::fc-announce:: The Two Cultures: Reconsidering the division between the Sciences and Humanities

[Melinda Rackham]

http://nchsr.arts.unsw.edu.au/twocultures.html

The Two Cultures:
Reconsidering the division between the Sciences and Humanities

21 and 22 July 2005

Lecture Room A, Webster Building , the University of NSW

The Two Cultures: Reconsidering the division between the Sciences and
Humanities, will be to bring a selection of scholars together in the sciences
(physics, molecular biology, computation, evolutionary systems) and in the
humanities, social sciences and cultural theory whose work has philosophical
resonance. The purpose will be an interrogation and reassessment of current
understandings of the fact/value, real/representation, nature/culture split.  A
genuine dialogue between scholars whose diverse research areas show evidence of
shared interests and commitments promises to extend the benefits of
inter-disciplinarity in more radical and provocative ways.

Themes:
Biosemiosis - living systems as language systems
Feminism and Science - a forbidden intimacy?
Re-figuring the Representation Question - mathematics, data and prediction
Biotechnology and Ethical Futures - where to from here?

Participants include:
Professor Karen Barad: Women's Studies and Philosophy, Mount Holyoke College
(theoretical particle physicist, research expertise on Niels Bohr and quantum
mechanics)
Professor Jesper Hoffmeyer: Institute of Molecular Biology, University of
Copenhagen (molecular biologist, biosemiotician)
Dr Philippa Uwins: Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Microscopy and
Microanalysis, The University of Queensland (research expertise on nanobes,
origin of life)
Dr Sha Xin Wei History of Science, Harvard University (mathematics, cultural
theory, art practice)
Associate Professor Thomas Lamarre:  East Asian Studies, McGill University,
Montreal (marine biologist, biophilosopher, research expertise on archaeology of
inscription)
Dr. Melinda Cooper: Sociology, Macquarie University (biophilosophy)
Dr. Vicki Kirby: Sociology and Anthropology, UNSW (semiology, biophilosophy)
Dr Catherine Mills: Philosophy, UNSW (biopolitics, biotechnology, ethics)
Dr Catherine Waldby: Sociology and Anthropology, UNSW (feminism, biomedicine
Dr Elizabeth Wilson: University of Sydney (cognitive psychology and
biophilosophy)
Dr Heather Worth: Deputy Director, National Centre in HIV Research, UNSW)


Background to the Symposium
"The two cultures" was a phrase coined by C. P. Snow over fifty years ago to
describe the growing impasse between scholarship undertaken in the humanities
and work being done in the sciences.  In the early nineteenth century this
"translation problem" between research communities was less evident, as figures
such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet, polemicist and scientific researcher,
illustrate.  Indeed, C. P. Snow himself enjoyed some success in both the
literary and scientific worlds.

However, the increasing specialisation of knowledges and the micro-management of
its detail have changed the shape of research communities, often dividing those
whose area of expertise can seem much the same to an outside observer.  Coupled
with this, the radical reshaping of the humanities in the last twenty years has
turned long established disciplines into more hybrid and problematic entities.
Scholars who share a specific methodology or theoretical approach may enjoy more
intimate "tribal" allegiances - to certain questions and concerns; conferences,
journals, publishers - than to colleagues in their actual field of inquiry.  The
"texting" of the object is largely responsible for these inter-disciplinary
mergers, where "the life of language," or how cultural representations "work,"
has challenged our understanding of an object's substantive facticity.

However, one of the casualties of "the linguistic turn" which displaced "natural
facts" with "cultural constructs" is that scientific research that purports to
explain natural facts (without inverted commas) has been difficult to engage.
Science Studies and Cultural Studies have certainly diagnosed the hidden
political agendas in scientific claims to objectivity.  And yet the truism that
scientific representations "work," that they possess a pragmatic purchase and
predictive efficacy whose very possibility is inadequately explained by cultural
constructionist arguments, is largely ignored.  The deepening suspicion that has
grown between the humanities and the sciences is even more entrenched as a
consequence, as the Sokal Hoax and the Science Wars of just a decade ago attest.

Despite the rapid changes in technological, medical, and scientific innovation
that demand a serious reconsideration of human identity - what it is and what we
want it to be - intellectual cooperation between the humanities and sciences
over such questions remains desultory.  In the humanities we are routinely
preoccupied with denying and diagnosing scientific truth claims, seldom
acknowledging the intellectual challenges that certain scientific discoveries
may represent for all of us.  This conference hopes to broaden the terms of
understanding and critical exchange between our different research communities.