Events Archive

Here we have archived past UC wide conferences and events addressing themes related to studies of science and technology.

• BIOCULTURES>science>technology>culture>humanity. In the 1950s, C.P. Snow saw a fundamental split between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities. But in recent years this split has faded, with theorists like Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway as well as writers like Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler examining what "the human" is in a world where recent biological and technological developments have profoundly shaken our assumptions about identity and power. At the same time, interdisciplinary work in fields like bioethics, gender studies, disability studies and critical race theory has begun to bridge this divide, offering up new ways of theorizing the body and its relationship to medical, cultural, and political knowledge. Putting projects like these in dialogue with one other, this conference seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that participates in the emergence of biocultures - the intellectual space where the humanities and the sciences converge. We invite presentations on biocultural issues from scholars and professionals from all disciplines. Please send abstracts of 250-350 words to projectbiocultures@gmail.com by July 1, 2007
  Date: November 16-17, 2007
  URL: http://www.uic.edu/depts/engl/biocultures/

University of California, Berkeley

• California's Stem Cell Initiative: Confronting the Legal and Policy Challenges. Sponsored by Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, the Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy, and the Berkeley Travers Program on Ethics and Government Accountability
  Date: March 2-4, 2006
  URL: http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/stemcell/

University of California, Davis

• A Science & Technology Studies Colloquium Maria Puig de la Bellacasa A presentation & discussion on Isabelle Stengers. Isabelle Stengers (philosopher of science, author of Invention of Modern Science, and Power and Invention, co-author of Order Out of Chaos with Ilya Prigogine. Maria Puig is a Spanish postdoc working on feminist science studies, currently with Donna Haraway. Her PhD was inBelgium with Stengers on philosophy and feminisms
  Date: 06/04/2007
  URL:
• STS Experimental Retreat. The weekend of September 15-16 we are planning to hold a retreat (location TBA) in northern California. We will come together over the weekend to workshop papers, look at writing in progress and/or presentations (for conferences, job talks, etc.). The workshop sessions will seek collaborative feedback from faculty and students alike, while also generating larger discussions about research, methods and other key issues within STS. We will be providing food and lodging (transportation will be up to you). We are very excited about this event and hope it will further strengthen our growing STS community in California. If you are interested could you please forward comments/feedback about the event as soon as possible as we are already looking into retreat locations and need to get estimates on the number of participants who would like to be involved—also, can you fill out the info below. Thank-you and we look forward to hearing back from you soon. 1) Name: 2) Institution: 3) Is that weekend free -- not a commitment, but to begin to give a sense of how many people might come? Even if you can't come, please let us know your thoughts on this type of event. 4) Are you a graduate student or faculty? 5) Are interested in submitting a paper, presenting a presentation, being a discussant or just attending? 5) If you are interested in presenting what is the topic (couple words or just a title)? 6) If you are interested in being a discussant what kind of submissions are you interested in reading? 7) Please indicate additional comments or suggestions you have about the event.
  Date: September 15-16 2007
  URL:
• The Curious Lives of Documents: One-Day Graduate Student Symposium. Documents are pervasive artifacts: sought after, collected, venerated, hidden, depended on and fabricated by intellectuals of all paths of life. They are more than the inscribed papers that circulate in economies of information and decay in archives. Passports, financial bulletins, official government papers, maps, scientific reports and judicial verdicts they are networks in and of themselves, performances surrounded by stories, fed by the social, and empowered to reveal and conceal. The Curious Lives of Documents Symposium seeks to bring documents into focus, to interrogate their textures their shifting contexts, and the simultaneous practices and relationships that surround them. The document is a point of friction that operates between what becomes official truth, what is left unsaid and what must remain secret. Technological innovation and social relations affect the materiality of documents, and release them from the surface of paper. As academics we participate in these tensions. Are we, as scribes, too easily seduced by the work of other scribes? From the shifting social life of documents to our role as document makers, this symposium seeks to make visible the curious lives of documents as ethnographic subjects. This will be a one-day symposium, the intent of which is to provide a space for senior graduate students to present their work and for lively discussions on the symposium theme and panelists’ projects. Panel presentations will be limited to 15 minutes (7 double-spaced pages) and each panel will have a discussant. Following the symposium and reception, there will be a Midnight University in which alternative forms of expression and presentation will be explored. The organizers of the Midnight University encourage new forms of presentation—all forms of media are welcome and encouraged. To best explore the curious lives of documents, we must be willing to investigate the document from various perspectives and with divergent approaches. The symposium and the Midnight University hope to provide various venues for individuals to explore their work in a variety of ways.
  Date: March 2, 2007
  URL:

University of California, Irvine

• Critical Legalities Symposium: Constructing Legalities in Scientific Organizations, Fields and Cultures. The Center in Law, Society and Culture and the Center for Organizational Research
  Date: April 7, 2006
  URL: N/A
• Lively Capital 3.
  Date: April 13, 14, 2007
  URL:

University of California, Los Angeles

• MEPHISTOS 2007. The graduate community of the University of California, Los Angeles is proud to host the Twenty-Fifth Annual MEPHISTOS Conference.
  Date: April 6-8, 2007
  URL: http://mephistos.bol.ucla.edu/
• Science and Public Reason. Southern California Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
  Date: April 14, 2006
  URL: N/A
• The Stem Cells: Promise and Peril in Regenerative Medicine. Sponsored by UCLA's Center for Society and Genetics, Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, and School of Law
  Date: February 3-5, 2006
  URL: http://www.societyandgenetics.ucla.edu/symposium.htm

University of California, San Francisco

• Biocapital Downstream: The Experimental Machinery of Global Clinical Trials.
  Speaker: Kaushik Sunder Rajan, PhD, UC Irvine
  In this talk, I discuss the experimental machinery and political economy of clinical trials through an account of the globalization of these trials to India. The globalization of clinical trials started in earnest in the mid-1990s; India has become an attractive destination, and has started building infrastructure for the conduct of these trials, over the past three years. I attempt to provide an overview of why the outsourcing of trials might look attractive from the perspective of an American clinical research institution; what capacity building for these trials means from the perspective of Indian actors; and what sorts of local histories and contexts set the stage within which these trials are conducted. In the process, I wish to open up the question of how we might conceptualize the relationship between experimental systems and subaltern experimental subjectivity, and what political economy has to do with this relationship.
  Date: November 15, 2007
  URL: http://dahsm.medschool.ucsf.edu/seminarSeries/index.aspx

University of California, Santa Cruz

• Bio[X]: New Iterations of Lively Bodies. Science Studies Graduate Student Conference. The UC Santa Cruz Science Studies Cluster and the UC Science, Technology and Society Network will be hosting a joint graduate student conference . We seek contributions that interrupt traditional realms of ‘bio.’ The theme Bio[X] stands for lively intra-actions of the biological, biosocial, biopolitical, bioethical, and biocapital. Our exploration of Bio[X] aims to address the scientific making of bodies and meanings that affect articulations of bodies and their materialities, mobilities, and tangibility. New iterations of lively bodies may include, but are not limited to, the following topics: the role of ‘new’ technologies in biological practices, the movement and constitution of whole and partial bodies across international and national boundaries, human/non-human determinations and relations, apparatuses of information development and codification, questions of temporality and material agency in biological practice, and governance and justice in the making of bodies and bodily practice.
  Date: February 23rd, 2007
  URL:
• Genomics & justice: promises, perils, and paradoxes. The Science & Justice Working Group presents a two-day workshop of in-depth exploration of the effects of translating genomic information into practice in the lives of human beings. The first day kicks the program off with a public forum to bring the social justice and science communities together. The second day is an in-depth workshop for social justice thinkers and genomic scientists.
  Date: May 17 & 18, 2007
  URL:
• Professor Catherine Waldby: The Biopolitics of Reproduction:Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women's Clinical Labour. Professor Catherine Waldby is International Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, and foundation member of the Global Biopolitics Research Group www.globalbiopolitics.org. She researches and publishes in social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her most recent books are, with Robert Mitchell Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (2006 Duke University Press) and with Brian Salter and Herbert Gotwiess The global politics of human embryonic stem cell research, (Palgrave 2008 forthcoming). This paper investigates some contemporary rearticulations of female reproductive biology, particularly the advent of assisted reproductive technology and the centrality of reproductive tissue (embryos, oöcytes, cord blood) to the regenerative medicine industries. We argue that while nation states have lost traction over female reproductive biology and are less and less able to mobilise it for nation-building, it is increasingly available for private investment and capitalisation in the bioeconomy. Focusing on global markets for women's oöcytes (unfertilised eggs), we explore the consequences of framing women's contribution to the biotechnology industries as labour, in historical continuity with earlier colonial forms of female bodily labour, and cognate to other forms of feminised global production. 4:30pm Humanities 1, Room 201
  Date: Wednesday October 3, 2007
  URL: