Notices

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Race, Sex, and Reproduction in the Global South, c.1800–2000

An international workshop at the University of Sydney, 18-19 April 2017

Conveners: Warwick Anderson (Sydney), Chiara Beccalossi (Lincoln), Hans Pols (Sydney)

Sponsored by Race and Ethnicity in the Global South, an ARC Laureate Research Program, and the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science

Biomedical scientists grew preoccupied with the size of the population and patterns of reproduction at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By its close, sexology, a science devoted to the study of human sexual behavior, emerged, and at the beginning of the twentieth century the eugenics movement advocated active social engineering and state intervention in citizens’ reproductive sexuality. This medical attention to reproduction and sexual behaviour has been closely intertwined with interest in evolutionary theories, the improvement of hereditary traits and racial differences. Scientific and pseudo-scientific inquiries into race and sexuality increasingly informed national policies in the modern period. The medical and scientific knowledge on race and sexuality has moved across countries and continents to become global through processes of translation, hybridisation and transculturation. However, historical accounts of how science and medicine have shaped modern ideas of race and sexuality in a global context often refer only to developments in the Global North. Recent histories of the Global South have shown that debates on race and reproduction in the southern hemisphere have their own history. Biomedical scientists in the southern hemisphere, for instance, showed greater interest in racial plasticity, environmental adaptation, mixing or miscegenation, and blurring of racial boundaries; sexologists in the Global South were more likely to cross disciplinary boundaries, incorporating criminal anthropology, psychiatry, biology, endocrinology and psychoanalysis in their studies until well into the 1970s.

Keynote speakers: Alison Bashford (Cambridge), Margaret Jolly (ANU)

Presenters: Ellen Amster (McMaster), Chiara Beccalossi (Lincoln), Shrikant Botre (Warwick), Nicole Bourbonnais (Graduate Institute Geneva), Eve Buckley (Delaware), Sarah Ferber (Wollongong), Vera Mackie (Wollongong), Daksha Parmar (Jawaharlal Nehru), Yolana Pringle (Cambridge), Lisa Todd (New Brunswick), Rebecca Williams (Exeter)

The workshop is free, but limited places are available. Registration necessary by 4 April 2017. Contact:

Dr James Dunk E james.dunk@sydney.edu.au T +61 2 9351 2809

More information here.

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ANZSHM 15th Biennial Conference – Health, Medicine, and Society: Challenge and Change

Notification and Call for Papers for the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine’s 15th Biennial Conference, in Melbourne, July 2017.

We feel that postgraduate students in health sciences and history may be interested in attending. Travel grants are available to PG students via a competitive process. There’s also a prize for the best paper by a student. 

Abstract submissions close on Feb 20. Expression of interest may be made via the conference website (weblink below). Feel free to circulate the notices to anyone you think may be interested in attending.

Many thanks

Madonna Grehan

ANZSHM 15th Biennial Conference - Health, Medicine, and Society: Challenge and Change

11-14 July 2017, Witness Seminar 15 July  |  ACU Melbourne (Fitzroy Campus)

https://dcconferences.eventsair.com/anzshm2017/csn

Tel: +61 3 9484 8076  |  Mob:  0428 220 520

Notice of conference [PDF]

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Call for 2017 SHOT International Scholar (IS) Nominations

Dear Colleague

The deadline for the 2017 SHOT International Scholar (IS) Nominations is January 30, 2017.

We are calling on former SHOT International Scholars to let us know of outstanding nominees for this year’s selection.

As you know, every year, the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) calls for nominations from non-North American scholars to join SHOT's International Scholars Program. Nominee submissions  are reviewed by members of SHOT's Internationalization Committee and up to four scholars are chosen each year for a two year term.

The aim of the Program is to foster the individual careers of International Scholars and to support local networks and activities for and by scholars working on the history of technology. International Scholars act as ambassadors for SHOT in their countries and regions, both by informing the Society about the state and developments of the history of technology in their regions, and by helping to disseminate information about the Society and its activities. 

To become a SHOT International Scholar, you must reside and work in underrepresented countries at the time of selection. Graduate students, post docs, and visiting scholars who are living  and working in the United States or Western Europe are not eligible to become International Scholars; however, they are eligible to apply once they return to their home countries. Of these potential  candidates, any one at any rank, from graduate student up through senior scholar, is eligible to become an International Scholar. Individuals may be nominated as International Scholars by any member of the Society, and we also encourage self nomination. For further information about the nomination and application process, as well as the benefits and support provided to International Scholars, please visit our site:

History Of Technology: International Programs

International Scholars Program. Each year the Society for the History of Technology designates up to four International Scholars for a two-year term.
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MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar May 17th – 24th, 2017

image001image002A Century of Engineering Life: Cells and Organisms

Application Deadline: February 1, 2017

Discussion of the possible wonders—and horrors—of gene editing with technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 fill both the popular and scientific press. Gene editing involves the precise excision and replacement of specific genes. This certainly offers unprecedented potential both for experimentally altering organisms for research and also for curing genetic diseases through replacing abnormal genes with their normal counterparts, a kind of targeted eugenics.

These modern efforts are only the latest attempts to engineer life in the laboratory for the benefit of both society and science. Around 1900 scientists such as Jacques Loeb, working at the Marine Biological Laboratory, embraced the increasingly experimental emphasis in embryology. Armed with a staunchly mechanistic view of life, Loeb sought to engineer living organisms in order to understand them.  In historian Philip J. Pauly’s term, Loeb’s goal was to employ the engineering ideal with the aim of Controlling Life. Today at the MBL, Loeb casts a long shadow and remains literally central to the Laboratory because the impressive Loeb Building houses research and the star-studded education courses. The kinds of research Loeb and his MBL colleague Thomas Hunt Morgan carried out on regenerative biology finds its home in the Eugene Bell Center across the MBL courtyard. Bell was fascinated with ways that cellular engineering can help regenerate lost tissue.

Both types of research offer approaches to engineering life. Both raised questions about how much deviation from the typical is still “normal” or acceptable.

Herman Muller showed that radiation can induce mutations, further blurring lines between pathology and novelty. Later, the invention of recombinant DNA technologies introduced “genetic engineering.” In vitro fertilization engineered eggs and embryos in ways that later informed cloning and stem cell manipulations. Today, Craig Venter and George Church want to create almost new organisms by dispensing with manipulation of single genes in favor of fully synthetic genomes. Others are using engineered cells therapeutically, or combining cells with nonliving materials to create replacement tissues or organs or parts for implantation in the body, while “synthetic biologists” try to reverse-engineer cells to learn how they work or turn them into living factories.

The 2017 MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar [https://cbs.asu.edu/mbl/century- engineering-life-cells-and-organisms] will look at the history of engineering life by bringing together a mix of historians, philosophers, social scientists, and biologists for a lively and intense week of presentations, discussions, and explorations. The focus will be on engineering cells and organisms, with a follow-up seminar in 2018 to consider the engineering of populations, evolution, and the environments. This year we will ask what motivated the desire to engineer life, what techniques have been involved, who has been doing that work, where, how, and why? How have social, ethical, economic, and political factors shaped or controlled scientific research programs?  Where are we now, and what does it take to have informed and reflective responses to the latest efforts to synthesize life or manipulate genes and genomes to achieve some stated goal. What happens when we learn, or do, more than we planned?

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The World in 2050: Imagining and Creating Just Climate Futures

A call for papers

We invite presentations of all kinds on the theme of “The World in 2050: Imagining and Creating Just Climate Futures” for an online, nearly carbon-neutral conference (described below) that will take place from October 24 to November 14, 2016. Coordinated by UC Santa Barbara, this conference is part of a series of events on “Climate Futures: This Changes Everything” [http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?page_id=11154]

The most pressing existential issue of the 21st century for humanity as a whole is the increasingly grim reality of climate change and our entry into a new era in the history of humans and the planet well signified by the Anthropocene. The changing conditions of life on Earth lie at the center of a storm of interconnected crises which include, among others, the precarity of the global economy, a widening deficit of political legitimacy, and cultures scarred by violence, from the most intimate interpersonal interactions to the most global realities of war-making.

Unlike either the justifiably pessimistic critical discussions or the unrealistically optimistic policy approaches that increasingly confront (or ignore) each other around the climate crisis, this conference will depart from our present ground zero by asking participants to experiment with perspectives on the multiple possible states of the world in mid-century and work back toward the present in an attempt to imagine, envision, enable, and collaboratively find or create some of the pathways to a more just – or just less worse – outcome for humanity by 2050.

Please note that this will be a nearly carbon-neutral conference. We believe that a conference that takes up the issue of climate change while simultaneously contributing to the problem to such a degree is simply unconscionable. Even a relatively small academic conference can generate the equivalent of 20,000 pounds or more of CO2 (chiefly from travel). To put that number in perspective, this is the total annual carbon footprint of ten people living in India, thirty-three in Kenya.

Consequently, this conference will largely occur online. Over a period of three weeks, starting on October 24 and running through November 10, accepted talks and other events will be available for viewing on the conference website. Q&A will also take place online during this period, as participants and registered attendees will be able to connect with speakers and each other via online comments and speakers will be able to reply in the same way. Both the talks and Q&A sessions will remain up on the website as a permanent archive of the event.

A conference using this format was staged at UC Santa Barbara in May of 2016. As that conference’s website [http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?page_id=12687] contains a complete archive of the event, please visit it if you would like to see how this conference will work. In particular, the opening remarks and the accompanying Q&A session [http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=13550] help explain the rationale for this approach while also demonstrating it.

While we realize that this will not replicate the face-to-face interaction of a conventional conference talk and Q&A, we believe that it will nonetheless promote lively discussion, as well as help build a community of scholars and activists with intersecting research interests and hopes for the world. An advantage to this approach is that individuals who would not otherwise be able to become involved in the conference owing to distance, daily life, or financial constraints will be able to fully take part. There will be no registration fee for the conference. Although this online conference will have its own carbon footprint, as data centers and web activity also require energy, we expect that this will be only a small fraction of that of a conventional conference, likely just 1-3%.

Instead of traveling to the conference to attend panels and deliver a talk, speakers agree to do the following:

  1. Film yourself (or yourself with others) giving a talk of 15-17 minutes. The webcams that come with desktop and laptop computers have improved dramatically over the past few years. Aftermarket webcams with noise cancelling microphones, which can be purchased for under $50, often provide even better quality. It is also the case that most computers have video recording software preinstalled, such as Apple’s QuickTime. Consequently, it is now possible, and relatively easy, to record a talk of surprisingly good quality in your home, office, or just about anywhere. How easy is it and how good is the quality? A sample talk that explains the concept and process in detail can be found here: http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=12048.
  2. Take part in your three-week online Q&A session by responding to questions raised by your talk. You will automatically receive an email each time a new question is posed. Only registered conference participants (this includes speakers, as well as others who register for the conference) will be posing questions.
  3. View as many of the talks as possible, posing questions of your own to speakers. This is especially important, as this is how you will meet and interact with other conference participants. Given the subject matter, our goal is help establish relationships and to build a community. In this case, since travel has been removed from the equation, our hope is that this community will be diverse and truly global.

Abstracts of 250 words and a brief biographical note of about 150 words should be submitted as one document [Word or pdf, only please] by August 15 and attached in a single e-mail copied to both of the following e-mail addresses: conference co-organizer John Foran – foran@soc.ucsb.edu and our conference assistant Rick Thomas –EHCfellow@gmail.com.

We welcome all international submissions if the talks themselves can be either in English or subtitled (see below) in English. The Q&A will be in English. You should also please confirm that you have viewed the sample video and agree both to the above conference requirements and to allow your filmed talk to be posted to the conference website, as well as our Vimeo, YouTube, and SoundCloud accounts. As noted above, the talks will become part of a permanent conference archive open to the public.

Amara provides free closed captioning software that allows anyone to caption videos. As they note on their website, Amara makes it “incredibly easy (and free) to caption and translate your videos…. Amara is built by a nonprofit, 501c3 organization. We are driven by the mission to reduce barriers to communication and foster a more democratic media ecosystem.” Because it does not require a steep learning curve, Amara can generally be quickly learned. Since our goal is to have a conference that is accessible as possible, please consider using Amara to add closed captioning to your talk or have someone (perhaps a student intern or a tech-savvy friend) do it for you. If you will not be able to closed caption your talk, please note this when submitting your abstract.

Abstracts are due by Monday, August 15, 2016.

Participants will be informed whether their submissions have been accepted or not by Monday, August 29, 2016.

Videos of the talks will be due by Monday, October 10, 2016.

The online conference will take place from Monday, October 24 to Monday, November 14, 2016.

Please send any questions to conference co-organizers John Foran – foran@soc.ucsb.edu and Ken Hiltner –hiltner@english.ucsb.edu.

Please feel free to be as creative as you like in your proposals – we look forward to seeing them!

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Annals of Science Student Essay Prize

Oliver Hill-Andrews

Submissions are being accepted for the Annals of Science best paper prize 2016. This prize is awarded annually to the author of an original, unpublished essay in the history of science or technology, which is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. The prize, which is supported by Taylor & Francis, is intended for those who are currently doctoral students, or have been awarded their doctorate within the past four years.

Essays should be submitted to the Editor in a form acceptable for publication in Annals of Science. View the Instructions for Authors (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=tasc20&page=instructions). The winning essay will be published in the Journal, and the author will be awarded US$1000 and a free subscription to Annals of Science.

Papers should be submitted by 30th September 2016, with the winner being notified by 31st December 2016. The Editors’ decision is final.

Questions and submissions should be directed to Oliver Hill-Andrews (Editorial Assistant) at annals.science@sussex.ac.uk

Read more

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2017 Mike Smith Student Prize for History of Australian Science or Australian Environmental History

First prize: $3000

Deadline: 9 am AEST Tuesday 4 October 2016

The National Museum of Australia and the Australian Academy of Science invite submissions for the 2017 biennial Mike Smith Student Prize for the History of Australian Science or Australian Environmental History.

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

Essays may deal with any aspect of the history of Australian science (including medicine and technology) or Australian environmental history, including 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 may be considered for publication in Historical Records of Australian Science, if it is in a suitable subject area.

More information and full eligibility and submission requires may be found at: www.science.org.au/opportunities/research-funding

For more information please contact: Australian Academy of Science
ia@science.org.au
02 6201 9456

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Call for abstracts: The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences

We invite submissions for papers to be presented at a two-day conference on The science of evolution and the evolution of the sciences, which will be held in Leuven, Belgium on the 12th and 13th October 2016.

Submissions should take the form of a 500-word abstract. Submissions on any aspect of the evolution of scientific theories are welcome, but contributions with a clear link to digital humanities are especially encouraged.

Aims and scope of the conference:

One of the longstanding debates in history and philosophy of science concerns how the sciences develop. Thomas Kuhn famously emphasized the role of scientific revolutions and so-called paradigm shifts. Other philosophers, including Karl Popper and David Hull, have offered a Darwinian account of the process of science. In their view, scientists create conjectures about the way the world works, and these conjectures undergo a process of selection as they are tested against the world. This is analogized with biological evolution: mutation and recombination creates novelty in the biological world, which then undergoes natural selection, driving adaptive evolution. In this conference, we will reexamine these ideas using new tools from cultural evolutionary theory and the digital humanities.

This conference explores recent attempts to move beyond mere qualitative theorizing about scientific cultures and their evolution and centers on the the question of the extent to which we can make quantitative predictions, extract quantitative data, or build quantitative models of and about scientific evolution over time. In addition to numerical models of cultural evolution drawn from the evolutionary sciences, quantitative data are also being extracted in the digital humanities. Cultural products like academic journal articles can be algorithmically mined in order to understand this body of work in a new light, offering data to help test hypothesis about scientific changes. By bringing together researchers with a common interest but with different disciplinary backgrounds and toolboxes, we hope to inspire cross-fertilization and new collaborations.

Questions addressed at this conference include:

  *  What novel predictions do Darwinian accounts of science offer?

  *  How can we test these predictions?

  *  Can new work in the digital humanities, such as the automated mining and analysis of the scientific literature, shed light on Darwinian accounts of science?

  *  Do formal evolutionary models or (quantitative) textual analyses permit a systematic approach to empirical issues in the realism-instrumentalism debate?

Keynote speakers:

Charles Pence (Louisiana State University)

Kimmo Eriksson (Mälardalen University and Stockholm University)

Mia Ridge (British Library)

Simon DeDeo (Indiana University & the Santa Fe Institute)

Abstracts must be received no later than June 7. Inquiries and abstracts should be directed to the conference organizers, Andreas De Block and Grant Ramsey, at the following addresses:

Andreas.deblock@hiw.kuleuven.be and grant@theramseylab.org 

The conference receives financial support from the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) and the FWO (Flemish Research Council). 

_______________________

Grant Ramsey

www.theramseylab.org

grant@theramseylab.org

+1 574.344.0284