Call for papers for a new collection of essays: “Second Nature: Reproduction and the Artificial in Art, Science and New Media”

This anthology of essays seeks to explore technologies of reproduction in a time when concepts like ‘original’ and ‘origin’ are profoundly unsettled by notions of ‘copy’ and ‘reiteration’. One key aim is to investigate the many parallels and intersections between digital reproduction and human reproduction, curiously neglected in most discussions of reproductive technologies. The anthology will also investigate our continuing attraction to both innovation and the copy, the virus, the sample, and the clone, exploring the dialectic between design intentionality and randomising systems of chance, and the challenge these pose to interpretation and evaluation in contemporary art and design, aesthetic criticism and cultural theory. Read More

UMAC’s (University Museums and Collections) årsmøde i Uppsala i sidste uge (se programmet her) var en flad oplevelse. Nu var jeg i og for sig kun med i 1½ dag (torsdag og fredag e.m.), men jeg har svært at forestille mig at de øvrige dage var meget anderledes. Ingen interessante ideer, ingen interessante spørgsmål og et intellektuelt debatniveau, der kunne rummes på en lillefingernegl. Jeg fik fornemmelsen af mangel på entusiasme, andet end at få lov at komme på en konference på den anden side af jorden. Det virker som om UMAC mest handler om at sætte universitetsmuseer på den politiske dagsorden. Det hjalp selvfølgelig heller ikke på mit indtryk af foretagendet, at der godt nok var en række tilhørere som rakte hånden op efter mit foredrag om MedMus-konceptet, men at ordstyreren afbrød efter kun to spørgsmål med henvisning til at vi skulle holde en programsat 30 minutter lang kaffepause, selv om vi var kommet tilbage efter 2 ½times frokostpause lige før mit foredrag. “Paphoved” sagde jeg, og det forstod han heldigvis ikke.

At skrive (konference-)abstracts er en avanceret kunstart. Her er nogle gode råd (taget fra www.sfedit.net): Read More

Here is the announcement for International Society for Intellectual History’s conference “Museum Narratives and Representations”, to be held 6-8 October, 2006 at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Museum Narratives and Representations
The aim of this international conference is to explore the institution of the museum, as well as the concept of the museum in space and time, as:

• a key intellectual device of the Enlightenment,
• a powerful political tool of the modern nation state,
• a rapidly growing industry today
• a complex analytical field.

Read More

Seminar: Access and audiences: Reaching out with medical and healthcare collections
Tuesday 18 October April 2005, 4.30 – 6.30 pm
Thackray Museum, Leeds http://www.thackraymuseum.org
Speakers: Rachel Bairsto, British Dental Association; Dawn Kemp, Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh; Fiona Elliott, Thackray Museum. Commentator: Emm Barnes, University of Manchester, Centre for HSTM
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Program for efterårets seminarrække ved Biocampus. Invitation til BioCampus Netværksmøder: Read More

The patient is a central category of recent (bio)medicine — this symposium focuses on the fragile patient, the patient as an object of biomedical science and industrialized care:

The Patient: A Symposium, Bucknell University, October 18 & 19, 2006

Precariously situated between home and hospital, work and bed, life and death, the patient occupies a liminal, unstable position. Charged to identify with her state as with the moral virtue from which she receives her name, the patient also lives in the fear of our indifference and impatience. Although attended by doctors, nurses, family and friends, her condition – particularly if it is chronic – ever threatens to sever her connections with the world and to exile her into that fundamental solitude owned by the sick and suffering.

Immersed within a society and medical system that seeks optimum outcomes linked to zero errors, the patient receives care delivered with industrial efficiency. Advances in diagnostic and therapeutic modalities provide both cure and control of chronic illness not imagined a decade ago. Poised to benefit on multiple fronts, she should be increasingly satisfied with the medical encounter; and yet, many patients feel alienated or even violated by the efficiency of the medical system. What defines a quality medical encounter from her perspective? What do medical practitioners – nurses, physicians, social workers – value in their relationship with the patient? How is this relationship preserved and nurtured? What are the opportunities or perils in the physician-patient relationship? Read More

Things are happening in the field of historiography that may have interesting consequences for the way we conceptualise the “representation” of recent biomedicine in a museum context, e.g., this conference:

Presence: A viable alternative to representation?
An international conference at Groningen University, The Netherlands Center for Metahistory Groningen (CMG), December 1 & 2, 2005

For more than thirty years now, thinking about the way we, humans, account for our past, has stood under the aegis of representationalism. In its first two decades, representationalism, inaugurated by Hayden White’s Metahistory of 1973, has been remarkably successful in questioning the realist assumptions in historiography. By now, however, it has lost much of its vigour and productivity, especially when faced with some of the more significant phenomena of the last decades’ dealings with the past (memory, lieux de mémoire, remembrance, trauma).

There are signs, however, that a new paradigm is emerging. We have boldly given a name to this emerging paradigm, we call it ‘presence’. Read More

Invitation and call for 1st annual symposium of the DK-UK Postgraduate Forum on Bio-studies: Current issues in bio-studies and society, 17th-18th November 2005, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK

This event will be the first meeting of the newly founded DK-UK Postgraduate Forum on Bio-studies. In both the United Kingdom and in Denmark, interest in the social, legal and ethical implications of developments in the biosciences has never been greater, as reflected in initiatives such as BioCampus at University of Copenhagen, BIOS at LSE, “Danish Biomedicine 1955-2005” at Medical Museion, the ESRC Genomics Network and many others.

The aim of this symposium is to focus on current issues in bio-studies in a cross cultural context in order to generate research initiatives and networking between the participants. The main themes to be explored will be Read More

Invitation from Lene Koch to the Medical Museion -group:

What: Stem cell group meets Nik Brown and Helen Busby
Where: Sofastuen, Panuminstituttet Blegdamsvej 3, 2200 N
When: September 27. 9.30 – 17 Read More