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  Place : Carmen de la Victoria, University of Granada   Date : 21-23 rd September 2022   Modality: Onsite meeting   Deadline for proposals : 30 May 2022 Organisers: Research Project: “HAMBRUNA. The Spanish Famine: Causes, Development, Consequences and Memory (1939-1952), Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness ( Ref. PID2019-109470GB-I00 ), Department of Contemporary History of the University of Granada; Research Network “Standards of living, health, nutrition and inequality” ( NISALdes ) (Ref. RED2018-102413-T); Research Project “The Silenced Famine of Francoism (1939-1952)”, 2020 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation; and Heritages of Hunger Project ( web ).   More   information:   https://bit.ly/3tKwTq4

  FEM ciència?, propostes de la SCHCT per repensar el feminisme, la història i la cultura científica ( https://blogs.iec.cat/schct/ fem-ciencia/ ) Entrevista a Francesca Bray: “Almost none of our categories is actually universal and none of our dynamics is inevitable.” En aquesta entrevista parlarem amb Francesca Bray sobre la història de la tecnologia amb una mirada decolonial i sensible al gènere. https://youtu.be/4rg8US0S7Vo Francesca Bray és historiadora i antropòloga de la ciència i la tecnologia i professora emèrita d’antropologia social a la University of Edinburgh. Ha estat durant 5 anys la presidenta de la Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) i ha rebut premis destacables com la Medalla Leonardo da Vinci. En la seva extensa trajectòria ha publicat nombrosos llibres i articles amb temàtiques que van des de la història crítica de la ciència i la tecnologia de Xina,   a la micro i macropolítica de la tecnologia agrícola del món contemporani i a l’ant...

A epidemia de covid-19 intensificou, nos países em desenvolvimento, profundas desigualdades sociais, espostas oficiais insuficientes e debates acalorados sobre o corpo humano, a doença e a prevenção, aos quais convergiram a ciência e a política. Ainda assim, revelou a coexistência de graves precariedades, tensões e resiliências nos sistemas de saúde. Isso foi particularmente intenso na América Latina, região que tem uma marcada trajetória nesses problemas, que, durante boa parte de 2020 e 2021, foi o epicentro mundial do covid-19 (fosse pelo maior número de casos, pela maior letalidade ou pelo percentual mais elevado de infectados na população).  A região também foi palco de casos extremos como o abandono de doentes e cadáveres (por exemplo, os corpos deixados nas ruas de Guayaquil e os enterros em massa em Manaus no início de 2020); de respostas governamentais acusadas de grave negligência e genocídio (como no Brasil de Jair Bolsonaro); de hospitais sobrecarregados e escassos recu...

An important part of the contemporary debate on human nature was shaped by debates taking place in early modern Europe in the attempt to remove the animal part of the human mind by turning it into an abstract monad while converting the body into a machine. Humans gained the promise of certain and universal knowledge ( mathesis universalis ) but began thinking of themselves as automata, bereft of individuality and real agency. Much of the questions raised back then resonate with us still nowadays:   Is human nature something immutable or is it the product of history and social conventions? Do humans even have a nature? And what does it mean for humans to have a nature and to what extent does biology condition what we are? Is it desirable to use technology to enhance the desirable characteristics of the human species? What instruments, images, analogies, models and literary strategies were used to further such a project? How does the e...

‘Medieval science’ is a fascinating object of study, both when viewed as a historical precondition of the rise of ‘modern science’, and when studied because its instances provide important examples of significantly different, yet highly sophisticated ways of thinking. However, those who wish to study particular instances of ‘medieval science’ in light of general philosophical reflections on science from the Middle Ages will not find much help in the recent literature: no general history of developments and shifts in medieval ‘theories of science’ is available, a state of affairs lamented already more than 50 years ago by Laurens Laudan, and again recently by Ana María Mora-Márquez. Detailed and systematic studies on medieval ‘theories of science’ are, thus, scarce. This is regrettable as a robust evaluation of ‘medieval science’ will, at least in its details, depend on the precise shape which ‘theories of science’ took in the Middle Ages. We adopt here a very broad and inclusive workin...

D esde principios de este mes y hasta el 31 de marzo próximo está abierto el plazo para el envío de la documentación para optar a los diferentes premios que otorga cada año la Sociedad Española de Historia de la Medicina a los mejores trabajos académicos de tema histórico-médico:   el premio Hernández Morejón a la mejor tesis doctoral y los premios al mejor Trabajo de Fin de Grado y al mejor Trabajo de Fin de Máster.  Este año podrán optar todos los que se han defendido durante el año natural de 2021. Más información en la página web de la SEHM:  https://sehm.es/ premiosshem/

  Workshop at the University of Edinburgh, 16 & 17 June 2022.   Organised by the ERC-funded project The Epidemy, A History of Epidemiological Reasoning ( http://epidemy.org  )   Models have guided the Covid-19 pandemic response with unprecedented authority. While many predictions over the last 20 months have been subject to heated controversy, modelling seemingly has no credible challengers in the guidance of pandemic politics. But the success story of infectious disease modelling far exceeds the horizon of the ongoing pandemic and is deeply interwoven with central  aspects of the history of science and medicine across the twentieth century. Why has understanding the dynamics of epidemics assumed primacy over the comprehensive precision of empirical inputs? How has mathematical modelling of infectious diseases moved to the forefront of public health expertise to become a globally trusted resource? Under what circumstances have the theoretical claims made wit...

July 15-16, 2022, University College London (in person) Vanessa da Silva Baptista (University College London) and Dr Eveline Szarka (University College London / Harvard University) Application Deadline: 31 March 2022 This two-day conference, funded by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at UCL, exploits the ambiguous meaning of the term “recreation” to bring together two important but disparate themes in the current scholarship of medieval and early modern recipe literature: the experimental turn centred the reproduction of scientific, craft, and household recipes, and studies highlighting how the playfulness of scientific activities contributed to contemporary scientific developments. Science is often associated with professionalism and seriousness. It is frequently forgotten that many scholars and non-scholars alike carry out playful science experiments as a form of recreation or entertainment. This was especially true for the late medieval and early modern period, when peo...

  We invite proposals for a collection of essays on the ways in which contemporary art and heritage practices have been engaging with forms of nineteenth-century immersive spectacle. The parallels between the technological transformation of our own time and the experiments of the early nineteenth century have long been noted and the origins of twenty-first-century immersive experiences are arguably traceable to that earlier period. In recent years, artists have revisited nineteenth-century visual presentations such as the 360-degree panorama, while museums and heritage sites have experimented with various types of virtual environments as a way to bring the past alive for modern audiences. We welcome contributions that explore and interrogate the ways in which these interventions reinterpret nineteenth-century visual technologies. The edited volume will appear as a special issue of the online peer-reviewed journal  19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century ....

The Past, Present, and Future of Scientific Instrument Studies http://sic2022.hpdst.gr/ We will take the 40th anniversary of the Scientific Instrument Symposia as an occasion to discuss how the study of scientific instruments has changed in the last four decades and where we stand today. Are we now studying different kinds of instruments? Has the very definition of what is a scientific instrument changed? Are we studying the same instruments in a different way and within different contexts? How have the questions we seek to answer and our methodologies changed? What about our disciplinary and regional boundaries? While it comes natural for a historian to historicise their own past, we should think in the same way about the future of scientific instrument studies. What are our new objects and objectives? While we are comfortable as a community of scientific instrument enthusiasts, we want to remain open to new scholars, new methods and new approaches to instruments, and aim to extend ou...

  The British Society for the History of Mathematics is holding a meeting on History of Mathematics and Flight on 2nd July 2022 at the Concorde Centre at Manchester Airport. Flight will be broadly conceived to cover the flight of man-made objects (planes, missiles, arrows, balloons etc), birds, insects, and even fugitives, as well as flight patterns and formation, navigation and control. We are inviting presentations of up to 30 minutes. Please send proposals to Isobel Falconer  enclosing a title, brief abstract, and brief biographical notes, by 1 March.

Sixth International Undergraduate Research Conference on Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society To be held online by the University of Toronto,  March 24-25, 2022 Conference Theme: The Interaction of Science, Technology, & Medicine and Politics Keynote Speaker: Maya J. Goldenberg, Associate Professor, Philosophy, College of Arts, University of Guelph. Author of Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) It has long been thought that the relation between science and politics is an uneasy one: politics covets power, while science seeks apolitical truth. Scholars from the history, philosophy, and social studies of science have investigated the interactions between science and politics to unearth a complex web where science and politics co-evolve and are co-produced. What  interactions lead science to shape political policies, and political environments to influence science? What lies at the intersection of sci...