CfP: "Science in Humanities, Humanities in Science: Embedded Connections"

Typically, the relationship between STEM fields and humanities fields gets discussed in terms of observation, exchange, and travel. From the outside looking in, specialists in the humanities scrutinize and critique the questions, methods, or conclusions of the sciences, and vice versa. Specialists from the sciences may borrow from, visit, or embed themselves in the humanities, or vice versa. Interdisciplinary and transnational initiatives coax specialists of all sorts out of their disciplinary territories to examine and address complex problems together.

This Cain Conference brings together scholars and practitioners who, on their own and in their collaborations, have consciously developed, deployed, or critiqued such embedded connections, cultivating and interrogating the humanistic dimension of STEM and heed for the STEM that’s within the humanities in pursuit of scholarly, advocacy, and/or business goals. It also brings together historians and social scientists of science, technology, medicine, and environment who have studied how such embedded thinking-otherwise has worked within different disciplinary (or non-disciplinary!) institutions and intellectual cultures, past and present.

What can specialists in humanities fields learn from how specialists in STEM disciplines understand and go about humanistic thinking, and vice-versa? What can those “moonlighting” in this fashion learn through putting their methods side by side with those of specialists? Are “STEM” and “humanities” accurate or useful shorthands for the kinds of thinking in question? How do practitioners in intrinsically multi-modal fields rework humanistic and technical thinking in bringing them together? What makes individual and collaborative work of this sort succeed or fail – and what are the standards for judging? Interdisciplinarity is often prescribed as a therapeutic for the tunnel-vision by which disciplinary methods can end up working against their putative goals. Yet thinking that follow embedded connections, too, may trip over its own feet. Such pairings of goals and perverse consequences (or sometimes consequences and perverse goals!) will serve as organizing themes for this workshop.

These four themes are:

- Care and harm

- Immediacy and deferral

- Recovery and waste

- Stability and crisis

The conference will take place in person in Philadelphia at the Science History Institute

The Call for Papers is also available in greater details here: https://www.sciencehistory.org/sites/default/files/embedded_connections_call_for_papers.pdf

Feel free to share it widely, with anyone you think might be interested. Note that the deadline is by April 1, 2023, and that proposals should be submitted to embeddedconnections@sciencehistory.org, indicating which one or two themes your presentation would align with.

For any questions, please contact Charlotte A. Abney Salomon, Ph.D., Associate Director, Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry.