2021 Conference Update

The next AAHPSSS conference will be held 24 – 26 November, 2021. The conference was to be based at the University of Wollongong, but COVID travel restrictions have necessitated moving it completely on-line. Conference registration rates have therefore been substantially reduced. Registration is now open and includes concessional rates for students and the unwaged, and options for single-day registration.

AAHPSSS is committed to interchange between scholars from a wide range of disciplines, with a focus on supporting postgraduate students, early career academics, and those in insecure employment. Please do consider how you might contribute to this conference, and how we all might support emerging scholars in the field.

Conference 21: Call for Papers

An update on the AAHPSSS conference:

The Call for Papers is now open. Submissions can be made through the conference website: https://conference.aahpsss.net.au/

We are calling for individual papers, complete sessions (90 minutes) or multi-session workshops. Guidelines for each proposal type can be found here: https://conference.aahpsss.net.au/submissions-are-now-open/

Submissions will remain open until Friday, 23 July 2021.

A reminder that the conference that will be 24–26 November, 2021 and will be based at the University of Wollongong, with on-line options available for all participants.

Registration costs for the conference are still being determined, and we expect to have a final decision by early July. However, those of you who have attended previous AAHPSSS conferences will know that we are committed to keeping this conference an accessible, low-cost event. In particular, the cost of online attendance at the conference will be kept to a minimum. Once determined, earlybird registration costs will be available through until Friday, 3 September 2021.

As part of this commitment to accessibility, AAHPSSS will once again support postgraduate students, early career academics, and those in insecure employment with Langham Bursaries for travel to the conference (from outside NSW) and with a Langham Prize at the conference itself. Guidelines for these awards will also be released in early July, but please do consider this opportunity, if you are an emerging scholar, and please do spread the word amongst postgraduate students and early career academics in your networks. Of course, we would be very happy for you to promote the conference and AAHPSSS itself amongst all of your colleagues.

Registration will become available shortly.

CFP: Bristol University Press titled, “Science and Technology Studies and Health Praxis: Genetic Science and New Digital Technologies”

Hello, I am writing to extend an invitation for expressions of interest for an edited collection I am working on with Bristol University Press titled, Science and Technology Studies  and Health Praxis: Genetic Science and New Digital Technologies. The details are listed below. Do let me know if you are interested and able to contribute, or if you have any questions (tina.sikka@newcastle.ac.uk). A call for abstracts will come shortly. I am really excited about the collection and would love to have a contribution that reflects some of the interesting work being done by scholars on the list.

Timeline

January 2021 – finalise chapters
September 2021 – chapter draft submission
December 2021 – return edited drafts for revision
March 2022 – final submissions of chapters
April 2022 – Introduction, final revisions
Completion: May/June 2022

This edited collection invites chapters from a variety of fields aimed at the interdisciplinary study of the latest health (digital and genetic) technologies using a variety of forward-looking STS methods (the socio-technical, radical democratisation, feminist technoscience, new materialism, laboratory studies, radical/auto ethnography, case studies etc.). What makes these health technologies unique, and therefore demands study, is that they constitute an embodied and mediated health ecosystem based on neoliberal logics that promise bio-molecular transformations of who we are in particular ways. The book will be primarily aimed at scholarly and student readers in critical STS, race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality and health studies.

Each chapter will apply some form of STS based method, approach, or theoretical frame (e.g. case studies, ANT, controversies, feminist technoscience/STS, Indigenous and Postcolonial STS, co-production and co-constitution, socio-material analysis, ethnographies) within the following framework:

1. STS, Health Knowledge, and the Body

  • How new health technologies (digital and genetic) are changing how we relate to our material, embodied selves;
  • The representation, communication, and internalization of health knowledge (mediated and unmediated);
  • The economic and cultural inequalities that result from these technologies, practices/performances, and changing definitions of 'good health';
  • How health norms, practices, and technologies are taken up and experienced by raced and gendered individuals and groups in embodied ways;
  • How fatness intersects with science, technology, normativity, and equality.

2. STS, Health and Subjectivity/Identity

  • How health technologies have transformed and produced new subjectivities, relations to the body, and relations to the natural world;
  • The study of the way in which ways in which health is tied to and reflects overlapping identities vis-á-vis health disparities;
  • How the social construction of race, sexuality, class, dis/ability and gender are expressed by and through digital and genetic technologies in novel ways;
  • The study of forms of sociality that these technologies might encourage/discourage;

3. New Frontiers in Health STS

  • The nature of scientific knowledge (production and distribution) as it relates to genetically and epigenetically based knowledge about health;
  • The novel and changing nature and character of new health technologies;
  • The impact of genetically-based knowledge regimes on our understanding of who we are (in particular around race, indigeneity, sexuality);
  • How these technologies are wound up and deeply implicated in (surveillance) capitalism;
  • How these technologies are co-produced and the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality, and dis/ability might be reflected in and through future health technologies.
  • The ways in which power and inequality are reflected and reproduced by these technologies, discourses, and practices.

Tina Sikka, PhD
Head of Postgraduate Research
Lecturer
Media, Culture and Heritage
School of Arts and Cultures
Newcastle University

Call for Papers: Expertise and Uncertainty

Spontaneous Generations logo

Spontaneous Generations, a scholarly journal published by the graduate students of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, invites contributions to its 11 th volume.

Experts occupy an increasingly contested space in our society. Politicians challenge the expertise of public health officials amidst the COVID-19 pandemic; climate change deniers that of climatologists; creationists that of evolutionary biologists and geologists. Even the rotundity of the Earth has not escaped renewed public scrutiny. While many regard this growing tide of resistance to experts with anxiety or alarm, even their most stalwart defenders acknowledge the risks inherent in excessive deference to experts. After all, experts are only human. They can make mistakes of fact or ethical judgment. They can fall prey to the temptations of conformity. They can be corrupted by corporate or state patronage. A technologically sophisticated society can hardly function without experts, but neither can a democratic one exempt them from scrutiny.

Scholars involved in the study of science, technology, medicine, and mathematics are wellpositioned to explore the pressing issues surrounding expertise. As experts who study other experts, they have a unique vantage point. The editors of Spontaneous Generations welcome contributions which explore these themes from an anthropological, historical, philosophical, sociological, or interdisciplinary point of view. Questions which contributors might take up include, but are not limited to:

  • What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?
  • What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?
  • What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?
  • What epistemological challenges arise from the practice and communication of expertise? How can non-experts evaluate expert testimony in a principled, reasonable way?

In short, we invite second-order reflections on the challenges, opportunities, and socialsituatedness of expertise, whether your own or that of the experts you study. We especially welcome contributions in the form of focus essays: 2–3,000 words in length. Research articles and book reviews which speak to the theme of expertise, more or less directly, are also welcome. We aim to publish both established and early career scholars. Contributions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition; be formatted in MS Word; and be received no later than December 20th, 2020. We will also be happy to review abstracts before that time, if you have an idea for a submission and are considering whether or not to go forward. Please send abstracts, inquiries, and contributions (along with your institutional and departmental affiliation) to Daniel Halverson at daniel.halverson@mail.utoronto.ca.

PSA2020: Call for Papers

Deadline March 6, 2020

Twenty-Seventh Biennial Meeting of the PSA

November 19 – November 22, 2020
Baltimore, Maryland

The deadline for submitting papers to be presented at the PSA2020 meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 19-22, 2020 is 11:59 pm Pacific Standard Time on March 6, 2020.

A call for posters has been issued separately. The call for session chairs will be sent out in late summer 2020. The conference will begin at 8:30 am on November 19 and last through 3:00 pm on November 22. The PSA will once again be offering travel grants for early career scholars, onsite childcare services, and dependent care subsidies of up to $200.

Contributed papers may be on any topic in philosophy of science. The PSA2020 Program Committee is committed to assembling a program with high-quality papers on a variety of topics and diverse presenters that reflects the full range of current work in the philosophy of science.

Members of the PSA2020 Program Committee are listed here: https://psa2020.philsci.org/en/73-program-committees.

The maximum manuscript length is 5,000 words, including abstract, footnotes, and references. If the manuscript includes tables or figures, an appropriate number of words should be subtracted from the limit. Submissions must include a 100-word abstract and a word count. Format and citation style should match those of Philosophy of Science (see https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/phos/instruct
for details). Submissions should be prepared for anonymous review, with no information identifying the author in the body of the paper or abstract. (See https://journal.philsci.org/submissions for instructions on how to prepare your paper for anonymous review.) Reviewing will be “triple-masked,” with neither reviewers nor the program chair having access to the author’s identity during the review process.

See the meeting website (https://psa2020.philsci.org) for more information and to submit a paper. To submit a paper, you will need to first create an account. (Click on “Create Account” on the top menu.) Then log into your account and click on “Submissions.” For co-authored papers, the presenting author should provide the abstract and upload the paper; non-presenting co-authors are asked either to create an account or to log into their account (if one is created for them by a co-author) to answer optional demographic questions.

Some papers will be accepted for both presentation at the PSA2020 biennial meeting and publication in a supplementary issue of Philosophy of Science; other papers will be accepted for presentation only. All authors are encouraged to post their papers as PSA2020 Conference Papers at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/ (a publicly accessible digital archive) prior to the meeting. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present abbreviated versions of their papers at the conference; the paper presentation should take no more than twenty minutes.

The Program Committee expects to announce its decision on papers accepted for presentation by the end of May 2020 and on papers accepted for publication in Philosophy of Science in mid-June. Final versions of all papers accepted for publication must be resubmitted by January 8, 2021; submission instructions will be provided closer to that date.

Please note that in accordance with current PSA policy:

  1. Papers submitted to PSA2020 may not be published, accepted for publication, or under review at the time of submission, and they may not be submitted elsewhere for publication while they are under consideration for publication in the PSA2020 supplementary issue of Philosophy of Science.
  2. At most one contributed paper on which you are the presenting author can be submitted.
  3. No one is permitted to present more than once at each PSA meeting. Thus, if a symposium proposal in which you are a presenting author is accepted, you cannot submit a contributed paper for which you are the presenting author. Commentators that are part of symposia are considered to be presenting authors. A scholar may appear as co-author on more than one paper or symposium talk but may present at PSA2020 only once. This policy does not apply to the poster forum; a presenting author on a contributed paper or symposium paper may also present a poster in the poster forum.

To maintain anonymity in the review process, questions about specific submissions should be sent to office@philsci.org, as this address will be monitored by someone not involved in the review process. General questions about contributed papers should be directed to the Chair of the PSA2020 Program Committee, Angela Potochnik, at psa2020@philsci.org.

Submissions open for the 2019-20 Mike Smith Student Prize

The Mike Smith Student Prize awards $3000 to an outstanding research essay addressing the history of Australian science or Australian environmental history.

Deadline:  9am AEDT Monday 20 January 2020

Criteria: The prize will be awarded for an essay based on original unpublished research undertaken whilst enrolled as a student (postgraduate or undergraduate) at any tertiary educational institution in the world.

The essay should be 4000–8000 words in length (exclusive of endnotes). Essays must be written in English and fully documented following the style specified for the Australian Academy of Science’s journal, Historical Records of Australian Science.

Essays may deal with any aspect of the history of Australian science (including medicine and technology) or Australian environmental history. ‘Australia’ can include essays that focus on the Australian region, broadly defined, including Oceania. Essays that compare issues and subjects associated with Australia with those of other places also are welcomed. The winning entry, if it is in a suitable subject area, may be considered for publication in Historical Records of Australian Science.

Past winners:  Historical Records of Australian Science have published a virtual issue showcasing six previous essays awarded the Mike Smith Prize.

Applications:  For more information about the application process please visit science.org.au/mike-smith-prize

SAANZ Conference – Call for Papers

This year's SAANZ (Sociological Association of Aotearoa New Zealand) conference, which will be taking place in Auckland, New Zealand (December 3–6), and will feature a "Science and Technology Studies" stream.  

Further information can be obtained at the following link: 

https://www.saanz.net/conference2019/#1562103264454-b519ec13-a816

Abstract submission is now open and closes at 5pm on September 20th.

Send abstracts of between 150 and 200 words in .doc or PDF format to saanz2019@auckland.ac.nz and include the following:

  • Title of presentation
  • Presenter's names and institutions/organisations
  • Preferred stream (if any)

Call for papers: Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science Conference 

November 13–15 , 2019

Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Abstract Submission Deadline: Sunday, 30th June, 2019

We are pleased to announce the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science will hold their next conference at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, from November 13–15, 2019.

Submissions for papers are invited from scholars working in any area related to the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, medicine or technology.

Titles of papers together with abstracts of up to 250 words should be submitted here by the 30th June 2019. The conference theme is open.

However, submissions might speak to topics such as

  • indigenous perspectives and science;
  • innovation;
  • science and technology in the Pacific;
  • theorising science from the South;
  • interdisciplinary engagement and contemporary issues in science and technology;
  • the body in STM.

Suggestions for themed panels are also welcome; please send proposals to a member of the executive.

Postgraduate students are encouraged to submit proposals and invited to apply for an Ian Langham Bursary for partial travel support. Please see our website for more detail and send all proposals to: conference@aahpsss.net.au by 30 June 2019.

You can read about the Centre for Science in Society at Victoria University of Wellington here.