Departmental Seminar

2017 Mar 02
2017 Oct 05

History of Science Seminar: Dwai Banerjee

Date: 

Thursday, October 5, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

d_benarjeeDwai Banerjee,
Assistant Professor,
Program in Science, Technology and Society at
MIT

“Molecular Markets: The BioLogics of Cancer in the Global South”


Abstract:

Indian corporations have manufactured low-cost drugs for the global poor for over three decades. Indeed, activist mobilizations at the height of the HIV-AIDS epidemic revealed a vast cost gap between global brands and Indian generics, much to the embarrassment of Euro-American pharma. In this talk, I argue that 21st century drug access controversies focus on a new kind and class of ‘living’ anti-cancer drugs - biologics. As cancer appears in the public health imagination as a crisis, it demands a new battle for the right to drugs. The fight over anticancer biologics reveal new flows of international capital and new intersections of genes and trade regimes. Yet, controversies around biologics imperil the legacy of HIV-AIDS activism, and the future of life-saving drugs. In sum, I describe how the future of the rights of cancer patients across the world rests calamitously in a shifting balance of power between global south interests and Euro-American capital.
 

2017 Oct 12

History of Science Seminar: Paul Kramer

Date: 

Thursday, October 12, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

Paul KramerPaul Kramer,
Department of History, Vanderbilt University

"Sex, Disease and Military Empire: The Case of the Philippine-American War"

 

 

Abstract:

Across the American Century, commercialized sex burgeoned with the arrival of US military forces, and commanders and public health officials worried about its implications for troop readiness and fighting power, far less its impacts on local sex workers and their communities.  Through the historical reconstruction of the US military's approaches to venereal disease control, and military and domestic US political debates about sex and disease at the edges of empire, one can illuminate the workings of race, gender, sexuality, and the costs of militarized world power.  This talk will present some of the broad contours of an emerging literature, and its scholarly and political stakes, before discussing in depth the case of military-regulated prostitution during the Philippine-American War, the first and foundational instance of US military authorities grappling with these questions.

2017 Oct 26

History of Science Seminar: Paul Ramirez

Date: 

Thursday, October 26, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469P

Paul RamirezPaul Ramirez,
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University

"Rumors, Speech Acts, and Medical Facts: An Oral History of Mexico's First Vaccination Campaigns"

Abstract: A global vaccinating expedition launched from Spain in the early 1800s made Jenner's cowpox vaccine available to communities of peasants throughout Spanish America. In Mexico, the vast majority of those Indian tributaries who were subsequently vaccinated had no prior experience with immunization technologies of any kind. What kinds of local, viceregal, or Atlantic knowledge contributed to the "domestication" of immunization in these early years of practice? Part of a book project on reforms in disease management during Mexico's Enlightenment, this talk draws on a cache of rumors reported in the months and years following the expedition, including charges of enslavement, sorcery, forced enlistment into Spain's armies, and kidnapping, to discern the domains of colonial knowledge and conventions of communication that were relevant to the introduction of immunization among non-literate peasants. In so doing it suggests how political processes at the village and parish level rendered this knowledge "fact" among patients and vaccinators alike.

2017 Nov 02

History of Science Seminar: Ahmed Ragab

Date: 

Thursday, November 2, 2017, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

Ahmed RagabAhmed Ragab
Associate Professor of Science and Religion, Harvard Divinity School

"Islam as a Postcolony: Science, History and Modernism in the Making of Ethnoreligious Identities"

Abstract: In this paper, I look at the making of Islam as an ethno-religious and postcolonial identity through scientific and historical narratives. I argue that science-narratives contribute to the production of Islam as a global identity-to-be in a contextual exercise of meaning-making that deploys the present in writing a past and forging a chosen future. In this context, science-narratives become, at once, sites of colonization, engagement and resistance as they operate to formulate the collective identity that makes Muslims, and that links and separates them from Islam. Here, Islam is deployed to police the consumption of technoscience in a manner that distinguished between good and bad Muslims, and that questions the ability or worth of Muslims acquiring scientific knowledge. I argue that these scientific narratives, manifested through a colonial archive and invested in Eurocentric mythology, operate to develop new meanings of Islam, as a rarefied category, and Muslims, as an ur-identity.

2017 Nov 16

History of Science Seminars: Warwick Anderson

Date: 

Thursday, November 16, 2017, 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

w_andersonWarwick Anderson,
Department of History,
University of Sydney

“Thickening Transregionalism: Historical Formations of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Southeast Asia”

 

Please note special start time: 12:30pm.

 

2018 Feb 08

History of Science Seminars: Gastón Gordillo

Date: 

Thursday, February 8, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

Gaston GordilloGastón Gordillo,
Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia

"Ambient Thickness: On the Atmospheric Materiality of the Anthropocene"

Abstract: In the humanities, concepts such as “place” and “territory” help us account for the social-historical nature of space; but these are anthropocentric concepts that are unable to explain those spatial dimensions that are indifferent to how humans experience them, such as the intensification of weather events associated with climate change. Drawing from my fieldwork about deforestation by agribusiness in northern Argentina, I propose to analyze the shifting atmospheres affected by environmental disruptions through the concept of “ambient thickness”: i.e. the ambient intensities that in the form of heat, droughts, or wind affect human practice and sensory experience. Attentiveness to how local people are affected by, and respond to, shifting levels of ambient thickness, I argue, can help us appreciate the often elusive, ever-shifting but palpable materiality of the spatial-environmental transformations and turbulences that define “the Anthropocene.”

2018 Mar 08

History of Science Seminars: Marcy Norton

Date: 

Thursday, March 8, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

marcy nortonMarcy Norton
Associate Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

“Cacao and the Quetzal: Reflections on Microhistory, Indigenous Technologies and Ontologies, and Early Modern Natural History”
 
Abstract: For a long time it was taken for granted that the emergence of early modern science was an “internalist” European history, meaning that paradigm shifts, epistemological ruptures, and incremental changes were related to European processes and/or European actors. The global turn has challenged internalist accounts and has led to histories that focus on the role of non-European people, places, and things in the creation of modern science, particularly in natural history and medicine. These “externalist” accounts of European science have catalyzed the development of a new set of analytic tools but also point to a need for more reflexivity about method. In this paper, by focusing on case studies from my earlier work on plants and current research on animals, I will discuss how microhistory is uniquely suited to writing history that reveals the role of Native American technologies and ontologies in the formation of early modern science.

2018 Mar 22

History of Science Seminar: Jennifer Derr

Date: 

Thursday, March 22, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

Jennifer_DerrJennifer Derr,
Department of History, UC Santa Cruz 

"Origin Stories: Constructing the liver in Egypt through epidemics of schistosomiasis and hepatitis C"

Abstract: 

During the twentieth century, Egypt was the site of two interconnected disease epidemics that target the liver. With the construction of dams on the Nile River and the spread of perennial irrigation, millions of Egyptians were infected with the parasitic disease schistosomiasis. One symptom of infection with the Schistosoma mansoni parasite is hepatic fibrosis; by the early twentieth century, doctors noted that liver disease was widespread among their patients. Beginning in the 1920s, millions of Egyptians also fell ill with hepatitis C, the product of an extensive nationwide treatment campaign for schistosomiasis. This talk explores the historical origins of schistosomiasis and hepatitis C in Egypt, and the locally specific production of the liver as a site of medical knowledge and practice.

 

2018 Apr 12

History of Science Seminars: Eden Medina

Date: 

Thursday, April 12, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

Science Center 469

Eden MedinaEden Medina,
School Of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering,
Indiana University

"Unmaking Truth After Dictatorship: Science, Memory, and the Disappeared"

Abstract: 

In 2006, the Chilean government announced the shocking news that the scientists at the Medical Legal Service had misidentified at least half of the remains exhumed from the largest anonymous gravesite of those killed by the Pinochet dictatorship. This talk connects this story of identification and error to the unique contours of Chile’s struggle for truth, justice, and reconciliation in the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship and the way scientists, families, and members of the justice system—lawyers and judges—experienced these struggles. In particular, I will explore why the misidentifications occurred and what led judges, scientists, and members of human rights organizations to question the correctness of the identifications. I use this case study to connect science and technology history to the history of Chile’s democratic transition during the 1990s and 2000s.