February 2008

Here’s the resumé of Adam’s PhD-dissertation ‘History in the flesh – investigating the historicized body’. For further info about the public defence on Friday 15 February, se here.

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(Here’s the second fragment of my paper on ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ for the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm last Friday — for the first fragment, see here).

As science (qua technoscience) is turning into a truly global phenomenon, science communication too is increasingly turning into a practice of national/transnational governance. (The 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference to be held in Malmö this summer – enthusiastically supported by the Swedish science council, Vetenskapsrådet – is a case in point.)

Consequently, science communication is gradually becoming integrated into the sum total of institutions and governance structures that regulate the global economy, politics and culture, i.e., what Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, among others, call ‘Empire´in their post-marxist class theory of the age of globalization (Empire, 2000; downloadable here).

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In an earlier post I wondered if the editors of the — otherwise interesting and increasingly successful — Advances in History of Psychology blog were really happy with the use of the word ‘advance’ in the blog title (because of the pretty antiquated philosophy of history connotations associated with ‘advance’)

In a recent post, editor Jeremy Burman explains his choice of name for the AHP blog. He is aware, of course, that ‘advance’ is problematic as a historiographical category. But in this case, Jeremy says, it just means that he wants to help further the history of psychology “by bringing together efforts from the various allied disciplines and collecting them into one place, from which further investigations can be launched”.

That’s fine with me. But then Jeremy adds: “More pragmatically, I also wanted an ‘a-name’ so the site would appear at the top of other sites’ blogrolls”.

Read again! I must admit that I’ve never thought about this blogroll position manipulation method before. And I wonder how common it is. I’ve quickly browsed my favourite science/medicine/tech blogs and nowhere have I found a bias towards the first letters in the alphabet.

I guess most blogs stay away from this practice, because it runs against the self-imposed and delicate gift-giving rules of the blogroll listing. But then again, I may be naïve. So I wonder: How common is this? And does it work as intended?

If Jeremy is really serious about this, he should perhaps change the title of the blog to Aadvances in History of Psychology to make sure that he gets ahead of the possibly forthcoming Absolute Psychology 🙂

(Here are the introductory paragraphs to a paper titled ‘Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience’ that I presented in Stockholm yesterday at the workshop  ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’, organised by Mark Elam, University of Gothenburg, in co-operation with the Nobel Museum. I’ll be back with more fragments from the paper — dealing with blogging and multitude — next week).

I have always been rather skeptical to the idea of ’science communication’. At first this may sound paradoxical because as an historian of science I am (by default as it were) also a ’science communicator’. Historians of science usually write books that can be read by a larger group of readers rather than just articles in scholarly journals. Some of the bigger names in the field, like historian of science Dan Kevles, former medical historian Roy Porter, and historian of technology David Edgerton (see earlier post here), are read widely beyond the circle of narrow specialists.

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Just want to draw your attention to the conference “Re-Thinking the Role of the Expert” here in Copenhagen 6-7 March — dealing with different aspects of knowledge and science communication (with an emphasis on ‘expertice’).

Personally I am eager to hear what Stephen Turner has to say about the role of bloggers as public intellectuals vs. traditional experts (which is one of my favorite topics right now). But the other papers look very attractive too. Here are the abstracts:

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Since 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) has run a series of seminars at their headquarters in Geneva on global health history, covering topics like child health, epidemic diseases, and primary health care. To mark its 60th anniversary WHO is now organizing (in co-operation with the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL) an intensified series of ten seminars throughout 2008 (read the full programme here).

If I could select one of the events only, I think I would choose Mark Jackson’s talk on Thursday 29 May, titled ‘Marcel Proust and the global history of asthma’. Not only is Proust the most famous asthma patient in cultural history — the title also promises exciting views on particular vs. global, literary vs. historical, and individual vs. social perspectives on the history of late 20th century health issues.

Collections are the body and soul, nay the life blood of museums!

Accordingly, the Medical & Healthcare Subject Specialist Network in UK organizes a two-day conference and training seminar titled ‘The body and soul of medical collections’ to be held at the Thackray Museum in Leeds, 10-11 March. 

The announced aim of the meeting is to inspire museums, libraries and archives to make better use of their medical and healthcare collections. Topics include audience development, collection rationalisation, collections care and access, education resources, engaging public debate, gallery refurbishment and redisplay, and oral history. Keynote speakers are Almut Grüner (Thackray Museum) and Nick Winterbotham (Millennium Point & Thinktank) and the other speakers are Beth Hawkins, Katie Maggs, Francis Neary, Pete Starling, Sarah Jones, Joe Cain, Kate Reeder, Carolyn Ware, Beamish Martin Warren, Pauline Webb, and Sue Weir.

The organisers don’t have a website, but you can probably contact the meeting coordinator, Steph Gillett, for further info at steph.gillett@btinternet.com or call him at +44 01793 845910.

(thanks to Simon Chaplin and MUSHM-LINK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK)

One of the problems of growing older is that all exciting mind-expanding conferences these days seem to be arranged exclusively for phd’s and postdocs! Like this summer school meeting on the history of medical imaging from the Renaissance to present times, organised by the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick University 7-11 July 2008:

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