Tag Archives: Isabelle Stengers

A sciences and humanities in Canada spring update from Situating Science

Leave a reply

For anyone unfamiliar with the Situating Science ‘cluster’ which brings together the sciences and the humanities in Canada, here’s a self-description from the Spring 2012 newsletter,

Created in 2007 with the generous funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Strategic Knowledge Cluster grant, Situating Science is a seven-year project promoting communication and collaboration among humanists and social scientists that are engaged in the study of science and technology. We operate on a hub and spoke model of six nodes spread across the country and explore a set of four interrelated themes. These are: “Science and its Publics”; “Historical Epistemology and Ontology” (including philosophy of science); “Material Culture and Scientific/ Technological Practices”; and “Geography and Sites of Knowing”.

For more information on your local “Network Node” events, video recordings and podcasts, research themes and network, please visit: www.situsci.ca.

I think the most interesting part of the newsletter was the list of upcoming events,

HOPOS 2012

The University of King’s College and Dalhousie University, institutions of the Atlantic Node, are hosting the 9th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science occurring in Halifax, June 21-24th, 2012.
Link:  http://hopos2012.philosophy.dal.ca/ 

VISITING SCHOLAR

The Cluster is pleased to announce Dr. Evelyn Fox Keller as the Cluster Visiting Scholar for 2012-13. Details will be available in coming weeks on our website.

WORKSHOPS

Two major Cluster workshops are planned for early summer 2013. The University of British Columbia will host “Translating Early Modern Science” while the University of Calgary will host “Where is the Laboratory Now?: ‘Representation’, ‘Intervention’ and ‘Realism’ in 19th and 20th Century Biomedical Sciences”.

CONFERENCES

York University will host the Cluster conference on the theme of Material Culture and Scientific / Technological Practices in the summer of 2013. Details will be available in coming months on our website.  

A conference on the theme of “Scientific Communication and its Publics” is being planned in Ottawa for the fall of 2013. The event, co-organized with the Institute of Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa (ISSP) and the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) will provide a unique opportunity and platform on which to follow up Cluster activities over the years.  Details will be available in coming months on our website.

I imagine Evelyn Fox Keller’s impending visit is causing great excitement. She is a professor emerita in MIT ‘s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Science, Technology, and Society Program and considered a groundbreaking academic. From her webpage on the MIT website,

Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, Emerita (STS)

Evelyn Fox Keller received her B.A. from Brandeis University (Physics, 1957) and her Ph.D. from Harvard University (Physics, 1963). She came to MIT from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric, History, and Women’s Studies (1988-1992). Professor Keller has taught at Northeastern University, S.U.N.Y. at Purchase, and New York University. She has been awarded numerous academic and professional honors, including most recently the Blaise Pascal Research Chair by the Préfecture de la Région D’Ile-de-France for 2005–07, which she spent in Paris, and elected membership in the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Science. In addition, Professor Keller serves on the editorial boards of various journals including the Journal of the History of Biology and Biology and Philosophy.

Keller’s research focuses on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science. She is the author of several books, including A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983), Reflections on Gender and Science (1985), The Century of the Gene (2000), and Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines(2002). Her most recent book, The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture, is now in press.

That listing of upcoming events gives you a sense of the Situating Science cluster’s scope. Luckily, there are many podcasts and blogs of previous events so you can catch up on anything you may have missed. Here’s a listing of some of the latest presentations which have been made available,

Isabelle Stenger’s “Cosmopolitics: Learning to Think with Sciences, Peoples and Natures”:
Link:
Paul Thompson’s “Ethical Issues in Agriculture: Organic, Locavore and Genetic Modification”
Link:
Gordon McOuat’s keynote address in India for “Sciences and Narratives of Nature: East and West” workshop entitled “Orientalism in Science Studies: Should We Worry?”  (podcast in process)
Link:

Owen Flanagan Jr’s “The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized”
Link:
Charis Thompson’s keynote for the “Politics of Care in Technoscience” workshop entitled “The Politics of Care: Beyond Altruism and Anonymity in Biomedical Donation”
Link:

Bernie Lightman’s NS Institute of Science address “Communicating Knowledge to New Audiences: Victorian Popularizers of Science”
Link:

Enjoy!

Carbon nanotubes, neurons, and spinal cords (plus a brief plug for the Isabelle Stengers talk being livestreamed today)

2 Replies

Mention scaffolds, nanotechnology, and cells and I think of tissue engineering. Michael Berger’s March 2, 2012 Spotlight essay, Exploring the complexity of nanomaterial-neural interfaces, on Nanowerk mentions all three. From the essay,

Carbon nanotubes, like the nervous cells of our brain, are excellent electrical signal conductors and can form intimate mechanical contacts with cellular membranes, thereby establishing a functional link to neuronal structures. …

Now, researchers have, for the first time, explored the impact of carbon nanotube scaffolds on multilayered neuronal networks. Up to now, all known effects of carbon nanotubes on neurons – namely their reported ability to potentiate neuronal signaling and synapses – have been described in bi-dimensional cultured networks where nanotube/neuron hybrids were developed on a monolayer of dissociated brain cells.

In their work, a team of scientists in Italy, led by professors Maurizio Prato and Laura Ballerini, used slices from the spinal cords of mice to model multilayer-tissue complexity. They interfaced these spinal segments to multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) scaffolds for weeks at a time to see whether and how the interactions at the monolayer level are translated to multilayered nerve tissues.

I found this part of the explanation a little easier to understand,

According to the team, interfacing spinal cord explants [cells removed from living tissue and cultivated in artificial media] to purified carbon nanotubes over a longer period (weeks) induces two major effects: First, the number and length of neuronal fibers outgrowing the spinal segment increases, associated with changes in growth cone activity and in fiber elastomechanical properties. And, secondly, the researchers point out that after weeks of MWCNT  interfacing, neurons located at as far as five cell layers from the substrate display an increased efficacy in synaptic responses – which could represent either an improvement or a pathological behavior – presumably mediated by ongoing plasticity driven by the neuron/MWCNT hybrids.

If this increased efficacy in synaptic responses should represent an improvement, it suggests to me that it could be helpful with spinal cord injuries at some point. The researchers themselves are not speculating that far into the future (from the Berger essay),

They [Prato and Ballerini] note that this is important because it exploits the design of artificial micro- and nanoscale devices that cooperate with neuronal network activity, thereby creating hybrid structures able to cross the barriers between artificial devices and neurons.

Taken in conjunction with today’s (March 5, 2012) earlier posting (Carbon and neural implants), it seems that there is a great deal of work being done to integrate ‘machine’ and flesh so we achieve machine/flesh. While I don’t believe that philosopher and chemist Isabelle Stengers will be addressing those specific issues in her  talk, Cosmopolitics, being livestreamed here later today (3:30 pm PST) from Halifax (Nova Scotia), she does touch on this,

Professor Stengers’ keynote address will examine sciences and the consequences of what has been called progress. Is it possible to reclaim modern practices, to have them actively taking into account what they felt entitled to ignore in the name of progress? Or else, can they learn to “think with” instead of define and judge?  [emphasis mine]

I don’t know what she means by ‘think with’ but it strikes me that it represents a significant shift of thought as it implies a relationship that is not separated (or bounded) in the ways we have traditionally observed. Defining and judging are made possible by the notion of separation (boundaries); machine and flesh have been viewed from the perspective of boundaries and separation; machine/flesh seems more like ‘thinking with’.

Cosmopolitics and Isabelle Stengers on March 5, 2012

Leave a reply

Lucky us tfor living in an age where we can ‘attend’ a live keynote talk by Isabelle Stengers, a renowned philosopher and trained chemist, taking place thousands of miles away (for most of us) in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Here’s the notice about the talk from the Situating Science Cluster announcement,

COSMOPOLITICS: LEARNING TO THINK WITH SCIENCES, PEOPLES AND NATURES

Keynote presentation of the “To See Where It Takes Us” conversation series …
MONDAY MARCH 5, 2012
7:30PM AST (6:30PM EST)
SCOTIABANK THEATRE, SOBEY BUILDING, SAINT MARY’S UNIVERSITY
903 ROBIE ST. HALIFAX, NS

…
Professor Stengers’ keynote address will examine sciences and the consequences of what has been called progress. Is it possible to reclaim modern practices, to have them actively taking into account what they felt entitled to ignore in the name of progress? Or else, can they learn to “think with” instead of define and judge?

Trained as a chemist, Professor Stengers received the grand prize for philosophy from the Académie Française and has collaborated and published with, among others, Nobel Prize winning chemist Ilya Prigogine and renowned sociologist of science Bruno Latour. Her books include: Order out of Chaos (with I. Prigogine), A History of Chemistry (with B. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent), Power and Invention, The Invention of Modern Science, Cosmopolitics I & II, Capitalist Sorcery (with Philipple Pignarre), and Thinking with Whitehead.

For those of us on the west coast of North America, the talk will be taking place at 3:30 pm PST (11:30 pm GMT) and we can watch the event in real time here: http://www.livestream.com/SITUSCI on Monday, March 5, 2012.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in Halifax next week (March 5 – 9, 2012), Stengers will be involved in a series of ‘conversations’. From the Situating Science Stengers events page here’s a little more about Stengers and the event titled, To See Where It Takes Us,

Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Dr. Stengers has for some 30 years offered one of the most thorough and tenacious reconsiderations of the history and practice of sciences. For Stengers, the sciences and their objects (or their natures), and our human involvements with these are situated in a continuously fluid relationship or “ecology”. Sciences, natures and peoples, therefore, should be seen as engaged in “conversations with” one another rather than as wholly separated. Hence the allusion to “cosmopolitics” in Stengers’ work.

These conversations raise crucial questions about the status of our obligations with knowledges of “the world” as we variously know it and participate in it.  The week of colloquia is set up, therefore, as a series of conversations, “to see where it takes us”.

The schedule and locations for the conversations are on the Stengers events page.