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**** The deadline for applications is 31 January 2011. ****
Call for applications
Biology and the Publlc:
Participation and Exclusion from the Renaissance to the Present Day
The Twelfth Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences
‘Villa Dohrn’, Ischia, Italy, 26 June – 3 July 2011
Directors: Janet Browne (Harvard), Christiane Groeben (Stazione
Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Naples), Nick Hopwood (Cambridge), Hans-Jörg
Rheinberger (Berlin)
Funding: Wellcome Trust, Max Planck Institute for the History of
Science, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn
Applications are invited for this week-long summer school, which
provides advanced training in history of the life sciences through
lectures and seminars in a historically rich and naturally beautiful
setting. The theme for 2011 is Biology and the Publlc: Participation
and Exclusion from the Renaissance to the Present Day. The faculty
are Antonio Barrera, Mary Terrall, Anne Secord, Jim Secord, Christina
Wessely, Philipp Sarasin, Tim Boon, Ilana Löwy, Carlos López Beltrán,
Massimiano Bucchi and Staffan Müller-Wille. The rest of this message
gives further information.
The Ischia Summer School
This week-long summer school provides advanced training in history of
the life sciences, a lively international field that offers a long-
term perspective on some of the most significant ideas, practices and
institutions in the world today. The event attracts expert faculty
and well-qualified students for a combination of lectures, seminar
discussion and student presentations in a historically rich and
naturally beautiful setting. We aim to encourage exchange of ideas
across disciplinary boundaries, national cultures and historical
periods. English is the working language and readings are circulated
in advance. We can accommodate up to 26 graduate students and
postdoctoral fellows, and also accept established researchers seeking
to enter a new field. The biennial school, which looks back on a
distinguished tradition of association with the Stazione Zoologica,
was revived in 2005 after a break of some two decades and again ran
successfully in 2007 and 2009. It is held in Villa Dohrn, the current
Laboratory of Functional and Evolutionary Ecology and former summer
house of the founder Anton Dohrn, situated above the port of the
gorgeous island of Ischia and overlooking the Gulf of Naples.
Introduction to the theme
Biology has become the most public of sciences and the one that
promises to intervene most deeply in our private lives. It is no
coincidence that since the 1980s funding agencies have spent
increasing amounts of time and money on ‘public understanding’, or
‘public engagement’ as it was later reframed. Innovative forms of
participation seek to enroll citizens in preparing for the
scientific, medical and ethical challenges especially of genetic and
reproductive technologies. Yet if some features of the present
situation are new, others have longer histories. This summer school
will explore how ‘biology’ and ‘the public’, their predecessors,
successors and alternatives, have been co-configured and reconfigured
over the long term. How have meanings of ‘public’ changed and
competed? How have disciplines and professionals, including biology
and biologists, shaped and been shaped by publics of various kinds?
A major challenge is to continue the ongoing reassessment of
‘popularization’ and ‘popular science’. In the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries these categories expressed the dominant view of
communication beyond an increasingly professionalized and specialized
science. Because this problematically painted laypeople as passive
consumers of diluted knowledge, ‘popularization’ and ‘popular
science’ have been generally rejected as neutral descriptions: a
wealth of research has recovered reader, visitor and user agency, and
explored the continual exchange between the esoteric and exoteric
circles of science. Yet as actors’ categories, ‘popular science’,
‘popularization’ and related terms offer rich histories to explore.
It is clear that they could mediate participation as well as
exclusion, and that meanings varied enormously within countries and
between them, but systematic reconstruction and comparison has only
just begun.
Recovering these histories will revise our understanding of the
making of biology itself. The institutional legitimacy of biology as
a unified science of life (not the only meaning the term has had) was
constructed, mainly in the decades around 1900, by demarcation from
and in relation to other practices and groups, including other
medical and life sciences, radical, alternative and ‘pseudo’-
sciences, and, perhaps most crucially, the public. ‘Biology’ in part
gained a distinct identity through the establishment of separate
research institutes and professional societies. It attracted public
and state attention by offering scientific tools to improve the
health of populations as well as individuals. Yet the laypeople who
now bought Darwinist books and attended hygiene exhibitions in their
millions may have played a more important role. Biology gained a
clearer identity in some school curricula than as a topic of
research. As newspapers reported breakthroughs from the tuberculosis
bacillus to artificial parthenogenesis (‘virgin birth’), publicity
was crucial to enrolling donors and educating potential patients, but
needed careful management to protect specialist reputations. To
understand the authority of biology, historians of the life sciences
must take the public into account.
Early-modern publics were different, and the life sciences did not
exist in our sense. Distinctions between science and common
knowledge, legitimate practitioners and others, nevertheless go back
before 1750, as do various forms of inclusion and exclusion. The
school will consider how we might best analyse these issues for
medicine, natural philosophy and natural history: the role and status
of natural knowledge in public anatomies, courtly performances and
other events; the changing boundaries of secrecy; encounters with
indigenous knowledge as new plants and animals were collected from
America after 1550; how civic pride put natural history museums on
travellers’ itineraries; translations into vernacular languages of
classical texts; the knowledge that learned physicians reckoned it
necessary for surgeons, apothecaries and midwives to acquire. For the
eighteenth century, with its lecture-demonstrations, projects to
appropriate and communicate useful knowledge, writing in the
vernacular and salon culture, we will explore the established
historical category of ‘public science’ and follow it through the
major transformations of the Age of Revolutions.
We can now recognize ‘popular science’ as distinctly modern in part
because, in the most politically exposed parts of the biological and
biomedical sciences, things have changed so much in the last two
decades. Expert opinions now more obviously compete, and with patient
groups and environmental activists independently promoting not just
information but also research, expertise is also more distributed.
Stakeholders may now expect to participate actively, for example,
through public hearings and citizen juries, in making decisions about
the uses and direction of research. We need not overestimate the
prospects for participation to recognize that the dominant norms are
in flux. It is timely to rethink ‘biology and the public’.
Faculty and programme
The organizers will introduce the theme and lead discussions. Each
faculty member will give a talk of up to 30 minutes, with equal time
for discussion, and organize a one-hour seminar discussion. This will
provide the lecture experience that some students particularly value
plus plenty of opportunities for interaction and participation, which
will be enhanced by student presentations and general discussions.
English is the working language and readings will be circulated in
advance.
Antonio Barrera (Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA)
Lecture: Indian knowledge, European experience and the emergence of
empiricism in early modern natural history
Seminar: Participation and exclusion: Indians and Europeans in the
making of early modern natural history
Mary Terrall (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
Lecture: Naturalists in the public eye: audiences for natural history
in the French Enlightenment
Seminar: Recruiting observers: Reaumur’s textual strategies
Anne Secord (University of Cambridge, UK)
Lecture: Private collections and the public good: British botany in
the early nineteenth century
Seminar: Seeing the field: observational perspectives and practices,
1789–1830
Jim Secord (University of Cambridge, UK)
Seminar: Evolution for the people: audience and genre in the
nineteenth century
Lecture: Global communication and the making of Darwinism
Christina Wessely (University of Vienna, Austria)
Lecture: Artificial animals: natural history as mass entertainment
Seminar: Scientific knowledge and middle-class life in German zoos
Philipp Sarasin (University of Zürich, Switzerland)
Lecture: What to do with ‘popular science’? The case of bacteriology
Seminar: Living with the bomb: the MAD culture of the Cold War
Tim Boon (Science Museum, London, UK)
Lecture: ‘Secrets of life’: who made biology films in interwar
Britain, and for whom?
Seminar: History of biology in museums today: how should we build lay
agency in?
Ilana Löwy (CERMES, Paris, France)
Lecture: Cancer, precancer and their publics
Seminar: Cancer organizations and cancer screening
Carlos López Beltrán (UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico)
Lecture: From political icon to scientic object: the Mexican mestizo
and genomic research
Seminar: Genomics and identity politics in Latin America
Massimiano Bucchi (University of Trento, Italy)
Lecture: Public participation in the biomedical sciences
Seminar: Decision-making about biomedical science
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter, UK)
Commentary: The role of the public in making ‘biology’
In addition, there will be a welcoming reception and other social
events, and we will take one day for a trip to Naples to visit the
main Zoological Station, a major international institution of biology
since 1872, to see its historical collections (a great specialist
library for history of biology and important archive), laboratories
and famous aquarium.
All participants should be present for the full week in order to
facilitate discussions. 26 June and 3 July are travelling days, with
no lectures or seminars scheduled.
Cost
There is a charge for students of 300 Euros each. This will cover
hotel accommodation and all meals, but students will need to pay for
their own travel to Ischia.
The directors will consider requests to waive the fee from qualified
students, especially from developing countries, who are unable to
raise the money themselves and whose institutions cannot provide it.
These must be supported by a detailed financial statement and a
letter from the applicant’s head of institution.
Timetable
31 January 2011 Deadline for applications
March 2011 Students to be notified of outcome
31 May 2011 Registration fees and/or registration forms due
Procedure
Applications are to be sent by e-mail to bvmallinckrodt@mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de or by mail to:
Birgitta v. Mallinckrodt
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Boltzmannstr. 22
D-14195 Berlin
Germany
Applications should include:
1. a brief cv,
2. a statement specifying academic experience and interest in the
course topic (max. 300 words),
3. a letter of recommendation.
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