Category: Talks and Lectures

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HPS at Melbourne, seminar

I would like to invite you to a special seminar by History and Philosophy of Science this week which will be held to commemorate the centenary of Diana (Ding) Dyason, former head of HPS at the University of Melbourne. 

Details: 

1pm Wednesday 18 September,
Arts West North Wing-553 (Discursive Space)

History and Philosophy of Science has been taught in some form at the University of Melbourne since 1946, making it one of the oldest such Departments in the world. Dyason joined the Department – then known as the Department of General Science and Scientific Method – shortly afterwards, in 1950. In 1958 Dyason was appointed to be Senior Lecturer-in-Charge of the recently renamed Department of the History and Philosophy of Science. Ding led the Department until 1975 when she was succeeded by Rod Home. During this time, Dyason was also the first President of the Australasian Association for the History and Philosophy of Science (now AAHPSSS) and left an enormous legacy in the social history of medicine.

The Ding Dyason commemorative seminar will touch on all aspects of Dyason’s life, work and intellectual legacy with a series of short talks and panels from current, former and emerging scholars from HPS. 

Speakers will include former heads of HPS, Janet McCalman and Howard Sankey, historian of the Dyason family Cecily Hunter, Lecturer in the History of Medicine and Life Sciences, James Bradley, and Postgraduate Research Fellow and this year’s Greg Dening Lecturer Fallon Mody.

The event will be lightly catered. All are welcome, no RSVPs necessary.

For further information about details of the event, please contact the HPS Seminar Co-ordinator, Martin Bush, at martin.bush@unimelb.edu.au.

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New Book: The Reproductive Industry: Intimate Experiences and Global Processes

Vera Mackie, Nicola J. Marks and Sarah Ferber, eds, The Reproductive Industry: Intimate Experiences and Global Processes, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019, with contributions from Jane Adams (Otago), Sarah Ferber (Wollongong), Sarah Franklin (Cambridge), Jaya Keaney (Sydney), Vera Mackie (Wollongong), Nicola J. Marks (Wollongong), Vasudha Mohanka (Wollongong), Robyn Morris (Wollongong), Damien Riggs (Flinders), Sonja van Wichelen (Sydney), Andrea Whittaker (Monash).

From its origins in 1978, when the first babies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) were born in the UK and India, assisted reproduction has become a global industry. Contributors to The Reproductive Industry: Intimate Experiences and Global Processes reflect on the global dimensions of IVF and assisted reproductive technologies, examining how people have used these technologies to create diverse family forms, including gay, lesbian, and transgender parenthood as well as complex configurations of genetic, gestational, and social parenthood. The authors examine how IVF and other reproductive technologies have and have not circulated around the globe; how reproductive technologies can be situated historically, nationally, locally, and culturally; and the ways in which culture, practices, regulations, norms, families, and kinship ties may be reinforced or challenged through the use of assisted reproduction.

See: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498570657/The-Reproductive-Industry-Intimate-Experiences-and-Global-Processes​

The volume can be purchased from Lexington Books with discount code LEX30AUTH19.

Nicola Marks
University of Wollongong
<nicolam@uow.edu.au> 

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AGM Agenda and Treasurer’s Report

Click on the below to see the Agenda and the Treasurer's Report

AAHPSSS AGM 2018 Agenda AAAHPSSS Acting Treasurer's Report 2017-2018

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Helen Verran’s Dyason lecture audio now up

The recording of the Dyason lecture for 2018, present by Professor Helen  Verran, is now available from this page. If the audio does not start immediately, click once into the panel.

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Dyason Lecture 2018: Dancing with Strangers. Imagining an Originary Moment for Australian STS

Courtesy Mitchell library, State Library of New South Wales

Helen Verran,
Professor, College of Indigenous Futures, Arts and Social Sciences, Charles Darwin University, Northern Territory.
HelenVerran@cdu.edu.au

Title: Dancing with Strangers. Imagining an Originary Moment for Australian STS.

In 1788 in what would in a few years become Sydney, not too far from the site where in 2018 a large group of scholars will meet to critically discuss the roles of sciences and technologies in modern cultures and societies, a group of sailors and soldiers danced with the strangers who had been warily awaiting them when they arrived on shore. Science and technology had also arrived, albeit to an extent unheralded. Of course, the strangers who at first hesitantly welcomed the group they assumed were mere temporary visitors, had their own highly elaborated traditions of knowing and doing that could with careful translation also have been understood as sciences and technologies. It is recorded in the colonial archive that as a start to that translation work, the two groups danced together. Each presumably also showed the other how to dance ‘properly’.

In this lecture I take this promising moment in which knowers in disparate traditions engaged each other with curiosity and respect, as occasion to articulate (another) originary moment in Australian STS.

Biography

Helen Verran grew up in her grandmother's house playing in the creeks that ran into the lower reaches of Sydney's Middle Harbour. Along with biology lessons at a lesser girls high school, the Long Reef rock shelf played its part, and to the bemusement of her family she went away to study science at university. In the 1970s the sciences in Australia were not welcoming for women rearing young children, so like many before her she turned to school teaching. An unexpected opportunity to teach science education in Nigeria led to a career shift, and returning to Victoria in the 1980s Helen joined Deakin University Science Studies Unit. It was here that her long engagement with Indigenous Australian knowledge traditions began. Retiring from nearly 25 years of teaching in the History and Philosophy Department at University of Melbourne, she took up a part-time professorship at Charles Darwin where her work with Aboriginal Australian knowledge practitioners continues.

The Dyason Lecture took place at the State Library of New South Wales on Thursday 30 August

Helen's talk commences around 11:00. You have to click in the sound bars to hear the talk.

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USyd HPS Research Presentation and Keynote

SCHOOL OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

RESEARCH PRESENTATION
SEMESTER ONE 2018

Friday 8th June

START: 1.30PM
NEW LAW ANNEX SEMINAR ROOM 340

PROGRAM

Welcome – Hans Pols Head of School

1:45–2:10 Eamon Little - Completing Honours Student
“Psychopathy and Moral Exculpation: A Clarification”

2:10– 2:35 Alexander Pereira - Current Honours Student

2:35 Afternoon Tea

3:00–3:30 Tim Shaw - Current PhD Candidate

3:30–4:00 Georg Repnikov recent PhD graduate :
"Beyond Classificatory Realism: A Deflationary Perspective on Psychiatric Nosology".

4:15 - 5:00  KEYNOTE:

Rob Wilson, Ph.D., FRSC
Professor of Philosophy
La Trobe University, Melbourne

"Disciplining Eugenics: History, Philosophy, and HPS"

Eugenics has usually been studied as a historical phenomenon, perhaps one with lessons for present and future uses of science and technology.  Here I want to raise some questions about the relationship of eugenics to both history and philosophy, drawing my experience working in constructing oral histories with survivors of Canadian eugenics over the past 10 years.  This will allow us to discuss received views of eugenics, the enthusiasm for aspects of eugenics in the philosophical bioethics community, and some topics in the philosophy of disability.

5:00PM – Please join us for Drinks and Canapes to celebrate Georg's recent graduation and all our achievements.

RSVP: hps.admin@sydney.edu.au

 

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Inaugural PEiPL Lectures: Philosophical Perspectives on Biosciences, by Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths

March 13-14, 7–8.30pm: Philosophical Perspectives on Biosciences, two public lectures organized by the Philosophy and the Sciences working group of PEiPL (Philosophical Engagement in Public Life) network and co-sponsored by HPS/Philosophy, University of Melbourne.

Malaysian Theatre B121 and the Singapore Theatre B120, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne.

Tues March 13 Kim Sterelny: Moral Minds: Norms and their Evolution

Wed March 14 Paul Griffiths: What is Biological Essentialism?

All welcome: these are public lectures.  Reception to follow the talk on the 14th.

March 15, 11.30am – 1pm

Human Nature: A Conversation.  Paul Griffiths and Kim Sterelny.

Sponsored by PEiPL.   Politics and Philosophy Lounge, 324 Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Bundoora.  Light lunch provided, spaces limited, all welcome.

RSVP rwilson.robert@gmail.com by March 9th.

Posters:

Phil Perspectives on Bio Sterelny

Phil Perspectives on Bio Griffiths

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Announcement: “Fluid Matter(s)” International Conference with Workshops, Public Lecture

Symposium “Fluid Matter(s): A cross-cultural examination of bodily fluids and drugs that act upon them” at the Australian Centre on China in the World (CIW) at ANU in Canberra, December 15-17, 2017

https://fluidmattersblog.wordpress.com/ (please find the programme and venue, participants and abstracts here)

Organised by Natalie Köhle (ANU), Shigehisa Kuriyama (Harvard), Lena Springer (Charité)