Science and Method in the Humanities (Mar 2012, New York)

Location: Rutgers University
Date: 2 March 2012
Website: http://sciencemethodhumanities.wordpress.com/
Deadline for abstracts submission: 1 Nov 2011

Rutgers University announces “Science and Method in the Humanities,” an interdisciplinary graduate symposium to be held on March 2, 2012, with keynote speakers Peter Dear (Cornell University) and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Duke University, Brown University).

The aim of the conference is to explore questions of method and methodology in the sciences and in humanities scholarship that engages the sciences. This one-day event will bring together scholars working across that curricular divide for an interdisciplinary discussion of science and method, ranging from the historical development of scientific methods and their various historical re-articulations to broader concerns of methodology across the humanities.

How does interdisciplinary scholarship reframe questions of methodology, broadly construed? How is method variously understood and how are its formulations shaped by historical, theoretical, and disciplinary concerns? How does method relate to matters of fact and theory? How do humanities disciplines appropriate and modify particular scientific methods?

Related themes/topics may include (but are not limited to):

•Scientific methods and the history of science
•Methodology, disciplinary history, and the professionalization of the humanities
•Method and form, genres of scientific knowledge, aesthetics of science, or as science
•Inscription and writing: media, authority, translation, referentiality
•Elements of method: hypothesis, collaboration, witnessing, objectivity
•Historical method: induction, deduction, experimentation
•Philosophy and the Analytic/Continental divide
•Vitalism in the sciences and in critical theory
•The afterlives of positivism
•The “cognitive revolution” and the humanities
•The curriculum and the “two cultures” debate
•Science Studies/STS, Actor Network Theory, and historical study
•Vernacular Science and Mobile Technologies
•Digital humanities: computation, quantitative analysis, electronic publishing and peer review

Please send 400-500-word abstracts to Lizzie Oldfather (lizzie.oldfather@gmail.com) by November 1, 2011.

For more information, please visit http://sciencemethodhumanities.wordpress.com/

About Fil Salustri
I'm a design methodologist and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada. Adjectives that describe me include: secular humanist, meritocrat, and long-winded. Some people call me a positivist too, as if that were a bad thing. Go figure. My real home page is http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil.

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