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 »January 2017
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 »Kavita Sivaramakrishnan – In the Waiting Room of History: Science, Cancer, and Aging in India and South Africa (1940s-50s)
The History of Medicine and Health Working Group of the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine meets monthly to discuss a colleague’s work in progress or to discuss readings that are of particular interest to participants.
Find out more »George J. Makari – Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind
Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept―the mind―emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither.
Find out more »February 2017
The Roles of Physicians in 19th Century Polar Exploration
Douglas Kondziolka collects arctic and antarctic polar exploration books, maps and letters from the era of the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century. The collection documents the important steps in Arctic discovery, both for a Northwest passage to Asia, and to the North Pole itself. In this talk, the roles of physicians, spanning from naturalists, to artists, to caregivers, to troublemakers, will be highlighted.
Find out more »Inscription, Digitization and the Shape of Knowledge
How does the digitization of archival information influence knowledge? Learn about Dr. Lauren Kassell's 10-year project to digitize one of the largest surviving sets of private medical records in history—the 80,000 consultations recorded by the seventeenth-century astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier—with responses from New York University thought leaders across various fields. Panelists will respond from the varying perspectives of their own work.
Find out more »The Ligo Project – Science (as) Culture: Winter Happy Hour
Join the Ligo Project at our Science (as) Culture Winter Happy Hour for cross-disciplinary discussion and exchange of ideas focused on integration of science and society and how to change how we as a society think about, learn about, and talk about art, science and technology.
Find out more »Presidential Scholars Research Symposium
This event will include presentations from several of our Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience, who will discuss their current cross-disciplinary research and findings.
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