Please see below a call for papers for an event that may be of interest.
Dr Laura Salisbury
Birkbeck College, University of London
Art and Science Now: The Two Cultures in Question
Science Museum and Tate Modern, London, 23-24 January 2009
Call for Papers
On 7 May 1959, C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture in Cambridge on the subject of
‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. A failed scientist and a moderately
successful novelist, C. P. Snow drew on his experience as a Civil Service Commissioner
to consider what seemed to him to be an increasing fissure between ‘literary intellectuals’
and ‘natural scientists’. In part an attack on the perceived insularity, decadence and
political sterility of the London literary scene, in part a complaint about the poverty of a
humanities education and a demand for curriculum reform in schools and universities, the
lecture was, most fundamentally, a critique of the lack of mutually intelligible exchange
between the two cultures. As the 1950s drew to a close, Snow believed that only a
national culture as aware of the importance of knowing the second law of
thermodynamics as of knowing the plays of Shakespeare, would be fit to offer developing
countries the scientific and technological solutions to poverty and deprivation that were so
urgently required.
The London Consortium is bringing together the Science Museum and Tate Modern in a
two-day conference to mark fifty years of the two cultures. Divided into a more
specialised academic event and a more public occasion, it will consider the history of this
debate, asking whether Snow’s critique has been addressed by the increase in multi-
disciplinary research, alongside the expansion of educational curricula and provision
within science and the humanities. But in a world of increasing disciplinary specialisation
in which there has been exponential growth of sub-disciplines in both science and the
humanities, it will also ask whether the distinctions between and indeed within the two
cultures might have become further entrenched. The most fundamental question this
celebration of 50 years since Snow’s lecture will ask, though, is how the terms of the
debate may have changed.
We invite papers for a conference at the Science Museum on 23rd January 2009, that
consider questions such as the following: How have new technologies such as the internet
and new resources like Wikipedia reconfigured our sense of disciplinary boundaries,
hierarchies of knowledge and the places where cultural capital is held? Has the new
dominance within general culture of ideas drawn from the ‘life sciences’ – molecular
biology, genetics and biochemistry, ecology, epidemiology – and their unpredictable
pressings upon fundamental questions of how and why humans and other organisms
should find themselves and their relationships defined in particular ways, led to an ever
more complex and porous boundary between science and the humanities? How are
Snow’s notions of disciplinary and national cultures to be rethought through the paradigms
and politics of globalisation?
Please send 200-word abstracts for papers (20 minutes maximum) by November 1st to
Dr. Laura Salisbury, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, Malet Street, London
WC1E 7HX – [log in to unmask]
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