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Editors: Dr. Scottie Hale Buehler, University of Texas at Austin Dr. Margaret Carlyle, University of British Columbia Okanagan midwiferytechnologies@gmail.com Open Call for Papers:  We invite contributions of articles to a special journal issue focusing on the technological culture of childbirth broadly defined. We are particularly interested in how novel technologies, as well as techniques, changed birthing practices over the long term, from the Middle Ages to the present day. We welcome papers on any aspect of this material culture. This especially includes research that nuances claims of technology-as-progress or that complicates existing narratives about the man-midwife’s takeover of midwifery with the forceps. We also welcome new stories about the history of childbirth practices, women’s technological ingenuity, and the very definition of childbirth ‘technology’ itself. This issue aims to generate new discussion about the history of childbirth using material culture ...

Technology and Language   is a new peer-reviewed, open-access, professionally produced online journal. It invites interdisciplinary explorations at the interface of technology and language. The launch issue will appear in December 2020 with programmatic contributions from philosophy of technology, linguistics, engineering, cultural and museum studies, history of technology, art history, literature and theatre studies:  https://soctech.spbstu.ru/en/issue/1/ Chief science editor:  Alfred Nordmann  (Institut für Philosophie, Technische Universität Darmstadt) This is a call for papers for the special theme of the 2021-issue of  Technology and Language .  Technology and the Media Environment of the Information Society (Deadline:  June 21st, 2021 ) Social networks and communication systems, new modes of reading and writing, the hybridization of symbolic codes stand for the disruptive  effects of digital and cyber-technologies on pr...

Deadline for abstracts: Friday, April 30, 2021 In a new study on representations of children and childhood, we are seeking essays that explore the theme of undeadness as it applies to cultural constructions of the child. The undead in popular culture commonly refers to the living dead monsters of horror and mad science that transgress the borders between life and death, rejuvenation and decay. For our purposes, undeadness is a broad concept that explores how people, objects, customs and ideas deemed lost or consigned to the past might endure in the present. When undeadness is applied to the child, an array of interpretive possibilities emerge. These might include nostalgic texts exploring past incarnations of childhood, mementos of childhood (hair, teeth, clothes, art and craft, games, photographs, audio and video recordings), images and artefacts of deceased children, as well as states of arrested development and an inability or refusal to embrace adulthood.  In our appli...

Eds.: Nassim W. Balestrini, Julia Hoydis, Anna-Christina Kainradl, Ulla Kriebernegg In recent decades, the humanities have witnessed the development of two interdisciplinary fields that tackle challenges for present and future generations: by exploring cultural representations of crisis and change, Aging Studies and Ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Their emancipatory research agendas challenge hegemonic discourses from the areas of science and medicine. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks (e.g., Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, or Posthumanism) and scrutinize ‘boundary texts’ in different literary genres (novels such as P. D. James’s  The Children of Men  [1992] and Margaret Atwood’s  Maddaddam  Trilogy [2007-2014], or Lucy Kirkwood’s...

The 118th annual conference of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) will be held from Thursday, November 11, to Sunday, November 14, 2021, at the Sahara Las Vegas Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. Strategies for Teaching Climate Change in the First-Year Writing Classroom: This session investigates the teaching of climate change themes, focusing on the first-year writing classroom. It will invite instructors whose courses have incorporated these themes to share their pedagogical strategies with those who are new to the use of climate change themes or who would like to improve their existing pedagogy. Both students and instructors show interest in exploring climate change themes in the writing classroom, but instructors often seem daunted by the topic’s complexity and by the prospects for incorporating its themes into more general writing instruction. On the other hand, students, non-science majors in particular, may be challenged by the venture into unfamiliar t...

Every year, the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA) in Halle (Saale), Germany, offers research fellowships for the study of the Enlightenment. These fellowships give young researchers and experienced scholars alike the opportunity to spend two to three months working in optimal conditions on a theme broadly related to the field of Enlightenment Studies. Among other opportunities, fellows will have the possibility to use the Centre’s library and its numerous primary and secondary sources and to get in touch with experts in the field of Enlightenment Studies working at the centre. The fellowships are generously funded by the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture (Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur). Available Fellowships:  2 fellowships for scholars from Germany and abroad for a two month research stay in Halle Stipend: € 3,600 (in total) 1 fellowship for PhD students from Germany and abroad for ...

T he Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry invites submissions for the 12th Annual Postgraduate Workshop, to be held on June 3-4, 2021, 10am – 2pm EST.  The deadline for submissions is  February 15th , 2021.  Please send a 200-300 word proposal along with your CV to SHAC Student Representative Alison McManus.  This year’s theme is “ Secrets of Matter, Matters of Secrecy: Concealing (al)chemical Knowledge from Ciphers to the Military Industrial Complex ”. The keynote speakers are Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto) and Nancy Langston (Michigan Technical University). More information can be found  here . Organizers: Alison McManus, PhD Candidate, Princeton University Program in the History of Science Sarah Hijmans, PhD Candidate, Université Paris Diderot Sarah Lang, PhD Candidate, Karl-Franzens-Universität Gra

ETH Turing Centre, Zurich, Switzerland Website:  https://hapoc2021.sciencesconf .org Email:  hapoc2021@sciencesconf.org While computing appears as a technological and scientific field in constant progression, our conception and knowledge of computers are also subject to change over time. In particular, digital machines of the 20th century were inspired by the biological individual, replacing with a solipsistic mental view the cultural and social aspects attached to the image of machines in the 19th century. However, the growing cultural import of computing practices has become ever more pressing in our days in all dimensions of social life. Not only have cultural phenomena increasingly become the object of computational analysis, but computational practices have also proved inseparable from the cultural environment in which they evolve. Therefore, it is urgent to critically address the entanglement of computing practices w...

We are pleased to invite proposals for presentations at an online workshop to be held 29–30 April 2021 on the topic of Marriages, Couples, and the Making of Mathematical Careers. This workshop proposes to explore the role of marriage and other domestic partnerships in the lived practice and constructed memory of mathematics. Though mathematicians are often imagined as the quintessential solitary researchers, many have managed the daily routines of a mathematical career through partnership with a spouse who was intimately involved in their working life or the posthumous construction of their legacy. Whilst marriage is certainly not the unique social form such collaboration can take, it does offer an especially clear window on the unstable boundaries dividing labour into the intellectual and the domestic, the masculinized and the feminized, the credited and the unacknowledged. We welcome proposals exploring any aspect of intimate partnerships in the history of mathematics. We are especia...

A fully-funded PhD studentship is available at the University of Warwick’s Department of History, in collaboration with the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and the Royal Botanic Gardens, through the AHRC’s Science Museums and Archives Consortium Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Scheme. Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship exploring the role of the West India Regiments in projects of circum-Atlantic colonial science, particularly exploration, botany and ethnology, in the nineteenth-century British Empire. Sitting at the interface of histories of science, empire and the military, the project also seeks to contribute to the ‘decolonisation’ of scholarly collections and academic knowledge. This is because the West India Regiments occupy a unique place in the history of British Empire in that they were a regular part of the British army but were almost entirely comprised of men of African descent. The PhD studentship is funded ...