A finalized conference program and detailed information regarding registration, directions, etc. for the conference, "Materializing Cultures: Science, Technology, and Medicine in Global Context," at Stanford University, May 1-2, is now available on the web at the following address:

http://shc.stanford.edu/shc/1997-1998/97-98workshops/empires.html

The conference abstract is included below. Feel free to distribute this message to affiliated listservs and interested colleagues.

Additional questions? Email Sara Pritchard at spritch@leland.stanford.edu.

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT

Materializing Cultures:

Science, Technology, and Medicine in Global Context

For the past four centuries, technological, scientific, and medical practices have played an integral role in all manner of cultural encounters. The industrial and agricultural systems of the French and British empires were continually subject to contestation and reshaping by colonized peoples. The spread and treatment of disease in these empires was accompanied by constant struggles over the definition of personhood and power. Scientific knowledge, meanwhile, was a central theme in negotiated representations of 'the West' and 'Asia.' Science, technology, and medicine are even more central to cultural encounters in the post-colonial world, whether these encounters be structured around development projects, the extraction of natural resources, or other forms of exchange.

This conference explores the myriad ways in which science, technology, and medicine both shape and are shaped in the course of cultural - and especially colonial - encounters. Six panels will explore the following themes:

• the ways in which medical and technological practices simultaneously create boundaries between ethnic groups or nations, and function as means for the transgression of such boundaries
• the dynamics between the display value and the functionality of technologies in colonial contexts
• how the tensions between the modern material practices of colonizers and the local knowledge of colonized people are manifested in production processes
• the ways in which translations, circulations, and exchanges of science and technology constitute the representations through which the communities of 'the West' and 'Asia' are imagined
• the ways in which scientific practices shape colonial and post-colonial notions of state and nation
• how the spread and treatment of disease helps to constitute the complex processes of identity formation in colonial contexts

This conference will take place at the Stanford Humanities Center Annex on May 1-2, 1998. For more information, directions, and updates, please email spritch@leland.stanford.edu or consult our web site: http://shc.stanford.edu/shc/1997-1998/97-98workshops/empires.html

Quelle = Email <H-Soz-u-Kult>

From: Sara Pritchard <spritch@leland.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: FWD:"Materializing Cultures" conference information available
Date: 10.3.1998

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