CfP: Narrating Science: The Power of Stories in the21st Century
CFP/conference: Narrating Science: The Power of Stories in the 21st Century
May 24 – 27, 2017, Toronto/University of Guelph
In
the latter decades of the twentieth century, discourses on science and
technology began to spread beyond the professional communities of
scientific experts involved in knowledge production. In the cultural
realm, we saw the rise of the “popular science” genre, of science series
and documentaries on TV, and, around the turn of the millennium, an
increase in the amount, depth, and quality of attention paid to science
in literary and mainstream fiction. At the Narrating Science conference,
we bring together scholars, scientists, and writers to compare how and
to what effect storytelling about science across a spectrum of genres
(fiction and non-fiction) and media (print and film) is engaging with
different aspects of science (concepts and facts, practice and
practitioners, institutions and societal impacts). Novelists Allegra
Goodman and Karen Jay Fowler will be joining us with a public reading
and discussion of their novels Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, and We
Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
We are interested in what
and how stories about science are contributing to understandings of
issues of societal concern (e.g. climate change, genetic engineering,
nuclear physics, evolution, concepts of cognition, pharmaceutics,
nuclear power, scientific ethics and responsibility, etc.), and in how
they reflect or embody the specifically global nature of the scientific
enterprise (the permeability of national borders to concepts,
technologies, and scientists; different cultural and national contexts
for the practice and use of science; and culture-dependent popular
perceptions of science).
If you would like to attend, check for updates about the program and registration after January 1st at www.fictionmeetscience.org.
To propose a presentation, send a description of your topic (<300
words) for a 30 minute talk, as well as professional biographical
information (<100 words) by December 9, 2016. Contributions from
across the humanities and social sciences, as well as from working
scientists, science communicators and writers are welcome, but should be
aimed at a multi-disciplinary audience.
Send queries and proposals to Susan Gaines at smgaines@uni-bremen.de.
Organized by the College of Arts, University of Guelph, Canada, and “Fiction Meets Science” (www.fictionmeetsscience.org) at the Universities of Bremen and Oldenburg, Germany.