Monday 17th June – 1-2pm – Seminar Room, Byrne House
You are invited to the next session of the Biological Interest Group on Monday 17th June. As usual it will be held in the seminar room at Byrne House, from 1-2pm. Participants can bring lunch and drinks if they wish.
Sam Hurn will be leading the session, which will be based on a draft paper which is hopefully going into the journal Ethnos for a special issue entitled ‘Consumer and Consumed’. The original paper was much longer, and Dr Hurn had to cut it down by about 7000 words, so the first thing she would like to get out of the session is whether or not it still makes sense. The themes explored in the paper will also form the basis of a chapter for a book which Dr Hurn is working on, so she would additionally like to pick the brains of STS people about how she might engage more with that body of literature.
The article can be obtained by emailing Jim Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk – As it is a work in preparation please do not disseminate further without Dr. Hurn’s express permission.
For any further information on BIG, please contact Sabina Leonelli at S.Leonelli [at] exeter.ac.uk
Monday 3rd June – 1-2pm – Seminar Room, Byrne House
You are invited to the next session of the Biological Interest Group on Monday 3rd June. As usual it will be held in the seminar room at Byrne House, from 1-2pm. Participants can bring lunch and drinks if they wish.
Nick Binney will be leading the session, which will be based on a summary of what he hopes will be the first two or three chapters of his PhD. Nick hopes to show that the way many physicians try to justify their use of diagnostic practices (at least in the case of heart failure) is problematic. He also hopes to show that we can understand why the justification of diagnostic practices is so problematic in the present if we understand something of how these practices have come to be developed and accepted historically.
Nick will be very grateful for any comments people have, but would be particularly interested to discuss 1) if people find his argument that the justification of diagnostic practices is problematic, 2) if people think that this should be of interest to practising physicians, 3) his argument that these problems are the result of philosophical assumptions made by physicians given the way in which these practices have developed historically, and 4) if this historical work has the potential to be valuable to the practising physician trying to consider which diagnostic practices to use. Nick’s argument for this latter point is very underdeveloped here, as this will be the subject of the rest of his PhD.
The article can be obtained by emailing Jim Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk – Nick has written this for BIG, so don’t worry about who you forward this document on to.
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For any further information on BIG, please contact Sabina Leonelli at S.Leonelli [at] exeter.ac.uk
Monday 20th May – 1-2pm – Seminar Room, Byrne House
You are invited to the next session of the Biological Interest Group on Monday 29th April. As usual it will be held in the seminar room at Byrne House, from 1-2pm. Participants can bring lunch and drinks if they wish.
Paul Brassley will be leading the session, which will be based on work entitled ‘Knowledge networks in UK farming 1935-1985’.
This article is much longer than the usual BIG contribution, for which the author apologises. It is designed to be a chapter of a book on technical change in English agriculture during the period 1939-1985. The book uses data from south west England, held in archives that are probably unique to Exeter University, and the subject of a research programme that has been going on since late 2009, to address the question of why technical change in agriculture was so rapid in the postwar period, as it was over much of western Europe, when it had previously been so slow. This particular chapter examines the function of knowledge networks in the process of technical change, from the original commissioning of scientific research on agricultural problems to the adoption of new technologies at the farm level. Paul does not expect people to read the whole of a 20,000 word piece, but he would be particularly interested in comments on what I have written from pp. 27-44, and especially on the conclusions on pp.40-44.
The article can be obtained by emailing Jim Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk – as it is a work in preparation please do not disseminate further without Dr. Brassley’s express permission.
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For any further information on BIG, please contact either me at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk or Sabina Leonelli at S.Leonelli [at] exeter.ac.uk
Monday 29th April – 1-2pm – Seminar Room, Byrne House
You are invited to the next session of the Biological Interest Group on Monday 29th April. As usual it will be held in the seminar room at Byrne House, from 1-2pm. Participants can bring lunch and drinks if they wish.
Adam Toon will be leading the session, which will be based on his paper entitled ‘Friends at last? Distributed cognition and the cognitive/social divide’.
The article is a draft of an article of Dr Toon’s that is due to appear in a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on the extended mind thesis. The main question he addresses in the paper is whether a new approach in cognitive science, known as distributed cognition, is able to bring together cognitive and social theories of science.
The paper is also part of a larger project he is currently working on, applying new movements in cognitive science to scientific practice, so he is very much looking forward to hearing people’s comments, both on the paper and the project in general.
The article can be obtained by emailing Jim Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk – as it is a work in preparation please do not disseminate further without Dr. Toon’s express permission.
Monday 25th March – 1-2pm – Seminar Room, Byrne House
You are invited to the next session of the Biological Interest Group on Monday 25th March. As usual it will be held in the seminar room at Byrne House, from 1-2pm. Participants can bring lunch and drinks if they wish.
Pierre-Olivier Méthot will be leading the session, which will be based on his paper entitled ‘What is a Pathogen? Essay on the Nature of Biological Associations in Health and Disease’.
Pierre-Olivier would welcome feedback on the overall argument, structure, and content of the paper and especially maybe on the last section of the essay (on the use of imprecise terms in science). Particularly, he would like to know whether this approach sounds consistent with the rest of the paper, whether it should be augmented and clarified (and if so, how), or whether it should be left aside for a future paper. In all cases, comments, questions, or suggestions on any aspect of this work will be most welcome!
The article can be obtained by emailing Jim Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk – as it is a work in preparation please do not disseminate further without Dr. Méthot’s express permission.
Monday 18th March – 1-2pm – Seminar Room, Byrne House
Ann Kelly will be leading the session, which will be based on the draft of an article exploring the critical possibilities of multi-species ethnography for an analysis of public health she has co-authored with Javier Lezaun, based on fieldwork conducted in Tanzania on a malaria control program.
Here is the abstract for the article:
“Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multi-species entanglement as the grounds for a more ethical politics. In this article, we examine efforts to control malaria in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an example of the laborious practices of disentanglement that characterize public health interventions. To capture the mutual imbrications of mosquitoes and humans in the city we elaborate and extend the concept of domestication, understood here as the process of co-adaptation to a shared built environment. Our goal is, first, to enrich public health conceptualizations of the ‘vectors’ of disease by attending to the urban surfaces and civic textures that create the conditions for transmission. From this perspective, disease control becomes less a matter of species eradication than of urban maintenance and repair.Second, we aim to nuance emerging anthropological theorizations of co-existence, by reflecting on the separations and distances that are often necessary to preserve the domus against the perils of proximity.”
The article can be obtained by emailing Jim Lowe at jwel201 [at] ex.ac.uk – as it is a work in progress please do not disseminate further without Dr. Kelly’s express permission.
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For further information about this session or BIG in general, please contact Sabina Leonelli at S.Leonelli [at] exeter.ac.uk
