A reminder that the deadline (1 November) is approaching to register for
our Communicating Reproduction conference. Please fill in the form at
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/communicating.html if you would like
to join us for the discussions. Further details are below.
Very good wishes,
Francis.
Communicating Reproduction
5–6 December 2011
A conference to be held in the Department of History and Philosophy of
Science, University of Cambridge.
Scholars have explored continuities and discontinuities in theories of
sex and gender; knowledge of entities such as seeds, germs, embryos,
monsters and clones; concerns about creation, evolution, degeneration
and regeneration; investments in maternity, paternity and heredity;
practices of fertility control, potency and childbirth; and health
relations between citizen and state, individual and population. But we
have paid much less attention to the huge changes in processes and media
of communication. There is important work on specific practices, from
education to advertising, conversation to mass entertainment, and on
specific media, from ritual objects to printed books, films to the
internet. But we lack synthetic and comparative accounts. This
conference aims to explore how we might best ground debates about
reproduction in changing practices of communication over the long term,
though primarily within the Western tradition. Nor is reproduction just
a lens through which to view the history of communication. For
generation and reproduction are themselves potent metaphors for
communication. Richard de Bury wrote in /Philobiblon/ (1345) of the
making of books as a form of generation across time and modern authors
often frame the distribution of identical copies in terms of mechanical
reproduction.
The conference will bring together scholars representing ancient to
modern periods and various disciplines. Talks will be 20-minute
summaries of pre-circulated papers, followed by commentary and
discussion in one-hour slots in such a way as to promote dialogue and
critical engagement between fields and approaches.
Speakers and provisional titles:
Helen King (Open University): Educating Lucina: midwives and the
communication of reproductive knowledge, ancient and early modern
Catherine Rider (University of Exeter): Communicating religious views of
infertility in the Middle Ages
Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University): 'Issue dangerous to the
Queen': pregnancy and politics in the Elizabethan polity
Mary Fissell (The Johns Hopkins University): Making a masterpiece from
bits and pieces
Angelique Richardson (University of Exeter): Reproduction and the
post-Darwinian novel
Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter): Reproducing species
Wendy Kline (University of Cincinnati): Coming home: modern midwifery
and the controversy over home birth
Solveig Jülich (Stockholm University): The Lennart Nilsson-industry:
remediating images of life before birth
Uta Schwarz (Cologne): Introduction to the film Helga (1967)
Ludmilla Jordanova (King's College, London): Closing comments
Organisers: Nick Hopwood, Peter Jones, Lauren Kassell, Francis Neary,
Jim Secord
To register, please follow the instructions at:
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/communicating.html
Funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in the History of Medicine on
'Generation to Reproduction' http://www.reproduction.group.cam.ac.uk/
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