December 2016
Toshihiro Higuchi – Birth of the “Atomic Tuna”: Radioactive Fallout, U.S.-Japan Alliance, and the Politics of Radiological Standards in the Mid-1950s
The talk, which will serve as an introduction to my book project on worldwide contamination with radioactive fallout (currently in preparation for publication), will focus on the bilateral politics of standards for the radiological inspection of tuna as a key driver behind the rise and fall of the “atomic tuna” scare.
Find out more »Science, Technology, and Society Discussion Series – The Anthropocenic Sublime: A Critique
Although staggering, spectacular or grandiloquent, the Anthropocene concept is not a scientific discovery. It does not refer to a recent advance in our understanding of the functioning of the earth system. The Anthropocene is just a stratigraphic division period. Its strength is not conceptual, scientific or even heuristic: it is primarily aesthetic. Panelists from various scholarly disciplines will discuss.
Find out more »Mario F. Mendez – The Implications of Frontotemporal Degeneration for the Social Brain, Sociopathy, Morality and Semantics
The frontotemporal degenerations, especially behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), are disorders that target the “Social Brain” and often have a genetic basis. Humans evolved frontal and related brain mechanisms aimed at supporting social groups, and this Social Brain is the focus of FTD. The consequences of disease in these areas range from violations of social norms to sociopathic acts. This presentation discusses these consequences, as well potential contributions from alterations in morality and in semantics. For further information or to convey…
Find out more »Charles Branas – Changing Places: Using Science to Design Safer and Healthier Cities
Charles Branas, Chair & Professor of Epidemiology, Columbia University This event is part of the Columbia Population Research Center Seminar Series. Registration required, please visit the conference website.
Find out more »January 2017
Toxic Docs: Opening the Secret Vaults of the World’s Largest Polluters
Toxic Docs: Opening the Secret Vaults of the World's Largest Polluters is part of the Food For Thought: Critical Reflections on the Social Sciences and Public Health Seminar Series at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Find out more »Charles Branas – Changing Places: Using Science to Design Safer and Healthier Cities
Interest in health and safety programs that directly change the places people live, work, and play has grown over the past decade. Place-based programs that change basic structures, for large populations and with reasonable sustainability, have the potential to become truly transformational policies for the health and safety. This discussion considers the benefits of such programs in building safer cities.
Find out more »Sara Pritchard – Polluted Nightscapes: “Natural Night-Sky Brightness,” Skyglow, and the U.S. National Park Service
Since the late nineteenth century, light pollution has increased dramatically throughout most of the urban, industrial world. This talk examines how the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) and specifically its “Natural Sounds and Night Skies” Division came to care about nighttime landscapes—or nightscapes. Despite challenges to wilderness in the environmental humanities, the development of alternative conservation strategies that seek to address both environment and livelihood, and the complexity of light pollution as a phenomenon, relatively new concerns about artificial light at night nonetheless replicate older conservation and environmentalist rhetoric.
Find out more »Center for Science and Society Welcome Back Student Lunch
Please join the Center for Science and Society for an informal lunch to learn about upcoming events, funding opportunities, and cross-disciplinary conversation. Open to all undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs associated with the Center, History of Science, and the Research Clusters, and those interested in getting involved, and to CSS Steering and Advisory committee members.
Find out more »Peter D. Balsam – Faculty Research Talk: The Brain is a Time Machine
All thought and behavior is organized in time. Everything we do—from picking up a glass of water to the daily rhythms of eating and sleeping—relies on timed signals from the body and brain that convey information about the right time to do it. The mechanisms of our brains allow us to organize the temporal structure of our actions and physiology on scales ranging from milliseconds to days. Like the air we breathe, we are not often aware of time, but it is the infrastructure for all our everyday functions. When these mechanisms become disordered or fail to offer temporal information to guide our behavior, it can contribute to the symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, mood disorders, and substance abuse. Professor Balsam’s recent work focuses on how anticipation underlies motivated action, research that can be harnessed to suggest new treatment strategies.
Find out more »Camille Robcis – The Politics of the Psyche
This talk maps the intersections of politics, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry in France in the aftermath of May ’68. For many thinkers during these years, Marxism could offer a theory of alienation to explain why the protesters had taken to the streets, but it was unable to account for why the revolution was systematically aborted. Why were libidinal politics consistently repressed by the “fascism in our heads,” “the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the thing that dominates and exploits us,” to quote Michel Foucault? In this context, several of these thinkers – including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – turned to psychiatry in the hope of finding a new theory of the subject that could embrace and reclaim these libidinal politics. This talk revisits this history and explores the possibilities behind a politics of the psyche.
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