Call for papers
Workshop: Forging Science and Medicine: Categories, Objects, Boundaries
Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia), August 28-29, 2014.

This workshop aims to discuss historical cases dealing with the co-construction
of science (natural and social) and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. With the aim of circumventing historical narratives that assume an a
priori distinction between science and medicine, this workshop seeks
contributions which problematize the alleged boundaries between them. We are
particularly interested in research that shows how historical actors’ categories
and behaviours with regard to what they do and define as pertaining to “science”
and/or “medicine”, contributed to the creation of new objects of enquiry,
technologies and specialties, or to the obsolescence of analogous entities,
previously standard. Moreover, the workshop will explore how discussions and
practices about the boundaries between science and medicine, as defined by
historical actors, have been shaped through translational activities such as
training, communication and policy making. A sample of major questions addressed
by this workshop is: 

• How have the holders of expert knowledge established boundaries between
science and medicine? 
• How have the attributes of being “scientific” or pertaining to the “medical”
realm been used to make original knowledge claims? 
• What are the spaces in which medicine and science are made to appear as
different or the same?
• What has been the discursive and practical role of conflict and cooperation
between science and medicine as defined by actors themselves?
• How have new objects of enquiry and technologies been built at the crossroad
of what contemporaries experienced as scientific and medical endeavours?
• How have ideas of science and medicine and their boundaries been shaped by
training, communication and policy making?

The working languages of this workshop are English and Spanish.

A limited number of accommodation grants are available. Interested applicants
should submit a) an abstract (maximum 600 words) that describes the content of
the paper, the question it addresses, and the historiographical contribution to
the understanding of the historical construction of the relations between
science and medicine; b) a one page CV resumé, including main publications. 

Applications should be submitted to Monica Garcia [log in to unmask]
by March 10. Applicants will be notified of the results of the application one
week after the submission deadline.

Papers will be pre-circulated. The workshop organizers are committed to see the
papers published as an international journal special issue.

Organized by Mónica García, Stefan Pohl and Josep Simon (GESCTP, Universidad del
Rosario, www.gesctp.com)

This workshop is a continuation of the symposium Science X Medicine: Promiscuous
Objects, Entangled Problems held at the 24th International Congress of History
of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester, 2013).