BROWN BAGS
Spring 2012 Brown Bags are held
12:00pm – 1:30pm
on alternating Thursdays in 8411 Social Science
(unless otherwise noted).
"Lifting Technology and the Achievement of Greek and Roman Architecture"
Abstract:
Reconstructing the finished appearance of monuments has preoccupied study of ancient Greek and Roman architecture since Palladio and Winckelmann. My presentation turns attention toward processes of construction. Building techniques preserved in the ruins of ancient cities illuminate the roots of Greek and Roman architecture's sophistication and expressive power. Among these techniques, the lewis device for hoisting architectural blocks gave builders the means to construct revolutionary monuments that define the architectural achievement of classical antiquity. My research on the lewis, informed by systematic fieldwork, raises new questions about organization of labor and transmission of innovation and technique. My presentation investigates how technology shapes society, and it encourages new ways of thinking about diagnostic tools like the lewis for evaluation of ancient architecture.
Bio: William Aylward is professor of Classics at UW-Madison. He specializes in Greek and Roman archaeology, Roman Provincial studies (particularly Anatolia), and the history of architecture.
"The Neuroscientific Turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences"
Abstract:
In the decade following the Decade of the Brain, neuroscience has become one of the hottest topics of study—not only for scientists but also, increasingly, for scholars from the humanities and social sciences. In recent years, economists to philosophers to historians have applied the neuro- prefix to their home disciplines, and neuroscientists have begun to turn their gaze to things like art appreciation and religious experience. While some have hyped this development as evidence of a coming “neurorevolution,” others have decried it as yet another form of biological reductionism or as a symptom of a larger struggle for institutional legitimacy in a difficult economic climate. What are the characteristics of what Melissa Littlefield (UIUC) and I have called the “neuroscientific turn”? What are the pitfalls, the challenges, and the promise of these new hybrid forms of inquiry? In this paper, I will provide an overview of some of the ways and in which venues this scholarship is taking place, explore some of the many critiques that have been levied against these new “neuro-scholars,” and will argue for the importance of a transdisciplinary perspective.
Jenell Johnson is the Associate Director of Disability Studies at UW Madison, an Honorary Associate Fellow of Life Sciences Communication, and this fall she will start as an Assistant Professor of Communication Arts. Her work focuses on the rhetorical contours of non-expert engagements with science and medicine, and she has published articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Medicine Studies, Journal of Cultural and Literary Disability Studies and Advances in Medical Sociology. Her book manuscript Medical Marvel: Lobotomy in American Medicine and Culture explores the role that representations of psychosurgery in popular culture played in the development and decline of lobotomy and investigates the effects of these representations on contemporary psychosurgery research. The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain, a collection of essays from humanists, neuroscientists, and social scientists,is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
February 23:Stephanie Tai, *11:30*
"Two Tales of Sacred Cows: Industrial Dairy Farms, Raw Milk and the Tensions of Science and Public Participation"
Abstract:
Legal issues regarding the production of food are becoming more visible during the transformation of our agricultural production system to one involving technology and industrialization. This study examines two types of legal conflicts: one involving the regulation of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, and another involving the legalization of sales of raw milk. It draws from literature regarding science in public participation--specifically, discussions of the role of public participation in specific legal frameworks, from legislation to regulation to litigation. In particular, this study explores the ways in which citizens and public interest groups participate in these legal conflicts—from regulatory and permitting comments to litigation—focusing on the tensions between discussions of values and discussions of scientific evidence.
To better understand these dynamics, this study compares the stated values and goals of public interest groups in these debates with the actual comments filed these groups in legal conflicts regarding CAFOs and raw milk in Wisconsin. The study adds to the STS literature by developing a stronger qualitative understanding of the ways in which certain values in food-related debates are expressed in scientific arguments, while other values are not. The study ultimately argues that currently existing legal frameworks, which are mainly limited to scientific participation, are insufficient to accommodate the range of concerns raised by citizens, and suggests a more holistic framing of food and agriculture-related legal disputes.
Stephanie Tai focuses her scholarly research on the interactions between environmental and health sciences and administrative law. She has written on the consideration of scientific studies and environmental justice concerns by administrative agencies, and is currently studying the role of scientific dialogues before the judicial system. She was an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown from 2002-2005 and a visiting professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law during the 2005-06 academic year. Her teaching interests include administrative law, environmental law, property, environmental justice, risk regulation, and comparative Asian environmental law. After graduating from Georgetown, Professor Tai worked as the editor-in-chief of the International Review for Environmental Strategies. She also served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Ronald Lee Gilman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. She then worked as an appellate attorney in the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where she briefed and argued cases involving a range of issues, from the protection of endangered cave species in Texas to the issuance of dredge and fill permits under the Clean Water Act.
March 8: Richard Keller
"Aging and Bare Life in Postwar France: The Politics of Vulnerability in the 2003 Heat Wave Disaster"
Abstract:
Of the 15,000 who died in the 2003 heat wave disaster in France, four-fifths were over seventy-five years old. Much of this surplus vulnerability resulted from physiology: the elderly are more susceptible to heat stroke and dehydration than other populations. But a significant component of this excess mortality resulted from social phenomena such as isolation and poverty. This paper explores the ways in which the 2003 disaster exploited an ecology of vulnerability that has its origins in the politics of old age in France since the 1960s, when a range of policy decisions cast the elderly as a population at the limits of citizenship.
Richard Keller is associate professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a research fellow at the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux in Paris. He is the author of Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Enregistrer les morts, identifier les surmortalités: Une comparaison Angleterre, Etats-Unis et France (Presses de l’Ecole des hautes études en santé publique, 2010, with Carine Vassy and Robert Dingwall), and is co-editor of Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Duke University Press, 2011, with Warwick Anderson and Deborah Jenson). His articles have appeared in the Journal of Social History, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Historical Geography, and Mouvements, among other venues.
The Technology of Consent and the Deferral of Ethics: An Ethnography of Informed Consent Documents
Abstract:
This talk analyzes informed consent documents as a “mundane artifact” and paperwork technology deeply woven into the routine work of US community psychiatry. Such documents exert puzzling and contradictory effects. Cast in a strong language of patient autonomy, the documents nonetheless ratify the staff’s disproportionate power. On the surface, they supply an ethical justification for practices that are by design intrusive, sometimes coercive, and enormously resented by most clients. But the documents also enable staff continually to defer (or even avoid) reflection on the ethical stakes of their work. The talk explores the normative consensus that is engineered into the paperwork and the way clinicians operate this apparatus of consent. It also gauges the small space for ethical refusal carved out by front-line staff. The talk is based on long-term fieldwork in a single clinic serving people with severe and persistent mental illness.
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Paul Brodwin is a medical anthropologist, associate professor in the Anthropology Department at UW-Milwaukee, adjunct associate professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and core scientist at the Center for AIDS Intervention Research (Medical College of Wisconsin). He is the author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Line of Community Psychiatry (forthcoming, University of California Press) and Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Contest for Healing Power (Cambridge University Press 1996); editor of Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (Indiana University Press 2000); and co-editor of Pain as Human Experience: Anthropological Perspectives (University of California Press 1992).
Exploits, Possibility, and Rhetoric in the Network
Abstract:
Exploits are software hacks that expose a gap or glitch in a system. When it comes to networked software platforms, exploits are inevitable. Any connection to the network invites hackers to expose flaws and gaps. And while they can cause problems for network security teams and shoppers looking to protect credit card numbers, exploits are also rhetorical in two senses. They open up public conversations about code, and they make an argument about what is (or should be) possible in a given software platform. This presentation examines two exploits involving the microblogging platform Twitter. One exploit, known as the “MouseOver exploit,” triggered a public conversation about software, hacking, and security. The second Twitter exploit involved the OAuth security protocol used by third-party application designers, and it opened up a very different kind of conversation, one confined to the programmers and companies that had designed the protocol. In fact, the existence of the exploit was kept a secret until the design flaw could be addressed. Through an examination of these two situations, I will suggest that the value of the exploit is rhetorical—it demonstrates, in Aristotle’s words, “the available means of persuasion.” But the presentation will also raise questions about how the possibilities of our digital spaces are determined, written, and rewritten. Who is at the table when software and protocols are written, and who is involved in the response to exploits? These questions are of growing importance as platforms like Twitter become increasingly important in the economic and political landscape.
Jim Brown is an assistant professor in the English Department and teaches in the UW’s new Digital Studies program. His work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Computers and Composition, and The Computer Cultures Reader. His research and teaching focus on rhetoric, writing, and new media studies, and he is currently working on a project entitled “Ethical Programs” that explores the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of networked software platforms.
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May 3: Holtz Center Grad Student Travel Grant Awardees