"Certainly, simplicity, vividness originate in popular knowledge… Therein lies the general epistemological significance of popular science." — Ludwig Fleck

"More than half of Americans are unaware that the earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it." — The New York Times, Feb. 22, 1999

This workshop series addresses the ways that scientific knowledge becomes instantiated in non-specialist culture(s)—or not. Much has been written about the entanglements (and estrangements) of ‘science’ and ‘culture’; this workshop will investigate the dynamic middle ground of popular knowledge as the space where the public scope of scientists is defined, and where the intellectual and material products of science are deployed. When, and to what extent, does it matter that non-specialists understand scientific theories or practices? How are the products of science disseminated, and what difference might resistance or acceptance in the broader public sphere make to the continued practice or conceptualization of the sciences? What mediations broker these exchanges?

• Session I. Friday, Nov. 16, 2001, Healing and the Body
• Session II.  Saturday, Feb. 23, 2002, Media of Knowledge
• Session III.  Friday, Apr. 12, 2002, The Scientific Laity

Session I. Friday, November 16, 2001, Healing and the Body: In her ground-breaking work, The Woman in the Body, Emily Martin showed how scientifically-educated women perceived, perhaps even experienced, their bodies differently from uneducated women, and taught their daughters different narratives of menstruation and sex. The study of medicine and the human body is one of the most public of the sciences and one that most universally touches individual lives, but how has the presence or absence of medical knowledge affected different people in difference places and times? How has the professional medical practitioner represented his or her knowledge and power, and for what cause? How has vernacular knowledge of the human body, at once publicly common and intimately unique, informed the development of biomedical sciences or the practices of healing?

Speakers for Session II:

Adriana Petryna, New School, NYC
"Science and Ignorance: The Rule of Partial Truths in the Chernobyl Aftermath"

Marta Hanson, UCSD
"Understanding is Within One's Grasp: hand Mnemonics in Early Modern Popular and Elite Chinese Medicine"

Mary Fissell, Johns Hopkins University
"Making Protestant Bodies in Tudor-Stuart England"

Note: Papers for the workshops, like Davis Center papers, are precirculated. They may be requested or obtained from Vicky Glosson (609-258-6705) in the two weeks preceding each event. Lunch is provided for all who attend; just let Vicky Glosson know you are coming.

Session II. Saturday, February 23, 2002, Media of Knowledge: The media has long been called "the fourth estate" to denote its power in articulating political agendas and public reaction. To what extent has mass media also transformed the practices of science? Media outlets have long served as the organ of dispersion of scientific knowledge, but what if the message is the medium? Has the publicity of the scientific enterprise merely conveyed a "popularized" science, or has it in a reciprocal way helped shape the sciences? To what extent has the development of the sciences required an audience? How has the media shaped public debate about scientific issues? How have scientists used media to intervene in political policies?

Speakers for Session II:

9:00 a.m.    Thomas Broman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Metaphysics for the Enlightened Public: Johann Christoph Gottsched and the Debate over Wolffianism, 1730-1745"

10:40 a..m.   Adrian Johns, University of Chicago
"The Thermodynamics of Civilizatioin: Print, Piracy, and the Invention of Social Science in Nineteeth-Century America"

1:10 p.m.     Alison Winter, University of Chicago
"Seeing Selves: Mind, Memory, and Identity on Film, 1920-1962"

3:00 p.m.    Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Pachyderm Personalities: The Media of Science, Politics, and Conservation"

4:35 p.m.     Kavita Philip, Georgia Institute of Technology
"Technologies of Desire: Pop Cultural Discourses of Science and Technology in the Shadow of Globalization"

Note: Papers for the workshops, like Davis Center papers, are precirculated. They may be requested or obtained from Vicky Glosson (609-258-6705) in the two weeks preceding each event. Lunch is provided for all who attend; just let Vicky Glosson know you are coming.

Session III. Friday, April 12, 2002, The Scientific Laity: It would be difficult to imagine an expert’s "science" that wasn’t founded on a more pedestrian knowledge of the everyday, or to name an important science that doesn’t have a range of non-expert aficionados. How has a kind of ‘scientific laity’ intervened in the formation and movement of scientific knowledge? What role have they had in creating a public science, and how do their activities reflect structures of thinking within their culture? When have vernacular ways of knowing come into conflict with elite agendas and when have they formed the basis of new ones? How does knowledge about the way the world works take shape among various communities outside the circle of "official" science?

Speakers for Session III:

9:30 a.m. Christopher Kelty, Rice University
"Of Polymaths and Transhumanists: Networked Scientific Laities"
Commentary: Michael S. Mahoney

11:15 a.m. Jarita Holbrook, UCLA and University of Arizona-Tucson & Max Planck Institute for History of Science and Technology
"Modern Navigation and the Navigators: Theory versus Practice"
Commentary: Eric H. Ash, Dibnor Institute for the History of Science and Technology

2:00 p.m. Ken Alder, Northwestern University
"Lies and the Laity: Expertise and the Machinery of Truth-Telling in American Life"
Commentary: Elizabeth Lunbeck, Princeton University

Note: Papers for the workshops, like Davis Center papers, are precirculated. They may be requested or obtained from Vicky Glosson (609-258-6705) in the two weeks preceding each event. Lunch is provided for all who attend; just let Vicky Glosson know you are coming.