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Yesterday, our own Adam Bencard defended his Ph.D.-thesis — ‘History in the Flesh: Investigating the historicized body’; for a resumé, see here — in the old anatomical theatre of Medical Museion. Adam started with a 40 min long presentation about the basic idea of the thesis — that the notion of ‘presence’ (Gumbrecht, Runia) might be a way out of the impasse into […]

Camilla (here) and I (here) have earlier brought up the relation between exhibitions and the blog medium. Now Dave Johnson (Blogging Roller) reports from the 2nd annual North Carolina Science Blogging Conference a couple of weeks ago: The last session I attended was devoted to helping the Museum of Life and Science (Durham, NC) figure out how to use blogs to […]

Even if both Adam (here) and I (here) have been critical of all these ‘turns’ that appear over and over again — and more or less mindlessly — in the humanities, I for one am nevertheless inclined to accept some ‘turns’ more than others. I’m particularly intrigued by the notion of a sensory turn (see also here). The senses and sensory experience have recently been embraced also by historians. […]

Here’s the resumé of Adam’s PhD-dissertation ‘History in the flesh – investigating the historicized body’. For further info about the public defence on Friday 15 February, se here.

In an earlier post I wondered if the editors of the — otherwise interesting and increasingly successful — Advances in History of Psychology blog were really happy with the use of the word ‘advance’ in the blog title (because of the pretty antiquated philosophy of history connotations associated with ‘advance’) In a recent post, editor Jeremy Burman explains his […]

Just want to draw your attention to the conference “Re-Thinking the Role of the Expert” here in Copenhagen 6-7 March — dealing with different aspects of knowledge and science communication (with an emphasis on ‘expertice’). Personally I am eager to hear what Stephen Turner has to say about the role of bloggers as public intellectuals vs. traditional […]

The session “Modelling Futures, Modelling Pasts” (Chair: Thomas Macho, Humboldt University, Berlin) on Friday, Feb 8, 4:45-6:15 pm, at this week’s Science Futures Conference in Zurich offers talks on epidemiology, modelling, numerical experiments and simulation studies: Susanne Bauer, University of Copenhagen: Epidemiological Studies as ‘Future Machines’: Modelling Population Health and Predicting Individual Risk Mikaela Sundberg, University of Stockholm: Exploring […]

The Swiss STS Meeting 2008 , dedicated to ”Science Futures” (for the CFP s. earlier post), offers a 4-day conference  with a number of panels of interest to the cultural studies of biomed/biotech. Session themes include: biological utopias and dystopias, arts and artefacts, brain research and the emotional turn, technoscience and material transformation, simulations and numerical […]

Camilla recently reviewed Wellcome Collection’s new exhibition ‘Sleeping and Dreaming’ at 183 Euston Rd, London. Next month (21 Feb) Sonu Shamdasani at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine (three stories higher up in the same house) organises a research workshop titled “Histories of Insomnia” — with presentations by KanWen Ma on insomnia in the history of traditional Chinese […]

Our own Adam Bencard will publicly defend his PhD-dissertation “History in the Flesh: investigating the historicized body” on Friday 15 February at 1pm. “History in the Flesh” is a historiographical study of a number of historical, philosophical, sociological and anthropological approaches of the body over the last 30 years. Framing his thesis as a contribution to the emerging critical engagement with the so called linguistic, […]

This artificial femoral head was recently added to the Medical Museion’s collections. It was implanted in 1954 into a 50-year-old man suffering heavily from orthoarthritis. The operation left him 100% disabled and he lived with constant pains for the remaining thirty-three years of his life. Upon his specific request, the femoral head was recovered from the […]

Two seminars on public engagement with science will be held at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, 7-8 February. 1) A public seminar on ‘Public Communication of Expert Knowledge and Political Decision-Making’ on Thursday 7 February. Speakers include Christian Azar (Chalmers U of Technology): ‘Popularize? Agitate? Inform? What is the Role of the Expert in Politics?’ Lena Sommestad […]