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2016-2017

The doctoral colloquium is a student-run colloquium that enables graduate students to try out grant proposals, present dissertation chapters, give practice job talks, discuss issues of professional development, and hear visiting speakers. The colloquium usually meets on Mondays at 4:30-6:00pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201) on those Mondays when there is no scheduled Klopsteg lecture.

Alka Menon (sociology) and Jamie Morse (sociology) coordinated meetings and events for 2016-17.

FALL 2016

October 3
Welcome, meet and greet, planning session for the year

October 10
Klopsteg launch

MICHAEL GORDIN: History, Princeton University
“Scientific Babel: The Languages of Science Before and After Global English”

Sunday, October 16
SHC Fall Quarter Welcome Reception
5:00 - 8:00PM
Jean Gimbel Lane Reception Room
Ryan Center for the Musical Arts
70 Arts Circle Dive, Evanston, IL 60208

October 24
Doctoral Colloquium

Feedback on student work in progress

November 21
Reading Group

The readings are:

1. Prasad, Amit. 2014. "Entangled Histories and Imaginative Geographies of Technoscientific Innovations."  Science as Culture 23(3): 432-439.
This is a short essay by an STS scholar in which, as Jaimie puts it, he summarizes the main storyline of the book in direct relation to why we need to challenge our "imaginative geography" and its inherent Orientalism with respect to technoscientific discovery/innovation. He also introduces the notion of "entanglement," which we plan to take up alongside with the concept of "assemblages" in our reading group next quarter.

2. Marston, S. A., Jones, J. P., III, & Woodward, K. 2005. Human geography without scale, 30(4), 416–432.
On the problem of scale in geography this essay gives an overview of where different geographers stand on this question and includes a provocation to abandon scale as we conventionally think of it. The attachment includes responses to this article.

3. Tilley, Helen 2010. Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies; Or, Is The History of Science Ready for the Rest of the World? 101(1): 110-119.
An essay by our own Helen Tilley on how science and research took up "indigenous" or "primitive" knowledge, looking at the forces behind this move and its consequences for our understanding of the history of science.

4. Harrison, Mark, 2015. "A Global Perspective: Reframing the History of Health, Medicine, and Disease." Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 89(4):639-689.
Written by a scholar who gave the Klopsteg Lecture last week, this essay squarely addresses a "global" perspective on the history of medicine. We urge you to consider not only the examples he gives but also what is absent in this analysis, thinking about the backdrop in noting what he ultimately foregrounds.

WINTER 2017

January 23
Doctoral Collquium

We will be commenting on a work-in-progress by Savina Balasubramanian, please read the paper and arrive prepared to offer feedback.

For the second half of the session, we will have a roundtable on how people have approached long-term writing projects, drawing on the experience of our postdocs and faculty. Please review the document that Professor Ken Alder has graciously shared with us for purposes of discussion. It includes assembled summaries and outlines from his dissertation, subsequent book proposal, and actual book. Come with your own questions to ask Ken and our postdocs, Fred Meiton and Stefanie Graeter.

February 13
Doctoral colloquium

We will convene for our second meeting of the quarter at 4pm in the Hagstrum Room of University Hall for a double header. In our usual 4-5:30pm slot, we will offer feedback on works-in-progress from Omri Tubi and Mallory Fallin, both of the sociology department. They have provided reading notes. Then from 5:30-6:15pm, SHC postdoc Fred Meiton of History will give a practice job talk in the same room. The working title of the book that the talk will be based on is Electrical Palestine: Jewish and Arab Technopolitics Under British Rule.  Please come support our colloquium members!

March 6
 Reading Group

To guide our discussion of the concepts of assemblages and entanglements vis a vis the notion of the global, we will be reading the following selections - some of these are quite short, and some of these are the endnotes to the chapters.

assemblages

1. Muller, Martin. 2015. "Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-Material Power, Politics, and Space." Geography Compass 9(1):27-32. (Read only the first five pages of this one, until the section beginning "Empirical Clusters.") The beginning of this article nicely lays out the genealogies of assemblages and actor-networks, and then it revisits ground we trod in our last reading session.

2. Michelle Murphy. 2006. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Durham: Duke University Press, p.1-18 (introduction) (intro notes). This selection fleshes out one example/case of an assemblage.

3. Collier and Ong, 2005. "Global Assemblages, Anthropological Problems." Introduction to their edited volume Global Assemblages Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. (12 pages, introduces some concrete examples of global assemblages)

4. Collier, Stephen. 2006. "Global Assemblages" in Theory, Culture, and Society. This is exceedingly short but a slightly clearer definition of assemblage.

entanglements

5. Nading, Alex. 2014. Mosquito Trails: Ecology, Health and the Politics of Entanglement. Berkeley: University of California Press. "Introduction: Dengue in the Landscape." (into notes) This is an anthropological take on entanglement that is a relatively easy read.

6. Paper draft from Elizabeth Roberts. "What Gets Inside: Violent Entanglements and Toxic Boundaries in Mexico." This paper covers some of the same ground as Roberts's Klopsteg lecture, but we thought we'd incorporate it and ask more of how entanglement could be used here.

Looking forward to ascertaining once and for all what these concepts are and how we can use them. Hope to see you there!


SPRING 2017

May 22
 Doctoral colloquium

 special event

Thanks to the generous support of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies

March 30-31, 2017 | Graduate Student Conference
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and the POLITICS of KNOWLEDGE in GLOBAL AFFAIRS

::keynote speaker

SHEILA JASANOFF  harvard kennedy school

 special event

Funded by the Buffett Institute for Global Studies in support of its Global Medical Cultures and Law Research Group

May 5-7, 2017 | Faculty Conference
MEDICAL CULTURES, TRADITIONS, and LAW

::keynote dialogue

MADHAVI SUNDER  law, university of california davis

CHIDI OGUAMANAM  law, university of Ottawa

::panelists (with pre-circulated papers)

ROSEMARY COOMBE  law, communication and culture, york university

KAUSHIK SUNDER RAJAN  anthropology, university of chicago

::presenters

BRIDIE ANDREWS  history, bentley university

MARÍA CARRANZA  inciensa, university of costa rica

PAUL JOHNSON  history, university of michigan

STACEY LANGWICK  anthropology, cornell university

PROJIT MUKHARJI  history and sociology of science, university of pennsylvania

STEVEN PALMER  history, university of windsor

SIRI SUH gender, women, and sexuality studies, university of minnesota