia-Pacific world. Oceans, seas and coastlines shaped, and were in turn shaped by, peoples and cultures. Indigenous/European engagements created sites of conflict, negotiation and compromise, and facilitated networks of trade and exchange, producing stories, objects and memories. How does attention to the maritime dimension help us to understand these relationships? The conference 'Sea Stories: Maritime Landscapes, Cultures and Histories' will provide a forum for examining the complex interactions of peoples, places, environments and cultures across the maritime landscapes of Australasia and the Pacific. The conference will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines (e.g. Archaeology, Anthropology, Heritage, History, Literature, Environmental Studies) who work on the landscapes and cultures of the sea. The conference aims to highlight the important interdisciplinary work being carried out on maritime cultures, societies, histories and landscapes across the region. As a key maritime centre for Indigenous peoples, settlers and visitors, and home to several major Australian institutions for maritime research (e.g. the Australian National Maritime Museum, the University of Sydney) Sydney is an ideal venue for this conference.
We invite papers which address the following themes:
· Indigenous and European histories: intersections and engagements
· The European imaginary: coasts, coastal landscapes and landforms
· Communities, cultures and maritime materialities
· Maritime objects, maritime memories
· Networks of trade and exchange
· Narratives, folk traditions, performances
Please send 250-word abstracts to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
*2nd STS Italia Summer School: “Technologically Dense Environments: What, Where and How”
June 12 2013 to June 16 2013 | Ostuni (Italy)
http://www.stsitalia.org/?p=1178
Updated: April 10 2013
The school program will be focused on stimulating a sensitivity among students for the complexities of moving between technologies in the contemporary world, especially in working and organizing settings. The idea of technologically dense environments (TDEs), in fact, refers both to concrete places in which human actors and technological artefacts work 'together' and to virtual places in which human interaction is made possible by technologies. In TDEs, complex socio-material practices mobilize the coordinated activities of heterogeneous (humans and nonhumans) elements, blurring the distinction between technological and organizational processes. Confirmed Speakers: Trevor Pinch (Cornell University); Attila Bruni (University of Trento); Giuseppina Pellegrino (University of Calabria); Manuela Perrotta (Queen Mary University, London); Cornelius Schubert (Siegen University).
Call for participation
Call for Abstracts: Science and its Publics
June 15 2013 | Toronto, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST)
Deadline: April 15 2013
http://sts.wisc.edu/call-for-abstracts-science-its-publics-june-15th-2013-toronto/
Updated: April 10 2013
The debates and outcomes of scientific research have often had consequences for the wider public, both in terms of the way that scientific ideas interact with lay beliefs and the way that technological development changes different forms of social living. The interaction between science and the public is by no means unidirectional either, as funding, institutional support, and direction for many research endeavours is integrated with wider social structures. Shifting public sentiments and modes of social living, therefore, will often affect the character of scientific research as much as scientific development will affect society as a whole. Far from being an abstract philosophical point about the place of intellectual endeavours in human society, the relations between modern science and society can be studied historically. Looking at Darwin's ideas on speciation and their relation to Victorian society, the political impetus behind the Moon Landing, and the way that biotechnology has changed human narratives about the self, scientific endeavours and public interests can be seen to be importantly intertwined yet fairly well distinguishable.
Scientific research, more or less by necessity, is something carried out mainly by a specific community of researchers. Although the scientific community is larger than ever before, the boundary between experts and active researchers and the wider public remains quite clear and distinct. The roles of science in public life, and public life in scientific research, present many questions for historians and philosophers of science. How have public attitudes towards and influence upon scientific research shifted over time? How can the social and intellectual lines between scientists and non-scientists be best delineated throughout history? Is there a proper role for science in public life? Is there a proper role for public interests in influencing scientific research?
The conference keynote will be given by Dr. John Durant from MIT's STS department. His earlier research was in the history of evolutionary and behavioral biology, with special reference to debates about animal nature and human nature in the late-19th and 20th centuries. More recently, however, he has undertaken sociological research on the public dimensions of science and technology. He is especially interested in public perceptions of the life sciences and biotechnology, in the role of public consultation in science and technology policy-making, and in the role of informal media (especially museums) in facilitating public engagement with science and technology. He is the founder editor of the quarterly peer review journal, Public Understanding of Science, and the author and editor of numerous books, essay collections and scholarly articles in the history and the public understanding of science. (from his MIT website - http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/durant.html)
We welcome submissions on any historical or philosophical topic related to this theme of "Science and its Publics." To submit please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by April 15th 2013, with the subject line "Science and its Publics - Conference Submission." Notifications of acceptance will be sent out within two weeks.
Congress of the Swiss Sociological Association
June 26 2013 to June 28 2013 | University of Bern
Deadline: February 28 2013
http://www.sgs-kongress2013.unibe.ch
Updated: January 28 2013
This workshop will focus on the challenges women in science and engineering face in building careers in the current financial crisis between equality and integration. Increasingly science careers are financially insecure and at the same time require high levels of mobility. In the fi eld of science and engineering stereotypes are reproduced by the traditional models of success in these disciplines. Male characteristics are considered to be strength, hardness and rationality whereas the opposite characteristics are constructed as female. To be successful in science and engineering woman require gender - as well as network - awareness, as excellent performance is not suffi cient to build a successful career. Mobility and building effective networks are also important, but can be highly gendered (Ackers, 2011; Sagebiel 2012; White, 2012).
The workshop welcomes proposals that cover a range of themes in relation to gender, science and engineering careers, including the following: • The gendering of scientifi c knowledge • Gender and science funding models • Mobility in science careers • Dual careers • Gender, networking and careers • Success cultures • Gendered organisational cultures • Gender and higher education versus industry
A parallel session lasts 2 hours and includes 4 to 6 presentations. If you would like to propose a contribution to the workshop-topic “Gender, science and engineering careers: growing inequalities?”, please submit a title, an abstract (maximum 2000 signs) and your personal details (name, institution/organization, address and e-mail). Contribution abstracts should include the research question, the theory and research context, the applied methods, and results. In addition key words and a bibliography (maximum of 10 references), should be included. Send to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). The organizers of the workshop are responsible for collecting the submissions and selecting the contributions to be included in the workshop.
Interpretive Methods - IPA 2013: Societies in Conflict: Experts, Publics, and Democracy
July 01 2013 | University of Vienna
Deadline: May 15 2013
https://ipa2013.univie.ac.at/registration/
Updated: May 10 2013
In order to continue its successful history we will organize a pre-conference course on interpretive methods and methodologies the day before the IPA conference starts, on Tuesday, July 2nd 2013. Taking place already for the third time this day-long event is intended to introduce participants – from doctoral students to more seasoned researchers – to interpretive policy analysis. The pre-conference will be divided in a plenary session in the morning, and parallel sessions focusing on different methodological approaches in the afternoon. These afternoon sessions will be more on “how-to-do” and thus be more workshops than lectures, where participants are invited to bring their questions to the discussion. It is not designed, however, for participants to present their work (for that see Methodology Workshops in the regular conference programme, Panel 100).
Tentative Schedule Time Lecturer Session 10:00 - 12:30 (with coffee/tea break) Dvora Yanow Introduction to Interpretive Methodology and Conceptual Overview of Methods Intro for all participants Lunch break 12:30 – 13:30 13:30 - 17:00 (coffee/tea break 15:00 -15:30) Dvora Yanow TBD Designing interpretive research projects Parallel Sessions (participants can only be in one workshop) Beate Littig Merlijn van Hulst Interviewing Aletta Norval Ruth Wodak Varieties of discourse analysis Instructors Dvora Yanow University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University Introduction; Designing interpretive research projects Beate Littig Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna Interviewing Merlijn van Hulst University of Tilburg, Tilburg School of Politics and Public Administration Interviewing Aletta Norval University of Essex, Department of Government Varieties of discourse analysis Ruth Wodak Lancaster University, Department of Linguistics and English Language Varieties of discourse analysis TBD Designing interpretive research projects
Registration Admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis and be limited to 40 participants, but the course will not proceed without a minimum of 25 participants. Please register early! Please note that the admission for the afternoon session also is based on a first-come, first-served basis. This means that it might be possible that you won’t get a place in your preferred course if it is already booked out. You can register for the pre-conference through the conference registration (https://ipa2013.univie.ac.at/registration/) Pre-conference fee (coffee/tea breaks and lunch included)
Early bird deadline: May 15th, 2013 For people who also register for the conference: - 95 € until May 15th, 2013 - 115 € after May 15th, 2013 For people who do not register for the conference: - 110 € until May 15th, 2013 - 130 € after May 15th, 2013 Cancellation policy Cancellations made before May 15th, 2013 will receive 70% of the registration fee. Cancellations after that date can not be refunded. Notification of cancellations must be in written form and addressed to Event management of University of Vienna (Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
For any questions or further information, please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
18th International Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology ISEG
July 04 2013 to July 06 2013 | Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Deadline: January 15 2013
Updated: August 14 2012
The SPT 2013 conference has the main theme Technology in the Age of Information. Although the organization welcomes papers and tracks proposals in all areas of the philosophy of technology, it especially encourages submissions addressing this topic.
Considering this era of the emergence of the ICTs, several questions may be raised: do we live in an information society? What is the role of ICTs in culture, politics and revolutions? Is the contemporary global economy shaped by ICTs? What are the new challenges upon the public spaces and human privacy that they bring to live? And what about their particular cognitive range, aesthetical dispositions, or nano and bio technological convergences? Do ICTs stimulate new technological utopias? Many other questions can be asked, and are welcome.
As in previous SPT’s conferences, the organization is open to contributions from an interdisciplinary spectrum. Not just philosophers, but also social scientists, natural scientists, and not least engineers. The list of tracks outlined below is suggestive of the topics under consideration, but does by no means restrict them: 1 – ICTs 1: globalization, informational economy and commodification 2 – ICTs 2: control, discrimination and surveillance 3 – ICTs 3: Webs, imaginaries and utopias 4 – ICTs 4: new media, public space and democracy 5 – ICTs 5: politics, alternatives and revolutions, 6 – Consumption and mobile lifestyles 7 – Informatics, nano- and bio-technological convergences 8 – Materiality and immateriality in the digital era 9 – Information and aesthetics 10 – Reflective engineering 11 – Philosophy of engineering and design 12 – Phenomenology of technology 13 – Ethics, Politics and the Good Life 14 – Environment, Sustainability, and Risks 15 – Technology, gender and culture 16 – Technological Innovation 17 – Technology and Critical Thinking 18 – Philosophy of Technology and Social Sciences
SUBMISSIONS:
Abstracts should be submitted by January 15, 2013. They must be between 500 and 750 words in length (references excluded) and submitted via email as embedded plain text or an attachment in RTF, WORD, or PDF format. Abstracts will be refereed. They should include the name(s) of author(s), affiliation(s), contact details and the paper title. They should also contain the name and number of the track to which the abstract is submitted. If an abstract does not seem to fit with any topic, simply note that with the submission. All submissions are welcome, and authors should not feel constrained by the topics. Notification of Acceptance will be no later than March 15, 2013.
Proposals for tracks will be also accepted by January 15, 2013. They will also refereed. Proposals should include a generic topic and issues to be addressed, as well as a short biography of its mentor(s). Notification of Acceptance will be no later than March 15, 2013.
All submissions should be sent by email in Word or rtf format to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS AND PLENARY SESSIONS: TBA
IMPORTANT DATES: • Deadline to submit abstracts and tracks proposals is January 15, 2013. • Notification of Acceptance will be no later than March 15, 2013. • Conference is on July 4-6, 2013.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Corporate Workshop With the topic, Connecting Technology and Responsibility, this corporate workshop will unite SPT 2013 and CEPE 2013 conferences participants in a passionate and intense debate with ICT companies regarding their products potential ethical quandaries. The corporate workshop will be held at July, 3rd, 2013, from 3 to 7 p.m. at ISEG. The keynote speaker of this Workshop will be Professor Simon Rogerson, De Montfort University, UK (research interest: computing and social responsibility).
Note: To be a participant, you must be registered into SPT 2013 or CEPE 2013 conferences.
CEPE 2013 conference is hosted by UAL, July 1-3, with the topic Ambiguous Technologies: Philosophical Issues, Practical Solutions, Human Nature, it is an important worldwide forum that debates ICT philosophical issues in society through the lens of information and computer ethics. See CEPE important dates for abstracts/papers at: http://www.cepe2013.com/#?Itemid=23
Important Note: participants that attend both conferences will have reduced fees. More information about the fees will soon be given on the conference website.
Tobacco Roads: Technology Transfer in Tobacco Industry during the Early Twentieth Century
July 05 2013 to July 07 2013 | Kavala, Greece
Deadline: March 10 2013
Updated: March 10 2013
The workshop marks the centenary anniversary of Kavala’s accession to the Greek state in July 1913. It is supported by the National Technical University of Athens, the Municipality of Kavala, ADVANTAGE AUSTRIA, Athens, and the Austrian Embassy in Athens. *Organizer: *Maria Rentetzi, Associate Professor, National Technical University of Athens, Greece *Location:* The venue of the conference is a wonderful tobacco warehouse ren ovated to host the tobacco museum of the city of Kavala in northern Greece. The conference invites historians and scholars from the history of technolo gy, technology studies, the humanities, architecture, museum and cultural st udies and other related disciplines to an interdisciplinary discussion of the history of tobacco technologies. It aims to reassess the role of technology transfer in the social construction of whole cities and urban infrastructures and retell their history through a multidisciplinary approach.
By focusing on major dimensions of technological change in the area of tobacco production and processing, the workshop aims to answer how and why tobacco technologies were crucial in shaping whole cities. The conference is especially focused on the tobacco industry in Kavala, a town by the sea in northern Greece, and its interrelation to the Austro-Hungarian tobacco monopolies. We encourage, however, contributions that deal with the seminal issue of technology transfer in the tobacco industry in general during the early twentieth century, given that the transfer of technology affects the practices of both the new locality and the point of origin. During the early 20th century the economies of a number of Greek cities relied almost exclusively on the cultivation, processing, and sale of tobacco leaves. Especially in coastal cities such as Kavala, everyday life mirrored the incessant tobacco production cycle—picking, drying, processing and baling tobacco. This was then transported to the port, loaded onto barges lined up at the quays in front of the city’s enormous tobacco warehouses and ferried out to foreign company steamers anchored out to sea. Since the 1840s, Lloyd, the major Austrian steamship company, had established a fortnightly service between Trieste and Kavala. Tobacco exports were directed mainly at the Hapsburg Empire, but also Russia, England, Egypt, France, and even the United States.
The city attracted both the Greek bourgeoisie—retailers who traded tobacco as independent exporters in mainly the Balkans, Russia, Egypt, and Turkey—and European corporations. These were powerful investors who built their own tobacco warehouses and often had the double role of foreign consul in the city and tobacco merchant. It is indicative that by 1880 all the major European countries had established consulates in the city of Kavala. By the end of the nineteenth century, around 4,000 tons of tobacco were being sent abroad annually from the city’s port mostly by the Austro-Hungarian *Herzog et Cie*. By 1913 there were 61 tobacco trading houses in the city. In this context of economic growth, powerful tobacco dealers mainly from the Austro-Hungarian empire, introduced innovative processing and packaging machinery in order to maintain a firm grip over tobacco production. Indeed, the tobacco industry stood at the cutting edge of business practice. The history of tobacco in Greece has been told as part of the country’s political, economic, and labor history; fortunately it has also evoked interest in gender and women’s history. Yet, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have paid less attention to the ways that the transfer of tobacco technologies, mostly from the Hapsburg Empire, shaped local societies, were transformed by them and also greatly influenced the national economy after the city’s accession to the Greek state. Transferring artifacts and methods for tobacco production and processing is but one form of technology transfer.
The history of Greek cities such as Kavala has witnessed many other forms of technology transfer that touch on the technological know-how, the actors, the practices, and the industrial buildings. The story of the Greek city of Kavala and its tobacco trade relations with Vienna is an example of technology transfer and a starting point for a wider discussion on the use of technology in tobacco production, processing, and distribution. Thus, we invite contributions on, but not limited to, the major actors in the tobacco trade in Kavala, such as the Austro-Hungarian Jewish industrialist Pierre Herzog who monopolized trade of Balkan and Turkish tobacco in Central Europe by the end of the nineteenth century and his company’s representative in the city, Adolf Wix von Zsolnay; the tobacco trade and economic relations and technology transfer between Kavala and Vienna; the traditional tobacco processing methods and their mechanization; the work culture and the political upheavals that were resulted from the introduction of new technologies in tobacco warehouses; the transfer of architectural styles and forms from Austria to the wider area of Kavala and neighboring cities. Also references to other parts of the world and tobacco centers are welcome.
*Submission **g**u**i**d**e**l**i**n**e**s**:*** A 250-words abstract along with a short one page cv as a word or pdf attachm ent are requested by March 10, 2013. Please send these to Maria Rentetzi .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Proposals will be reviewed and notification of the outcome w ill be made on March 30, 2013.
SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES AND TRANSDISCIPLINARY FUTURES: FROM COLLABORATIVE DESIGN TO DIGITAL FABRI
July 08 2013 to July 12 2013 | ISCTE-IUL University Institute of Lisbon
Deadline: April 01 2013
sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt
Updated: January 28 2013
[ facebook.com/sttf2013 ] [ twitter.com/sttf2013 ] STTF2013 invites you to apply for a one week intensive programme of social and technical methods, in a transdisciplinary environment that will engage participants in both conceptual and practical activities with all four pillars of sustainability as background. STTF2013 is intended for Master and PhD students, researchers, and professionals from STS, Product and Service Design, Social Sciences and Humanities, Architecture and Engineering, Communication and Media, Environmental Studies, Economics and Management, Computer Sciences, and others. Regardless of individual experience, everyone will have the opportunity to work in sociotechnical processes of design, construction and discussion of concrete objects, through Introductory Sessions, Masterclasses and Hands On Workshops.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS > Jerry Ravetz (University of Oxford UK) > Liz Sanders (MakeTools US) > Tomas Diez (FabLab Barcelona ES) > Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne FR) > Alex Schaub (FabLab Amsterdam NL)
IMPORTANT DATES > Application Deadline – APRIL 1 > Notification of Selected Participants – APRIL 15 > Early Registration and Payment Deadline – MAY 1 > Late Registration and Payment Deadline – JUNE 1
FIND OUT MORE > For more information on How To Apply, Fees, Programme, Speakers, or Venue, please visit our website http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt > STTF2013 is a joint initiative of VitruviusFabLab-IUL (Digital Fabrication Laboratory) and CIES-IUL (Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology), research units of ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon) > For any additional inquiries, contact us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call CIES-IUL Front Desk +351 210 464 018
SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES AND TRANSDISCIPLINARY FUTURES: FROM COLLABORATIVE DESIGN TO DIGITAL FABRICA
July 08 2013 to July 12 2013 | ISCTE-IUL University Institute of Lisbon
Deadline: April 01 2013
[ sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt ] [ facebook.com/sttf2013 ] [ twitter.com/sttf2013 ]
Updated: March 10 2013
STTF2013 invites you to apply for a one week intensive programme of social and technical methods, in a transdisciplinary environment that will engage participants in both conceptual and practical activities with all four pillars of sustainability as background. STTF2013 is intended for Master and PhD students, researchers, and professionals from STS, Product and Service Design, Social Sciences and Humanities, Architecture and Engineering, Communication and Media, Environmental Studies, Economics and Management, Computer Sciences, and others. Regardless of individual experience, everyone will have the opportunity to work in sociotechnical processes of design, construction and discussion of concrete objects, through Introductory Sessions, Masterclasses and Hands On Workshops.
IMPORTANT DATES > Application Deadline – APRIL 1 > Notification of Selected Participants – APRIL 15 > Early Registration and Payment Deadline – MAY 1 > Late Registration and Payment Deadline – JUNE 1 FIND OUT MORE > For more information on How To Apply, Fees, Programme, Speakers, or Venue, please visit our website sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt > STTF2013 is a joint initiative of VitruviusFabLab-IUL (Digital Fabrication Laboratory) and CIES-IUL (Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology), research units of ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon) > For any additional inquiries, contact us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call CIES-IUL Front Desk +351 210 464 018
The 2nd annual IPSA-NUS Summer School for Social Science Research Methods
July 08 2013 to July 19 2013 | National University of Singapore
http://methods-school.nus.edu.sg
Updated: March 10 2013
This methods program might be of interest to some of you, your students and colleagues. This year's Summer School offers eleven courses in quantitative, qualitative, and formal methods. All courses are taught by highly experienced international faculty and provide participants with rigorous training in state-of-the-art research methods. For more information on the various Summer School courses, financial aid, early registration discounts, and more, please visit our website (http://methods-school.nus.edu.sg/) or contact us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Please share this announcement with any colleagues, students, and friends that might be interested in the Summer School. Best regards, The IPSA-NUS Summer School team -- IPSA-NUS Methods Summer School National University of Singapore AS1, #04-10, 11 Arts Link Singapore 117573 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Planning Later Life – Bioethics and Politics in Aging Societies
July 10 2013 to July 12 2013 | Göttingen (Germany)
Deadline: November 01 2012
http://www.biomedizinische-lebensplanung.uni-goettingen.de
Updated: August 14 2012
Organized by
Silke Schicktanz and Mark Schweda (Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Göttingen) and Frank Adloff (Department of Sociology Erlangen-Nürnberg)
The aim of the international conference Planning Later Life – Bioethics and Politics in Aging Societies is to critically reflect on the relevance of modern medicine in shaping the lives and situations of aging and elderly persons today. It discusses and contrasts the ethical, social and political consequences of demographic change in the field of medicine and health care as well as the implications of the rise of anti-aging medicine and prevention, and recent trends in dementia research and care. The conference is interdisciplinary, combining perspectives from ethics, sociology, cultural anthropology and nursing sciences.
Among the confirmed keynote speakers are:
• Norman Daniels (Harvard),
• John Harris (Manchester),
• Otfried Höffe (Tübingen),
• François Höpflinger (Zürich),
• Sharon Kaufman (San Francisco),
• Stephen Katz (Petersborough),
• S. Jay Olshansky (Chicago),
• Dieter Sturma (Bonn),
• Nancy Jecker (Washington)
• Jason Powell (Preston).
Apart from the plenary sessions, there will be open parallel sections discussing the changing images of old age between autonomy and dependency, the evidence and benefits of anti-aging and prevention, problems of personal identity and dementia as well as solidarity and social responsibility in future healthcare policies. Contributions in the form of oral presentations of 20 minutes are invited. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words, highlighting question, methods and results of your research, to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Deadline is November 1st 2012. All abstracts will undergo peer review.
The conference will take place within the framework of the BMBF-funded research project Biomedical Life Plans for Aging. Values Between Individual Ethical Reflection and Social Standardization
The 2nd When the City Meets the Citizens Workshop: Big Data and the Study of the Urban Habitat
July 11 2013 | Boston, Massachusetts
Deadline: March 18 2013
http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_project.php?id=4394
Updated: February 11 2013
In conjunction with the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) =============================================================
Social media analysis can play a key role in providing insights into people's activities, opinions and day-to-day lives. When they are geolocated, these user-generated information streams become a unique opportunity to understand the rhythms and tenors of a city and its citizens. By applying computational, social science, and humanities methods to social media data such as photos, tweets and check-ins, researchers are now beginning to conceive of new methodological and theoretical frameworks not only to extract local insights but, more importantly, to better understand cities and their residents.
Following the success of last year's first WCMCW held in Dublin, this workshop aims to understand the various ways social media data can be used to produce knowledge about cities that supports citizen engagement. The WCMC workshop will involve discussions on topics such as (but not limited to): * Improving understandings of the city through mining social media * Use of social media to engage citizens (for example, through game mechanics) * Visualizations and interfaces to enable exploration of city data * Mobilizing communities through social media * Pervasive applications for user interaction and data collection * Disaster recovery and coordination using social media * Enabling citizen and NGO initiatives through social media * Methodology for quality evaluation and validation of user generated content * Privacy and ethical concerns in citizen engagement
Objectives: Our aim is to facilitate a session that encourages computer scientists, industry professionals, academic researchers, architects, urban planners, government officials, hackers, artists, and other interested participants to work together to explore timely questions relating to social media, big data, citizen engagement and the creation of smarter cities. We will encourage interdisciplinary collaboration so that participants can work together to create a common understanding of how social media data might address contemporary urban issues. Participants will have the opportunity to showcase projects; discuss theoretical, methodological, ethical, and political questions in regard to the study of urban life through the prism of social media data; and participate in a brainstorming “data hacking” session where participants will collaboratively tackle a specific social media dataset.
SUBMISSIONS: All contributions must be submitted as PDF files. The workshop accepts novel research or work-in-progress papers (no longer than 4 pages) or position papers (no longer than 2 pages). All papers must be submitted by the deadlines provided below and formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author instructions page). All submitted papers will be reviewed and judged on originality, technical correctness, relevance, and quality of presentation by the Program Committee. All accepted submissions must be presented during the workshop.
Please submit papers to EasyChair WCMCW2013 (http://www.easychair.org conferences/?conf=wcmcw2013).
IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper submission deadline: March 18, 2013 Paper acceptance notifications: March 26, 2013 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Elizabeth M. Daly, IBM Research, Ireland / Co-Chair Raz Schwartz, Rutgers University, USA / Co-Chair David Millen, IBM Research, USA Ingrid Erickson, Rutgers University, USA Brian Keegan, Northeastern University, USA Germaine Halegoua, University of Kansas, USA
Asia-Pacific STS Network Biennial Conference 2013
July 15 2013 to July 17 2013 | Co-hosted by Asia Research Institute and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore
Deadline: February 15 2013
http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/cluster/events_details.asp?clusterid=ST&eventid=1357
Updated: December 10 2012
Deadline extended to February!
The Asia-Pacific Science, Technology and Society Network is an association of regional scholars for fostering collaboration and encouraging science, technology and society research, teaching, and critical discussion on current STS themes and issues in the Asia-Pacific region.The conference website may be viewed here, including submission & registration guidelines.
Deadline for proposals is 7 January, 2013. Contact conference organizers at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Knowing, Making, Governing - across Asia and the Pacific, the work of science, technology and society calls attention to the region’s plurality of socio-technical projects and ways of knowing. The conference accepts proposals for all themes pertaining to science, technology and society, including:
Potential Themes
Biosciences Food, Water & Agriculture Medicine Business, Finance, & Markets Gender Modeling and Numbers-work Care Indigenous Knowledges Normativity and Normalization Citizenship & Activism Information & Media Posthumanities Disaster Inter-Species Relations Publics & Participation Energy Knowledge & its Limits Risk Environment & Ecology Government, Policy & Politics Theory & Method
The conference accepts proposals for all STS-related themes; the above are only some of the most common.
APSTSN Biennial Conference 2013 is jointly hosted by the STS Research Cluster of the Asia Research Institute (ARI), the STS Research Cluster of the Faculty or Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), and Tembusu College (at University Town), all at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Support has also been received from the Humanities and Social Science Research Fund at NUS and from the Singapore Tourism Board.
Co-Convenor, Asia-Pacific STS Network Organizer, Asia-Pacific STS Network Biennial Conference 2013
8th Annual Science in Public Conference
July 22 2013 to July 23 2013 | The University of Nottingham
Deadline: January 31 2013
Updated: January 10 2013
‘Critical Perspectives on Making Science Public’ Call for Panel Proposals is the theme of the 8th Annual Science in Public Conference. Relations between science, publics, politics and commerce are in flux. Participatory activities bringing government, business, science and publics together in cooperative research partnerships are multiplying while activist publics are increasingly contesting certain forms of scientific research. In certain areas science is being ‘defended’, while in others scientists are calling for a new wave of ‘citizen scientists’ to shape research and policy agendas. Occasionally, scientists themselves are becoming activists uniting in protest against the privatisation and commercialisation of their work or highlighting their lack of representation in government. Meanwhile, it appears that the dissemination of and access to research results has never been easier, enabling the rapid mobilisation of a variety of interest groups through new social media.
The theme of the 2013 Science in Public conference aims to engage with these trends. It is linked to the five-year Leverhulme Programme on ‘Making Science Public – Challenges and Opportunities’ directed by the University of Nottingham. With this call we warmly invite panel proposals that will theoretically, empirically or through practice address the tensions, dynamics and normative implications linked to the changing field of ‘making science public.’ The conference will be opened with a keynote by Professor Harry Collins of the Cardiff School of Social Sciences, whose work on the nature of scientific knowledge and expertise has provoked considerable discussion and debate. Later in the day Dr. Sujatha Raman, Deputy Director of the Leverhulme programme, will lead a roundtable discussion on different notions of the public, models of democracy and the implications of Professor Collins’ work on expertise, to which Professor Collins is invited to respond. Professor Brigitte Nerlich, Director of the Leverhulme Programme will chair the discussion.
Science in Public provides an excellent opportunity for postgraduate students, researchers, academics, policy makers, artists, NGOs, and others working in public and private organisations to discuss issues around ‘science in public’ and share their work. We are looking for panel proposals in traditional academic and innovative formats, including visual/performing arts and other practice-based approaches that address the conference theme. Proposals for panels should include a panel title, nominated convenor and a 300 word description of your panel’s format and theme. Panels are expected to last for 90 minutes. Proposals (and any informal enquiries) should be sent to Dr. Adam Spencer, Department of Geography, University of Nottingham: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 31 January 2013. Panel themes and the call for papers will be announced on 15th February 2013.
Registration costs will be minimised as far as possible; we anticipate that they will be in the order of £45 – £60.
Interrogating Inequality
August 10 2013 to August 13 2013 | New York
Deadline: January 09 2013
http://www.asanet.org/meetings/call_for_papers.cfm
Updated: November 09 2012
The announced Regular Session Topics listed in the Call for Papers are open to submission of full papers from members of the Association and other interested individuals. For these avenues to formal paper presentation, the Program Committee selects fairly broad topics, drawing upon the experience of past programs as well as suggestions from the membership, its own views of the discipline, and those topics it considers to be of timely and emerging interest in the field. This structure of fewer but wider categories is believed to broaden the scope of sessions and stimulate fruitful dialogue among related areas of specialization. One benefit of this structure is that Regular Session organizers have the opportunity to organize more than one session, depending on the number and quality of submissions.
An author’s chances of acceptance are thus enhanced, since organizers are less constrained by narrowly defined topics. All Regular Session topics are eligible for multiple sessions if warranted by the number and quality of submissions. Regular Session organizers are expected to select for the program the best papers submitted to them. It is against ASA and Program Committee policy for organizers to recruit presenters selectively or to impose their own pre-planned themes on Regular Sessions.
Further, in order to assure wide participation in the program, it is Program Committee policy that organizers not give sole-authored papers in sessions they organize if they are to serve as presider or discussant in that session. Regular Session organizers may construct sessions in the traditional paper-reading style or opt for a more interactive format. A traditional paper-reading session normally lists a session presider, four or five papers, and a discussant (optional). Interactive session formats vary, often pairing paper presentations, using more discussants, or having presenters discuss each other’s papers. In all cases, organizers are responsible for facilitating the session interaction. A paper presentation on a Regular Session is classified as an authorship under the participation rules. Paper titles with authors' names and affiliations will be listed in the Program.
Ethics, Culture and Community-based Environmental Research
August 14 2013 to August 16 2013 | SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Syracuse, NY
Deadline: May 31 2013
http://www.esf.edu/es/sonnenfeld/documents/ESF2013SummerWorkshop-Flyer.pdf
Updated: April 10 2013
Summer Graduate Workshop
This summer, the Dept. of Environmental Studies at SUNY-ESF will host a three-day graduate training workshop, part of the NSF-funded, Northeast Ethics Education Partnership (NEEP) with Brown University's Center for Environmental Studies. Led by Drs. Dianne Quigley (PI) and David A. Sonnenfeld (co-PI), the workshop is designed for up to 20 graduate students in Environmental Science, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies and related fields in upstate New York.**
Schedule: The workshop will be held August 14-16, with 12 hours of classroom training, plus 3 hours of follow-up, online training. On-campus accommodations will be provided for up to 10 participants from outside the Syracuse area; lunch will be provided for all. Note: It may be possible to accommodate students who cannot attend all three days of the workshop.
To Apply: Send an email to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), describing your research interests and aims for this workshop.
Deadline: All applications must be received by e-mail no later than 5:00 pm EDT, May 31, 2013.
Further Information: Please see the workshop flyer or contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Workshop Benefits:
· Learn New Research Models, Including Community-based Participatory Research: If you are a graduate student interested in carrying out research adapted to community needs and sensitive to cultural diversity, this workshop will provide a review of case/field studies with new approaches to research design, methods and outcomes that reflect various ethical approaches to research (community-based research, distributive justice, postmodern, care ethics and virtue-based approaches).
· Institutional Review Board (IRB) Application Training: If you are planning to conduct field-based environmental research for your dissertation or thesis work, and you need or desire training on protection of human subjects, including for Institutional Review Board (IRB) applications, this workshop will provide guidance and preparatory training for those applications.
· Cultural Diversity/ Sensitivity Training: Research approaches will be assessed to ensure that exploitation, community stigma harms and culturally-inappropriate practices can be prevented. Communities and cultural groups increasingly require that research activities produce beneficial change and positive outcomes to their local community settings. Guidance from international ethics recommendations, ethical theories, international/ national field studies will be reviewed for use in research design and research beneficence.
· Certificate of Completion: Students completing 15 hours of training will receive a Certificate of Completion for Research Ethics and Cultural Competence/ Diversity Training. This can be included on CVs to indicate gaining of much-needed professional skills/ expertise that can be shared with others. Students will have access to online resources in research ethics and cultural diversity from the NEEP Website and Blackboard Course Pages.
AMCIS 2013 CFP: Global and Cross Cultural Aspects of Crowdsourced Content Production and Knowledge..
August 15 2013 to August 17 2013 | Chicago, Illinois, USA
Deadline: February 22 2013
Updated: December 10 2012
19th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2013): Hyperconnected World: Anything Anywhere Anytime 15–17 August 2013
Call for Papers for the mini track on “Global and Cross Cultural Aspects of Crowdsourced Content Production and Knowledge Repositories”
Track: Global, International, and Cross Cultural Issues in IS (SIGCCRIS) Description
With the advent of Web 2.0, many crowdsourced content production and repository sites, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and Yahoo! Answers, are flourishing. Wikipedia, for example, became one of the top ten most popular websites. Many scholars have focused attention on information quality and processes of mass knowledge production, as well as the social aspects of these projects. However, significantly less attention has been given to their global nature. Wikipedia, for example, includes articles in 285 languages, Yahoo! Answers International is available in more than 25 languages, and YouTube in more than 60 languages. This global nature of such knowledge creation and content repository projects offers a rich socio-technical environment to examine international and cross cultural issues online. Previous studies are predisposed to primarily investigate the English version of these repositories, yet there is a need for more cross cultural research. The purpose of this minitrack is to showcase research on knowledge production projects that goes beyond their English versions. The minitrack welcomes both empirical and conceptual work and solicits innovative analysis of international and cross cultural aspects of these projects. We invite papers, research in progress, and panels.
Suggested Topics:
Appropriate topics for this minitrack include (but are not limited to) the following list:
· Global, cross cultural and international issues of crowdsourced content production and repository sites, such as:
o Wikipedia
o YouTube
o Yahoo!Answers
o TripAdvisor
o Amazon Recommendations, and others.
· With special interest in:
o International collaboration and conflict
o Cross cultural interactions
o Case studies in any non-English language
o Comparative and cross cultural studies in more than one language, focusing on content, structures, policies, contributions, interactions, processes, motivations, and challenges
MINI-TRACK CHAIRS:
Pnina Fichman (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)), Indiana University
Noriko Hara (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)), Indiana University
IMPORTANT DATES:
January 4, 2013: Manuscript submissions for AMCIS 2013 begin
February 22, 2013: Paper submission deadline 11:59PM EST
April 22, 2013: Paper acceptance notice
May 9, 2013: Camera-ready copy of accepted papers due
Instructions for authors and more information is available at: http://amcis2013.aisnet.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=84&Itemid=60
Complexity: Researching alcohol and other drugs in a multiple world
August 21 2013 to August 23 2013 | Aarhus, Denmark
Deadline: February 18 2013
Updated: January 10 2013
Hosted by Contemporary Drug Problems, the Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research (Aarhus University, Denmark), the National Drug Research Institute (Curtin University, Australia) and the Centre for Population Health (Burnet Institute, Australia), this conference will bring together leading international researchers in drug use and addiction studies from a range of research disciplines.
The last decade has seen the idea of complexity gain force in social science and epidemiological research. As social problems of all kinds prove less amenable to change than is sometimes suggested by the reductionist demands of orthodox positivist approaches, theory and method have turned to ways of articulating the elusive, uncertain and complex. For some, such as the science and technology studies scholars Annemarie Mol and John Law (2002), complexity means multiplicity rather than unity, realities rather than reality, distinct but overlapping worlds, logics and orders. Implicated, too, are questions about the relation between order and chaos, and the validity of binaries of any kind, including that of simplicity and complexity itself. Certainly, Mol and Law see a necessary connection between complexity and simplification – research methods, they argue, must simplify if they are to enact order and make useful statements about issues. The trick is to remember that simplification is occurring, and to resist the urge to tidy it away or obscure it.
Issues of complexity, simplification and research method are of direct relevance to alcohol and other drug problems. Addiction, one of Western liberalism’s most productive concepts, is both heavily contested and frequently taken for granted. Drugs, too, are seen to be self-evident (in their action in the body and role in addiction), yet ‘behavioural addictions’ such as gambling and overeating promise, via emerging neuroscientific understandings of brain chemistry, to remake the category of ‘drugs’ in policy, practice and popular culture. Diseases commonly associated with drug use – especially the bloodborne viruses HIV and hepatitis C – challenge simple epidemiological estimates of incidence and prevalence and straightforward understandings of the social, behavioural and biological dynamics of transmission.
Quantitative methodologies wrestle with tensions between elaborative and parsimonious modelling, especially in relation to large populations conceived as a diversity of sub-groups. Retaining the complexity and richness of the data in research results while still drawing succinct and direct conclusions is a major challenge for both quantitative and qualitative approaches. The demands of policy and service provision favour simplification, but many ask at what cost. Qualitative and quantitative research of all kinds is, it seems, implicated in these contemporary dilemmas of complexity and simplification. This conference offers a forum in which the issues and dilemmas of complexity in alcohol and other drug research can be explored. It welcomes research based on quantitative and qualitative methods, and encourages innovative use of methods, concepts and theoretical approaches.
Possible themes include: ♦ Changing meanings, definitions and measures of addiction ♦ The relationships between alcohol and other drug use and health and social phenomena ♦ Emerging drugs and conceptions of their effects ♦ Public opinion on illicit drug use, drinking or smoking ♦ Drug policy and the forces and assumptions that shape it ♦ Drugs and addiction in film, news and other media ♦ Models and practices of treatment and recovery ♦ Pedagogies of addiction and drugs in universities and schools ♦ Drugs in urban cultures and spaces ♦ Subjects and practices of harm reduction ♦ Global politics of drug production and consumption ♦ Complexity and method in the addiction and drug use field ♦ Validity and reliability in quantitative drug research ♦ Quantitative and qualitative theories of complexity and their uses in drug research
Science and the Politics of Emergent Life: Foucault and beyond
August 23 2013 | University of Sydney
Deadline: June 17 2013
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/biopolitics_science/
Updated: May 10 2013
A Biopolitics of Science/COST Bio-Objects Graduate Workshop
Since Foucault’s proposal of the term *biopolitics* in the 70s, the consideration of life’s entanglement with social, political and material practices, in concert with science and technology, has opened up in abundant ways: from the ‘politics of life itself’, to the interrogation of biocapital and biovalue, and more recently multispecies ethnography. Increasing attention is being paid to the production, governance, regulation, manipulation, and intensification of human and non-human life (or sometimes the lack thereof). ‘Life’ in these fields is undoubtedly being thought of as more-than-human – including non-human animals, plants, and micro-organisms – and increasingly understood as emergent. The Biopolitics of Science Research Network seeks to promote dialogue across disciplines and foster collaboration on these important issues.
We invite PhD students working within the broad theme of life, politics and science to a graduate workshop. The aim of this workshop is to showcase postgraduate research, provide support and feedback from senior scholars, and build connections between graduate students in Australia and further afield. The workshop will be co-hosted by the European Union COST Action Bio-objects and their Boundaries
If you are interested in attending please submit a paper proposal of no more than 250 words, along with your name, affiliation, year of study and contact details, to Rachel Carr at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Producing knowledge, governing populations Anthropology, science studies and health policies
September 10 2013 to September 13 2013 | Lyon, ENS
Deadline: December 15 2012
Updated: July 17 2012
Research in what is called the anthropology of health (in France) and medical anthropology (in the English speaking world) share a common concern for how bioscience, biotechnology, and biomedicine raise issues at the heart of contemporary society. Francophone and Anglophone anthropologists have worked theoretically side by side (but sometimes in ignorance of each other) to examine health inequalities, patterns of resort, pharmaceutical developments, public health policies, interventions on populations. They have placed the body in context and decentered biomedical notions of health and illness as they have revealed changing definition of old age and death or the patenting of life. These developments index a transforming relationship between humanity and health, one made visible in the relationship between subjectivity, misfortune –embodied or not – and the forms of political engagement these incite. This research, sensitive to how life is not at the heart of our ways of thinking and doing politics, remains haunted by Foucault’s works on biopower and, increasingly, the care of the self.
Science and technology studies (STS) has over the past 30 years shown how scientific production creates new standards and values, how such works fans out through complex networks, each time redefining the world in which we live. STS research on biomedicine has also grown, but often isolated from conversations and debates in the anthropology of health and medical anthropology. These two disciplinary solitudes (medical anthropology and STS) have been maintained by critics that accuse STS of inadequate fieldwork and a heavy-handed approach to forcing data to fit pre-established theoretical framework, or critics of medical anthropology who complain that rich accounts of local illness knowledge and practice are too often opposed to a monolithic and “black-boxed” version of biomedicine. Yet can we still do without a real exchange between these two disciplines?
While the paradigm of evidence-based medicine seems to enjoy unquestioned legitimacy today, everyone agrees that this legitimacy is the byproduct of ongoing work engaging life
1 sciences experts, health specialists and of the mobilization of social and political dynamics. Thus evidence-based medicine is the result of an effort which, although taking the appearance of evidence, is the result of a process aiming at building its own legitimacy. Based on processes rather than given facts, evidence-based medicine is at the heart of the debate we hope to develop during this meeting. The foundations of such omnipresence of evidence- based medicine has to be studied, in that it allows the understanding of the logic of practices associated with it in contemporary societies. The primary objective of this conference is therefore to open, or rather to broaden, the space for exchanges between anthropology of health and science studies around evidence based-medicine: what are its contributions, its limitations, but also its constraints? How does it produce, impose or recompose within its everyday activities norms and standards of care? How does it redefine our conceptions of health, body and ailments afflicting us? How does it change our system of values? How does it influence the politics defining policies implemented within our health systems?
As a rough guide we suggest three main questions that will define our meeting. Although we invite papers to enroll concerning these three questions, they are far from exhaustive.
Making evidence
In most developing countries research activities are conducted within health systems. Clinical trials, scaling up interventions, and various tests and trials are inscribed into multiple dimensions. On the one hand they take part in the production of knowledge at a global level and turn research frameworks into spaces within which many questions are examined. Furthermore, this knowledge produced by researchers from the South (often in collaboration with researchers from the North) is mobilized to help a particular policy along, to defend such or such modification of an international recommendation (e.g. WHO). The problematic link between knowledge produced in these contexts, even from an operational logic standpoint, is rarely discussed. How does one go from protocol, from a test by its very nature "beyond real life" (as scientists like to put it) to public health recommendations and to practical implementations in the field? What are the rationales at stake, what are the operations of translation? What are the negotiations involved between researchers, public health specialists and political actors from global to local stances? It seems to us quite useful to read these negotiations through the lenses of the historical development of medical evidence (Marks
1999). Trial participants are indeed people who remain with their own history and daily life. Health workers have their own conception of medicine and care, which they developed through their experiences. Political, economic and social contexts vary, so do the schools of thoughts. Within trial set ups, trajectories and ontologies are multiple and the production of facts adds further to the different social worlds into which individuals are inscribed. Therefore the issue is not only to understand the production of biomedical facts in the light of the context (presence of other types of medicines, influence of religion and of the socio-political), but also to understand how this production comes to construct ontologies, professional environments, and ways of life. What does it imply for individuals, patients or health professionals? What ontologies of the body, health or disease are emerging from these practices and what is their impact? What consequences can this specific practice of medicine have on the actors involved, willingly or not? And how can we from this questioning conceive ethics or at least try to reframe some of its foundations, or else notice some inadequacies of its standardization? It is clear from these lines that we stand here far from the reductionist label attached to science, quite the opposite. We would rather understand how a new wealth and complexity find their origins in these practices, how within the space of clinical trials it is not so much the opposition of two worldviews which is displayed, rather it is their productive encounter.
2 Making bodies comparable
The rise of biology as a discipline, the development of statistics, and the practice of care, helped make bodies commensurable and standardizable, condition sine qua non for the development of biomedicine. However this configuration is by no means fixed. It is in fact constantly changing. Indeed, bodies are not comparable in nature and it is biomedicine’s tour de force along with sciences in general to let us think they are (Latour 1997). Research carried out in Medical Anthropology highlights the idiosyncrasies peculiar to the living, and understand the materiality of the body as the product of history, social change and ongoing interactions between humans, their environment and the context in which they live, what Lock and Nguyen have summarized by forging the term "local biologies" (Lock and Nguyen
2010). When one considers human beings as unique both in terms of their genomes as in
terms of their everyday experiences, there is reason to believe that the biological sciences can only produce partial pictures, snapshots of the materiality of bodies. This observation allows us to offer another reading of biomedical failures and permits a better understanding of some of the problems associated with the implementation of biomedical and clinical research results originating from different contexts. Moreover it also allows for further reflection on the consequences of the biomedicalization of life and its impact on subjectivities, on the relationship that individuals have with themselves, with their image, their body, or their identity. The question of both the commensurability of the body and the generalization of data is at the heart of the issues we wish to see addressed during our meeting: while clinical trials along with the emergence of new technologies, and biomedical experiments in general are geographically and historically situated, their results can be generalized to give rise to public health policy. We are interested in all the dimensions of this journey: how, at the experimental level, is the body turned comparable to the point of adding them up, one to another? How do we produce the data? How does one objectify the living? However, this journey cannot account for its 'success', or rather cannot give an answer the age old question “why does it work”, a question we must immediately replace with “how does it work.” How does one render bodies comparable? How does one produce knowledge, how does one generalize to the point of making recommendations sometimes leading to real public health policies? And what are the consequences? An approach articulating science (in its most concrete modalities) and politics (at the more global scale) is strongly expected.
Standardizing practices, practicing standards
We all know that standardization is at the heart of the production of scientific statements, whether it be practices (Berg, 1997), protocols (Timmermans and Berg, 2003), or even living entities such as cells (Landecker, 2009) or organs (Hogle, 2009). This standardization aims at making facts transportable to other places, with other actors, to make them immutable mobiles (Latour). However, science studies have taught us that such standardization is never complete, never perfect. This is due to the many idiosyncrasies of the living on the one hand, and on the other to the fact that the reproducibility of a result, of a technology or statement lies foremost in the reproducibility of the conditions of their production, and therefore in the standardization of a large number of elements. Therefore, once produced, how are such data, facts, tools, technologies treated to be translated, transported, and distributed? And how are they received? Many studies in medical anthropology underline the richness and diversity of contexts in which they must take root, which sometimes means a temporary or permanent inconsistency between proposed health policies and local contexts in which we want to implement them. How are these contexts "redefined" by these policies and technologies, and with what consequences? How do experiences of populations, health, and people in the interface between science and politics fit? Of course, on this topic historians are probably better equipped than anthropologists to address this issue (Packard 1989, Vaughan 1991;
3 Jochelson 2001) although anthropologists are not totally out of the picture (Dozon 1985, Carton 2003). People themselves are not a passive receptacle for biomedical technologies, practices, or even health policies, policies that carry the characteristic of being based on a type of amnesia when people on their side do remember (Fassin 2006). Today's recommendations may be echoing previous policies (i.e. indoor residual spraying and community mobilization in the fight against malaria). To forget this means not taking into account the history of health policies nor the memory of the people or contexts. How do patients cope with, bypass, reinvent, adapt or adjust pragmatically to implemented medical practices and technologies? How is history mobilized to understand the present? What are the continuities (or breaks) between the colonial and postcolonial eras that matter? For the African continent we invite the panelists to try and answer the question of the place and status of life science in times of necropolitics (Mbembe).
Our meeting in its purpose and questioning is inherently interdisciplinary. We claim therefore
an interdisciplinary openness and invite representatives from various disciplines to propose papers (history, political science, anthropology, sociology, science studies but also clinical research, public health ...). Although the fieldwork of conference organizers mainly takes place on the African continent, papers based on other continents are most welcome.
Beyond the relevance and quality expected for papers in an international symposium, their selection will be based on the appreciation of their grounding in a real fieldwork. We give to fieldwork a broad meaning: it may be archival or ethnographic. We expect original contributions based on work in progress or recently completed. We will pay particular attention to research including a historical dimension. Indeed we consider it necessary to articulate ethnography with a reflection based over a long time period. Research based on the use of archives will therefore be most welcome.
Producing knowledge, governing populations
September 10 2013 to September 13 2013 | Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France
Deadline: December 15 2012
http://cssp-jnu.blogspot.com/2012/06/cfps-international-symposium-on.html
Updated: September 18 2012
Research in what is called the anthropology of health (in France) and medical anthropology (in the English speaking world) share a common concern for how bioscience, biotechnology, and biomedicine raise issues at the heart of contemporary society. Francophone and Anglophone anthropologists have worked theoretically side by side (but sometimes in ignorance of each other) to examine health inequalities, patterns of resort, pharmaceutical developments, public health policies, interventions on populations. They have placed the body in context and decentered biomedical notions of health and illness as they have revealed changing definition of old age and death or the patenting of life. These developments index a transforming relationship between humanity and health, one made visible in the relationship between subjectivity, misfortune –embodied or not – and the forms of political engagement these incite. This research, sensitive to how life is not at the heart of our ways of thinking and doing politics, remains haunted by Foucault's works on biopower and, increasingly, the care of the self.
Science and technology studies (STS) has over the past 30 years shown how scientific production creates new standards and values, how such works fans out through complex networks, each time redefining the world in which we live. STS research on biomedicine has also grown, but often isolated from conversations and debates in the anthropology of health and medical anthropology. These two disciplinary solitudes (medical anthropology and STS) have been maintained by critics that accuse STS of inadequate fieldwork and a heavy-handed approach to forcing data to fit pre-established theoretical framework, or critics of medical anthropology who complain that rich accounts of local illness knowledge and practice are too often opposed to a monolithic and "black-boxed" version of biomedicine. Yet can we still do without a real exchange between these two disciplines?
While the paradigm of evidence-based medicine seems to enjoy unquestioned legitimacy today, everyone agrees that this legitimacy is the byproduct of ongoing work engaging life sciences experts, health specialists and of the mobilization of social and political dynamics. Thus evidence-based medicine is the result of an effort which, although taking the appearance of evidence, is the result of a process aiming at building its own legitimacy. Based on processes rather than given facts, evidence-based medicine is at the heart of the debate we hope to develop during this meeting. The foundations of such omnipresence of evidencebased medicine has to be studied, in that it allows the understanding of the logic of practices associated with it in contemporary societies. The primary objective of this conference is therefore to open, or rather to broaden, the space for exchanges between anthropology of health and science studies around evidence based-medicine: what are its contributions, its limitations, but also its constraints? How does it produce, impose or recompose within its everyday activities norms and standards of care? How does it redefine our conceptions of health, body and ailments afflicting us? How does it change our system of values? How does it influence the politics defining policies implemented within our health systems? As a rough guide we suggest three main questions that will define our meeting. Although we invite papers to enroll concerning these three questions, they are far from exhaustive.
Making evidence In most developing countries research activities are conducted within health systems. Clinical trials, scaling up interventions, and various tests and trials are inscribed into multiple dimensions. On the one hand they take part in the production of knowledge at a global level and turn research frameworks into spaces within which many questions are examined. Furthermore, this knowledge produced by researchers from the South (often in collaboration with researchers from the North) is mobilized to help a particular policy along, to defend such or such modification of an international recommendation (e.g. WHO). The problematic link between knowledge produced in these contexts, even from an operational logic standpoint, is rarely discussed. How does one go from protocol, from a test by its very nature "beyond real life" (as scientists like to put it) to public health recommendations and to practical implementations in the field? What are the rationales at stake, what are the operations of translation? What are the negotiations involved between researchers, public health specialists and political actors from global to local stances? It seems to us quite useful to read these negotiations through the lenses of the historical development of medical evidence (Marks 1999). Trial participants are indeed people who remain with their own history and daily life. Health workers have their own conception of medicine and care, which they developed through their experiences. Political, economic and social contexts vary, so do the schools of thoughts. Within trial set ups, trajectories and ontologies are multiple and the production of facts adds further to the different social worlds into which individuals are inscribed. Therefore the issue is not only to understand the production of biomedical facts in the light of the context (presence of other types of medicines, influence of religion and of the socio-political), but also to understand how this production comes to construct ontologies, professional environments, and ways of life. What does it imply for individuals, patients or health professionals? What ontologies of the body, health or disease are emerging from these practices and what is their impact? What consequences can this specific practice of medicine have on the actors involved, willingly or not? And how can we from this questioning conceive ethics or at least try to reframe some of its foundations, or else notice some inadequacies of its standardization? It is clear from these lines that we stand here far from the reductionist label attached to science, quite the opposite. We would rather understand how a new wealth and complexity find their origins in these practices, how within the space of clinical trials it is not so much the opposition of two worldviews which is displayed, rather it is their productive encounter.
Making bodies comparable The rise of biology as a discipline, the development of statistics, and the practice of care, helped make bodies commensurable and standardizable, condition sine qua non for the development of biomedicine. However this configuration is by no means fixed. It is in fact constantly changing. Indeed, bodies are not comparable in nature and it is biomedicine's tour de force along with sciences in general to let us think they are (Latour 1997). Research carried out in Medical Anthropology highlights the idiosyncrasies peculiar to the living, and understand the materiality of the body as the product of history, social change and ongoing interactions between humans, their environment and the context in which they live, what Lock and Nguyen have summarized by forging the term "local biologies" (Lock and Nguyen 2010). When one considers human beings as unique both in terms of their genomes as in terms of their everyday experiences, there is reason to believe that the biological sciences can only produce partial picture, snapshots of the materiality of bodies. This observation allows us to offer another reading of biomedical failures and permits a better understanding of some of the problems associated with the implementation of biomedical and clinical research results originating from different contexts. Moreover it also allows for further reflection on the consequences of the biomedicalization of life and its impact on subjectivities, on the relationship that individuals have with themselves, with their image, their body, or their identity. The question of both the commensurability of the body and the generalization of data is at the heart of the issues we wish to see addressed during our meeting: while clinical trials along with the emergence of new technologies, and biomedical experiments in general are geographically and historically situated, their results can be generalized to give rise to public health policy. We are interested in all the dimensions of this journey: how, at the experimental level, is the body turned comparable to the point of adding them up, one to another? How do we produce the data? How does one objectify the living? However, this journey cannot account for its 'success', or rather cannot give an answer the age old question "why does it work", a question we must immediately replace with "how does it work." How does one render bodies comparable? How does one produce knowledge, how does one generalize to the point of making recommendations sometimes leading to real public health policies? And what are the consequences? An approach articulating science (in its most concrete modalities) and politics (at the more global scale) is strongly expected.
Standardizing practices, practicing standards We all know that standardization is at the heart of the production of scientific statements, whether it be practices (Berg, 1997), protocols (Timmermans and Berg, 2003), or even living entities such as cells (Landecker, 2009) or organs (Hogle, 2009). This standardization aims at making facts transportable to other places, with other actors, to make them immutable mobiles (Latour). However, science studies have taught us that such standardization is never complete, never perfect. This is due to the many idiosyncrasies of the living on the one hand, and on the other to the fact that the reproducibility of a result, of a technology or statement lies foremost in the reproducibility of the conditions of their production, and therefore in the standardization of a large number of elements. Therefore, once produced, how are such data, facts, tools, technologies treated to be translated, transported, and distributed? And how are they received? Many studies in medical anthropology underline the richness and diversity of contexts in which they must take root, which sometimes means a temporary or permanent inconsistency between proposed health policies and local contexts in which we want to implement them. How are these contexts "redefined" by these policies and technologies, and with what consequences? How do experiences of populations, health, and people in the interface between science and politics fit? Of course, on this topic historians are probably better equipped than anthropologists to address this issue (Packard 1989, Vaughan 1991; Jochelson 2001) although anthropologists are not totally out of the picture (Dozon 1985, Carton 2003). People themselves are not a passive receptacle for biomedical technologies, practices, or even health policies, policies that carry the characteristic of being based on a type of amnesia when people on their side do remember (Fassin 2006). Today's recommendations may be echoing previous policies (i.e. indoor residual spraying and community mobilization in the fight against malaria). To forget this means not taking into account the history of health policies nor the memory of the people or contexts. How do patients cope with, bypass, reinvent, adapt or adjust pragmatically to implemented medical practices and technologies? How is history mobilized to understand the present? What are the continuities (or breaks) between the colonial and postcolonial eras that matter? For the African continent we invite the panelists to try and answer the question of the place and status of life science in times of necropolitics (Mbembe).
Our meeting in its purpose and questioning is inherently interdisciplinary. We claim therefore an interdisciplinary openness and invite representatives from various disciplines to propose papers (history, political science, anthropology, sociology, science studies but also clinical research, public health ...). Although the fieldwork of conference organizers mainly takes place on the African continent, papers based on other continents are most welcome. Beyond the relevance and quality expected for papers in an international symposium, their selection will be based on the appreciation of their grounding in a real fieldwork. We give to fieldwork a broad meaning: it may be archival or ethnographic. We expect original contributions based on work in progress or recently completed. We will pay particular attention to research including a historical dimension. Indeed we consider it necessary to articulate ethnography with a reflection based over a long time period. Research based on the use of archives will therefore be most welcome.
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Energy Ethics Capstone Workshop
September 12 2013 to September 13 2013 | Washington, D.C.
http://onlineethics.org/Projects/EESE.aspx
Updated: September 18 2012
Next year, the NAE’s Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society (CEES) and Arizona State University (ASU) will host a workshop on ethical, educational and policy issues that come with various energy choices. Check the Energy Ethics project page this winter for more information this Workshop.
STS in the Changing World: Politics of Co-production of Science
September 13 2013 to September 14 2013 | Tomsk State University Tomsk, Russia
Deadline: June 15 2013
Updated: May 10 2013
The Open Society Foundation announces this First Annual Conference of the Research Center ‘Policy Analysis and Studies of Technologies’ (PAST Center) which seeks to promote the development of social studies of technology in the Tomsk State University and in the Siberian Region. In the contemporary world, socio-technical change takes place under conditions of uncertainty: many social and material actors participate in the innovation process and their interests enter into complex multiple relationships. Science and Technology Studies brings together scholars from many disciplines whose research can explore these relationships from an interdisciplinary perspective.
The field of STS is growing rapidly in Russia and Russian STS network is being formed. The main purpose of the 2013 PAST STS conference is to create a regional platform for initiating a dialogue between those scholars who are interested in the STS approaches. The Tomsk State University is an excellent place for being such a platform due to its long-standing history as a prominent academic and scientific center. Today Tomsk is one of the biggest scientific, technological and educational centers in Asian Russia.
The Conference Committee extends an opportunity to explore approaches in Science and Technology Studies (STS) focusing on various types of interaction between science, technology, and society. The conference sessions will cover four main topics: - Politics of innovation; - Sociology of technology; - Expert knowledge; - Technology assessment. The Conference Committee welcomes papers that address the following questions: What are the interdisciplinary dimensions of innovation? What kind of considerations can serve as a basis for innovation-friendly environmental policy? How can we conceptualize relations between innovation and society? In what ways do universities influence innovation processes? Who is responsible for our choices between alternative forms of technology? In what ways is the debate about the Third Wave of STS helpful for our understanding of expertise and expert knowledge? What are the expert societies? In what sense can we talk about applying ‘expertise’ to studying experts and expert activities? What is the role of expertise in the public debates? Which contemporary projects, programs, institutions, and approaches in the area of technology assessment seem most relevant to STS? Public understanding of engineering and technology as focus for enquiry?
The conference is open to STS issues covering the politics of co-production of science and technology and welcomes researchers at various stages of their career, especially early career researchers. The Conference Committee seeks to provide various formats for exchange of ideas about current issues in the social studies of technology by offering roundtable sessions along with debating panels. The keynote speakers of the conference are: Arie Rip, Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technology in the School of Management and Governance of the University of Twente; Oleg Kharkhordin, Rector of the European University at St. Petersburg; Victor Vakhshtain, the Head of Department of Theoretical Sociology and Epistemology, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Elena Simakova, Lecturer at the University of Exeter, Academic Adviser of the Research and Educational Center ‘Policy Analysis and Studies of Technologies’.
Languages of the Conference: English and Russian. Simultaneous translation will be provided. Please submit your abstracts in Russian or English by email to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by.
Call for Papers - Raymond Williams, John Logie Baird: Television, Technology and Cultural Form
September 18 2013 to September 19 2013 | University of Brighton in Hastings
Deadline: May 31 2013
Updated: May 10 2013
The University of Brighton in Hastings, supported by the Raymond Williams Society, is pleased to announce a two day conference in Hastings on 18th-19th September 2013 to celebrate Williams' contributions to media and cultural studies and to our understanding of television as cultural form and practice, and Logie Baird's innovations in technology and broadcasting. The conference takes its title from Raymond Williams' 1974 book, Television, Technology and Cultural Form. This conference will address both men's relationship to Hastings, the town in which both spent a key part of their working lives. Williams worked in Hastings, as an adult education tutor, while John Logie Baird's early experiments in television technology took place in Hastings. It was in Hastings that he built the world's first working television set and the first television pictures were transmitted from his workshop on Queen's Parade in 1924. This conference builds on the successful conference held at the University of Brighton's campus in Hastings in 2011 which celebrated Raymond Williams and Robert Tressell, 50 years of The Long Revolution and the centenary of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
The 2013 conference again seeks to create a multi-disciplinary forum in which academics, researchers, television practitioners, trade unionists and local historians can explore the impact and legacy of Williams and Logie Baird on contemporary research and practice in the field of television.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Stuart Laing - Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton, and author of Representations of working class life
Mike Dibb - award-winning filmmaker, his work includes the ground breaking television series Ways of Seeing and he is the director of The Country and the City (Where we live now 60), with Raymond Williams
Jean Seaton - Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster and the official historian of the BBC. Her work includes Carnage and the Media, Power without Responsibility, with James Curran, and she edited, with Ben Pimlott, The Media in British Politics. She is an editor of Political Quarterly and the Director of the Orwell Prize.
Trevor Griffiths - renowned playwright, whose work for the stage includes the plays The Country, Comedians, and A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine, for film, the screenplays for Reds and Fatherland (director, Ken Loach); his television work includes All Good Men and the socialist serial drama Bill Brand:-
in conversation with
Jack Shepherd - writer, director, actor, who has acted on stage and in television in plays by writers who include David Storey, John Arden and Trevor Griffiths; he played the title role in Bill Brand. His own plays include In Lambeth and Holding Fire!
We are keen to invite submissions from researchers across the social sciences, literary and cultural studies and from practitioners and activists concerned with these issues.
We invite submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Ownership and control The future of national televisions The role of the BBC Television, lifestyle and consumption New technologies and new patterns of viewing Forms of television drama The politics of television and politics on television Television and the public sphere Television in an age of austerity
Submissions may be in a variety of formats including posters, verbal presentations and workshops.
Please send abstracts of 150 words to Mina Wareham .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) including with your submission your presentation title and format, author names, institutional affiliations, email address and a contact phone number.
Critiquing Culture The Cultural Studies Graduate Conference at George Mason University
September 21 2013 | George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia
Deadline: June 15 2013
Updated: April 10 2013
Featuring Sarah Banet-Weiser as Distinguished Keynote Speaker, Dr. Banet-Weiser is a Professor in the School of Communication and the department of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC Annenberg. In 2012 she published two books: Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture, and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee.
The Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee (SOC) at George Mason University invites paper proposals for our 7th annual Cultural Studies Graduate Student Conference. The conference will take place on Saturday, September 21, 2013.
CALL FOR PAPERS
At George Mason University, we acknowledge the need to specify Cultural Studies as an academic field with definable features and particular modes of methodological inquiry. In our view, Cultural Studies examines cultural objects as products of the wider social, historical, economic and political conditions that structure their formation, and acknowledges the interrelationship between these factors. In particular, Cultural Studies focuses on power relations and inequalities, which shape the horizon of possibilities for any cultural object at hand, be it a political discourse, an economic model, or a mass cultural product. As a field, Cultural Studies has expanded both geographically and theoretically, building upon its origins in the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies through the inclusion of a range of critical approaches including Marxist political economy, poststructuralism, feminism, critical theory and post-colonial studies. While the objects of Cultural Studies vary widely, the field aims at political relevance and efficacy.
In an attempt to establish a vibrant community for scholars working in precisely this interdisciplinary vein, the Cultural Studies Student Organizing Committee at George Mason University invites graduate students to submit research papers for a conference specifically oriented toward the examination of cultural objects, whether through Marxist, structuralist/poststructuralist, feminist, or other critical lenses. We encourage the submission of papers related, but not limited, to the following broad themes:
Political Economy Mass & Popular Culture Gender & Sexuality Race & Ethnicity Representation & Aesthetics
This year we also strongly encourage paper submissions that address the intersections of activism, culture, ethics and consumption.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a current CV should be sent to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) by 15 June 2013. Please include presentation title, presenter's name, institutional affiliation, contact information, A/V requests, and any special needs required in the email. Abstracts should be sent as .doc or .rtf file attachments.
Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy
September 25 2013 to September 27 2013 | Atlanta, GA
Deadline: March 15 2013
http://www.atlantaconference.org/
Updated: October 24 2012
The ability of science and innovation systems to deliver depends on continually improving capacity. Yet, capacity is multidimensional and has interrelated characteristics and related challenges. The Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2011 will explore the research base that addresses the broad range of capacity related issues central to the structure, function, performance and outcomes of the science and innovation enterprises. The conference will include a variety of sessions: plenaries to discuss critical questions in issues, contributed-paper sessions to discuss on-going research, and a young researcher poster competition.
Science & Its Publics: Exploring Emergent Forms of Public Engagement
October 08 2013 | University of California, Irvine.
Deadline: April 30 2013
http://www.newkirkcenter.uci.edu/
Updated: April 10 2013
4S 2013 attendees who do research on public engagement with science are invited to submit abstracts for a special public program on Science & Its Publics: Exploring Emergent Forms of Public Engagement of Science to be held immediately prior to the commencement of 4S 2013. The conference will be sponsored by the Newkirk Center for Science and Society at the University of California, Irvine.
“Science communication” continues to be a topic of great social importance and interest as well as great controversy. Traditional models of science communication have been criticized as naïve, but new models have not been fully articulated. Rapidly emerging technologies and media offer new channels for science communication, but remain underexplored and underexploited. And yet, the need for science communication remains acute, and scientific institutions continue to perceive the deficiencies of science communication in terms of “crisis.”
An important recent development, more fully formed abroad than in the U.S., is the turn toward activities that fall under the heading of “public engagement,” rather than “science communication,” signaling more interactive mode between “science” and the “public.” Innovations that fall under the general rubric of “public engagement” include, but are not limited to, consensus conferences, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding, social networkingpublic experiments, museum exhibits, bioart, participatory design and technology assessment, participatory action research, the quantified self and consumer genetics, citizen science and interactive gaming. While these innovations are potentially exciting, we are still learning about their effects and their effectiveness. The field of social studies of science has a long track record of conducting high quality social science research on these emergent forms of public engagement of science.
The purpose of Science & Its Publics is to critically inform science studies scholars, scientists, and community members about emergent forms of public engagement of science. Particular emphasis will be paid to introducing an American audience to developments that may be more fully formed outside the U.S. Presentations will be 20 minutes long, and speakers will be expected to convey their research findings in a form that is accessible to a mixed audience without sacrificing the rigor of their analyses.
Scholars who do research on public engagement of science broadly defined are invited to submit abstracts of up to 250 words by April 30, 2013. Participants are welcome to submit presentations based on the same material they will present at 4S, but the presentation should be geared toward a non-specialist audience that includes community members and academics from a wide range of disciplines. The selection process will be competitive, overseen by the Program Committee: Professor Simon Cole (Director, Newkirk Center), Professor Geoffrey Bowker (Informatics), Professor Kavita Philip (History), Professor Paul Dourish (Informatics), and Professor Michael Montoya (Anthropology & Chicano/Latino Studies).
Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:
· consensus conferences
· crowdsourcing and crowdfunding · social networking
· public experiments
· museum exhibits
· bioart
· participatory design and technology assessment
· the quantified self and consumer genetics
· citizen science
· interactive gaming
· sciences of prediction and risk assessment
· community based participatory science
The sponsor is unable to reimburse travel costs to Southern California, but one author of each accepted paper may apply to be reimbursed for up to two nights of lodging, meals during the conference, and local travel. All 4S attendees, even if not presenting, are welcome to attend, and registration is free. The Newkirk Center can offer help and advice on local travel arrangements, including a ride share program for transportation between Irvine and San Diego. For further information, contact Erin Umberg, Assistant Director, the Newkirk Center for Science and Society, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
MEDIA ART HISTORIES 2013: ReNew
October 08 2013 to October 11 2013 | Riga, Latvia
Deadline: February 15 2013
http://moodle.donau-uni.ac.at/renew/openconf.php
Updated: February 11 2013
MEDIA ART HISTORIES 2013: ReNew The 5th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology
The 5th International Conference will coincide with the international festival for new media culture Art+Communication. It will host three days of keynotes, panels and poster sessions on the histories of networked digital, electronic and technological media arts.
Confirmed keynote speakers include:
Prof. Dr. Peter WEIBEL, ZKM Prof. Dr. Erkki HUHTAMO, UCLA & t.b.a.
Besides general topics of the call, the theme of Renew, Media Art History 2013 addresses current tendencies in sustainability quests from various perspectives. As media art is based on increasingly out-dating technology and it is dependent on energy (electricity) the conference will discuss sustainable approaches towards the issues of producing, preserving and representing media artworks - how to 'renew' them through both - tools and histories. By focusing on networked media arts, the Renew conference will cover a broad range of topics to include early communication art (mail, fax, radio, satellite, etc.), net.art and net.radio, open source and network culture, locative media and wireless communities, hybrid networks and electromagnetic art, and last but not least - artistic investigations in sustainability, and future visions of art within the convergence of information and energy technologies.
Proposed topics:
* Histories of networked art and media technologies * Archiving, preserving and representing new media art * Media archaeology * Paradigm shift - from new media to post-media conditions in art * Writing histories of media art across Eastern Europe and the Baltics * Revising the geospatial aspects - for writing comparative media art histories * Resilient networks and emerging 'techno-ecological' art practices * Multifarious potential of expression in media art - 'new imagery' of our times
* * * EXTENDED DEADLINE for abstracts: February 15, 2013. Notification of acceptance will be announced by March 25, 2013.
Individual proposals should consist of a 250-word abstract with title. Proposals and inquiries regarding submissions should be made on: http://www.mediaarthistory.org web-site.
* * * Selected papers from the conference will be published in Acoustic Space and other venues. Founded in 1998 by E-Lab as artistic journal for sound art, networked audio experiments and new media culture, since 2007 Acoustic Space comes out as peer-reviewed journal for transdisciplinary research on art, science, technology and society, published by RIXC & Art Research Lab of Liepaja University.
* * * The conference will be complemented by a variety of affiliated events, including the Art+Communication festival, with a thematically related media art exhibition, experimental film and video screening programme, live performances, concerts and workshops.
* * * MAH 2013 Renew Conference Chairs: Rasa SMITE and Raitis SMITS
http://rixc.lv/2013
2nd World Social Science Forum
October 13 2013 to October 15 2013 | Montreal, Canada
Deadline: February 05 2013
http:\\www.wssf2013.org
Updated: December 10 2012
DEADLINE EXTENDED to FEB(as of 1/7/2013).
In October 2013 the theme is “Social Transformations and the Digital Age.” The Forum will gather scholars from across the disciplines and across the world to address the ways in which digital technologies are being developed and used, and
1. how they are transforming different spheres of social life and
2. how they are transforming the social sciences.
Please see our website for the full call for papers and panels.
Crucial for the WSS Forum 2013 organisers is a broad participation from social scientists from all over the world.
2013 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies (S.NET),
October 27 2013 to October 30 2013 | Northeastern University
Deadline: May 01 2013
http://www.northeastern.edu/nsrg/?p=657
Updated: March 10 2013
At this point we are open to all suggestions, ranging from standard papers, presentation, and posters to ideas for concurrent workshops, plenary sessions, and special roundtables.
Our theme for the 2013 meeting is Innovation, Responsibility, and Sustainable Development. Boston is a literal hub for innovation, and the theme fits in well with the region's traditions and current strengths in a wide range of technologies. Moreover, as we have stressed from its origins, the Society seeks to advance critical reflection from various perspectives on developments in a broad range of new and emerging fields, including, but not limited to, nanoscale science and engineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive science and geo-engineering.
Proposals can be submitted until May 1 via the S.NET Submission Portal. The Program Committee will assess all proposals and respond by June 15.
Hotel information: We have arranged for a block of rooms at the Boston Park Plaza, a classic hotel located a short distance from the Northeastern campus, for a rate of $165 plus tax / night (with free in-room internet), a very nice rate for Boston in October. Information on hotel reservations and conference registration will be sent out in subsequent emails, and all conference related information will be posted on the website of the Nanotechnology and Society Research Group.
Please forward this announcement through your respective professional networks. We want to make the 2013 meeting the largest and most diverse yet. Please direct any S.NET related emails to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change Conference
November 18 2013 to November 20 2013 | Sacramento, CA
Deadline: April 15 2013
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BECC2013submit
Updated: April 11 2013
Selection criteria The Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC)
Conference brings together a range of academics, practitioners, and policy-makers from a variety of fields engaged in energy and climate efforts to provide the latest and most relevant behavioral research, best practices, and methodologies. The BECC 2013 Organizing Committee is seeking abstract submissions from a wide variety of disciplines and sectors, including, but not limited to: Disciplines: -- applied anthropology -- social psychology -- behavioral economics -- organizational behavior -- political science -- communications -- cognitive sciences. Sectors / Issue Areas: -- buildings (residential and commercial) -- technology design and usage -- transportation -- urban design -- sustainable consumption (e.g., food, water, and waste). Abstracts should be no more than 500 words in length and offer new research findings and/or documented examples of behavior change pilots, programs, or trials. Abstracts should not be a discussion topic, a marketing presentation, or a review or summary of already established work.
NEW! Accepting Abstracts for Papers New this year is the option to submit an abstract for a full paper written for presentation at BECC. The conference will highlight sessions whose participants have submitted full drafts for review by their discussant. There will be a (non-peer-reviewed) publishing option available for those who wish to make their paper available on our website in lieu of journal submission. Submissions will be judged on: • Relevance to conference themes • Clarity of thought • Data / documented results • Creativity • Fit in conference program • Other criteria
Please Note: We keep our registration fee quite affordable to encourage robust attendance. However to achieve this goal all presenters are expected to register for the conference and to pay conference registration fees. Questions: E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Call: BECC’s “Energy Line” at 888-332-8258. If you leave a message, please reference BECC Conference. Website: http://www.beccconference.org
The Canadian Science Policy Conference (CPSC)
November 20 2013 to November 22 2013 | Toronto at the Allstream Centre
http:\\www.cspc2013.ca
Updated: April 10 2013
Community Partner for CSPC 2013!
CSPC brings together representatives from the public, private, academic and non-profit sectors of Canada to examine key policy challenges in science and innovation. By becoming a Community Partner, you join the national science, technology and innovation policy network. Community Partners help in building a national science and innovation policy dialogue and spread the word about the upcoming CSPC conference. This would primarily involve publicizing CSPC 2012 to boost awareness and attendance. You can become a Community Partner by helping us with any of the following:
• Include CSPC announcements in your newsletter
• Circulate CSPC relevant news through your mailing list
• Include a link to CSPC on your website
• Donate advertising space to CSPC
All Community Partners benefit from supporting CSPC by raising the profiles of their organizations among the science and innovation policy community and the public. The support of Community Partners will be acknowledged on our website and in our printed conference proceedings. In addition, becoming a CSPC Community Partner is a great way to network with other organizations with an interest and stake in science policy in Canada.
Support the development of a strong science policy conference in Canada! To find out more about how to become a Community Partner and what your organization can do to support CSPC 2013, please contact: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Check out our previous conference community partners and conference proceedings at http://www.cspc2012.ca
HSS 2013 Annual Meeting: Call for Papers Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Isis
November 21 2013 to November 24 2013 | Boston, Massachusetts
Deadline: April 01 2013
Updated: February 11 2013
The History of Science Society will hold its 2013 Annual Meeting in the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. The meeting will mark the 100th anniversary of the Society's journal Isis, one of the premiere international journals in the history of science. Submissions on all topics are encouraged. All proposals must be submitted on the HSS Web site or on the annual meeting proposal forms that are available from the HSS Executive Office: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Participants do not need to be members of the HSS, but all participants must register for the meeting.
Applicants are encouraged to propose sessions that include diverse participants: a mix of men and women, and/or a balance of professional ranks (i.e., mixing senior scholars with junior scholars and graduate students). Strong preference will be given to panels whose presenters have diverse institutional affiliations. Only one proposal per person may be submitted. An individual may only appear once on the HSS program -- workshops and other non-typical proposals are excluded from this restriction. Prior participation at the 2011 (Cleveland) or 2012 (San Diego) meetings will be taken into consideration. All proposals (sessions, contributed papers, and posters) must be submitted by 1 April 2013 to the History of Science Society’s Executive Office. Poster proposals must describe the visual material that will make up the poster. The HSS will work with organizers who wish to pre-circulate papers.
To encourage and aid the creation of panels with strong thematic coherence that draw upon historians of science across institutions and ranks, the conference organizers have created a wiki at http://hssmeeting.wikia.com Anyon.e with a panel or paper idea seeking like-minded presenters should post and consult the postings there to round out a prospective session. Instructions are available on the site. Before sending a proposal to the HSS Office, we ask that everyone read the Committee on Meetings and Programs’ “Guidelines for Evaluating Proposals.”
The 2013 program co-chairs are Karen Rader and John Powers (Virginia Commonwealth University). National Science Foundation travel grants, intended to defray the cost of travel to the meeting (hotels and meals are not included), will be available for graduate students, independent scholars, and recent PhDs (degree in the past 5 years). For information on these grants and for inquiries about child care, please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
International workshop on ‘Constructing and contesting spaces for low carbon energy
November 26 2013 to November 28 2013 | School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Deadline: April 01 2013
Updated: April 10 2013
Convened by: Rob Raven / Bram Verhees (TU/e ) ; Adrian Smith / Florian Kern (SPRU) ; Staf f an Jacobsson (Chalmers)
Aim
This workshop aims to bring together leading scholars who study the construction and disruption of socio political ‘ spaces ’ for low carbon energy innovations from different conceptual and theoretical perspectives. The aim is to critically reflect on the analytical advantages, and limitations, that ‘spaces’ thinking brings to understanding low carbon innovation. Background World wide energy systems are facing major pressures to transform into more sustainable systems of production and consumption. Climate change, depletion of resources, the need for competitive prices and economies , access to energy services for development and poverty reduction, and security of supply are all demanding a restructuring of current energy systems. Over the past decades numerous, potentially more sustainable energy innovations have been proposed, studie d , developed and implemented to varying degrees including, for example, on and off shore wind energy, solar PV technologies, carbon capture and storage, bioenergy innovations , insulation technologies, zero energy buildings, electric vehicles and other greener cars, and so on.
Some innovations like on shore wind and bioenergy have become well established innovation systems and p art of regular investment and policy portfolios in some regions , while others like carbon capture and storage are struggling to become established . W hat all these innovations have in common is that they are or have been characterized by (sometimes fierce ) contests for social, industrial and political attention and legitimacy . Innovation advocates need to engage with debates and discourses in the wider world in order to maintain the flow of resources, lobby for favorable contextual changes such as institutional reforms and strategically team up with or argue against incumbent innovation systems or competing niche innovations. A s our point of departure, we will loosely refer to these dynamics as the construction of socio political ‘ space s ’ for low carbon energy innovation s . Practical examples in the creation of spaces for low carbon innovation include attemp ts to lobby policy actors or corporate decision makers for necessary resources such as money and human skills, which can trigger further development of a low carbon innovation. In addition to mobilization of resources for development, many of these innovat ions also require more fundamental changes within incumbent energy systems such as the construction of smart grids for decentralized energy generation, e.g. building integrated solar PV systems . L ow carbon innovation advocates may engage in attempts at act ively chang ing their selection environments , for example, by generating media attention in order to influence public discourse or participate in campaigning for changing national or international legislation , or technology and infrastructural standards . Al l this occurs in the context of competing societal, policy and corporate agendas , problem definitions and proposed alternative solutions . Consequently most sustainable energy innovations involve ( at varying degrees ) contes tation , e.g. over their costs , desired locations, sus tainability, required policies, future potential , alternatives and so on . As such, there are recursive relationships between low carbon innovation processes on the one hand, and the wider contexts in which they happen on the other .
T hese recursive relationships can be studied from a variety of analytical perspectives. From an evolutionary perspective , for example, we can see niche spaces as provid ing shielding from prevailing regime selection environments in ways that allow a low carb on innovation to be nurtured towards a more compe titive form beyond niche space; or in depth studies of legitimation processes in emerging technological innovation systems. Conversely, a more networked perspective might see low carbon innovation as involvi ng the active negotiation and enrolling of favorable context conditions (the practice of ‘ contexting ’ ) into the socio technical configuration of a low carbon development, such that the network itself constitutes the space for low carbon innovation. Alterna tively, a neo institutional perspective could entail the study of collective institutional entrepreneurs advocating institutional reforms to enable wider diffusion of innovative practices within transformed organizational fields .
Workshop contributions an d topics
We welcome contributions to the subject from the above and other analytical perspectives , including (but not limited to) : • Socio technical transition studies ( e.g. multi level perspective, strategic niche management) • Innovation studies (e.g. technological innovation systems) • Science and Technology Studies (e.g. actor network theory , practice theory ) • Institutional theory (e.g. institutional entrepreneurship , organizational field theory ) • Discourse analysis (e.g. framing, narrative analysis) • Poli tical science (e.g. corporate political strategy, social movement theory ) T he workshop seeks to host rich, empirical ly informed contributions that address questions of theory development such as (but not limited to): • How do ‘ spaces ’ for sustainable energy innovations emerge, what constitutes them, how (and by who m ) are they maintained, how do they disappear, and with what consequences? • What are the power and political relations involved in constructing / contesting spaces, and with w hich consequences for low carbon innovations? • Who or what do low carbon innovation spaces exclude and/or dis empower? • How do policies (e.g. feed in tariff s , demonstration programs, market creation incentives) create, maintain or disrupt spaces for low carb on innovation and with what consequences? • What is the role of formal evaluations and other technology assessment procedures in the dynamics of spaces for low carbon innovation ?
CFP: Body Burdens, Biomonitoring, and Biocitizenship
March 12 2014 to March 14 2014 | San Francisco, CA
Deadline: June 20 2013
Updated: May 10 2013
ASEH conference
Since at least the publication of Silent Spring, scientists, policy-makers, and the general public has focused on pollution in the environment as the object of regulation and control, a source of fear and anxiety, and the subject of scientific testing. As technologies, analytical detection limits, and eco-populist, anti-toxic movements have developed over the decades, scrutiny has increasingly turned to the pollution in the body, captured by the notion of a “body burden:” the presence of industrial chemicals or radiation in the body. Body burdens become legible through practices of biomonitoring, and sometimes through claims of biocitizenship - through which life becomes the basis for making demands on the state (Murphy 2008, Petryna 2002).
This panel seeks to bring scholars into a conversation on the history of the concept of body burdens and the practices of biomonitoring. In particular, how has notion of a body burden challenged or remade older scientific, legal, and policy frameworks on pollution, encouraged new understandings of the porosities of bodies, and altered the everyday experience of toxic risk and ambiguity? Synthetic chemicals in bodies raise questions about the assumed boundaries between bodies and environments, between industrial and personal spaces, and between “matter out of place,” “matters of course” and “matters of concern” in an environment saturated with industrial processes. The concept of body burdens also raise questions about the relationship between exposure and harm, the nature of informed consent, and vulnerabilities within heterogenous populations.
The practices of biomonitoring can enable the democratization of knowledge of environmental toxicity but also the individualization of risk - particularly in the absence of effective state regulation of industrial chemicals. Finally, given that all humans now carry some form of body burden, notions of health and safety premised on acute exposures are shifting to notions of chronic exposure, though this shift is occurring unevenly across stakeholder groups (Kai 1994). We are seeking 10-15 minute presentations for the American Society for Environmental History conference.
Topics may include: - the history of the concept of body burdens - Maximum Permissible Doses and No Observable Adverse Effect Levels - competing concepts of bodily pollution - how harm, vulnerability, and risk have been articulated in relation to body burdens - activism and imaging around body burdens - the legal status of interior pollution - techniques, efforts, and failures to correlate exposure to harm - the rise of occupational health and its relation to civilian exposure to industrial chemicals - body burdens and the Cold War - animal versus human body burdens - the implications of different materialities of body burdens, such as radiation vs. endocrine disruptors - the role of metabolism - humans as industrial sinks - race, class, gender and body burdens Please send Abstracts of 250 words and a 2-page CV to Lindsey Dillon [ .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)] *and* Max Liboiron [max.liboiron@nyu.edu] by June 20th, 2013.