Events Archive

Colloquia Fall 2004

Our STS Colloquia this semester are on different days of the week because of our speakers' schedules. Please note the different times, days, and rooms. We will always begin with a half hour for coffee/tea and cookies and then proceed to the talk.

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Friday, October 15, 2004
10:30am-12:30pm
8411 Social Science

Sarah Hodges

WHAT'S COLONIAL ABOUT COLONIAL MEDICINE? NOTES ON GOVERNMENTALITY AND MADRAS PRESIDENCY'S LOCK HOSPITALS IN THE HUNGRY 1870S

Sarah Hodges teaches in the Department of History at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom. She works on the social and cultural history of modern South Asia, specifically the politics of reproduction and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial India. Her interests lie at the intersection of a number of fields: modern South Asian history, gender studies, anthropology, and the history of science, technology and medicine. She is particularly interested in questions of how and why the relationship between India and the West during the first half of the twentieth century was mediated by a scientific modernity How, for example, did the voluntary associationalism of public or social health initiatives (generated largely out of a European experience) map onto or create new global networks of governmentality that both preceded and exceeded the colonial state? Her work seeks to understand the particularities of reproduction in India in relation to the global phenomena in which it is both caught up and contests: the world histories of science, development and emancipation.

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Thursday, October 21, 2004
3:30-5:30pm
8417 Social Science

Andrew Pickering

CYBERNETICS AND MADNESS: FROM ELECTROSHOCK TO THE PSYCHEDELIC 60S

Andrew Pickering is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics and The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, and the editor of Science as Practice and Culture. He is currently writing a book on the history of cybernetics in Britain focusing on the work of Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask, which argues, amongst other things, that one can see cybernetics as thematising a mangle-ish ontological stance and putting it into practice.

Abstract:
The standard origin story of cybernetics refers to the intersection of mathematics and engineering in Norbert Wiener's work on autonomous weapons systems in World War II. This talk explores another genealogy emerging from the psychiatry of the 1930s and 1940s. The first part of the talk locates Grey Walter's cybernetic robotics in the psychiatric milieu of his time, including electroshock treatment and lobotomy. The second part connects Walter's EEG research to proto-psychedelic movements in the 1950s and early 1960s. The third part focuses on the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, tracing strands of this back to Walter via another British cybernetician, Gregory Bateson.

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Monday, November 8, 2004
3:30-5:30pm
8417 Social Science

Karen Barad

TAKING NATURE SERIOUSLY: NIELS BOHR'S PROTO-PERFORMATIVE THEORY
OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE QUESTION OF NATURE'S AGENCY

In conjunction with the performance of Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen" at the Overture Center, Karen Barad will speak on Niels Bohr's ideas on the nature of scientific knowledge.

Karen Barad is Professor of Women's Studies and Philosophy and Chair of Women's Studies at Mount Holyoke College. She also teaches in the program in Critical Social Thought. Her Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics. Her research in physics and philosophy has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She also held the Blanche, Edith, and Irving Laurie New Jersey Chair in Women's Studies at Rutgers University. Prof. Barad was a national board member for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (NSF-sponsored) "Women and Scientific Literacy: Building Two-Way Streets" Project. She is the author of numerous articles on physics, feminist philosophy, philosophy of science, cultural studies of science, and feminist theory, and has recently completed a book entitled Meeting the Universe Halfway (forthcoming, Duke U. Press).