Our 2011 meeting will be in Salt Lake City (Utah, USA) July 10th-16th 2011

Preliminary Call for papers
 

The deadline for the final call for papers will be February 28, 2011.
 

ISHPSSB Program Co-Chairs Chris Young and Mark Largent hope you are already thinking about papers and sessions for the 2011 meeting in Salt Lake City.
 

To be sure you are getting the most up-to-date information about the meeting, subscribe to the ISHPSSB listserv by clicking on the "Listserv" link  <http://www.ishpssb.org/listserv.html>at www.ishpssb.org

In the coming months, we will be setting up a bulletin board where you can suggest a session, or review sessions that have been proposed so far.  For now, only members can post on this bulletin board, so you might check on your membership status and then start sharing ideas.  The bulletin board
link is http://ishpssb.onefireplace.com/

Now, a few comments on audience, posters, and themes:

Our expectation for the Salt Lake City meeting is that we will have more cross-disciplinary sessions than ever before.  In addition, we expect that all sessions will be geared toward wider audiences.  This was a major thrust of the discussions that came out of the Brisbane meeting in 2009.  Every scholar has numerous meetings in which to present work to her or his peers: historians speaking to historians, philosophers speaking to philosophers, sociologists speaking to sociologists, and biologists from across the spectrum speaking to biologists within their specialty.  ISHPSSB is uniquely situated to provide us the opportunity to talk to each other, across disciplinary boundaries, about biology studies.  In order for this to happen, we need to think broadly about each other as an audience.  We hope you will begin now to look for ways of collaborating.

A new feature of the program for 2011 will be the creation of a poster session.  This is intended as a dynamic setting for scholars to present their work in progress as well as expanding on the implications of work completed in an interactive setting.  The program co-chairs intend to solicit posters from a wide range of scholars, providing for interaction among all participants.  We expect that this setting will engage biologists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers alike.  Our local arrangements team is working to make this happen in a comfortable setting with refreshments readily available.

As we begin planning for how sessions will be organized, we ask that presenters think about ways their work will potentially connect to other sessions throughout the meeting.  We hope this can be accomplished by thinking about the larger themes that are illuminated by your work.  These themes are meant to be broad and overlapping, but will help to provide benchmarks for organizing sessions as well as signposts for people at the conference seeking out areas of inquiry.  Some themes we have identified include: Civic engagement; Race; Policy, science funding, and scientific progress; Sustainability, environment, energy, and economics; Gender and LGBT; Genetic testing; Evo-Devo; and Education.  Please note that not all papers and sessions are expected to fit into one of the themes, and we hope that as we see work that pushes beyond these categories we can all be more aware of the new directions scholars and members of ISHPSSB are taking.

It is still too early to submit a freestanding paper proposal, in part because we are not yet to that stage in the planning, but primarily because there is still plenty of time for you to be looking for colleagues throughout the world who will complement your work in a session.  We would like the next six months to be a productive time for identifying collaborators.

During this time, we will also be soliciting scholars to take up leadership in addressing specific themes as described above.  If you are in a position to provide leadership in coordinating a theme, or if you would like to suggest a theme that will strengthen our multi-disciplinary and cross-session collaboration, please contact Chris Young and Mark Largent at

program@ishpssb.org

The deadline for the final call for papers will be February 28, 2011.  We hope you will be checking back regularly on the bulletin board http://ishpssb.onefireplace.com/ to identify how your work may connect with other potential proposals.

Please also keep in mind the ISHPSSB policy on multiple participation: no one may present in more than one session; exceptions are made for those who organize another session, comment in another session, or give a short plenary address. Individuals may serve more than one function in a given session, e.g., chair and presenter.  If you have questions about your session or paper idea, or about procedures, please contact the Program Co-Chairs, Chris Young and Mark Largent: program@ishpssb.org Chris Young, Department of Biology, PO Box 343922, Alverno College, Milwaukee, WI 53234; (414) 298-9138.

ISHPSSB would like to encourage sessions that:

a) combine more than one disciplinary perspective;

b) include participants from more than one institution and/or nation;

c) promote the interaction of junior and senior scholars, including
students.

Program guidelines include:

(1) The program co-chairs, in consultation with the program committee, and consistent with site constraints, will organize a rich, diverse, and high quality program. While it is the intention of the Society to be as inclusive as possible, the program co-chairs have the discretion to reject papers or sessions that are truly inappropriate for these meetings or that do not meet basic standards of communication. The program committee is available to assist the program co-chairs in judging borderline cases.

(2) No one may present in more than one session. An exception is made for those who organize another session, comment in another session, or give a short plenary address. Individuals may serve more than one function in a given session, e.g. chair and presenter.

(3) Each regular session must have a minimum of three presenters.

(4) Multiple sessions on a given topic should be identified with titles that distinguish the particular focus of each session, rather than merely serialize the topic.

(5) All accepted participants must pre-register for the conference in order to be included in the program.

Members of the 2011 Program Committee include:

Largent, Mark, Program Co-chair
Young, Chris, Program Co-chair
Callebaut, Werner
Millstein, Roberta  
Santesmases, María de Jesús
Suárez, Edna
Stotz, Karola
El-Hani, Charbel