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Critical Conversations: Methods and Practices in Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Friday, May 18th, 2007
The Stanford Science and Technology Studies Writing Group welcomes Stanford graduate students, postdocs, visiting lecturers, and other members of the Stanford community in the early stages of their academic careers whose work engages with the interdisciplinary study of science and technology. The goal of the writing group is to provide a supportive structure to help prepare work for publication and/or dissertation, as well as grant proposals, dissertation proposals, and any other type of writing demanded of beginning scholars.
The Stanford STS Writing Group will meet four times a quarter during 2006-2007, and conclude with a day-long graduate student conference and keynote event in the spring of 2007.
Critical Conversations: Methods and Practices in Interdisciplinary Science Studies will be an all day event, Friday, May 18th, 2007
At each regular meeting, a participant circulates a piece of writing intended for publication or dissertation work and another participant serves as a moderator for discussion. In addition to the group discussion at meetings, participants are encouraged to provide written feedback to the author.
The STS Writing Group is supported by a grant from the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
The group meets every other Tuesday from noon to 1:30pm in History room 307. Contact: Lydia Barnett (Department of History, lbarnett at stanford.edu) or Sarah Richardson (Program in Modern Thought and Literature, richardson at stanford.edu).
The Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology is soliciting applications for grants for support of the interdisciplinary study of science and technology in the academic year 2007-2008. These grants will be relatively modest (primarily in the less than $5,000 range), so that circumstances where cost-sharing will be available are especially appropriate. The grants are intended for the support of new initiatives involved with the interdisciplinary study of science and technology -- involving workshops, conferences, speakers, and short-term visitors. (Interdisciplinary initiatives internal to the sciences and/or technology themselves, which do not include an historical, philosophical, sociological, methodological, or other such meta-perspective on science and/or technology are not appropriate for such grants.) Applications should be submitted electronically to Rosemary Rogers, the Center Administrator (rrogers@stanford.edu), and should consist of a page or two of explanation and justification, a budget outline, and a statement of possibilities for cost-sharing.
George E. Smith, Tufts University, will be giving three lectures at Stanford
2/22/2007, 3/1/2007, and 3/8/2007
Turning Data into Evidence: Three lectures on the role of Theory in Science
Building 200 Room 203
4:15-6pm
Download Smith Lecture I (Word doc)
Download Smith Powerpoint Presentation I (ppt document)
Building 200 Room 203
4:15-6pm
Download Smith Lecture II (Word doc)
Download Smith Powerpoint Presentation II (ppt document)
Building 200 - Room 203
4:15-6pm
Download Smith Lecture III (Word doc)
Download Smith Powerpoint Presentation III (ppt document)
ABSTRACT: The view that all observation is theory-mediated and hence that scientific evidence invariably rests on theoretical presuppositions now seems beyond dispute. Many see the consequent apparent lack of uncontestable grounding as raising deep questions about the nature and limits of the knowledge achieved in the sciences, questions that are sometimes taken to challenge all claims of science to epistemic authority. The three lectures will concede from the outset that theory of some sort is always needed to turn data into evidence and hence that theory always enters constitutively into evidence. But they will then argue that close analysis of historical practice in certain representative areas of physics shows that the ways in which theory has in fact entered into the process of marshalling evidence has not undercut but actually strengthened their claim to epistemic authority.
George E. Smith is widely recognized as a leading authority on Isaac Newton, and, in particular, on Newton's contributions to scientific methodology. Together with I. B. Cohen, he edited The Cambridge Companion to Newton, where he has a central piece on Newton's methodology. Aside from being Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, Smith has pursued a highly successful career as a practicing mechanical engineer, and he Directed the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT from 2001-2006. The three lectures will discuss a number of key developments in the physical sciences, including gravitational research from Newton to Einstein, J. J. Thomson's work on the electron at the end of the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century seismological research into the earth's interior, in order to depict the fine structure of evidential reasoning in these sciences and thereby illustrate and defend their epistemic authority. The lectures will be of wide interest to historians, philosophers, pure and applied physicists, engineers, and earth scientists, as well as to all those interested in the question of the distinctive place of the "hard" sciences in Western intellectual life.
Stanford Seminar on Science, Technology, and Society Spring, 2006
April 21, 2006: Ronald Kline, Cornell University: "Where Are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?"
April 28: Chandra Mukerji, UC San Diego: "The Gender Politics of Technological Expertise: The New Rome and New Romans in 17th Century France"
May 5: Diane Vaughan, Columbia University: "NASA Revisited: Theory, Analogy, and Public Sociology"
May 12: Londa Schiebinger, Stanford: "Exotic Abortifacients: The Gender Politics of Plants in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World"
May 19: Joseph Dumit, UC Davis: "Virtually Unlimited Health Imperatives: Risk Trafficking and Prescription Maximization"
May 26: Simon Cole, UC Irvine: "How Much Justice Can Technology Afford? The Impact of Scientific and Technological Developments on Equal (Criminal) Justice"
June 2: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, École Polytechnique, Paris: "Back from Chernobyl: Diary of an Outraged Man"
June 9: Hugh Gusterson, MIT: "Deconstructing Colin Powell"
Contact jwidman@stanford.edu for more information about the seminar series.
Sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology and the Program in Science Technology and Science
For questions about this series, call (650) 723-2565
MediaSpace: A Panel Discussion on Being Public in a Networked World
Contact: Erica Robles - ewoka @ stanford.edu
New media technologies are transforming everyday places into complex ensembles of the physical and the virtual. Remote collaborations merge geographically distributed sites into shared workspaces. Virtual communities serve as contemporary public commons where networks, rather than architectural forms, provide the infrastructure for discourse. Tangible and ubiquitous computing systems graft a digital layer on objects and spaces, permanently re-shaping experiences of the familiar. And finally, mobile devices, so pervasive as to be mundane, support continuity through conversation even as the body crosses boundaries between locations. Communication technologies are blurring the distinction between where we are and what we experience.
The Department of Communication and The Patrick Suppes Center for The Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology proudly announce MediaSpace: A Panel Discussion on Being Public in a Networked World. This event is an interdisciplinary discussion about the ways in which fusions of media and space are re-shaping traditional boundaries between the public and the private, between interpersonal and mass communication, and between situations and locations. Three scholars, each with a different analytical perspective - critical, cultural, and design - will present from their work, articulating how media-spaces give rise to new forms of self-presentation, availability, anonymity, surveillance, monitoring, and spectatorship. Discussion, moderated by Professor Fred Turner of the Department of Communication, to follow.
Presentations:
Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa
Professor Andrejevic's work articulates the changing nature of participation and discourse about democratization of the viewer through forms such as reality TV and interactive media. His book, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, explores how interactive media shapes spectatorship, surveillance, monitoring, and participation, thus demonstrating ways in which new media make possible mutual surveillance and lateral monitoring between viewers and participants.
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Professor McCarthy's work demonstrates how television -- a display device traditionally considered part of the domestic, or private sphere -- actively shapes discourse in public spaces. She is the author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture in Public Spaces, which uses archival research as well as contemporary readings of spaces transformed by screens in order to illuminate how both individuals and institutions utilize screens as a material and cultural form. Recently, her research has extended to computer workers and how their relationship with their consoles as a cultural site of expression.
Discussion moderated by:
Sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology
A Century of Relativity 1905-2005: An Einstein Workshop
Reception to follow
Sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
a three lecture series by
Itamar Pitowsky,
Eleanor Roosevelt Professor of the Philosophy of
Science
in the Program for the History, Philosophy
and Sociology of Science,
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Logic and Probability in Modern Physics
The case of quantum mechanics