new books, articles etc

Two years ago, in January 2007, our own Susanne Bauer co-organised a meeting titled ‘Contested Categories’ here at Medical Museion. Now, a proceedings volume with the same title, co-edited by Susanne and Ayo Wahlberg (formerly BIOS, LSE), has been published by Ashgate. From the back cover: Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that […]

A year ago, Adam and I made fun of the tendency in the humanities and social sciences to invent ‘turns’ — the linguistic turn, the bodily turn, etc. (see earlier posts here and here). But some ‘turns’ are more justified than others. Melissa Littlefield at the University of Illinois and Jenell Johnson at the Louisiana State University have […]

Anastasia Filippoupoliti at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (afilipp@gmail.com) and Graeme Farnell at MuseumsEtc, UK (graeme@museumsetc.com) are soliciting papers for a forthcoming book that will explore: the processes involved in developing new science exhibitions in and for museums the issues involved in transforming scientific ideas or events into exhibitions the challenges faced by museums […]

The paper that Susanne and Jan Eric (who are both working in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ project) presented at the third Surveillance & Society conference in Sheffield in April 2008 (see earlier blog post here) has just been published in the journal Surveillance & Society (vol. 6, 2009). Here’s the abstract: This article explores two instances of medical […]

A new issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science is out — with, among other things, a thematic section about science at the nanoscale edited by Isaac Record. For example, Joachim Schummer points out that science can be popularized by its ethics (engineering ethics is often propaganda for emerging technology); Joe Pitt explores the rhetorical and […]

I’ve already mentioned the launch of the new University Museums and Collections Journal. The first issue has just been released online — there are two articles of potential interest for reflecting medical museums: In one of them, Sébastien Soubiran asks “What makes scientific communities think the preservation of their heritage is important?”, and answers the question through a […]

Just to let you know that postdoc Susanne Bauer in our ‘Biomedicine on Display’ research group has published a new paper on data mining in epidemiology. “Mining data, gathering variables and recombining information: the flexible architecture of epidemiological studies” is available in the December issue of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part […]

The journal Performance Research is planning a thematic issue (vol. 14, issue 4, 2009) on “notions and practices that correlate with ideas on the … formation of bodies, their somatic dimensions and constitution”. Issue guest editors Ric Allsop and Phillip Warnell are looking for contributions along the following lines: Guest/ host relationships; the possessed body – disguise […]

University Museums and Collections Journal is a new, peer-reviewed, on-line journal (ISSN 2071-7229) published by the International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC; part of ICOM). Editors are Sally MacDonald, University College London; Nathalie Nyst, Université Libre de Bruxelles; and Cornelia Weber, Humboldt University of Berlin. The journal website looks pretty raw at the moment, but it will probably improve soonish. UMCJ […]

In an earlier post, I summarized the fascinating autobiographical story behind Harvard biotech professor David Edwards’s new experimental institution, Le Laboratoire in Paris. In his recent book Artscience (Harvard University Press 2008), Edwards tells about his education, how he was swamped with money after a short but succesful career as a biotech inventor, and how he was decent enough to use it for good and visionary […]