Evelyn Fox Keller: culture/biology at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver ScienceOnline’s latest event

I finally got the location for Evelyn Fox Keller’s upcoming April 4, 2013 visit to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. I had hoped to get an email interview with her but she didn’t have the time. I assume that visiting both the University of Alberta (April 2, 2013) and the University of Calgary (April 1, 2013) just prior to UBC is the cause for this lack of time. For interested parties, I have more details about Keller and the other visits in my Mar. 14, 2013 posting.

Without any more ado (from the Situating Science event page for Evelyn Fox Keller: What Kind of Divide Separates Biology from Culture?),

University of British Columbia
Date:
Thu., Apr. 4, 5:00 PM – , 6:30 PM

What Kind of Divide Separates Biology from Culture?
Evelyn Fox Keller, History and Philosophy of Science, MIT
April 4 2013 5pm (refreshments at 4:30)
Room 130, Liu Institute, 6476 NW Marine Drive [emphasis mine]

There are directions (bus, car, and more) for the Liu Institute here.

An April 9, 2013 meeting of the Vancouver ScienceOnline group (they seem to have changed their website location and possibly their name) features an event titled, Adding your science to the online community,

How do you respond to an online scientific misconception? At first I thought this was a bit of a weird topic to be discussing within the ScioVan [ScienceOnline Vancouver] community, but during a long night with Susan (Vickers) and Catherine (Anderson) we [including Anne Steino] kept coming up with new dilemmas revolving around online responses.

For example: What if your distant family member posts a scientific myth on facebook? Should you correct them, and if yes, should you do it on facebook for everyone to see or in a private email? It turns out, we often keep quiet for the sake of harmony, but are we selling out our own principles? As science communicators we pray at the altar of helping people understand science. However, when it comes to correcting friends and family, we often hesitate. Why do we not hold our nearest and dearest to the same standard as “the rest of the world”? Maybe there’s a lesson to learn here. Maybe our way of communicating science has a high likelihood of alienating the people we are trying to reach. And maybe we don’t realize this when it comes to strangers, because we are less concerned with their opinion of us. However, when it comes to people close to us we often hear a small voice in our head going “perhaps this is not going to make everyone thank me for the clarification but instead make them really annoyed.” Does that mean that our way of communicating is not working in general or is it only true in our inner circles? Would it be a good idea to always imagine that you were talking to a distant cousin before embarking on an online scientific discussion?

In common with many of this group’s previous events, the talk will take place on a Tuesday,

April 9, 2013 at 7 pm

Science World at TELUS World of Science
1455 Quebec Street, Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Z7

You can find maps and parking here.

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