CFP: Science and Method in the Humanities (Due 11/11)

Science and Method in the Humanities
March 2, 2012

Abstracts Due: November 11, 2011

Full name / name of organization: Natura, Science and Epistemology Working Group, Rutgers University

contact email: lizzie.oldfather@gmail.com

Rutgers University announces "Science and Method in the Humanities," an interdisciplinary graduate symposium to be held on March 2, 2012, with keynote speakers Peter Dear (Cornell University) and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Duke University, Brown University).

The aim of the conference is to explore questions of method and methodology in the sciences and in humanities scholarship that engages the sciences. This one-day event will bring together scholars working across that curricular divide for an interdisciplinary discussion of science and method, ranging from the historical development of scientific methods and their various historical re-articulations to broader concerns of methodology across the humanities.

How does interdisciplinary scholarship reframe questions of methodology, broadly construed? How is method variously understood and how are its formulations shaped by historical, theoretical, and disciplinary concerns? How does method relate to matters of fact and theory? How do humanities disciplines appropriate and modify particular scientific methods?

Related themes/topics may include (but are not limited to):
•Scientific methods and the history of science
•Methodology, discciplinary history, and the professionalization of the humanities
•Method and form, genres of scientific knowledgge, aesthetics of science, or as science
•Inscription aand writing: media, authority, translation, referentiality
•Elements of method: hypothesis, collaboration, witneessing, objectivity
•Historical method: induction, deduuction, experimentation
•Philosophy and the Analytic/Coontinental divide
•Vitalism in the sciences and in crittical theory
•The afterlives of positivism
•The "cognitive revolution" and the humanities
•The curricuulum and the "two cultures" debate
•Science Studiess/STS, Actor Network Theory, and historical study
•Vernnacular Science and Mobile Technologies
•Digital humaniities: computation, quantitative analysis, electronic publishing and peer review

Please send 400-500-word abstracts to Lizzie Oldfather (lizzie.oldfather@gmail.com) by November 1, 2011.

For more information, please visit http://sciencemethodhumanities.wordpress.com/