Announcements
A collection of STS news items, in the order submitted, including grants and awards, new books and other publications, and people news.
Last updated 05/17/2012 by Jay Burlingham.
EASST is seeking nominations for 3 new awards to celebrate collaborative activity
Deadline: June 30 2012
easst.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/The-EASST-Awards-revised-version-April-2012.pdf
Updated: May 17 2012
Awards (of 1,000 Euros in each case) will be made at the Copenhagen Conference in October 2012. EASST is seeking nominations (deadline 30th June 2012) for these awards relating to activities or publications in the time period 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2012.
In honour of Olga Amsterdamska, an award will be made for a significant creative collaboration in an edited book in the broad field of science and technology studies.
In honour of Chris Freeman, an award will be made for a publication which is a significant collective contribution to the interaction of science and technology studies with the study of innovation.
In honour of John Ziman, an award will be made for a significant innovative cooperation in a venture to promote the public understanding of the social dimensions of science.
EASST is seeking nominations – including self-nominations – by 30th June 2012 for these awards relating to activities or publications in the time period 1 July 2010 to 30 June 2012. Full information on these awards is available from the homepage of the EASST website (www.easst.net) . Nominations must be made following the procedure specified there and using the downloadable nomination form.
Any questions to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
British Society for the History of Science Great Exhibitions Prize 2012
Deadline: September 01 2012
www.bshs.org.uk/great-exhibitions
Updated: May 17 2012
The BSHS Outreach and Education Committee is pleased to announce its second ‘Great Exhibitions’ competition, kindly funded by the B.Gee bequest. The 2010 competition (www.bshs.org.uk/2010-great-exhibitions-competition-winner-3) was won by Museo Galileo (www.museogalileo.it/en/index.html) in Florence, with the Thackray Museum (www.thackraymuseum.org/) in Leeds taking second place for their exhibition “How William Astbury’s X-Ray Vision Changed the World”. A pdf version of the competition poster is available for download in small (www.bshs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/GE-poster-2012-small.pdf) and large (www.bshs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/GE-poster-2012.pdf) versions.
Eligibility:
The competition is open for any public exhibition that deals with the history of science or the history of medicine. Entries are welcome from institutions in any country and exhibits may be permanent or temporary. Eligible exhibits must use artefacts or places of some kind and this may include buildings or locations, pictures, instruments, objects and books. Web-exhibits are not eligible for the prize. The closing date is 1st September 2012 and exhibits should still be available for viewing until the end of November 2012. There will be two prizes of £300, one for large and one for small exhibitions. The winning exhibit will be the subject of a special feature in the BSHS’s Viewpoint magazine (www.bshs.org.uk/publications/viewpoint).
Criteria:
The main criterion for judging this prize is the audience’s experience and therefore the judges will consider:
1. Clarity – is the purpose or aim of this exhibit clear? Has it clearly identified what it wants to tell the audience about the history of science or medicine? Is it easy to follow?
2. Design – is the exhibit attractive and engaging? What makes this exhibit stand out from other exhibits?
3. Learning – what sort of story does this exhibit tell about the history of science or medicine? Does it cater for its intended audience well? How accessible is the exhibit to a range of different audiences?
4. Originality – does the exhibit avoid cliché? Does it present the audience with something new? Does it challenge preconceptions?
Judging:
Please submit an entrance form [Word doc] (www.bshs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Great-Exhibitions-entrance-form-2012.doc) and supporting materials by 1st September 2012 to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or Dr Sabine Clarke, History Department, Vanbrugh College, University of York, Heslington York YO10 5DD, United Kingdom. Supporting materials can either be up to 8 photographs of the exhibition or a 5 minute video. Whenever possible the judges shall visit the exhibition or nominate a member of the Society to do so. Any further queries should be addressed to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Nominations for James J. Bradley Distinguished Service Award, Society of Automotive Historians
Deadline: August 01 2012
Updated: May 17 2012
Have You Thanked a Librarian Lately? You can with a nomination for the James J. Bradley Distinguished Service Award! Every year, the Society of Automotive Historians honors the work of libraries and archives whose mission is to preserve motor vehicle resource materials.
The nomination is due 1 August 2012. The award will be presented at the SAH annual banquet at the Hershey Country Club on 12 October 2012 during the AACA Eastern Fall Meet at Hershey, PA.
To nominate a deserving library or archives, go to www.autohistory.org or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for a copy of the nomination form. Send the completed Bradley Award nomination form to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) . Don’t worry if you can’t fill out all of the form. Do as much as you can.
The 2011 winner was the Jaguar Heritage Trust in Coventry, England. A list of previous Bradley Award winners can be found on www.autohistory.org.
Bradley Award committee members include Ed Garten, Mark Patrick, and Jim Wagner. Judith E. Endelman, chair, Bradley Award Committee.
Sacknoff Prize for Space History
Deadline: June 10 2012
www.spacebusiness.com/quest/prize
Updated: May 17 2012
The deadline for the 2012 Sacknoff Prize for Space History is rapidly approaching. The prize is designed to encourage students to perform original research and submit papers with history of spaceflight themes. The annual award, consisting of: a $300 cash prize, a trophy, and the possible publication in the journal, “Quest: The History of Spaceflight”, is open to undergraduate and graduate level students enrolled at an accredited college or university. Submissions must be postmarked by 10 June 2012 with the winners announced in August. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words, be written in English, and emphasize in-depth research, with adequate citations of the sources utilized. Originality of ideas is important. Diagrams, graphs, images, or photographs may be included. The prize committee will include the editor of “Quest: The History of Spaceflight” and members of the Society for the History of Technology /Aerospace Committee (SHOT/Albatross).
Although works must be historical in character, they can draw on disciplines other than history, eg. cultural studies, literature, communications, economics, engineering, science, etc. Comparative or international studies of the history of spaceflight are encouraged. Possible subjects include, but are not limited to, historical aspects of space companies and their leaders; the social effects of spaceflight; space technology development; the space environment; space systems design, engineering, and safety; and the regulation of the space business, financial, and economic aspects of the space industry.
In 2011, the prize was won by Megan Ansdell of George Washington University for her paper, “Language Protocols in International Human Spaceflight.”
Additional details on the prize can be found at www.spacebusiness.com/quest/prize A fly.er can be printed from www.spacebusiness.com/quest/prize.pdf If yo.u have any questions, contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
New Book by Eden Medina: Cybernetic Revolutionaries
mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12716
Updated: April 18 2012
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (2011, MIT Press)
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics.
Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies.
Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.
Eden Medina is Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University Bloomington.
Reviews
"... would Cybersyn be democratic? Eden Medina's study of the project is fascinating throughout but it derives most value from this question. Cybersyn is a case study of the Janus face of information technology: its ability to facilitate both dispersed democracy and centralised, undemocratic command and control... [It is] a wonderful, accessible book, a thorough examination of a project that generally serves as an enigmatic aside in other histories. At times it's quite a romp..." —Icon magazine, April 2012
Comments
“Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of cybernetics or the intersection of computer technology and politics.”
—Howard Rheingold, critic and author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
“This wonderful book explores cybernetics in Allende's Chile. In so doing, it blends social and technical issues with large scale economic planning and the dynamic politics of the time. It is a must-read for anyone interested in this era, and for anyone interested in the incorporation of science and technology studies into historical and political discourse.”
—Geoffrey C. Bowker, Professor and Senior Scholar in Cyberscholarship, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh
“Though we forget it at our peril, cybernetics has always been a science of control as well as communication. Medina's riveting history returns us to a moment when computers promised to liberate an entire nation. It reminds us just how appealing a cybernetic utopia can be, and how impossible to achieve.”
—Fred Turner, author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Special issue, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society: “The Social Study of Corporate Science”
bst.sagepub.com/content/31/6.toc
Updated: April 18 2012
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society December 2011 31
Special Issue: The Social Study of Corporate Science
Guest editors: David Schleifer and Bart Penders
David Schleifer
Bart Penders
"Food, Drugs, and TV: The Social Study of Corporate Science"
Benjamin Gross
"The Quest for “Magnalux”: Redefining Technological Success and Failure at RCA, 1951-1956"
Mark Peter Jones
"Networked Success and Failure at Hybritech"
David Schleifer
"We Spent a Million Bucks and Then We Had To Do Something: The Unexpected Implications of Industry Involvement in Trans Fat Research"
Bart Penders
"Cool and Safe: Multiplicity in Safe Innovation at Unilever"
Sergio Sismondo
"Corporate Disguises in Medical Science: Dodging the Interest Repertoire"
Birgitte Gorm Hansen
"Beyond the Boundary: Science, Industry, and Managing Symbiosis"
Jane Bjørn Vedel and Christopher Gad
"A Public Trial De Novo: Rethinking “Industrial Interests”"
Mobility and mobile media in Brazil
Deadline: June 15 2012
www.uk.sagepub.com/msg/conv.htm#HOWTOSUBMITYOURMANUSCRIPT
Updated: April 17 2012
Edited by:Adriana de Souza e Silva (North Carolina State University)
Isabel Froes (IT University of Copenhagen)
Important dates:
Full papers: June 15th, 2012 (8000/9000 words, including references) in English.
Full papers will undergo a double blind-review process;
Submissions may be in the form of empirical research studies or theory-building papers;
Papers must also include:
a brief biography of the author(s),
250-word abstract, and
6 keywords.
Proposals and inquiries should be sent electronically to Isabel Froes (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
Early submissions are greatly appreciated!
By the second decade of the 21st century, mobile phones have reached saturation levels in many countries in the world, surpassing the number of landlines and personal computers. Although initial scholarly interest on the social use of mobile phones focused on Europe, Asia, and the United States, the impact of mobile phone on the developing world (or Global South) is increasingly evident and perhaps much more profound. For many, the mobile device is the first phone, the first internet connection, the first TV set, and the first global positioning system.
Among developing nations, Brazil is a key site for studying the social dimension of mobile technologies. The country is part of the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), an acronym that refers to fast-growing developing economies. Brazil is the fastest growing economy in Latin America, and has over 217 million mobile phones, which represents an average of 111 working devices per 100 inhabitants. The country has also experienced one of the fastest mobile phone growth rates in the world since 2005 (averaging 16.6% annually); is the largest mobile phone market in Latin America; and is the fifth-largest mobile market in the world in absolute numbers, with roughly 217 million subscriptions as of September 2011. However, numbers alone reveal little if not analyzed within a broader social, cultural, and economic framework. The focus on a homogeneous large-scale market leads to overly sanguine perspectives that often obscure how socioeconomic diversity causes and reflects mobile phone use. As in many developing countries, Brazil has astounding income gaps among different sectors of the population, which influence and are influenced by technology development and use. For example, the use of high-end services such as mobile banking, and location-based services like Foursquare and Yelp is an intrinsic part of the daily mobile practices of the high-income population in the country. Conversely, the lower-income population in Rio de Janeiro is familiar with the diretão—a mobile phone that allows users to make clandestine calls to anywhere in the world with the use of an illegal sim card. However, Brazil has also been at the forefront of an experimental and innovative approach towards new technologies, forecasted in cultural events that focus on art, music and film festivals dedicated to new and creative uses of mobile technologies, such as the Mobilefest and Arte.mov.
Despite this cultural and socio-economic diversity, and the relevance of its marketing, the social use and development of mobile phones in Brazil is largely under theorized and poorly studied. With the goal of contributing to bridge this gap, this special edition invites essays that critically investigate the inter-relations among mobile technologies, culture, and social development within the Brazilian society.
Submitted manuscripts are encouraged (but not limited) to focus on:
(1) History of mobile phones in Brazil. Essays are encouraged to explore the development of mobile phones in Brazil, comparing them to the landline infrastructure and internet growth within the Latin America socio-economic and political framework. Authors may explore the development and use of new mobile services, such as the mobile internet, text messaging, mobile apps, etc.
(2) Social uses and appropriation of mobile phones. We welcome essays as empirical or theoretical studies dealing with the use and appropriation of technology by low-income communities. Of special interest are essays that explore how mobile and wireless technologies reconfigure the life of community dwellers and how people find new and unexpected uses for existing technologies.
(3) Mobile art and games. We invite essays that investigate mobile phones as artistic and gaming interfaces, including essays that explore uses of hybrid reality, location-aware and pervasive activities in educational contexts, media arts, and gaming.
(4) Location-based services. Submitted essays should investigate the uses and development of location-based services in Brazil, such as mobile annotation, location-based social networks, and mobile mapping.
About the editors:
Adriana de Souza e Silva is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University (NCSU), affiliated faculty at the Digital Games Research Center, and Interim Associate Director of the Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) program at NCSU.Dr. de Souza e Silva's research focuses on how mobile and locative interfaces shape people's interactions with public spaces and create new forms of sociability. She teaches classes on mobile technologies, location-based games and internet studies. Dr. de Souza e Silva is the co-editor (with Daniel M. Sutko) of Digital Cityscapes—Merging digital and urban playspaces (Peter Lang, 2009), the co-author (with Eric Gordon) of the book Net-Locality: Why location matters in a networked world (Blackwell, 2011), and the co-author (with Jordan Frith) of Mobile interfaces in public spaces: Control, privacy, and urban sociability (Routledge, 2012).
Isabel Fróes has received her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Programme at New York University (NYU) and a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Pontifícia Universidade Católica, Rio de Janeiro, PUC-RJ in Brazil. She is a lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark), where she works both as a practitioner and scholar in the fields of communication, mobility, art and design. With a focus towards valuable interactions between people and technology, her research analyzes the future implications and current uses of digital media. In her courses she taps into the value of interactive elements in every arena and explores how they could affect the ways new concepts and activities are developed in distinct fields. She has presented some of these thoughts at various events such as the AAM conference (2009), and the IXDA South America (2010,2011). She has taught various courses at Danish institutions such as IT University of Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen and Kolding School of Design as well as Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Querétaro in Mexico.
Proposals and inquiries should be sent electronically to Isabel Froes (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
Special issue of journal Techne’, “Phenomenology and Classroom Computer Simulation”
Updated: April 12 2012
Techne’: Research in Philosophy and Technology
Special Issue Title: Phenomenology and Classroom Computer Simulation
Issue: 2011, 15(3)
Guest Editor: Robert Rosenberger
Contributors: Norm Friesen, Albert Borgmann, Don Ihde, Estrid Sørensen, Darin Barney, and Robert Rosenberger
In this special issue of Techne’: Research in Philosophy and Technology, contributors address the topic of computing in the classroom generally, and computer-simulated frog dissection in particular. This discussion between Norm Friesen, Albert Borgmann, Don Ihde, Estrid Sørensen, Darin Barney, and Robert Rosenberger quickly expands to include a variety of themes, including technological ethics, scientific imaging, online politics, the agency of artifacts, and animal advocacy.
New Book by Gabrielle Hecht: Being Nuclear
mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12821
Updated: March 27 2012
Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade by Gabrielle Hecht (MIT Press April 2012)
Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” (later specified as the infamous “yellowcake from Niger”). Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa’s other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something--a state, an object, an industry, a workplace--to be “nuclear.”
Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear--a state that she calls “nuclearity”--lie at the heart of today’s global nuclear order and the relationships between “developing nations” (often former colonies) and “nuclear powers” (often former colonizers). Nuclearity, she says, is not a straightforward scientific classification but a contested technopolitical one.
Hecht follows uranium’s path out of Africa and describes the invention of the global uranium market. She then enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. Doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
Gabrielle Hecht is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II and editor of Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War.
New book: Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties
www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=20163
Updated: March 20 2012
New book, edited by Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard C. Keller, Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties.
By the 1920s, psychoanalysis was a technology of both the late-colonial state and anti-imperialism. Insights from psychoanalysis shaped European and North American ideas about the colonial world and the character and potential of native cultures. Psychoanalytic discourse, from Freud’s description of female sexuality as a “dark continent” to his conceptualization of primitive societies and the origins of civilization, became inextricable from the ideologies underlying European expansionism. But as it was adapted in the colonies and then the postcolonies, psychoanalysis proved surprisingly useful for theorizing anticolonialism and postcolonial trauma.
Our understandings of culture, citizenship, and self have a history that is colonial and psychoanalytic, but, until now, this intersection has scarcely been explored, much less examined in comparative perspective. Taking on that project, Unconscious Dominions assembles essays based on research in Australia, Brazil, France, Haiti, and Indonesia, as well as India, North Africa, and West Africa. Even as they reveal the modern psychoanalytic subject as constitutively colonial, they shed new light on how that subject went global: how people around the world came to recognize the hybrid configuration of unconscious, ego, and superego in themselves and others.
Contributors: Warwick Anderson; Alice Bullard; John Cash; Joy Damousi; Didier Fassin; Christiane Hartnack; Deborah Jenson; Richard C. Keller; Ranjana Khanna; Mariano Plotkin; and Hans Pols.
“This marvelous collection maps human subjectivities as they have been reshaped by colonialism to ensure the emergence of a cosmopolitan, psychoanalytic subject and the globalization of the unconscious. Indeed, the editors and the authors propose that the myriad forms of globalization we see around us assume this new cosmopolitan self and so do the new ideas of living with cultural diversities and perhaps even dissent. Both the psychoanalytic subject and the globalized unconscious have their origins in colonial psychiatry and psychoanalysis and both now have to negotiate the diffusion and fragmentation of sovereignties in our times. Unconscious Dominions is fresh, lively and provocative and can be read as a travelogue on our incomplete journeys into our disowned selves.”—Ashis Nandy, author of The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism
New book by Thomas Hoholm, The Contrary Forces of Innovation…in the Food Industry
www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=484530
Updated: March 19 2012
New book from Thomas Hoholm, The Contrary Forces of Innovation: An Ethnography of Innovation in the Food Industry (Palgrave)
Why do innovations tend to 'explode' into multiple versions when inventors seek to realize them? Why do most innovators seem to promise too much certainty about the future? And why is it so hard for innovations to succeed in finding use and establish a market?
Thomas Hoholm presents a real-time study of the messy realm of industrial innovation. The complexity and the tensions of industrial innovation processes are fleshed out through the analysis of an intriguing case study from the food industry. By drawing together insights from innovation studies, science and technology studies, and studies of industrial networks, the controversies of innovation are investigated. Particular attention is given to the interaction between the mobilising of actors-networks and the exploration of knowledge, as well as to the interaction among the networks of interconnected processes called 'industry'.
Through an ethnographic case study of innovation between the biomarine and agricultural industries, Hoholm has followed innovation processes from idea to commercialization. His study adds to our understanding of innovation dynamics, particularly related to path creation, network friction, and the relationships between divergence and convergence in industrial innovation processes.
New Book from Paula Stephan, How Economics Shapes Science
www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674049710
Updated: March 16 2012
Paula Stephan, How Economics Shapes Science (Harvard University Press, 2012)
The beauty of science may be pure and eternal, but the practice of science costs money. And scientists, being human, respond to incentives and costs, in money and glory. Choosing a research topic, deciding what papers to write and where to publish them, sticking with a familiar area or going into something new—the payoff may be tenure or a job at a highly ranked university or a prestigious award or a bump in salary. The risk may be not getting any of that.
At a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the ongoing cost-benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation. She shows how universities offload risks by increasing the percentage of non–tenure-track faculty, requiring tenured faculty to pay salaries from outside grants, and staffing labs with foreign workers on temporary visas. With funding tight, investigators pursue safe projects rather than less fundable ones with uncertain but potentially path-breaking outcomes. Career prospects in science are increasingly dismal for the young because of ever-lengthening apprenticeships, scarcity of permanent academic positions, and the difficulty of getting funded.
Vivid, thorough, and bold, How Economics Shapes Science highlights the growing gap between the haves and have-nots—especially the vast imbalance between the biomedical sciences and physics/engineering—and offers a persuasive vision of a more productive, more creative research system that would lead and benefit the world.
New Book from Laura Stark, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research
Updated: March 16 2012
Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research
by Laura Stark (The University of Chicago Press).
Behind Closed Doors explores how rules for the treatment of “human subjects” were formalized in the United States in the decades after World War II, and how these rules play out within Institutional Review Boards today. The book reconstructs the workaday life of scientists, lawyers, administrators, and research subjects on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, where scientists and administrators first wrote rules for the treatment of human subjects as they prepared to open the NIH Clinical Center. The book argues that the model of group deliberation that gradually crystallized during this period reflected contemporary legal, as well as medical, conceptions of what it meant to be human, what political rights human subjects deserved, and which stakeholders were best suited to decide. Using the author’s observations and audio recordings of the meetings of three IRBs over the course of one year, the book explains how the historical contingencies that shaped rules for the treatment of human subjects in the postwar era guide decision-making today — within hospitals, universities, health departments, and other institutions in the United States and across the globe.
REVIEW in the journal SCIENCE (Jan 13 2012, 335 (6065):170):
“Behind Closed Doors challenges the historical mythology of bioethics… The most important contribution of this interesting, slim book is Stark’s demonstration that the conventional version of the origin of IRBs is a very partial story.
… Along with the historical account, Stark offers several chapters based on her ethnographic observation of two IRBs at different universities. Some of this interesting material contributes substantially to our understanding of how IRBs make decisions.
…Behind Closed Doors makes an important contribution to our understanding of IRBs and the ethical regulation of research.”
—Charles Lidz
COMMENTS
“Laura Stark, as her book title promises, takes us behind closed doors to better understand how IRBs do their work. Comfortable both in meeting rooms and archives, she skillfully analyzes the many barriers to the ethical and legal conduct of human experimentation. Everyone seeking to improve the system will be grateful for her insights.”
—David J. Rothman, Columbia University, author of Strangers at the Bedside
“Behind Closed Doors looks closely and candidly at the apparatus of institutional review boards and their role in creating norms and conventions of acceptable human experimentation. The writing is lucid, the analysis sharp, and the observations keen. This will be a book to be reckoned with in the decades to come.”
—Susan E. Lederer, University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Subjected to Science
“Behind Closed Doors is a novel and important addition to the literature on the governance of experimentation on human subjects. It will appeal to academic scholars in the history of science and medicine, sociology, bioethics, and postwar American history.”
—Gerald Kutcher, author of Contested Medicine: Cancer Research and the Military
Call for applications: Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry Award Schemes
Deadline: May 31 2012
www.ambix.org/
Updated: March 16 2012
The Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry invites applications for its award scheme for 2012. Two types of award are available: support for research into the history of chemistry or history of alchemy by New Scholars and support for Subject Development of either history of chemistry or history of alchemy.
The New Scholars Award is open to post-graduate students (both masters and doctoral students) and those who have obtained a PhD within five years of 1 January of the year in which the application is made. Awards of up to £1000 will be made to cover research expenses, including travel, accommodation, subsistence, the reproduction of documents, and library fees. Applications may also include the costs of reproducing images for publication. The scheme will not fund the purchase of equipment or course fees.
In addition, post-graduate students only may apply for the costs of travel to conferences and accommodation, but only in order to give a paper. The scheme will not pay conference registration fees.
Subject Developme