Symposium on the Sciences and the Humanities: Intersections, Methods, Examples

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

March 2, 2018
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Smith Warehouse
9:00 am to 5:15 pm

9:00-9:30  Coffee and breakfast pastries

9:30-9:45   Introduction - Rob Mitchell, Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory

9:45-10:30   ScienceHumanities: New Visions for Literature and Science Collaboration - James Castell English, Cardiff University, Keir Waddington, History, Cardiff University, Martin Willis, English, Cardiff University

In this paper we offer a new and necessary re-evaluation of the nature of disciplinary knowledge and expertise, and its collaborative pitfalls and potentials. We explore a present lacuna in research: the lack of focus on how scholars both think about and practice this work across and between the humanities and the sciences. We do this by thinking theoretically, politically, and through practice. We call this triangulation the ScienceHumanities, a single identifier that even in being written on the page throws separate disciplines into close proximity. It represents not a relativist campaign against the sciences that repeats familiar tropes or ways of working, but a widening of focus and a recognition of the value of plurality. ScienceHumanities offers a new way of conceptualizing the most fundamental challenge of multiple and disparate disciplines working together. We argue here that it is only by solving the problems of their own difference and by finding innovative ways of working which do not privilege particular epistemologies that disciplines might be able to meet together to tackle what have been framed as grand societal global challenges.

10:30-11:15  Divisive Loves: Hierarchy and the Disciplines - Stefani Engelstein, German, Duke University

Calls for a return to philology have resounded in the literary fields for a generation, but a closer look at the history of philology calls the desirability of this phantasm into question.  In the long nineteenth century, the field of philology disciplined human diversity by positioning its objects – languages, the people who speak them, and the textual cultures they produce – within living systems of adaptation and descent.  Over the course of the century, the disciplinary division between the humanities and the sciences cleaved philology into two uneasily matched halves: comparative linguistics and literary/cultural criticism.  Operating within a loosely shared methodological framework, the new fields constructed their objects as subject to opposed laws of development and appealed to  increasingly disparate codes of legitimacy.  Even as they diverged, however, the branches reinforced each other in the production of hierarchies of culture imagined in forms as immutable and as toxic as those of the racial theories with which they were always already closely allied.  Particularly in light of the recent resurgence of Aryan and Nordic fantasies, our inherited humanist methodologies carry with them a responsibility for self-critical interrogation of our own disciplinary histories.

11:15-11:30   Coffee Break

11:30-12:15   Does a Computer Have an Umwelt? An Exploration of Meaning-making Beyond the Human - N. Katherine Hayles, Literature, Duke University

This talk explores the possibility of meaning-making beyond the human and beyond the biological into artificial forms of cognition. Many of our environmental crises today can be understood as an over-emphasis on humans as the most important species on the planet and an under-recognition of meaning-making among nonhuman animals and plants. Exploring that possibility opens up in a new way how meaning-making occurs, and thus sheds new light on cognitive assemblages, where humans and computational media interact. Jakob von Uexküll’s “umwelt” theory, articulated in the 1920s and 1930s, proposes that biological lifeforms construct subjective worlds for themselves based on the kinds of sensory systems they have and their environmental interactions. Computers, like biological organisms, know the world through the data available to them, which may be limited to their programs or may extend into the world through sensors and actuators. The crucial element that the umwelt idea adds to existing discourse is the link between sign and meaning, potentially casting new light on the ways in which computational media construct meanings for themselves as subjects. This talk will explore that possibility, comparing contemporary media archeology with the umwelt and outlining the implications for a theory of meaning for networked and programmable machines.

12:15-1:00   Romanticism in the Anthropocene - James Castell, English, Cardiff University

The Anthropocene is a discourse with its origins in the earth sciences, but it has also taken on myriad new lives in the world of the arts and the humanities. As such, it is an exemplary domain for ScienceHumanities approaches. Indeed, it is difficult to see how adequate responses to the Anthropocene could be anything other than inter- or transdisciplinary. This paper will argue that the Anthropocene should also be recognised as a product of the Romantic period. Of course, one of the many contested dates for the commencement of the Anthropocene is James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in the 1760s. Perhaps more importantly, contemporary geology (including the work of the International Commission on Stratigraphy) remains at least partially defined by thinking from the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, which laid the foundations for our current understanding of the ‘deep time’ of the Earth and the planetary catastrophes that have marked it at more or less regular intervals throughout its history. This paper will consider some of the ways in which the Romantic period has shaped the way we think about our contemporary ecological circumstances. Complementarily, it will also investigate how new modes of thinking about the environment impact on our readings of Romantic writing. In particular, it will turn to William Wordsworth’s poem, The Ruined Cottage, in order to highlight a possible difference between ecocritical accounts of the late twentieth century and approaches that we might take when reading this poem in an age dominated—in both the humanities and the sciences—by discussion of the Anthropocene.

1:00-2:00   Lunch (provided)

2:00-2:45  Good Places of Sleep: Nineteenth-Century Sleep Research and Fictions of Utopia - Martin Willis, English, Cardiff University 

We seem obsessed by the quality of our sleep in the early twenty-first century, yet the high point of sleep research was the second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly the period from 1880-1900, when modern sleep studies began. For the Victorians, sleep was an active state, (linked often to other cognitive pathologies and dissonances such as catalepsy and epilepsy) which enabled or disabled certain functions of mind and body. How one slept was therefore of considerable interest to the general public as well as to physiologists, physicians and neurologists. Concurrent with this avid attention to the epistemologies of sleep, utopian fictions employed sleep as a foundation for asking questions of ideal lives and worlds. Often, other worlds were entered through the medium of sleep. This seminar will consider the connections between sleep and utopia and ask whether sleep is itself a good place.

2:45-3:30   Encyclopedia of Distress: Fanon, In Case - Cate Reilly, Literature, Duke University 

3:30-3:45   Coffee Break

3:45-4:30   Life-Regulation from Malthus to Systems Ecology - Rob Mitchell, English, Duke University

In the eighteenth century, concepts of regulation were at the center of efforts in European sciences and the humanities to understand and direct relationships among life, individuals, and political collectives. Liberal theorists from John Locke to Adam Smith, for example, sought to account for the proper relationship of political regulations to the implicit principles that they claimed naturally regulated economic relations; Immanuel Kant contended that the Ideas of reason must play a “regulative” role in subjective experience; Thomas Malthus argued against the utility of human political regulations by outlining a natural logic of population self-regulation; and Mary Shelley began her novel Frankenstein with a description of Robert Walton’s dream that his artic voyage would result in a discovery capable of regulating all future nautical navigation. In this presentation, I outline two quite different models of regulation that emerged in this period: a "sovereign" model of regulation by invariable standards, and a population-based account of regulation by means of variable standards. I contend that the conflict between these two models articulates some of the paradoxes of Malthus's influential account of regulation (e.g., his difficulty in accounting reflexively for the effect of his representation of natural regulation on political regulations), and the reappearance of these same paradoxes in more recent work in ecology and economics.

4:30-5:15  The Everyday in the ScienceHumanities - Keir Waddington (History, Cardiff University)

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, Duke's Germanic Languages and Literature Department, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Cardiff University's ScienceHumanities Initiative.