Biomedicine on Display

A series of lectures on historical and social science perspectives on genomics (“Genomics in Perspective”) were held at the NIH in May and June (lecture website here). For full videos, look here. For short abstracts to browse before watching, look here.
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Together with Nete Schwennesen (Biocampus and Institute of Public Health), we (Hanne Jessen and Susanne Bauer, Medicinsk Museion) are organising a conference “Contested Categories”, 15-17 January 2007.
This event is an open continuation of last year’s DK-UK network meeting , now the Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Group, at BIOS (LSE), London and will take place just before the Health and Citizenship Conference, 18-20 January in Copenhagen.

The symposium “Contested Categories” will focus on how the life sciences challenge and reconfigure formerly stable categories: the social and the biological, the nature/culture dichotomy and the human/animal boundaries are increasingly blurred and become populated by hybrids, cyborgs and boundary objects. New categories emerging in this empirical field of the life sciences raise a host of questions: What are the sites of contestation and which categories are at stake? What new kinds of contested/ambiguous relations become possible and acquire significance? What are the theoretical and methodological implications and challenges we face when studying the life sciences? How can comparative and inter-disciplinary studies contribute to exploring the formation and reconfiguration of categories such as race, gender, kinship and life? In which ways can concepts such as biosociality, bioindividuality and hybridity address these changes – are they useful tools or phenomena of these transformations?

Invitations and calls for both conferences Continue Reading »

The former DK-UK Postgraduate Network on Bio-studies has merged with something called PLSSG (Postgraduate Life Sciences and Society Group). This way, they say, “we can initiate local subgroups and arrangements as well as explore comparative and transnational trends”. So far the network is mainly limited to members in Denmark and the UK, but hopefully others will join. For further info, see the PLSSG website hosted by the London School of Economics.
(thanks to Annette V. Jensen, a.v.jensen@lse.ac.uk)

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London has taken an interesting and unusual initiative when creating a job for an ‘outreach historian’ (see the announcement here and below). The only problem is that the position (as judged by the announcement) does not seem to involve any requirement to do research in science communication studies, or museological studies, or any other research area of relevance for the communicative practice. If this is the case, the position risks becoming a second rate academic job. But otherwise it is an excellent initiative. Now at least five London institutions with a strong academic basis are competing in the increasingly important medical history public outreach arena.
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Johannes Grave, postdoc at NFS Bildkritik / NCCR Iconic Criticism, Universität Basel (and who visited us with the Wandering Seminar in mid-May; he is sitting a step below Susanne on this pic) has sent us the following comment and photos of three objects which caught his attention when he inspected our collections and those in Cambridge and Munich:
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As you may have noticed, the blog has been idle for almost two weeks. We have been traumatised by the recent flood of spam. In fact almost 200 spam comments a day have come from these beasts who want to sell their online poker games, viagra pills, ‘cheap’ mortgages, etc., which they believe we are all in dire need of. Now we are in the process of upgrading to the newest 2.0.3 version of WordPress, which will not only give us much better blogging facilities but hopefully also a much better protection against the Global Spam Scum.