President's Corner
The main job of an ISHPSSB President is to help others do the important
work of the Society, that is, preparing another conference full of
innovative sessions, stimulating discussions, and openings for new
participants. The spirit of "ISHkaBibl" is that this should happen without
contributing to an expanding infrastructure. I do not intend to abandon
that minimalist ethic, yet we shouldn't forget that the smooth running of
the Society (and its informal forerunner) has always depended on some
members having a not so minimalist sense of work and of initiative-taking.
For the Leuven meetings, for example, Chip Burkhardt secured NSF funding
that facilitated travel by US graduate students and independent scholars to
Belgium, and Ron Rainger, Joe Cain and Keith Benson helped him administer
these funds. Local arrangements organizer Guido van Steendam, with his
ever-present cellular phone, kept everything running smoothly enough that
the rest of us could forget our jet-setting ways and appreciate the setting
and the pace of the old city of Leuven. And, of course, the Program
organizers Elihu Gerson and Linnda Caporael spent zillions of hours pulling
the Program together. Maybe they don't illustrate my point about "above
and beyond the call of duty, " because they were only doing the job for
which they accepted nomination. (Just joking.) While I am mentioning work
that people have been elected to do, I want to add my appreciation of the
efforts of the retiring secretary, Peggy Stewart, who during the crucial
formative years of the Society (and before) ran the secretariat with good
humour and great efficiency. In the words of the new secretary, Barbara
Horan, "Peggy was VERY well organized, and so it is not a great burden to
take over this task from her."
In the notes that follow, I describe some of the people who will be making
the scene that they can then be "the people behind." I also introduce some
initiatives, most of which are still tentative. Criticisms, suggestions,
and, in some cases, volunteers are welcome.
1997 Seattle meetings
Other items
1997 Seattle Meetings
- Local arrangements
- Keith Benson is already committed to ensuring that every meeting room has
disabled access, a requirement Ron Amundsen led us to recognize in Leuven.
The provisional dates are Wednesday through Sunday, July 16-20, 1997.
- Openings for new participants
- A perennial (biennial?) charge to the program committee is to attract more
biologists. The University of Washington fortunately has a great group of
biologists -- if we can bring them in from their tide pools and other
summer research sites. Facilitating graduate student participation is
another priority. I urge members with permanent jobs to contribute to the
travel fund. I have also floated the idea of a two-tier registration fee
for the meeting, with the low scale for graduate students and the
difference between the tiers being used to supplement the travel fund. The
council are still chewing over this and other ideas.
- Program organizing
- Bob Richardson
(University of Cincinnati) is chair
of the Program Committee. The members listed below have agreed to work
with him on the Program Committee. There is room for historians to
volunteer to be added to the committee.
The committee's job is to maintain the special quality of ISHPSSB meetings
by:
i) priming people to take the initiative to organize sessions on
emergent topics;
ii) helping Bob identify sessions and session
organizers emerging out of tentative paper & session proposals;
iii)
taking additional effort to bring graduate students and non-USA-ers into
the program; and
iv) perhaps organizing a session themselves. Of
course, ISHSSPB members must supply most of the material for the committee
to work on. Preference will again be given to papers joined together into
session proposals over individually submitted papers having to be packaged
into sessions by the program committee. To facilitate people joining
together into sessions we encourage members to send "calls for papers" for
inclusion in the spring 1996 newsletter. The secretary, Barbara Horan (bhoran@gsvms2.cc.gasou.edu),
plans to establish an email list for the Society, which could be used to
gain more immediate responses.
In the interests of a more manageable and digestible program, the proposal
is being floated that no one should give more than one paper and one
commentary at a meeting. Please convey objections to this proposal or
endorsements to the Program chair.
- Possible plenary
- I would like to re-introduce a plenary in the '97 meetings. (This would be
held before the Society's general meeting or before an evening reception so
as not to cut into time available for concurrent sessions.) The theme I am
proposing is stimulated by the formation of the "Core-periphery relation in
knowledge production" interest group. "Biology and Agents without
History" (the name derives from Eric Wolf's 1982 book, Europe and the
People Without History) would address the people and things tending to be
written out of biology and of our studies of biology, but implicated
materially, discursively, economically or psychologically as the Others.
This topic might include speakers on core/periphery, Man vs. gendered
agents, basic vs. applied science (e.g., basic ecology vs. environmental
science for regulatory purposes), formal vs. folk science. I would like
speakers to highlight the dimensions they have been exploring and the
methods they have come to use that other ISHkaBiblers could learn from.
This proposal needs to be developed, but before I take it much further I
would like to hear people's responses to the general idea of a plenary and
to this specific theme. Suggestions or volunteers for speakers would also
be welcome (pjt1@cornell.edu).
Other Items
- Site selection for 1999 and into the new millenium
- With the goal of meeting outside the USA at least every third time, the
site selection committee is exploring the pros and cons of a tentative
offer from Ana Barahona at U.N.A.M. in Mexico to host the '99 meetings,
probably in Michoacan, a few hours west of Mexico City. This offer should
not preclude others from offering their locality to the committee, which
consists of myself (pjt1@cornell.edu),
Bob Richardson (robert.richardson@uc.edu),
Joan Fujimura (fujimura@leland.stanford.edu),
and Ron Rainger (j3ron@ttacs1.ttu.edu). But speak up
soon.
- Nominating Committee
- As past-President Chip Burkhardt (burkhard@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu) is
chair of this committee. The other members are Helen Longino, Jim
Griesemer, Christiane Groeben and John Jungck (John as an unofficial
advisor, given that the by-laws at present say that the committee comes
from council members). When the council met in Leuven, some discomfort
with uncontested elections was expressed and we decided to return to
multi-candidate slates. Members should be aware that they have the right
to make nominations., and the nominating committee has no power to reject
these, except to insist on a seconder. Consultation in advance with the
chair of the nominating committee would, however, be appreciated.
- Internetting ISHPSSB
- We have established a moderated e-mail list for the Society. The address
for the list is pending. If you would like to know the address as soon as
it becomes available, please send e-mail to the list moderator, Chris
Young, at youn0008@gold.tc.umn.edu
When the address is finalized, your name and e-mail address will be added
to the list and you will receive a verification. At that point, you can
participate as much or as little as you like in various conversations on
the e-mail list.
Mailings will be assembled about once a month by a moderator, a real live
person who will read through the messages and sort them by topic. The
moderator will help to reduce the amount of mail that ends up coming to
your inboxes by combining related messages, eliminating duplication, and
making sure only messages intended for the entire list end up being
e-mailed to everyone.
If the number of messages coming in to the moderator is large, or if
messages have timely information (e.g. meeting or seminar announcements),
the moderator may forward mailings to the e-mail list more
frequently.
To facilitate organizing sessions for the 1997 meetings, we encourage
members to send out "calls for papers" to the e-mail list. This will allow
more rapid turnaround for session development.
The newsletter will also go out to the e-mail list. Once the list is up
and running, if you prefer not to receive a printed version of the
newsletter in the mail (snail mail), your name could be dropped from that
mailing list (thus reducing printing and mailing costs for the
Society).
Every ISHPSSB member is encouraged to subscribe to the e-mail list to enjoy
more frequent and rapid correspondence with other members. Of course, an
e-mail list should not marginalize members whose internet access is limited
by location or by choice. The Society will continue its regular
mailings.
Of course, even with an email list and a web site, the Society would need
to continue its mailings, so as to ensure we do not marginalize members
whose internet access is limited, by location or by choice.
- Prizes
- The idea of Society prizes was raised at the council meeting in Leuven.
The sentiment was this should be a non-monied prize, because Society funds
would be better spent on supporting travel to the meetings by graduate
students and independent scholars. I would like to hear reactions from
members about instituting a prize for the best paper given by a graduate
student at one of the previous two ISHPSSB meetings and then submitted for
publication. The idea is to give a boost to the careers of younger
scholars, not to celebrate the already established. Suggestions of names
for such a prize are also welcome (pjt1@cornell.edu).
- Survey
- I have received some wonderful responses from participants in the Leuven
meetings to the survey of inter- or trans-disciplinarity. I intend the
survey to provide the material for an article on the significance of
transdisciplinary studies of science. Among other goals, I hope this
article will help in resisting the anti-science studies movement.
In the interests of expanding the pool of quotable views,please take the time
to respond .
- By-laws
- One of the major task that warrants a formal organization to any Society is
convene a sub-committee to review and revise the by-laws that govern that
formal organization. ISHPSSB's bylaws were developed prior to its legal
incorporation of the Society within the commonwealth of Virginia. The
articles of incorporation were drawn from the statutes and revised only as
required by state regulations for incorporation. A committee consisting of
myself, Chip Burkhardt and
Elihu Gerson was
convened in 1993 to deal with certain problems, e.g., the potential
incestuousness of the nominating committee. The wheels of reform turn
slowly; we are still open to suggestions about changes.
That's all for now from my corner.
Peter Taylor
Department of Science & Technology Studies, 632 Clark Hall
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
pjt1@cornell.edu
Created October 24, 1995; Revised May 1996.
This page is maintained by Valerie Gray Hardcastle.
Last updated: 28 May 1996.