Thomas Söderqvist (Added 18 July: Registration dead-line has been extended to 30 July)
The ‘science wars’ of the 1990s is already history, but the relations between scientists and scholars of science studies and recent history of science and medicine continue to raise concern. The Centre for Science Studies at Lancaster University is organising a conference ‘Getting Underneath the Fact: Natural Categories & Biological Facts as Historical and Emergent Objects’, 28-29 August 2006.
Abstract:
The initial project of science studies, it seems, is becoming ever more compromised by demands for science studies scholars to learn the language and the nominations of science before they can critique. This is highlighted by the recent Report on Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Summer School at St Annes College, Oxford on the 26-29 Sep 2005. The report suggests that while the debate between scientists and social scientists and other humanities scholars may be fruitful the latter are “intimidated by the complexity of the science … This suggests a training need: To find ways to familiarise social scientists and humanities researchers with neuroscience, and to equip them to liase with neuroscientists in a competent manner”.
This conference will be an opportunity to explore how STS research and the debates in which we engage are compliant with this vision, relying upon assumed foundations of knowledge. In the passage above the ontological assumptions of the neuroscientist may be read as fact, hence
not open for debate or contestation. The task for the social science/humanities researcher becomes, it seems, someone who adds a bit of construction after the fact. This conference will provide a forum to think about assumed foundations in knowledge, their performative nature, and the way in which debates are framed around biological and natural facts. These issues will be explored in different research domains including genetics, brain sciences, classifications and number systems.
Draft programme, full conference abstract and registration form can be found at: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/sociology/events/index.php?unit_id=16
RETURN YOUR REGISTRATION FORM BY 7TH 30TH JULY 2006 to: Ruth Love, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Tel – 44 1524 593148. E-mail: r.love@lancaster.ac.uk
