History of Science calls for papers / meetings & conferences

Call for Papers: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Disasters

Placing Chernobyl, 9/11, Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima and Other Events in Historical and Comparative Perspective

Co-Sponsored by the SHOT Prometheans (Engineering) SIG / SHOT Asia Network / Teach 3.11

and held during the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) Annual Meeting Sunday, 7 October 2012 Copenhagen, Denmark

For this year’s Prometheans / SHOT Asia Network SIG workshop (with co-sponsorship from Teach 3.11, a project of the Forum for the History of Science in Asia), we would like to focus on historical and contemporary studies of both natural and anthropogenic disasters. Inspired by discussions about Fukushima and the greater East Japan Earthquake (Tohoku-chiho Taiheiyo Oki Shishin) and tsunami during the SHOT/4S/HSS co-located meeting in Cleveland last year, an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars from these three societies decided to create an open forum for academic discussions about disasters and the opportunity to place them in historical and comparative perspective. This year’s SIG session will be one gathering of this forum, with a focus on analyzing the sociotechnical dimensions of disasters from historical and other disciplinary perspectives.

This workshop will take place during the Sunday morning* special-interest-group (SIG) time slot at the SHOT annual meeting in Copenhagen. (*This event may be 1/2 day or full day depending on the level of interest.) Offered in an interactive workshop format, the event will be directed primarily towards historical and contemporary studies of disasters of different scales. A portion of the program may also be dedicated to interpreting the events surrounding the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the East Japan Earthquake through comparison with other disasters. While we anticipate that historians may comprise a significant portion of the membership because the event will take place at SHOT, scholars of all academic disciplines are invited to contribute and to attend.

Among the kinds of papers that we are interested in seeing are the following:

Historical or contemporary studies of any disaster of natural or anthropogenic origin. Especially papers that focus on the organizational, technological, and/or sociotechnical dimensions of the disaster, and how this contributed to or exacerbated a particular disaster or the responses that followed the disaster.

An examination of the cultural, political, or economic dimensions of a particular industry, such as nuclear energy, oil extraction, or civil engineering and construction, and their contributions to the disaster.

Historical and contemporary studies of environmental movements and environmental organizations and their relationship to disasters and disaster response.

Any comparative study of disasters, and specific dimensions of disasters.

The workshop format will consist of pre-circulated papers (1000-1800 words in length) and prepared responses; open discussions around predetermined themes during the workshop; and written responses and reflections submitted following the workshop. Members of the Prometheans, SHOT Asia Network, and Teach 3.11 will serve as the program committee for this event, and will work organize the papers received into coherent sessions. Works-in-progress, and submissions by graduate students as well as senior scholars, from any nation, are actively encouraged.

We ask those who are interested to signal your interest by sending us an email, with proposed title, at your earliest convenience so we are able to make an early decision about the scope of the workshop. The applications process will be open until June 1st, by which point we will need a firm commitment to attend and a 300-word abstract from all participants. Pre-circulated papers will be due on September 1st. Those presenting material during the main SHOT conference are still welcome to participate in the workshop with the same (or different) material, and are encouraged to do so (please indicate, for planning purposes, that this will be the case).

Please send emails signaling your interest with a proposed title for your paper to the SIG Workshop Program Committee chair, Atsushi Akera at akeraa@rpi.edu.

Call for Papers: German Science in Southern Europe, 1933-45

October 11-13, 2012 Lisbon, Portugal

Submissions deadline: June 15, 2012

The European fascist period is certainly a time of exclusions, disruptions, and confrontations, but it is also a time of network building and scientific and cultural exchange: the exhibitions, public lectures, academic or even touristic exchange that Germany organizes between 1933 and 1945 in the southern European countries (from Portugal to Romania, not forgetting Spain, Italy or Greece) reflect a hybrid (i.e. political and scientific) concern to be "recognized and imitated" (to put it in the words of the Hamburger romanist and NSDAP member Wilhelm Giese).

The conference welcomes paper proposals from a broad range of disciplines. Questions that could be addressed, especially on case studies examples, might
include, but are not limited to:

a.. Knowledge & Technology transfer
b.. Circulation and appropriation of Knowledge
c.. Fascism, Science, Culture
d.. Fascist Scientific Policies
e.. Science and the Economics of War
f.. Networks: Actors, Institutions, Events, Disciplines
g.. Academics: Exchange and Exile
h.. Influence, Persuasion, Coercion: Science, Culture and the 'Weltanschauungskrieg'
i.. Crossing Borders: the Role of Science and Culture in the Internationalization of Fascism

The Conference is hosted by the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon, and organized by the Research project The Power of Science; German Science in Portugal, 1933-45.

A selection of papers presented at the Conference will be published in a book.

Graduate and Postgraduate students are strongly encouraged to submit papers on research in-progress or recently completed studies.

Working language of the conference: English (a limited number of papers presented in Portuguese, Spanish or German may also be accepted)

Submission of Abstracts: Please submit a paper abstract (300 words) and a short CV at http://pos.fcsh.unl.pt/conference

Submissions deadline: June 15, 2012

Notification of Acceptance: June 30, 2012

Further Information:

Please address all inquiries to pos.conference@gmail.com

Fernando Clara
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Av. de Berna 26-C
P 1069-061 Lisboa
PORTUGAL
Telf.: +351 217 908 300-Ext.1295
Fax: +351 217 908 308
email: f.clara@fcsh.unl.pt

Call for Papers: Early Modern Medicine and Natural Philosophy

Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh
2-4 November 2012

We invite the submission of extended abstracts (approximately 1000 words) for individual paper presentations (reading time should be 30 minutes).

The aim of the conference is to bring to the fore the medical context of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and to explore the complex connections between medicine and natural philosophy in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Medicine and natural philosophy interacted on many levels, from the practical imperative to restore and maintain the health of human bodies to theoretical issues on the nature of living matter and the powers of the soul to methodological concerns about the appropriate way to gain knowledge of natural things. And issues of life, generation, ageing, medicine, and vital activity were important topics of investigation for canonical actors of the Scientific Revolution, from Boyle, Hooke and Locke to Descartes and Leibniz. Recent efforts to recover the medical content and contexts of their projects have already begun to reshape our understanding of these key natural philosophers. Putting medical interests in the foreground also reveals connections with a wide variety of less canonical but historically important scientists, physicians, and philosophers, such as Petrus Severinus, Fabricius ab Aquapendente, Lodovico Settala, William Harvey, Richard Lower, Thomas Willis, Louis de la Forge, and Georg Ernst Stahl. This interdisciplinary conference will bring together scholars of Renaissance and Early Modern science, medicine and philosophy to examine the projects of more and less canonical figures and trace perhaps unexpected interactions between medicine and other approaches to studying and understanding the natural world.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an extended abstract of approximately 1000 words and a 1-2 page CV to Peter Distelzweig at pmd17 [at] pitt [dot] edu.

Submission should have full institutional and contact information and should be in doc/docx or pdf format.

Deadline for submissions is 1 June 2012.
Decisions will be announced by 30 July 2012.

Partial funding will be available for accepted papers.

Call for Papers: Disrupting Pathways: Endocrine Disruptors and the Public Expertise of Health and Environmental Problems

We are pleased to invite you to submit a paper for the international research workshop "Disrupting pathways: Endocrine disruptors and the public expertise of health and environmental problems".

The workshop will be held in Paris the 14th and 15th of December 2012 and will gather both US and European participants. It will be organized around three main themes: a) the 70s and 80s early qualification of pesticides, PCB's, Dioxins or drugs as endocrine disruptors; b) the convergence between medical and environmental problems taking place in the 1990s; c) the regulatory initiatives from the late 1990s onward.

Travel and accommodation costs will be covered.

Please send proposals to the organizers Nathalie Jas (jas@ivry.inra.fr<mailto:jas@ivry.inra.fr>) and Jean-Paul Gaudilliere
(gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr<mailto:gaudilli@vjf.cnrs.fr>) by the 30th of June 2012.

In the past twenty years endocrine disurptors, the category as well as specific substances, have acquired a peculiar visibility both as targets for research and as objects of political debates. Issues like the impact of pesticides on the health of farmers, consumers and wild animals, the long term effect of persistant pollutants like PCBs which seems impossible to eliminate, the relations of xenostrogens to declining fertility and reproductive cancer incidence in humans, or the peculiar sensitivity of fetuses and developing organisms to chemicals mimicking the structures and roles of hormones are now discussed through an increasing number of publications and affairs perfectly illlustrated with the current debates on the need for a complete ban of Bisphenol A.

The processes, which have led to this situation and the recognition of what may be called an endocrine disruptors paradigm linking in unprecedented ways research, expertise, regulation, and social mobilizations - producing knowledge at the crossroad of reproductive medicine, toxicology, ecology, epidemiology and the social sciences - are complex and far from self-evident.

In the mid 1990s, the importance of man-made and man-realesed chemicals and pollutants modifying endocrine/reproductive functions in animals and humans was a motive of serious concern in small circles of experts, often associated with environmental, feminist or public health activism. It was a US phenomenon in the first place. A quarter of century later it is no longer possible to locate in such a precise manner the actors of endocrine disruptors networks. They are in laboratories, conservatories, and hospital services but also in the medias, health or environmental regulatory agencies, as well as in political institutions. They are present in the United States, Europe and the so-called emerging countries. In parallel with its diffusion, its contested but significant acceptance, the endocrine disruptor paradigm has crystalized a body of knowledge challenging traditional toxicology and views of adverse effects; a body focusing on low doses, multiple exposure, cumulative effects and sensibility of development periods.

The role of the proposed seminar is to explore the advent of this endocrine disruptors paradigm from the 70s onward, i.e. to understand how specific problems and substances have been redefined to become manifestation of endocrine disruption, to understand the dynamics of social movements and their role in the public expertise of these processes, to understand the transformation of regulation, to explore the impact the debates on endocrine disruptions have had on specific fields and disciplines in scientific research.

This seminar is an element in a more general research project of the trajectory of endocrine disruptors as scientific and political entities, which seeks to address both their generalization and the deep differences in their modes of existence in Europe, especially in France, and in the United States.

The workshop will take place in Paris. It will gather both US and European participants. It will be organized around three main themes: a) the 70s and 80s early qualification of pesticides, PCB's, Dioxins or drugs as endocrine disruptors; b) the convergence between medical and environmental problems taking place in the 1990s; c) the regulatory initiatives from the late 1990s onward.

Nathalie Jas
Research Fellow
RiTME Research Unit - INRA
65 Bd de Brandebourg
94205 Ivry-sur-Seine
France

Tel: + 33 (0)1 49 59 69 81

Call for Submissions: 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine

Monday 22 - Sunday 28 July 2013 Manchester, United Kingdom

The International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine is the largest event in the field, and takes place every four years. Recent meetings have been held in Mexico City (2001), Beijing (2005) and Budapest (2009).

In 2013, the Congress will take place in Manchester, the chief city of Northwest England, and the original "shock city" of the Industrial Revolution. Congress facilities will be provided by The University of Manchester, with tours and displays on local scientific, technological and medical heritage co-ordinated by members of the University's Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

The Congress requires that each Symposium is organised by two or more individuals from different countries. Organisers may be representatives of institutions, or act together as individuals. We encourage organisers to ensure that the composition of their panels reflects a range of different national backgrounds and perspectives.

The theme of the 24th Congress is ‘Knowledge at Work.’ All proposals must indicate how the Symposium fits into this theme, broadly considered.

Each Commission of the Division of the History of Science and Technology of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science is expected to organise at least one Symposium in its area.

Language

Papers may be presented in any of the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Russian and Arabic. Descriptions of Symposia may be submitted in any of these languages, but must be followed by a French or English translation.

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide facilities for translation at the Congress.

Summary of key dates

First circular 31 October 2011
Deadline for submission of symposia proposals 30 April 2012
Second circular and call for individual papers 1 May 2012
Decisions on accepted symposia announced 30 June 2012
Deadline for submission of individual papers 30 November 2012
Decisions on individual papers announced 1 February 2013
Early registration opens 31 March 2013
Third circular and full programme 1 April 2013
Deadline for accommodation reservations 21 May 2013
Final date for registration 1 July 2013
Congress opens 22 July 2013
Congress closes 28 July 2013