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Posted Tue, 7 Oct 2008 10:41:57
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Forwarded from: Laura Salisbury <[log in to unmask]>

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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